Crazy for Loving You: A Bluewater Billionaires Romantic Comedy(44)

That’s reasonable. I don’t think it’s the full story on why she hasn’t issued a single complaint about raising the baby beyond that first night, but it’s a start.

Yeah! A start! my balls crow.

They’re idiots.

So am I, because my place here isn’t real. It’s for show, for the lawyers and judges. Still, I don’t look away from her. “Why do you call him Remy? Is that what Julienne called him?”

“No, she called him Mington.”

I cross my arms. “Why do I even try with you?”

“Pinky swear. Here. Look.” She bends over her phone, and a minute later, she flashes the screen at me across the pool. I hear muffled voices, and I can’t see a damn thing on the screen, so I do something I’ll probably regret, and I dive into the water to cross the pool.

Quicker than walking around.

Plus, I didn’t go into the Marines because I wanted to be stuck on land forever.

I fucking love the water.

I surface, and she’s frowning at me. It’s a subtle frown, her brows barely pinched, her pink lips straighter than turned down, but it’s definitely a frown.

She looks different without all her makeup on.

Like a real woman.

Not the one who’s always on the magazines that my sisters keep when I’m visiting home. And not just because her skin is still blotchy in places.

But only a few places.

“Here. Look. Home videos from her private Instagram account.”

“Private? Like where she said nice things about people?”

Daisy grimaces. “Sure. Let’s go with that.”

She lifts the phone again, and I lean closer to watch the video on the small screen.

The scent of coconut floods my nose as I get within sniffing distance of Daisy, and I suddenly need to know what Sierra is doing. How big Baxter and Nina are now. If she ever got remarried.

Noise off Daisy’s phone reminds me to breathe, and there’s another flash of weirdness in my chest as Julienne Carter-Roderick appears on the screen, stalking across the kitchen in her Coconut Grove mansion, wearing heels and a baby sling and talking to the camera. “Mington is three weeks old today, and he’s brilliant, naturally. He said Hello in Mandarin this morning when I woke him up. That baby course in Italian clearly is a piece of shit, since it’s teaching Mington to speak Mandarin, but at least he’s learning to be quatralingualistic before he can crawl.”

“Quatralingualistic?”

“She tried, poor thing. Her father—my uncle—abandoned her mother when she was two, and her mom never got over it, which meant the Graminator was basically the closest thing she had to a solid maternal role model. Nicely done with her yesterday, by the way. Tiana showed me the video last night. You’re hot when you’re all bossy and protective. And we could get married. That’d prove to the social workers that we’re good for the baby.”

I switch my attention from the video to her face.

She blinks innocently.

“If I’m not going to be an asshole, you need to not be an asshole.”

“What? I’ve read a ton of romance novels on marriages of convenience, and it’s not a bad idea.”

She’s honestly incapable of being serious for three fucking seconds. And I’m not nearly as annoyed by it as I should be. I stop when I realize I’m subconsciously leaning toward her, nearly smiling. “Do you flirt with everything that moves?”

“Basically. I hit on my friends all the time, but they all have boyfriends or fiancés now, so I have to find another object to practice on. And you, clearly, need to feel like you’re attractive so you can find a higher caliber of crushes.”

She gives me that grin again, shrugging her shoulders in a little oopsie move. “Sorry. I’m done. I swear. I just—you really could do better. Look at you. You deserve to have a woman who’ll worship you the way Derek, Beck, and Jude worship Emily, Luna, and Cam, because I don’t tolerate my friends being in relationships with people who don’t deserve them.”

“Just when I think we’re making progress, you go and say something that makes me want to leave.”

“West.” She loops her arms around my neck, much like she leaped on me for that kiss that I can’t erase off my lips, and she lowers her voice conspiratorially. “Friends watch out for friends. You’d tell me if I was dating someone horrifically wrong for me, wouldn’t you?”

I study her blue eyes, then slowly nod. “Probably owe you that much.”

She quirks another grin, and I realize she has tiny laugh lines at the corners of her eyes.

She really does laugh all the time. Because she’s happy?

Or because she’s faking it?

But her attention drops to my wet T-shirt, and an uncharacteristic seriousness touches her gaze. “You know what occurred to me yesterday, while I was at the emergency room?”

“That money can’t buy your way out of allergies?”

She shakes her head. “You don’t have Carter genes. Maybe Julienne didn’t just draw names out of a hat. Maybe she looked at you, and how you told her off when she had her hissy fit about that wall and the fountain, and she realized she wanted her son to be raised by someone with the cojones to stand up to people. Like The Dame.”

“I didn’t tell her off.”