by Grant, Pippa
Remy half-coos in his sleep.
Daisy picks up the pace, and soon we’re rounding the top of the D and coming to a stop at the wall at the end of the corridor.
Logically, I know her bedroom is on the other side of that wall.
Practically, we’re at a dead end.
She flashes a grin back at me. “Want to see something cool?”
Without waiting for an answer, she leans into the corner.
There’s a subtle click, and a secret door opens.
“Okay, yeah, that’s cool.” I follow her inside, but we’re not in her bedroom. We’re in a massive library.
Rather than the typical billionaire home library with dark shelves and leather-bound books and priceless artwork, though, Daisy’s library has watercolors I don’t recognize and white shelves filled with worn paperbacks. These books have been read. And loved. I angle closer, looking at the titles.
Romance novels.
My sisters are going to love her.
If she’s serious. If she’ll let me stay in Remy’s life.
If this thing I’m feeling is mutual.
I’m attached, and I don’t want to get unattached. And legally speaking, I don’t have to.
I can be a part of Remy’s life. Forever.
“Have you read all of these?” I ask.
“All but those.” She points to the shelves around the white marble fireplace. “I spend a lot of time on airplanes, and sometimes I can’t sleep after business calls around the world in the middle of the night, so I…anyway. It’s my little secret.”
“That you read romance novels?”
“That I read.” She grins and winks, but I don’t believe for a second that she hasn’t been impacted by people’s opinions of her.
I turn away from the shelves and take stock of the rest of the room, because the idea of Daisy as a secret romantic who spends hours in here, reading and dreaming of finding her Prince Charming is too much to handle tonight.
I’ve hoped before.
Hoped, and loved, and lost.
With women who weren’t the fascinating, intricate puzzle that is Daisy Imogen Carter-Kincaid.
The rest of her library is exquisite. Pine wood flooring. Overstuffed chairs the color of the ocean. A fresco ceiling painted with a young girl dancing with unicorns. Daisies worked into the wide plaster trim along the ceiling and around the doorways. Little touches of femininity everywhere, from the heart-shaped sconces on the plaster wall to the delicate pink glass flowers on the white marble fireplace mantle.
No windows here—and I wonder if there’s another hidden door that leads outside somewhere.
“Why do people in south Florida need fireplaces?” I ask.
“Sometimes it gets below sixty.” She tiptoes beside me on bare feet. “Here. Let me have this little guy. I need snuggles.”
I could give her snuggles.
I’d like to give her snuggles. Naked snuggles on that fuzzy white rug in front of the fireplace. With my cock rocking against her pussy.
I clear my throat and hand her the baby, who curls into her chest and sighs happily while she smiles softly at him.
Seriously.
Easiest baby ever. Even with all of the movement, he’s stayed asleep.
He’ll be up again and hungry in an hour or two, but for now, he’s blissed out and happy.
“Sit.” Daisy waves at one of the chairs in front of the fireplace.
I oblige, and I have to concentrate hard on not appreciating the curve of her breasts and hips in that get-up.
She grabs her phone from a decorative table near the door, then crosses back to me. Instead of taking the other seat, she settles into my lap while thunder rolls outside.
My arms go around her, my nuts cheer, and when she looks at me, I want to kiss her.
“Hi,” I say softly.
She shifts Remy across her breasts and presses a kiss to my cheek. “Good evening, my gallant chair. I need to show you something.”
“I’d be a lot happier about that sentiment if you weren’t holding a baby.”
“Westley Jaeger, are you thinking dirty thoughts about me?”
“Only some are dirty.”
She smiles, and it’s brighter and more dazzling than lightning on the ocean, and an order of magnitude more dangerous. “Here. You need to watch this.”
She shifts in my lap, swipes her thumb over the phone, and stops on a video in her text messages, which she enlarges to the full screen. She hits play, then hands me the phone to hold while we both watch.
It’s dim, like it’s being shot at night, with little specks of light floating across the screen.
