The door to the greenhouse opened, and I glanced up, looking for Lila.

At the sight of my father, my skipping heart tripped and ate it.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” Dad said with the tilted smile he’d passed down to all the Bennet men.

“I’m not disappointed,” I lied, steering my cart of seedlings to the fresh bed we’d turned over.

A noise of dissent was the maximum of his argument. “What time is Lila supposed to be here?”

I paused, a tray of plants in hand, my eyes narrowing on him as he approached. “Who told you? It was Luke, wasn’t it?”

“Nobody told me, son. I have two eyes, a couple ears, and something between them, you know. Doesn’t take much more.”

With a frown, I knelt at the bed and kept my eyes on my hands as they got to work.

“How serious is it?” he asked.

“It’s not.”

When I noted his stillness, I glanced up at him. His face said he knew better.

“It’s not,” I insisted. “We have an … arrangement.”

“You see each other an awful lot for whatever this is to be just an arrangement.” There was no accusation—he stated it as if he were noting the color of marigolds.

And he wasn’t wrong.

I’d spent the better part of two weeks pretending like Lila and I had some sort of handle on the rules. Nights apart almost immediately dissolved into hours spent texting. Then sexting. By the beginning of the week, they’d disappeared completely.

And then, there were the dates.

But they weren’t dates, not technically. Was Chinese takeout a dinner date? Not by my standards. But sitting across the bed from Lila, her hair piled on top of her head, wearing nothing but my Hoeing Ain’t Easy T-shirt with duck sauce on her chin felt like a date. When I wiped the sauce off and she leaned over her takeout container to kiss me, it felt like a date.

And last night, the last rule went straight out the window.

I’d spent the night with Lila.

We’d woken up in a tangle, her body curled into mine, my arms around her like a vise. To see her in the morning light, sleepy and smiling and so goddamn lovely did nothing to convince me this was casual.

It was anything but casual.

And I didn’t know just what to do about that.

“Your mother knows,” Dad said. When my face shot up, he clarified, “Well, she suspects. You haven’t been in before midnight in weeks. And last night, you didn’t come home. You can’t imagine she wouldn’t have noticed.”

“I’m a grown man. I can sleep where I’d like without having to tell my mother.”