The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The First Collection Frost, J (good beach reads .TXT) 📖

finishes with a string of emojis: a peach, a clapping hand and, strangely, an avocado.

An avocado spanking?

Sorry, that was supposed to be an eggplant.

An eggplant spanking?

A spanking and sex!

I chuckle; I knew what she meant.

That will definitely make me feel better. Put Stanley in before I get home.

I will, Daddy. ILY.

ILY2, baby doll.

I brush my thumb over the screen, feeling better than I have since Miranda walked through the security doors. I may be forced to deal with the woman who is deliberately undressing in my peripheral vision for the next forty-eight hours, but at the end of that, she’s going to climb on a plane and return to the ruins of her life, while I’ll go back to my life with a little girl who makes me stupid happy and wants avocado spankings.

Miranda walks naked from her closet to the bathroom, making sure I see her. My friend Ryan refers to the swelling of his wife’s breasts during pregnancy as a visit from the Titty Fairy, and I see that the Titty Fairy has visited Miranda. The sight of her swollen breasts leaves me unmoved. All I can think of is the icy, calculating heart beneath them, and the very warm heart behind my little girl’s modest B-cups.

Evidently remembering that I’m more of a leg-and-ass man, Miranda pulls on a wrap dress with a short skirt. She carries a pair of strappy wedge sandals over to me and sets them down on the desk before she sits on the edge of the bed and lifts her foot onto my thigh. She wiggles her painted toes. “Do you mind, darling? Bending over is impossible these days.”

“Sure.” I fasten on her shoes without touching her. She leaves her left foot resting on my thigh when I finish buckling the ankle strap, rocking it back and forth on my thigh. Fuck, she just doesn’t give up, does she? I’m unpleasantly reminded of when we first met. She was persistent then, too. “Mir, move your foot.”

“My ankles are so swollen from the flight. Be a love and give them a rub?”

Her ankles look normal to me, and even if they were swollen, I wouldn’t be interested in touching them.

“Sorry, no.” I push her foot off my leg and rise out of the chair. “Ready? It’s six blocks to the house. Can you walk in those things?”

She tosses her hair back over her shoulders. “Of course.”

Chapter Eleven Emily

Apparently, Daddy only dated supermodels before me.

I thought Rachel, who Icky-Rick accurately, if tactlessly, described as a cross between Halle Berry and J.Lo, was bad enough. But Miranda has Rachel beat. Miranda even throws Lucy into serious shade. No wonder Daddy wasn’t interested in poor Lucy when he had Miranda.

Miranda towers over me, nearly as tall as Daddy in her wedge sandals. And why is she wearing wedge sandals when she’s seven months pregnant? Shouldn’t she be wearing Crocs by now? Of course, she has to be one of those women who wears pregnancy as well as she wears couture. In fact, I’m pretty sure the white-and-blue-patterned, wrap dress that emphasizes her boobs and makes her baby bump look oh-so-sleek is couture. She could be a maternity-wear model, all perfect skin and blue eyes and high cheekbones and impossibly glossy, golden-blonde, spiral curls even though she’s just off a transatlantic flight and her hair should look like Kate Moss’s after a hard night at Club Mayfair.

I hate her on sight. And on principal. No one as beautiful as she is should have to trick a man into giving her a baby. She must have had willing sperm donors lined up from London Bridge to Teddington Lock. Why did she have to use my daddy?

She gives me those stupid air kisses on both cheeks and looks me up and down in a way that says she finds me mildly amusing. I’m still wearing the sundress Daddy put me in this morning, with ankle socks and my bunny slippers. Until Miranda breezed in, I felt little and cute. Now, I feel like an idiot and wish I was wearing full body armor.

I don’t give her air kisses back, or say that it’s nice to meet her because Daddy would book me into the playpen permanently for that lie. Instead, I smile and ask how her flight was.

“Inconvenient, as travel to America has been since nine-eleven,” she says, waving a hand.

I want to snap at her and tell her there’s a good reason for the inconvenience, but I don’t think that’s being the bigger person, so I just smile.

“Lo tells me you’ve made dinner,” she continues. “I’m sorry you’ve gone to the trouble. I’d have been happy to eat out.”

“No problem,” I say, just as Daddy says, “Maybe another time.”

Does he want to eat out with the Mir-beast? Because I really, really do not. I’d rather have the home-court advantage.

Logan offers Miranda a drink. I guess he’s decided to play host, even though he’s been glowering at her since they walked through the door. When she asks for tonic water and lime—yuck—Daddy heads off into the kitchen and we trail through the great room behind him.

“You’re not from the City,” Miranda says.

I’m not sure it’s a question, but I answer it anyway. “I come from Syracuse. That’s upstate—”

“Yes, I know where it is.”

Her condescension runs down my spine like an ice needle. Ouch.

“How long are you staying in the City?” she asks.

“Um—”

Daddy, using his Batman hearing, intercepts the question even though he’s a room away. “Emily lives here now.”

Miranda’s pink-bow mouth purses like she’s already tasting the lime. “You always said you didn’t want your submissive living with you. That your work was too demanding to pursue the lifestyle full time.”

Daddy cuts up a lime and puts a couple of wedges in a tall glass with ice, then pours the fizzy tonic water over the top. It’s a pretty drink, but, ugh, tonic water. He comes back around the kitchen island to hand Miranda the drink, puts his