“What is this?” I ask.
“Shh.”
A shadow moves into the frame, and I realize I’m staring at—oh, fuck.
Seriously?
It’s a crystal ball.
“Ah, yes. Julienne. I knew you’d be coming. Your husband has been unfaithful again.” The first voice is low and raspy, and it makes my hairs stand on end.
“Doesn’t take a psychic to read the gossip pages, Becky. I’m well aware of what he’s been doing while I’m growing our baby.”
Hearing Julienne’s voice puts a hitch in my shoulders. Daisy shivers, and I pull her closer. She’s soft and curvy and fits perfectly, and I don’t want to move. Don’t want to watch the rest of this video either, because the creepy-crawlies dancing up my spine are warning me that whatever it is, it’ll change everything.
“You’re concerned about your safety,” Becky the psychic says.
The shadow that I assume is Julienne’s nods. “I think my mother-in-law is trying to kill me.”
What?
Daisy puts a hand to my chest. “Shh,” she says again.
Becky the Psychic leans over the ball. “She’s very attached to her son.”
“She hates me. She’s so jealous. She always wanted to be famous, and now I am, and I get half of Rafe’s trust fund if I can prove he’s cheating, and she’s still nothing. But when we went to her house last night for dinner, she was acting…strange. Like, she usually at least pretends to like me, but she was all, you won’t be my problem much longer. What does that even mean?”
“I see darkness in your future, my child.”
“No fucking duh, there’s darkness. Divorce and scandal and when she left her phone out, I checked the last text messages because she’s a moron and doesn’t know to erase text alerts, and she’s been talking with someone called Bob about peanuts and hospitals. I’m going to the hospital to have a baby in two weeks. And she doesn’t know a Bob. That’s clearly a code name so we don’t know he’s a hit man. I think she’s going to slip peanut dust into my food after I give birth. She’s going to knock me off.”
“She’s off her rocker,” I whisper.
“You are in danger,” Becky intones. “Grave danger. But not from the corners you suspect.”
Julienne shrieks. “What? What? Both of my in-laws want to kill me?”
“You have enemies, my child. More enemies than you know. And they come soon. You must put your house in order. Reconcile with your husband. It is the only path to eternal peace.”
Daisy’s not the only one with a shiver now. Eternal peace is a fuck-ton more ominous considering both Julienne and Rafe are dead now.
“That’s insane,” I mutter.
“You mean freaky,” Daisy whispers. “Shh!”
“My house in order,” Julienne is saying. “Oh. My. God. Becky. My in-laws get my house if I die. I mean, Rafe gets it first, and then—oh my god. Oh my god. What if they’re going to kill him too? What if they’ve realized he’s a huge disappointment and they want to murder us both to take the baby and try for a better son?”
“You must get your house in order,” Becky repeats.
“Yes. Yes. Anthony and Margot aren’t getting shit from me. She said my hair looked awful. Can you believe her nerve?”
“That should be stupidly funny,” Daisy whispers. “One star for h
er hair.”
“The stars have written your destiny, Julienne. You must correct your wrongs.”
“I’m not dying today, bitch. Forget it. But I’m fixing my will. And I’m making Rafe fix his too, and then I’m shoving it in their faces when I catch them and their hit man. But—but who? Fuck. I’m not leaving anything to my grandmother. She’s such a haughty asshole.”
“This is insane,” I mutter. I can’t stop saying it, because it keeps getting stranger and stranger.
“I see—I see a man,” Becky suddenly gasps. It’s an overdramatic kind of gasp, the kind that normal people don’t make, the kind that makes me ask who believes this shit, and I almost shut the phone off, but Daisy swats my finger away when I try.
“A man? For me?” Julienne asks. “Should I leave Rafe?”
“A man…you can trust… He’s tall. Dark. Handsome… Have you met anyone new lately, Julienne? Has someone tall, dark, and handsome come into your life?”
“Oh my god, my general contractor. For the baby’s room. He’s totally tall, dark, and handsome.”
