Crazy for Loving You

by Grant, Pippa

  He’s shaking his head and muttering again as he heads into the walk-in closet.

  I follow, only to get treated to the sight of him pulling off his T-shirt.

  “Whoa, baby, that is epic,” I breathe.

  He starts and turns around, and hello, even better.

  “Do you have any concept of personal space?”

  “Not really. That artwork is amazing. Phuket? Or Bora-Bora?” Amongst all the ink on his chest, I move to touch the beach bungalow-and-mountain landscape on one pec between a mermaid masthead over his shoulder and what appears to be an intricate string of thorns and roses curving around his shoulder blade, but he swats my hand away.

  “Go away.”

  “I’ll show you mine if you tell me.”

  “I don’t want to see your ass.”

  I chuckle. “Aww, you know I have an ass on my ass! Westley Jaeger, have you been googling me?”

  “I’m changing my pants.”

  “Do you have a tattoo on your ass too?”

  “Don’t say ass in front of the baby. Actually, you shouldn’t cuss in front of the baby at all. They’re very impressionable. And go away.”

  He’s right. I should go away. If I tell myself we can be friends who keep in touch after Remy’s guardianship is no longer in question, I’m lying, because I can’t be friends with a hard-bodied, competent, half-cranky, half-resigned, all-saving-my-ass former military man, because he’s too fucking attractive for me to just be friends with.

  I know I don’t need feelings about him.

  Just help. Preferably with a side of mutual respect, since I know a thing or two firsthand about the awkwardness of having parents who hate each other, though hopefully all the legal baloney will be over with long before Remy can remember any of this.

  But West doesn’t like me, which is the other barrier to me being friends with him.

  And that’s probably my fault. “So what’s the story with you and Becca? You like her, but you wouldn’t look at her yesterday. Don’t think a few little shrimp made me blind. I mean, it did, for about thirty minutes when I couldn’t open my eyes, but before that.”

  He turns his back to me and drops his pants, white briefs and all, and my mouth goes dry.

  He does not, in fact, have any tattoos on his ass.

  But he does have two solid marble orbs that end in tree trunk thighs that could probably squat my entire house.

  In my lifetime, I’ve seen a healthy share of asses. Athlete asses. Movie star asses. Asses from every continent on earth, of all shapes, sizes, and colors.

  I could build an ass museum with all the asses I’ve seen.

  But West Jaeger’s ass tops them all.

  The thick muscly types don’t usually do it for me—I’ve been in more of a mood for the slender starving rock star type lately—but I want to bend over and take a bite of one of those cheeks, and then trace every inch with both my tongue and my fingers.

  Even more than all the ink on his back, his bare ass is pure erotic artwork.

  That he’s covering with board shorts.

  I whimper.

  He pulls a fresh white T-shirt over his dark, disheveled hair, and the tattoo disappears too.

  But I know it’s there.

  And I won’t forget anytime soon.

  This is not good for my sanity. I shake my head as he bends over, grabs his dirty clothes, and places them carefully in a laundry hamper beneath the short row of folded and ironed jeans and T-shirts hanging on the lone rod in the closet.

  He irons his jeans.

  I’m simultaneously turned on and appalled, and I’m highly uncomfortable with both reactions.

  “Going for a swim?” I manage to say nearly normally.

  He grabs his phone off the end table in the sitting room and walks out without answering me.

  Remy gurgles and coos.

  “Agreed,” I tell him. “We like hanging out with West, don’t we?”

  Remy smiles.

  God, he’s adorable.

  It’s seriously hard to believe he’s a product of Julienne and Rafe.

  “Wait up,” I call to West. “I need your opinion on whether the new speaker system for baby music should go in this nursery, or in the one closer to my bedroom. Or if I should just get a second one.”

  “Do you know why I gave you a schedule last night?”

  Yay! He’s talking to me again. “Because you can’t shake your time in the military?”

  “Because I need space from you if I’m going to stay here long enough for you to get full, uncontested custody of the baby.”

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” I say quietly. “I’m not hounding you about Becca because I want to be an ass. I just want to understand. You’re doing me a huge favor, and I can’t do you huge favors back if I don’t know you well enough to know what kind of favors you like.”

  He studies me for a moment. “Thank you,” he says gruffly before turning back down the hall.

  Such a grumpy bear. He’s so damn adorable. “It sucks that Julienne put you in this position, because you seem like one of the good guys who’d be a super amazing role model for Remy in a world where they’re hard to find. Maybe we should get married.”

  That stops him short in the middle of the hallway, with the early evening light shafting through the arched windows and illuminating him like an avenging beach angel.

