Crazy for Loving You A Bluewater Billionaires Romantic Comedy - Pippa Grant Page 0,19
stand up and tell me this kid’s parents had a solid reason for putting me in that will, and I’d stay.
I’d fight.
I could give him doting aunts. The best grandparents. An insane uncle—everyone needs an Uncle Tyler—and cousins and pool parties and root beer popsicles and birthday parties and lawn darts and a solid middle-class life full of fun and hard work.
But staying here is nothing more than a shortcut to another family I don’t belong with.
Easier to walk away now than to stay, get attached, and complicate what’s undoubtedly going to be a messy situation. “The Rodericks—they’ll fight for the kid?”
I met Anthony Roderick once. Guy leered at his daughter-in-law like he wanted to take her to bed himself, slapped the housekeeper on the ass, and pissed in the bushes.
Not in that order.
I’d probably be in jail if I’d been any closer when the ass-slapping happened, but he was long gone by the time I made it out of the nursery. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to understand the maid, but I knew the hand gesture. Leave it be. It’s fine.
It wasn’t fine.
“They’ll try,” Alessandro tells me. “They’ll lose. We know people.”
We know people.
See? The baby has Alessandro too. He doesn’t need me. He’ll never even remember me.
I hand him my card. “Either of them need anything, let me know.”
He studies me again, and I get the feeling he’s calling me a pansy-ass for leaving. Or possibly an idiot for thinking I could have anything Daisy Carter-Kincaid might need.
He opens the door, and a parrot squawks an obscenity at us from a perch near a window. “Get out of here, Frank,” Alessandro says.
The parrot tells him to fuck off, then flutters away.
“We’ll keep you on the guest list until the legal dust settles,” he tells me.
I nod and head for my truck, parked in the same place I put it last night. Or fifty years ago. Feels that long.
“By the way, TMZ has a copy of the will and pictures of both of you.”
My head whips up. “What?”
“Might want to keep your head down.”
Fucker.
He grins.
I flip him off and head for my car.
In all the chaos, I forgot to tell my family.
My sister Keely reads TMZ religiously. I open my truck, climb in, and fire up my phone, which I shut down last night when the battery started getting low. I’m tired, and I don’t want to deal with this. I got approximately forty-five minutes of sleep last night in the sprawling, sea-toned sitting room where the baby fussed and whimpered through the night, with the window open to let in the sea breeze and the sound of the bay outside.
Forty-five minutes of dream-filled sleep about getting summoned into that princess bedroom for a second chance at the striptease, followed by a booty call, courtesy of that flash of seeing Daisy naked at three AM.
She’s wild and unpredictable and annoying and irresponsible and fucking fascinating.
And for two whole minutes, I thought we’d have some fun. Until life happened.
But life with Daisy isn’t happening now. Because I’ve done the date a single mother thing one too many times.
No way I’m getting involved with a woman who just unexpectedly inherited a baby.
No matter what watching her face light up with joy and utter adoration at holding the baby did to that hollow in my chest.
My phone powers up, and a minute later, I get approximately six thousand message notifications. I scroll up, and start at the top of the family group text, and jump in apparently just in time.
Keely: WESTLEY MICHAEL JAEGER, YOU ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE WITH ME. A BABY? You inherited a BABY with a BILLIONAIRE HEIRESS PARTY GIRL and you let us find out from people? *angry emoji* *shocked emoji*
Mom: Keely, I told you, that article was about a different Westley Jaeger. Our West would’ve told us if he inherited a baby.
Britney: Mr. I’ll Take Care Of This Myself? No, Mom, he wouldn’t have.
Mom: He didn’t even know that awful woman.
Keely: Yes, he did. Remember? “He strokes paint onto the wall like he’s never satisfied a woman in his life and he probably stuffs his pants with ass padding to make it look that good.”
Mom: Oh, THAT woman? THAT was the woman who left him a BABY? Honey. This is just Tyler setting up another prank.
Allie: God, Keely, did you memorize that review? And Tyler knows a lot of people, but even he can’t hack people to put up a prank article about West.