Oh, fuck me. No.
No.
“Yes. Yes!” Becky the Psychic says. “And his name… His name starts with…a…a B? No, a…a T? No, I see…a J?
Julienne gasps.
“Yes! I see a J!” Becky says.
“His last name?” Julienne whispers.
“This is forking insane,” I say, stronger.
“It explains everything,” Daisy replies while Julienne shrieks my name.
“Should I leave Rafe for Westley?” Julienne breathes.
My nuts, the randy suckers without any taste, retreat so far into my abdomen that they bruise my stomach on their way to hiding behind my lungs. She’s dead. She’s not coming after them. And they’re still in hiding.
“No, you must stick by your husband to survive,” Madame Becky says.
“So name Westley as my baby’s guardian if Anthony and Margot take us both out.” Julienne’s leaning forward like she believes every bit of insanity that she’s spewing. “He can take my son away. Keep him safe from them.”
“And…I see a woman…”
“Probably a lot of them, with the way he looks,” Julienne whispers.
“She’s…blond. No, brunette. No…purple. Purple? Surely not—”
“Daisy!” Julienne shrieks.
Another full-body shiver hits me, because this cannot be real. “You have got to be shirting me.”
“My cousin Daisy!” Julienne shrieks again. “She never wears the same hair two weeks in a row!”
“She’s a scam artist,” I say to Daisy while panic swells up in my veins. This is what they need. This video is all they’ll need to one day prove I shouldn’t be in Remy’s life. Julienne let a psychic tell her who to put in her will. That’s why I’m here. “She guesses until she’s close enough for her clients to reach their own conclusion.”
She kills the video. “Julienne thought of you during a psychic reading when she thought her mother-in-law was plotting to kill her with peanuts.”
“She was allergic?”
“Highly. But West—she knew you’d be good for her baby. Better than anyone she’s related to.”
She still took parenting advice from a scam artist.
“Where’d you find this?”
She tosses her phone onto the other chair and shifts deeper into my arms. Remy’s little eyes have closed. He’s breathing through his mouth and drooling on her chest. “Julienne one-starred Madame Becky the week Remy was born.”
“You read her blog?”
“Not on purpose. I was—” She cuts herself off, and the pieces tumble into place.
“You looked up what formula and diapers he was used to.” Of course she did. Daisy isn’t stupid. Never has been. And she knew she needed to figure out how to take care of a baby.
“I remembered this afternoon, and on a whim, I reached out to ask Madame Becky if she knew anything—and not about my future, just about Julienne’s last weeks—and she sent me the video.”
“She videotapes her readings?”
“Just some. She’s running a how-to fortune teller course soon.”
“You think Margot Roderick would’ve poisoned her if—if the dolphins hadn’t gotten to her first?”
“No idea. But I sent the video to our attorneys. It might not prove Julienne was right in the head, but it’ll prove she wasn’t drunk and she most definitely did not want the Rodericks to raise her son. Plus, she still had to convince Rafe, so it’s not like the will was impulsive. She named both of us on purpose. And now we know why.”
“I’m here because she was a paranoid nutjob.”
“No, nuts would kill her. She was more of a paranoid banana-job.”
I smile, but I don’t feel it. This is it. She brought me here to say goodbye. “Point is…I’m not his family, and I shouldn’t have been in that will.”
“Westley, you are more family than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“You’ve never even seen me with mine.”
“Yes, I have.”
“No, you—”
“Family is what you make it. Tell me you didn’t have your Marines family. Go on. Tell me you didn’t have brothers and sisters in the Corps.”
I open my mouth.
Then shut it.
Because of course I’m not going to tell her I didn’t—don’t still have family in the Corps.
“You didn’t have to stay. You chose to. That makes you more family to Remy than even I am,” she whispers. “I had to step up. You didn’t. And if you hadn’t been there that first night—maybe that psychic knew what she was talking about.”
“You believe in psychics?”
