Daddy Undercover (Crescent Cove 9)

Shaking my head, I sighed again. “Trust me, he’s packing in all ways. And since you have a perverted mind, no, it wasn’t anything salacious. Just you watch enough movies with a guy on the couch, sometimes you bump into things.”

She screeched loudly enough to pop my eardrum. I winced and held the phone away from my head and still had no problem hearing her.

“You guys are snuggling when you’re watching movies? How haven’t you done it yet?”

“We aren’t about that. We’ve always snuggled while we watch movies. Is that weird?”

“As weird as him sleeping with someone whose name rhymes with yours. At least that was what I got out of your ramble. Apologies if I’m off base.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. He deserved it. Probably.

I’d still feel guilty by dinnertime, guaranteed.

“He slept with her and made a baby with her. Which is basically the hugest secret ever, and you can’t tell anyone—not even your bestie Ryan—because no one on this planet knows yet but me and Trina.”

I wasn’t someone who hated people on the regular, especially someone I’d never even met. But I would have in her case even without any other mitigating factors due to the whole baby-in-a-basket deal. That was the cruelest thing I could imagine.

“Oh, Gina, I’m so sorry.” Luna’s quiet empathy had me sinking to the cold floor, as if my legs just couldn’t hold me up anymore.

“Remind me we aren’t anything to each other, would you?”

“Honey, you know that isn’t true. It’s never been true, or you wouldn’t be so hurt right now.”

“What’s been just in my head and heart doesn’t count.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“I can’t, especially after this week. I’ve been over there every spare hour when I haven’t been at the diner, helping with the baby. She’s so cute, Lu. She smiles like him. It kills me a little bit every time, but it makes me happy too. I don’t mind that she’s here. I just wish—”

“That she was yours.”

I sniffled. She didn’t know about me either. My mom was the only one. That knowledge was just one more knife in the ribs. I didn’t feel the edge of the blade most of the time unless I took a deep breath.

Or unless my best friend discovered he had a gorgeous little girl who smelled like powder and had the softest hair I’d ever touched.

“I was handling it. Not that well, granted. But I was taking it one day at a time. But people are starting to notice how much time I’m over there, and he kept putting off telling everyone about Samantha, and then Caleb Beck asked me to look at some Christmas lights.”

“You said yes. You better have said yes.”

“I did. Just as friends.”

“Even so, you can’t just wait around like the sheriff is an incoming bus. He’s never on time. Never gets the schedule or the destination right. And you’re worth so much more than being someone’s convenience if he’s too stupid to grasp what he could’ve had.”

I sniffled again. I wasn’t crying, but man, my nose didn’t know it. “You just told me to get banging him out of my system.”

“Nope. Suggestion rescinded. I don’t think he deserves your pent-up sex drive now.”

I grinned and leaned my head against the stove. “I don’t think it’s on the agenda anyway. I told him yesterday we need to rethink our arrangement.”

“You mean the one where you play his nanny and the baby’s nursemaid while he gets to glower at any guy who looks sideways at you?”

“He doesn’t do that.” Exactly.

“You think not? Remember when I was at the diner last month?”

“Yeah, you and Ryan stopped in before you went to Kinleigh’s.”

“There was a new guy at the next table. You bent over to pick up something off the floor, and the dude was checking you out. Can’t blame him. You have a nice butt.”