Two Besties, Two Babies, Two Dangerous Daddies novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Riviera Rules

The besties settle above a bakery in Nice and go yacht-hunting for nicer rich men in Monaco, until Ciro Vaccaro steps off a tender on the quay.

Lexie held her phone away from her body.

"He knows my name, Trix."

"Mine knows my last name."

"So we don't get on the plane."

I looked at the gate agent scanning boarding passes.

Then I looked back down the long gray terminal, full of men in dark coats who could be anybody.

"If they know our names, they know where we live," I said. "At least France is far."

"That's the whole plan? Far?"

"Far, and croissants."

She stared at me for one more second.

Then she handed her pass to the agent and walked down the jet bridge without looking back.

I turned my phone off before it could buzz again.

We landed in Nice the next afternoon with two carry-ons and a little under ten thousand dollars.

The sky was so blue it looked like a screensaver.

Lexie put on nine-dollar sunglasses and said, "I feel rich already."

We found the flat because of a handwritten sign in a bakery window on a narrow street near the old town.

The sign said À LOUER and gave a phone number.

Neither of us could read it.

An old woman in a flour-dusted apron came out, looked at our suitcases, and pointed up.

The flat was two rooms over her ovens.

One bed, one couch, and a kitchen the size of a phone booth.

The window over the sink looked straight down into the street.

The whole place smelled like butter at five in the morning.

"Cash," the old woman said.

It was the only English word we heard from her all week.

I paid her for a month and she patted my cheek.

Lexie wrote our rules on a paper bag and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a lemon.

BABIES FIRST.

BESTIES ALWAYS.

MEN A DISTANT THIRD.

"Add one," I said.

She uncapped the marker again.

RICH MEN A SLIGHTLY CLOSER THIRD.

"Now it's a constitution," I said.

That night we lay on the one bed with the window open and the street noise drifting up.

"What do we call them?" Lexie said. "I can't keep saying the baby. It sounds like a horror movie."

"The pamphlet said mine's the size of a bean."

"So Bean."

"Bean," I said. "What's yours?"

"Same week, so also a bean. But I'm not copying you."

"Pick something else."

"Peanut."

"A peanut is a legume, Lex."

"Don't tell it that," she said. "It's already got enough going on."

She fell asleep with one hand on her stomach and something silver half under her pillow.

I pretended I hadn't seen the lighter.

On our fourth day we took the train to Monaco to find husbands.

Lexie wore lavender linen and the big amethyst earrings.

I wore a white halter, my best flared jeans and the biggest gold hoops I owned.

"Rule of the day," I said on the platform. "No mob."

"That's a low bar."

"It's the bar we have."

The harbor was full of boats bigger than the trailer I grew up in.

Some of them were bigger than the whole trailer park.

We walked the quay.

I priced every man who passed.

"Steel Daytona, maybe fourteen thousand," I said. "Wife's at the hotel."

"How do you know?"

"He's carrying a beach bag with seashells on it."

A man in loafers with no socks strolled by, shaking his wrist so his watch would catch the sun.

"Fake Royal Oak," I said. "The date window's in the wrong place."

"Next," Lexie said.

She rated the yachts out of ten by decks and helicopters.

"Seven," she said about a white one. "No helipad. Good bones."

"You sound like a realtor."

"I sound like a woman who wants a helicopter."

A man in a linen shirt with a gold Patek smiled at me from a café table.

I smiled back.

Then he picked up his espresso with his left hand, and I saw the wedding ring.

"Married," I said.

"Next."

We bought ice cream at a place that charged eighteen euros for two scoops.

Lexie did the math on a napkin and her eyes filled up.

"We have rent until about Christmas," she said. "And zero diapers."

"That's why we're here."

"I know. I just want it on record that I'm scared."

"So noted."

I took her hand across the little table.

We'd been holding hands across tables since fourth grade, when her dad left and she wouldn't eat her lunch.

By five she was green.

"The ice cream wants to come back," she said. "Or Peanut is filing a complaint."

"Go home. I'll do one more lap."

"Text me every twenty minutes."

I walked her to the station and waved until the train pulled out.

Then I went back to the quay alone.

The sun was going down and turning every hull gold.

I was pricing a Cartier on a man walking a tiny white dog when a tender cut across the harbor, fast.

It bumped the stone steps right in front of me.

A man in a navy suit stepped off it without looking down.

Dark hair. A nose broken once. A small scar through his left eyebrow.

Ciro Vaccaro straightened his cuff and looked straight at me.

His cuff had a plain silver link in it, where the gold one should have been.

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