“I believe in you.”
Of all the women in the world, I never expected this one to be the one to bring me fully to my knees. But here we are. With her holding the only bit of evidence she needs to kick me out of her posh life and back to where I belong.
And instead, she’s opening the door wider.
Inviting me in.
“Daisy—”
“Do you still want to stay? I wouldn’t blame you if—”
I silence her with a kiss.
I don’t know if she’s offering me herself as well as Remy. I don’t know how long she’ll let me be the man who holds her and kisses her. I don’t even know if she wants to kiss me, or if she just likes kissing.
But her free hand is curling into the fabric of my shirt and she’s parting her lips and stroking her tongue against mine and making soft, needy whimpers in the back of her throat that are making me feel like the only man in the world who can give her what she needs.
And I’m ready. Willing. Able.
Whatever she wants.
Whatever she needs.
For as long as she wants me.
That’s my boy! my nuts yell.
And suddenly I’m chuckling into the best kiss I’ve ever had in my entire life.
“Are you laughing at my technique, Mr. Jaeger?” she whispers.
“No. You—you’re—you make me lightheaded. I like it.”
Her eyes are dancing, teasing, but there’s a vulnerability lurking too.
Like she knows we can’t just be a one-night stand. There’s Remy to think about. Our futures. Intertwined.
Of fucking course I’m not walking away from this kid. He’s snuck into my heart.
Daisy can give him a good life. A solid life, with opportunities I couldn’t begin to imagine.
But I can give him a boisterous, loud, joyful family. Cousins. Aunts. Uncles.
All those things that can’t be measured on a profit and loss balance sheet.
Daisy brushes her fingers down my beard. “You’re not kissing me just because I’m a single mom, are you?”
“I’m kissing you because you’re so much more.”
Her brow furrows, and her gaze drops. “I’m not. I fake my way through everything,” she whispers.
Whoa, my nuts say. She
fakes it? Fuck! Give the woman a real fucking orgasm, Marine!
“I mean—not that.” She squirms and climbs off my lap. “I mean I’m only successful in business because people like me.”
Regroup! Regroup! my balls shriek. Regroup and go after that nooky!
Insensitive fuckers.
But in this case, I don’t think they’re wrong.
Daisy needs some TLC. And it’s time I give it to her.
Thirty-Two
Daisy
So there I was. Sitting right in West’s lap. Kissing the hell out of him. Feeling that thick ridge under my thigh. Knowing I was going to get some tonight.
And now I’ve completely and totally killed the mood.
Because he thinks I’m something I’m not.
A month ago, I wouldn’t have cared. I would’ve lured him downstairs to my office, smothered us both with froyo, and weathered this storm with some good old-fashioned monkey sex all night.
But I can’t let him think I’m something I’m not. He’s in this for the long haul, and we can’t co-parent Remy if I’m not honest with him.
“Daisy.” He grips my shoulders gently, stopping me from my retreat into my bedroom. “Being a people person is a skill. And you’re not faking your way through taking care of Remy.”
Oh, god, he has no idea. Do I love the little guy? With all my heart. But can I do this? I honest to god don’t know. I’m going to fuck him up so bad. “I am. I’m totally faking it.”
“That kid adores you. Babies see through fake.”
“But he’s so easy. It’s not me. It’s him. I’m not looking for pity here. I have a good life. There are seven and a half billion people on earth, and I have more than all but like a thousand of them. But I’m not a good person. My friend Emily? She helps minimize the appearance of scar tissue on people who need it. Cam runs a foundation that funds scholarships for kids and so much more. Luna’s a freaking charity goddess and an earth savior to boot. Her boyfriend Big Dick Beck saves innocent dogs. And what do I do? I tell Carbs ’n Coffee to put everyone’s bill on my tab some random day. That’s—that’s—”
“Incredibly thoughtful.”
“So small compared to what I could do.” My chest is warming even as I have to stop myself from banging my head against the nearest bookcase, because it’s not enough.