Crazy for Loving You: A Bluewater Billionaires Romantic Comedy(64)

Christ, now I’m picturing her giving out blow jobs for business deals. “Not helping.”

“Your sisters must love-hate you.”

A week ago, this conversation would’ve ended with me demanding to know if she took anything seriously.

Pretty sure we’ve covered that though, and I don’t have a single doubt that she takes Remy seriously as a heart attack. And that she’d do anything for him, and not just because she has the money to afford the world, but because she loves him. He’s sleeping happily in a baby swing by the arched windows overlooking the gently-lit courtyard, completely oblivious to how freaked out she was just an hour ago.

“Tell you a secret?” she says softly.

I tap my right ear. “Tell this one. I won’t hear it.”

That smile. Fuck.

Yeah! Ooh-rah! Commence with the fucking! my balls cheer.

Swear to god, I’m not related to them.

“Whenever someone in my family turns twenty-one, The Dame gives us a million dollars. Do something good with it, she gives you a job. Fuck—fork it up, and she disinherits you.”

“That’s insane.”

“It’s also why she’s basically disinherited eighty percent of her descendants. My cousin William tripled his million at the slots in Vegas, and she shut him down hard. Gambling isn’t the way to ensure the family business survives the next generation.”

“What’d you do?”

She clearly survived.

And if the way she’s shifting on her seat is any indication, she doesn’t actually want to talk about it. “I spent a quarter of it on initiation fees to the Sandbar Club, and—”

“I’m sorry, what?”

She smiles, and it’s full of mischief. “It’s an exclusive club for Miami’s richest businessmen.”

“Business…men?”

“Formerly all men, yes. I spent a week playing spy on some of its rumored members, dropping hints in various places that Carter International Properties was expanding into hotels, but looking for partners in the venture, and then I applied for the club. I might’ve also gotten chummy with the membership chairman’s wife, who didn’t know he was sleeping with his secretary, but he knew I knew, so…”

“You cheated your way into an exclusive club of assholes.”

“Basically. Yes. And then I convinced ten members to give me a million dollars each as buy-in for the Mermaid Grand Resort.”

“I know that name.”

“All-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean.”

“Ah. Allie. My sister. She went to one for her ten-year anniversary.”

“I’ll have to thank her for her patronage.” She winks at me. “It didn’t exist when I was twenty-one. But I marched into The Dame’s office and dropped ten checks on her desk, told her I was buying oceanfront property in the Dominican Republic to open an all-inclusive resort, and she was either with me, or she was against me. Now, we have sixteen properties, and we’re expanding to add four more in the next year. I passed The Dame’s test. And every year, she buys out one more of the original investors, because they’re idiots who thought that handing a twenty-one-year-old party girl a check for a million bucks was a good idea.”

“Why not open it yourself? You did all the work.”

She rolls her eyes. “Every last one of those men would’ve sued me to get their money back the minute they found out I was in charge. I don’t make money. My grandmother’s name makes money.”

“Alessandro says you make your grandmother’s money.”

“He’s biased. Without the Carter family name behind me…” She trails off with a shrug.

Like she honestly thinks she couldn’t do it on her own.

I don’t know much about the business of running an empire, but I know that anytime I walk into her office to trade off Remy, she’s on the phone or on her computer. She makes phone calls to Japan in the middle of the night—yeah, he was up at three, but I was up anyway to talk to Tokyo—and the days she’s gone to her office, she’s taken night duty before and after since she’s gone from seven AM to nine PM.

Daisy’s no lazy slouch.

She works hard.

And she’s turning a sly grin my way. “Sort of like how you wouldn’t be nearly as hot without the Jaeger name behind you. Be honest. How many women mistake you for Tyler and just drop their panties right there?”

And there’s the distraction. “Is your grandmother crashing the visit with the social worker next week?”

“She’ll try. I suspect Alessandro will be doing a periodic security exercise that involves locking the house down about the time we get the call that she’s at the Bluewater gate though.”

“Or you could tell her to stay the fuck away.”

“I don’t like my life to be miserable, and I’d really like to not be disinherited. Party girl isn’t an official title anywhere else in the world.”

I shake my head and screw the lid onto the peanut butter jar. Family’s complicated. Mine are all relatively normal—yeah, Mom goes on tour and uses all of us as fodder for her stand-up routine, and my sisters all have their quirks, and Tyler’s a special case all by himself—but none of us are so intimidated by any of the rest of us that we avoid conflict at all costs.