How To Wife Your Nanny A Billionaire Single Dad Romantic Comedy- Melinda Minx Page 0,5

have loved boats. I should have been riding on a yacht with a scarf blowing behind me. Smoking a pipe or some shit—whatever poor people thought rich people did on yachts.

I got seasick though. It helped that we were outside and looking over the railing. The feeling of the ferry moving wasn’t so bad if I I could see the water. Going inside the ferry and losing sight of the water was basically a death sentence for me. Or a puking sentence—it’s not like it was going to kill me.

I did a lot for Naomi. I did pretty much everything for her, truth be told. I tried not to spend too much money on her, that was the main thing. I knew how quickly kids could go bad if you showered them in money rather than affection, so I tried to stick to affection. That included doing things like riding that damn puke-inducing ferry to Staten Island rather than having my driver simply take us there.

Lacey frowned at me. “Why was the Gobblegurt lady mad at you?”

The wind was blowing her dark hair back, but a lot of loose strands were running across her face, making her scrunch it up even more than she normally did when she was frustrated with me.

“She wasn’t mad at me,” I lied.

“You told me not to lie, Daddy.”

I sighed. “Okay, she was mad at me.”

And I couldn’t get the damn image of her out of my head. Ever since I found out I had a daughter, I hadn’t really dated.

I’d slept with women, of course. A one-night stand was how I ended up with Naomi in the first place. Her mother had figured—incorrectly—that I was the kind of guy who wouldn’t want to know about having a daughter. She’d died in a car crash when Naomi was just nine months old, and ever since that day, my life had been transformed. For the better, of course.

Still, I’d resigned myself to being a single dad for the rest of eternity. No one was good enough for my little girl, and I was fiercely protective of her. The last thing I needed was Naomi thinking some woman was going to be her new mom, only for that woman to have a nasty breakup with me and rip that all away from my little girl.

So I’d been guarded. I’d only slept with women. No dating. No long-term anything.

So why couldn’t I get Lacey out of my head? I wasn’t like I wanted to sleep—okay, I’m lying. I wanted to sleep with her. I’d always had a thing for the librarian type. Especially the type of women like Lacey who were this confounding mix of fierce and headstrong, while also managing to be painfully awkward and self-conscious.

The way her body reacted when I’d touched her earlobe was absolute perfection, and I’d wished I hadn’t been in a library full of kids, so that I could have touched her more and seen what she’d have done for me.

Well, she had at least seemed into me before she found out who I was. That was the other thing. Normally, once women find out that I’m Noah Black, billionaire CEO of Blackwinters publishing, they suddenly like me a lot more.

Lacey was the opposite.

“She was mad at me…” I said, looking at Naomi, but I wasn’t sure how to explain the situation to her. She was sharp for a four-year-old, and I had to be very careful of what I said to her. She remembered everything too, which had come back to bite me in the ass more times than I could count. “She was mad at me because she didn’t understand what happened with her books.”

“What happened with her books?”

I crouched down and met Naomi eye-to-eye. “Remember when you first got into those books, and I told you I’d see if I could get the author to make more?”

She nodded.

“Well, it turns out she stopped making those books because of me.”

“So she’s always been mad at you?”

I tried not to laugh. “Yeah. She was mad at me before I ever met her. The thing is, I didn’t even realize I’d done anything wrong.”

“Now you have to tell her you’re sorry, Daddy.”

“That’s right, the problem is she’s still mad at me and doesn’t want to hear it.”

“You have to say sorry anyway. Whenever you hurt someone’s feelings, you have to let them know you feel bad about it.”

I smiled at her and tucked the stray strands of hair back behind her ear.