The other Daddy laughed. “Don’t look at me.”
Edward shrugged, his eyes twinkling. “I’m not his Daddy, either. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard Sam say earlier that he didn’t have a—”
“Shmrhph mup, schcmld mddy!” Sam… said? Waving his fork at Edward. Then he swallowed the oversized bite and said more clearly, “Traitor! Why am I not surprised? Rene! Platypus! Platypus!”
I smiled back, because he was funny and it was so nice of him to include me in all this, even if… if I was failing at it, but I’d never been great at being in social situations anyway, so I was glad when the tattooed Daddy grinned like Sam was the most adorable thing he’d ever seen—which he was, of course—and saved me from having to play along.
“So, you don’t have a Daddy of your own, Little One?” the man asked Sam.
Sam batted his eyes and started flirting right back while the Little on Sam’s other side showed her Daddy the way she’d colored the anthropomorphic food characters on the cute, printed menus and then glowed at his praise. Over at the buffet, a Little built like a linebacker wearing a soft-looking cotton bodysuit printed with rocket ships quietly sucked on a binky and trailed after his Daddy. He had one hand hooked into the Daddy’s waistband as the Daddy filled up one of the brightly colored, sectioned plates that the hotel had provided, and he looked… happy. They all did. They looked like this was exactly where they fit, and I… I didn’t.
My stomach cramped. I wasn’t good at flirting, and I didn’t really want to color, and I kind of wished I could just have a normal plate.
No, what I really wished was that I hadn’t come down to breakfast at all.
Wait, no. Not that, because no matter how bad at being Little I was, Edward was still by my side, and that was… that was pretty great.
As if he could tell I was thinking of him, his arm suddenly came around me, his warm smile chasing away some of my despair.
“Rene,” he started, “let’s—dammit.”
His phone had chirped, really loudly, causing all the conversations around us to pause for a second.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he said, grimacing as he pulled it out. “That’s Greg’s emergency ringtone. My attorney. I need to…” He frowned down at the screen, then sighed before looking up at me. “I’ll be right back. Are you going to be okay on your own here?”
“He’snoton his own,” Sam chimed in, glaring at Edward even though Edward had been nothing but nice to him all day.
I felt a little bad about that. Luckily, though, Edward seemed to think it was funny.
“Of course he’s not,” Edward said, smiling at him as if he couldn’t feel the daggers Sam was shooting out of his eyeballs at all. “And in that case, please take good care of my—of Rene for me, Sam. I’ll just be a minute.”
“Suuuuureyou will,” Sam said, rolling his eyes and making a shooing motion. “Go evict some widows and orphans or something, Mr. G. We don’t need you here.”
“Sam,” the tattooed Daddy said sharply. “Manners.”
Sam startled and turned bright red, but instead of a snarky comeback, a look came over his face that reminded me of a heart-eye emoji and he leaned into the man, apologizing sweetly as he all but melted against him.
Apologizing to the tattooed Daddy, not to Edward.
Edward just laughed, though. “Be good,” he whispered with a wink before striding off with his phone already to his ear. But not before he’d paused to kiss the top of my head after he stood up, leaving my stomach all aflutter.
But thenmyphone buzzed, and when I pulled it out, it was a message from Daryl.
11
Edward
The conceptof work-life balance hadn’t even been on my radar for the last few years, so it probably wasn’t fair of me to feel so irritated that Greg was interrupting me while I was… well, I suppose not technically on vacation, since my original purpose in coming to Asheville had been work-related, but I definitely didn’t appreciate being pulled away from Rene.
Walking away from him—especially when I could tell the chaotic breakfast event was making him anxious for some reason—was the last thing I wanted to do. But I did run one of the largest construction companies in the state, and regardless of my personal wishes, I wasn’t so irresponsible that I’d ignore it when Greg said an urgent issue had come up.
That didn’t mean I had to like it, though.
“Make it quick,” I barked into the phone ungraciously as soon as I was out of earshot of the loud breakfast room. A chastising silence answered me, and I sighed, scrubbed a hand over my face, and tried again. “Sorry, I was in the middle of something important. Please, bring me up to speed on the Patel situation.”
“Something important?” Greg finally responded. “I got word that you’d put off the meeting with The Plazerra’s management team this morning.”
“I did.”
