Daddy Undercover (Crescent Cove 9)

And would probably end with Santa in shards on the hardwood floor.

“People are talking. My car has been here practically every hour I haven’t been parked at the diner for the past week.”

“So what? Everyone knows we’re friends.”

“They also have suspicious minds. Mrs. Gunderson actually told me yesterday she has a hundred bucks on the ‘are they or aren’t they fucking’ pool. She didn’t say fucking though. She called it ‘intimate private time’.”

This was not news. I’d known about that pool for the better part of a year. I just hadn’t told Gina.

“Maybe I should bet on it,” I muttered. “I could make a mint.”

Gina stomped on my foot as she walked past me, still carting the baby. I didn’t groan—out loud at least.

She had some power behind that stomp.

Carefully, she set down Samantha in the swing and turned on the rainbow-colored musical mobile. Sadie took up her favorite spot beside the baby on the floor.

“You knew about that pool.”

I shrugged and hooked my thumbs in my pockets. “Does it matter?”

“Did you laugh about it? Maybe even pretended you hit it whenever you want?”

“Hit it? Are you serious right now?” My jaw locked as I forced down the red-hot irritation I couldn’t let free. Not now. “If you genuinely think that about me, we’ve got a problem.”

“We do have a problem, because my asserting my right to resume my life is a personal affront to you.”

“That’s what you see.”

She shrugged and crossed her arms over her standard Rusty Spoon T-shirt, pulling the well-worn material snugly across her breasts.

Which annoyed me too.

Why did she have to tug at me even now? All I wanted to do was kiss the holy hell out of her and resolve this in a way that made my intentions crystal clear.

But I couldn’t, if I wanted to keep our friendship intact. If it even still was. Somehow it seemed as if our previously rock-solid relationship had sprung some cracks when I wasn’t looking.

I narrowed my eyes. “Is this about Trina?”

“Trina,” she repeated as if the word tasted foul. “Is that your baby mama? Since you never bothered to name her before.”

“I didn’t name her because she doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, I know. You already told me how your dick has a mind of its own.”

“I made the decision to sleep with her, not my dick,” I said tightly. “But it was just supposed to be a couple of days. It wasn’t supposed to produce a lifelong reminder.”

I swallowed the bitter tang from my words. In just a week, Samantha was more than that to me. I didn’t see her mother when I looked at her or gave her a bottle or tried to have a one-sided conversation with her. She was just mine.

But I could be unreasonably petty when I was clawing back from the corner Gina had shoved me into.

“Whatever it was supposed to do, she’s here. And Samantha,” she enunciated carefully, “deserves to know you more than she knows her Aunt Gina.”

“You’re not her aunt.”

“Why do you keep saying that? First, you’re mad I’m leaving forever, which is epic BS and insulting to boot. I’m sticking. We’re glue and peanut butter and all those other messy substances.” She stomped toward me and poked me hard in the chest. “But then you try to strip away that title, as if you don’t want me to think I have any rightful place in Samantha’s life. Make up your damn mind, Brooks, because you’re confusing the hell out of me.”

I gripped her finger, holding on even when she would’ve ripped it away. “I don’t want you to be her aunt. I want something else entirely. Can’t you see that? Or are you really that fucking blind?”