The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(17)

“Is she planning on making them play on our snowshoe baseball team as part of their journey?” I murmur to Ridhi.

She turns a horrified stare on me. “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that we’re letting those prissy socialites mess up our record. We want to win.”

“Against Deer Drop, yeah. The other teams? Standing room only, you and Anya would sell out of cream puffs and cupcakes, and we might make enough in side bets about who’ll face-plant first to do the roads and the bridge.”

“Plus we’d get to see them play snowshoe baseball,” Willie Wayne agrees.

“And how do you plan on getting Estelle Lightly’s buy-in on that?” Ridhi asks. “Whitney Anastasia didn’t play snowshoe baseball in Pink Gold.”

For the first time since Phoebe Lightly tried that eyebrow thing on me, I’m grinning again. “Pretty sure if flattery doesn’t work, telling her we’re shorthanded and also in need of a manager will.”

“Shiloh’s right. You’re awful.”

Willie Wayne grins at me. “Awful, maybe, but not wrong.”

“And how are you going to explain to Bridget that you’re replacing her?” Ridhi asks.

“She’s fifteen. She has lots of years to play manager.”

Estelle’s spelling out her family’s transgressions while Shiloh keeps shooting more and more desperate looks our way.

Her mother might’ve worked in Hollywood for a while, but she was one of the most honest, kind, and real people I’ve ever met. She walked away from her career when the tabloids started attacking Shiloh, and to her dying day, she insisted her only regret was not doing it sooner.

Margot Lightly lifts a hand. “Could we please get on with the torture? You can’t finish what you don’t start. Also, I work best with a mimosa.”

Octavia—Tavi, according to Bridget—has done nothing but take selfies of herself and her dog this entire time. Carter, Estelle’s only grandson, is still slouching like the one-hit wonder Bridget tells me he is. “His stage name is Carter Hardly,” she mentioned with an eye roll last night. “He was trying for a play on Lightly and has no idea how stupidly ironic his name is.”

“No mimosas until you’ve improved your soul,” Estelle tells Margot.

“My soul is just fine.”

“You blackmailed Berta Svendali into picking a god-awful spokesperson for her perfume line.”

“That was for her own good. If she’d used a better spokesperson, that horrid scent would’ve been all over Manhattan, and her reputation would’ve been ruined.”

“That was for Tavi’s good, since it launched her reputation as an influencer. And yours. And don’t get me started on you stealing Magnus Ricardo’s shoe design.”

“Back off, Mother,” Michael Lightly says. So apparently he does stick up for his wife. Didn’t see that coming. “We all know where we got all our worst qualities from. How about you fix you first and then see how much that fixes the rest of us?”

“Oh, shall we talk about your indiscretions?” Estelle replies. “Or about your lack of a record of doing real work for the family company? I should take your last twenty years’ worth of pay out of your trust fund.”

“This is better than that last episode of Lola’s Tiny House,” Willie Wayne whispers.

“Gigi, we have our dysfunctions, but we still love each other, and that has to count for, like, so much when it comes to staying out of hell.” Tavi pauses long enough in snapping selfies to lift her dog and make it talk for her. “There’s nothing I’d change about our family.”

“Except for us to be related to other people,” Carter mutters.

“Other people with trust funds?” Phoebe asks him. “Or were you planning to get an actual job?”

“Family game night,” Estelle says. “Yes, we’ll add that to the list. We need to experience this family-game-night thing. ‘The family that games together dances through the heavenly gates together.’”

“‘The family that came together,’” Willie Wayne mutters. “And it’s ‘danced in joy together,’ and it’s about found family, not biological family. She’s ruining the movie.”

“She’s also bringing a crap ton of cash into Tickled Pink,” Ridhi says.

Money money money. I shove a frustrated hand over my hair. “If this is just about the money—”

“Shove it, Teague.” Ridhi pins me with the same look she gave me when Shiloh told me to get goats. “It’s not about a onetime cash infusion. You know what an increase in tourism, even a small increase, could do for us? You can quit fighting off all those cookie-cutter subdivision developers trying to creep in from Deer Drop. Could probably even stop showing houses in Deer Drop and sell a few here instead. Get a bigger herd of goats. Imani and Dante could fix up the Pearly Gates Inn. Patrice could run the spa full-time again. We’ll finally be able to afford to tear down that damn Ferris wheel.”

My nose twitches.

Once I got over the shock of Shiloh telling me she was pregnant, the first thing I wanted to do was finish that Ferris wheel so I could take my kid on a ride.

Now, Bridget’s fifteen, and an old fifteen at that—she was born thirty-two, swear she was—and the Ferris wheel can’t be “finished.”