  Oh, shi—shirt.

  The one time he takes me seriously, it’s about getting married.

  “Kidding.” I laugh, which is easy, because I do this laugh seventeen times an hour when I’m partying with new acquaintances, which is basically every other weekend.

  He slowly turns to face me again, still lit and glowing. “Why do you want this baby?”

  Does he have to do that thing where he crosses his muscled arms over his chest while he interrogates me? Because I have a damn good air conditioning system, but I’m starting to sweat. “I—”

  I have to stop and clear my throat. This is harder to say than I’m sorry was.

  Why do I want Remy?

  Because he’s alone and helpless. Because he deserves a fucking awesome life. Because he’s an orphan. Because he’s my responsibility. Because my grandmother will disinherit me and yank away the only thing I’ve ever been marginally good at if I don’t take on this challenge too.

  But I can’t say that.

  “You’re going to have to tell a judge,” he points out. “So you might as well tell me.”

  “I don’t know you well enough to trust you,” I manage to say, just barely over a whisper.

  “You’ve trusted me with your cousin’s baby for the better part of the last two days.”

  “That’s completely different than trusting you with me.”

  “Is that what you’re going to tell Remy when he asks you personal questions? That he doesn’t have the right to know you? How’s he ever going to learn to have real relationships with other people when his mother figure won’t let him in?”

  Heat is creeping over my scalp and down my neck. I’ve been naked and felt less exposed than I do right now.

  “I don’t know what google told you about me, but it only tells you what I want it to tell you. So go ahead. Judge me. Make assumptions. Draw your conclusions. Everyone does. Why shouldn’t you too?”

  “Going on the offensive only works if your offense is better than your defense.”

  I blink twice, because I’m not sure what he means, but I think he just called me out on avoiding the question.

  Again.

  “I’ll never have a bigger bank account or house or legal team than you,” he says, “but I also don’t have family that threatens and bullies their way into being in charge. Don’t know shit about raising kids firsthand, but I know they need unconditional love and a whole hell of a lot of work if they’re going to grow up to not be shitheads.”

  Shit. Am I swooning? I think I’m swooning again. “Having money doesn’t automatically make someone a shithead.”
>
  “No, but being related to your grandmother seems to.”

  I actually can’t argue with him. Also, I swear the man is getting sexier by the millisecond.

  And if that smirk as he turns and walks away again is any indication, he knows it.

  Nineteen

  West

  Confucius once said, there’s nothing like feeling like an asshole to encourage a guy to try to rescue an idiot cat from a swimming pool.

  So maybe I’m paraphrasing Confucius, but I do feel like an asshole for putting Daisy on the spot. It’s not her fault I have a fucking hero complex. Not her fault her cousin married into a family of assholes and then named me in her will.

  And it’s not her fault I said yes when she asked me to come back.

  That’s all on me.

  So I need to quit taking it all out on her and make the most of being here.

  Nicely.

  Also, this damn cat does need to be rescued from the pool, since it stuck a claw through the pool floatie it’s been chilling on since yesterday.

  “C’mon, kitty kitty,” I mutter. “You don’t look like you can swim, so just let me grab you and get you to shore, okay?”

  The gray tabby meow-squeals and prances in place on the deflating unicorn, which is not only wilting, but also taking on water, which the cat is freaking over.

  Apparently it doesn’t like getting its paws wet.

  Or maybe it’s terrified that whatever happened to the unicorn will happen to it.

  But when I wade closer in the four-foot-deep water in the middle of the D-shaped pool in the courtyard, it arches its back and hisses, its tail going fluffier than my sister’s Pomeranian at the height of summer humidity.

  “All right, all right, I’ll just pull you over to the side and you can climb off with your prissy little self.”

  Another three minutes, and it’ll be swimming for it, but this one seems to have enough demon in it that it could probably levitate to shore. I should leave it to its own devices, but if it can’t swim, I’ll be the asshole who let a cat fall off a deflating unicorn and drown.

  “Pussy problems?” a familiar voice calls.

  My shoulders bunch, and I order them to relax. Me being an ass to her won’t make any part of the next few weeks to months any easier.

  “Where’s the baby?” I try to keep my voice casual, but I don’t know if I hit it.

  “Steve’s babysitting him.”

  I twist around, not sure I heard her right. “Steve—the alligator?”

  She laughs, and dammit.

  She’s incapable of uttering a single true sentence, and here I am, wanting to actually laugh at both her audacity and the fact that I’m sixty percent tempted to believe her.

  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?”

  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?”