Page 25 of Baby Daddy Billionaire SEAL

Ihadcalled Michael—that much was true—but he hadn’t been available, so I’d ended up leaving a message. I hadn’t heard back from him, so I’d been fudging the facts when I told Jake that Michael was completely fine with it and that he now valued my talent so much that he didn’t need me to have a military husband to bring to the table.

So, understandably, I thought, I was a little nervous walking into that day’s film shoot.

Michael spotted me right away. I’d hoped I would have a few minutes to settle in, at least, but he came hurrying over, clearly eager to talk to me. I steeled myself, knowing it would be an uncomfortable conversation.

“Olivia,” he said. “I got your phone message but didn’t understand what you meant.”

I hadn’t been vague—at least, I didn’t think I had. “Jake isn’t going to be working on the project anymore,” I said. “He had another commitment come up.”

“But you understand that you were hired on a conditional basis, don’t you?” Michael asked. “We didn’t bring you to work here expecting to be surprised with something like this. You were chosen for this jobbecauseof your connections to the military.”

My heart sank.

I hadn’t believed that he would say something like this, but maybe I should have known. Maybe I should have expected that he would prioritize his SEAL consultant over his writer. Writers were a dime a dozen in Hollywood. I was good, but I wasn’tsogood that you couldn’t go out and find my equivalent easily. A Navy SEAL was a lot harder to find.

But he wasn’t going to let me go because of that, was he? Not now that we had already started on the project?

I cleared my throat and tried again. “I know this isn’t what we’d planned,” I said. “And Jake is willing to continue helping out on the project, but he’ll have to do it by correspondence.”

“Correspondence? What does that mean? He’s going to sendletters?”

“I’m saying if we have questions, we can email him. We might not need to do it—I’ve got plenty of experience around the military. But if you want an expert opinion on something, we can still ask him, and he’ll get back to us.”

He had promised nothing of the sort, of course. But I knew better than to admit that. I was going to have to find a way to get the answers to the military questions myself, without any input from Jake. I could do that. Google was free, and I might not have known as much about the military as Jake did, but I knew enough to do the right searches.

Not that I could tell Michaelthat. He didn’t trust my expertise. That much was obvious.

He was frowning. “I wanted to have him right on set with us,” he said. “I don’t want to have to send an email every time I have a question and wait for him to write back. I want someone on hand. If I wanted an email correspondent, I could have gotten in touch with my own. I deliberately hired a writer who had the right connections, and now you’re telling me you don’t have Jake anymore?”

“Did someone say my name?”

My stomach turned over. Of course, I knew his voice immediately and knew that the situation had officially been wrenched from my control. It felt as if I’d swallowed a rock.

“Jake!” Michael sidestepped me, went straight to him, and clasped his hand. “I thought I wasn’t going to see you today. Your wife has been telling me that you weren’t going to be able to make it. She said you had something else you’d decided to prioritize over the movie.”

Jake laughed. “I told her not to worry about that,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you that, you silly thing?”

I could have slapped him for referring to me like that. But this situation was precarious enough, and if I wasn’t careful, he would tell Michael that we had never been married at all. I had to try to salvage things if I could.

I swallowed my pride. “You told me you wouldn’t be able to make it,” I said to Jake, trying to sound as if I was perplexed by a misunderstanding and not annoyed.

He laughed again. “No, honey,” he said patiently. “That wasn’t what I said. Don’t you remember? I said I would have to cancel my other plans so I could be here today.” He smiled at me indulgently, like I was a child, and I wanted to hit him that much harder.

Michael laughed. “I have this problem with my wife,” he said. “Sometimes I have to tell her things three times. But maybe it has to do with these creative types.”

“Is your wife a writer, too?”

“She’s a painter,” Michael said. “But I’m sure you can relate. Having an artist for a wife… nothing more riveting. But they don’t always have their feet on the ground, do they?”

“Not always,” Jake agreed. “That’s why it’s so lucky for her that she has me around. But you don’t need to worry, Michael. I wouldn’t let anything take precedence over this project. I’m here for the long haul; you can count on that.”

“I’m so glad,” Michael said, clapping Jake on the shoulder. “I didn’t know what I was going to do without you! Listen, you two look like you could stand to have a conversation, and we won’t be starting the shot for about twenty more minutes, so why don’t you go and get some coffee before you join us?”

“That sounds great to me.” Jake threaded his arm forcefully through mine and towed me away before I could decide whether or not I wanted to go with him.

I managed to keep myself together until we were a few yards away, where nobody could hear us. Then I whirled to face him.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I demanded.

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