Crazy for Loving You A Bluewater Billionaires Romantic Comedy - Pippa Grant Page 0,4

throat. “About getting you a water? I never joke about water.”

“About…the, erm, dating thing.” She tries to smile again, but she looks more like she sucked down a raw oyster that’s decided it wants to live and is clawing its way back up her throat while she pretends she’s not going to puke.

The gentlemanly thing to do would be to brush it off.

Tell her I’m kidding. Laugh. Move on. That I’m following in my mother’s footsteps.

Hell, the saving face thing to do is to laugh it off.

So I nod. Force a laugh. “Yeah. You got me. Sorry. Bad timing.”

Her high cheekbones are going scarlet. She lifts the Beach Burger milkshake cup to her face like she can cool them off, and I know she doesn’t believe me. “West, I—I don’t know what to say.”

Flex your muscles! Do a headstand! Save an old lady from choking! my balls bark at me. Send her a dick pic! Show her what she’s missing.

Clearly, my balls aren’t always that bright.

“That’s not a yes.” I swallow hard, because fuck, this hurts worse than that time O’Leary dropped a dumbbell on my foot right before a twenty-mile rucksack run.

This wasn’t supposed to hurt. It’s supposed to be logical.

We make good friends. I fix leaks under her sink. She cooks me dinner. We’ve both been burned by love before. Who wants that when you can just go for comfort and companionship?

She’s shaking her head. “I just—I don’t—god, this is so hard.”

“You don’t see me like that,” I fill in for her. “It’s okay. Bad joke.”

“I—you—yes.” She slumps back in her chair. “You’re like—”

“A brother.”

Her mouth flounders open for a second before she seals her lips shut.

She was going to say it.

She was going to say I’m like a brother to her.

Of fucking course she was. That’s what I’ve been going for, isn’t it?

“You’re…very comfortable. And nice. And—very funny with jokes,” she finishes lamely.

She looks like she wants a portal to hell to open up and swallow her, because that would be less awkward than sitting here and telling me that I’m comfortable.

I could tell her about the time I nearly got blown to smithereens in Mosul. Or the time me and my buddies saved a dude who fell out of his raft on some nasty rapids. Or the time I let my commander talk to my mother.

But she’s right.

“After the way you said your divorce went, I thought comfortable might be nice.”

Her brows wrinkle. “Are you looking for just comfortable?”

Retreat! Retreat! my nuts yell. “Becca. We’re not kids anymore. We’ve both been burned. And you keep saying you don’t want to be alone the rest of your life. I don’t either, but I can’t see myself dating a twenty-something, and the dating pool isn’t exactly full for people our age.”

She starts to say something, cuts herself off, glancing sideways, and whispers something that I only catch because I’ve gotten fucking good at reading lips since that mortar round left me with eighty percent hearing loss in my right ear halfway through my career.

I just started dating someone.

Someone who isn’t me.

Because she doesn’t see me like that.

I have four sisters with zero filter when it comes to relationship advice. My parents taught me manners. The Marines taught me to be a man. And I suddenly feel like that awkward teenager on a string of bad dates again.

“Who is he?” I have lots of experience being a brother. I’ll be her fucking brother.

Her cheeks turn into beets. “A dad I met at Mia’s swim meet. He—he was her fourth-grade teacher. That was the year—”

“You got divorced.”

“He’s a good guy. Also divorced. We just clicked. He coaches his son’s little league team, which is why I hadn’t seen him at swim meets until this weekend. The games always conflicted with swim practices. We’re all going mini-golfing this weekend. It’s not—I didn’t do it to hurt you. I didn’t realize you…thought this was going somewhere else.”

“Not your fault. Forget I said anything.”

Neither one of us will forget I said anything.

We make it through swallowing down burgers and shakes with stilted conversation that’s making more bad memories surface.

A blind date to a funeral. The time my buddies put a laxative in my lunch and it kicked in right after I picked up my date for a drive up the California coast. That super fun date where we were playing sand volleyball and I accidentally gave her a black eye when we both dove for the ball at the same time and our