Crazy for Loving You: A Bluewater Billionaires Romantic Comedy(43)

What the fuck is wrong with me?

“Relax, hammer man. Remy’s napping. You should try it sometime. Does wonders for the grumpies. Aww, Elvira’s unicorn popped. That’s really sad.”

Daisy plops down at the edge of the pool and dangles her feet in, watching me and the cat. While she was wearing the baby backpack backwards, all I could see was face and bare legs and tiger-striped toenails.

Now I get the full view of her in a tight pink tank top and short white shorts.

Her skin’s still blotchy from yesterday’s reaction, but her personality is back in order—not that it was missing long—so I’m not worried over residual side effects.

“You know how to catch a cat?” I ask her.

“I caught Twinkle Toes. The vet’s coming over to check her out.”

“You caught the cat?”

“I draped myself with a dead tuna fish and walked down the hall until she couldn’t resist me anymore. Left it in your bed, by the way. Nothing better than waking up to tuna bed.”

She grins and winks. It bothers me how much I feel at home right now, because my sisters and Tyler would say the same. And how much I’m not actually surprised that Daisy’s taking care of the sick cat that I couldn’t find.

My nuts start singing some Barry Manilow, because they’re hopelessly falling for Daisy’s breasts.

I remind my nuts that women like Barry White better, and they tell me I should pay better attention to who I’m flirting with. Or trying not to flirt with.

They might have a point.

I’ve nearly gotten the deflating unicorn to the opposite side of the pool with Demon Cat—aka Elvira, apparently—hissing and occasionally swatting at me from a distance. She’s hissing and swatting at the water filling the floatie too.

“No reaction to having fish in your bed?” Daisy says.

“Only fair, since I put shrimp shells in your bed.”

She sucks in half a breath before she leans back and laughs. “Westley Jaeger, you have a sense of humor.”

I don’t answer, because this seems like dangerous territory.

Where I’m comfortable to Becca, I’m apparently passing some kind of test with Daisy, who’s simultaneously unreliable and dependable at the same time.

Which means she’s faking one, and I don’t like fake.

I like real.

I like rules.

I like order.

Therefore, I will not like Daisy Carter-Kincaid. I can be civil, but I don’t have to like her.

Do what you want, but we like her, my balls inform me.

Traitors.

I get the floatie lined up with the edge of the patio, but the cat keeps creeping further back, trying to climb the unicorn head, which is the only part not actively under an inch of water.

“Go on, leap.” I point to the fancy concrete surrounding the pool.

The cat hisses and swipes again, but it miscalculates, because it’s a fucking cat, and gets its claw stuck in the unicorn’s horn.

“Are you kidding me?” I mutter while it jerks its paw and tries to yank it out of the vinyl. But the bopping unicorn won’t give it up, so now the cat appears to be boxing a deflating unicorn head.

Daisy tips her head back and laughs while whipping out a phone and pointing it at me.

“What do you people do for entertainment when I’m not around?” I jump out of the pool and drag the floatie out, but the damn cat is still fighting like it wants to stay in the pool and pulverize the unicorn. “What the fuck, cat? Let go. Be free. Stay out of the water.”

It finally wrenches its claw loose, the momentum throwing it into the water.

I leap back in, but before I can reach it, it’s scrambled out, a streak of soaking wet pussy flying into the landscaping like someone just shot it out of the clown cannon my mom bitched about for two years when that one comedian got popular for using it to avenge people terrified of ventriloquists by launching puppets at every show.

She called it insulting the genre by splitting the fan base. Mocking each other is why we can’t have nice things. You can be funny without being mean.

I hadn’t understood, but eventually the cannon dude was arrested for tax fraud, so there’s that.

But back to Daisy and the cat.

“Appreciate the help,” I call to her.

She says something I don’t hear clearly, so I tilt my good ear toward her. “Do I want to know?”

She sighs and splashes the water. “I said, my parents got divorced when I was seven.”

“Because of a wet cat?”

“Basically. Several wet cats. In a manner of speaking.”

I open my mouth.

Then close it.

“Yes, my father was the same kind of philandering asshole that Rafe was. Is. My father is. He’s not dead. Not like Rafe. But he’s still a cheater, and I have three ex-stepmothers happy to share stories, though after the first one, I never bothered to get to know them well enough to invite them over for story time. That would’ve been awkward.”

Huh.

She’s flustered.

I stand there watching her, testing a theory that she hates silence, and it’s not three seconds before my patience is rewarded.

“I’m never having children, but I’m apparently having Remy, so you need to know that we will get along and never say bad things about each other in front of him, even though I don’t know if you’ll be around long enough for him to even remember this, or I will crush you in ways you had no idea you could be crushed, which will also make me very sad, because I don’t like crushing people, but I’ll do it to keep Remy from feeling like any more of a pawn than everyone’s already treating him. Understood?”