Baby For My Billionaire Rival (Billionaire Daddies)

7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Caroline

A s soon as I step out of my car, I realize I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve had my outfit planned since Monday when Jake invited me to the farm. I thought I’d look charming in a pair of overalls, a flannel, and the closest thing to work boots I own (although I’m not sure you can call them that since they have a heel).

Now, though, I feel like a clown. Like someone might think I’m making a mockery of farm life rather than trying to embrace it.

Maybe I can get back into the car and drive off. Pretend like I never even made it. Car trouble. Family stuff. Alien abduction .

I look down the long driveway I took to get to the Simmons farmhouse. Doubtful I haven’t already been noticed. The last thing I want to do is drive a further wedge between Jake and me. We’ve been doing our best to get along since Fig shoved us together. But it hasn’t been easy. Two months of being enemies really does a number on the whole trust thing.

However, this is a big step. I’m seeing where the magic of Simmons Sauces happens. Not to mention, Jake’s home. His family’s legacy.

I want to do my best to make sure he knows how honored I am to be here. I mean, I’m already impressed. The long driveway split off in three parts, one in the direction of a bevy of greenhouses, the other in the direction of an open pasture. Jake instructed me to take the middle one all the way down to the family’s house.

Someone wolf whistles. I snap around to see a young kid emerging from the farmhouse. He’s got the height of Jake and the same piercing eyes. “Are you lost, doll?”

“Are you sure you’ve even hit puberty, doll ?” I shoot back. Shit . It just comes out. This kid is truly a kid. Like might not even be eighteen kind of kid. If I just harassed a member of Jake’s family, I’ll never live it down.

A middle-aged woman with whisps of brown and white hair appears beside him. She’s totally incensed. “What’s wrong with you?” She smacks him with a rag. “Mind yourself. Apologize to her.”

The boy flushes. “I’m –”

“I don’t know where he learned to talk like that,” the woman shouts out before her son can speak. “Certainly not me or his daddy. Maybe all those video games or something.” She looks back at her son. “Now apologize like I said, what’re you waiting for?”

The boy rolls his eyes. “I was trying, but you interrupted me.”

“Well, go ahead now, no one is stopping you.”

The boy looks at me sheepishly. I smile. “It’s all good. Promise.”

“You must be Jake’s school friend. Savannah girl. Caroline, right?”

I nod. Charming to think I’m Jake’s “school friend” like we met while playing Red Rover on the playground. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m his mama, Lori. And this is his littlest brother, Evan.”

“Littlest?” I didn’t know Jake had even one brother.

“After Brody, Cooper, and Sean, there was Evan.”

Four brothers?! My God, no wonder Jake takes everything so seriously. He’s got a legacy to live up to and an example to set.

“Trust me, I know, I didn’t mean to have five boys. But that’s the way they all came out. “Defective,” she says laughing, ruffling Evan’s hair.

Evan ducks away. “Mama, stop that!”

The crunching of gravel under tires gets our attention. We all look over to the road where a souped-up golf cart barrels down the road, then curls to a stop in front of the farmhouse. Jake’s in the front seat, arm slung over the wheels, flannel rolled up to reveal his tanned, muscular forearm.

One look at him and the wind is knocked out of me.

“Everything okay over here?” he calls out.

“Just getting acquainted!”

“She’s not embarrassing me, is she?” Jake asks me.

I shake my head. I’m still dumbfounded at how attracted I am to him. His hair is perfectly tousled, no doubt from his fingers running through it on repeat. He wears an easy smile, easier than I’ve ever seen on campus.

It’s like he’s happy to see me. Although, that couldn’t possibly be true, could it?

“Hop in,” Jake says, tapping his hand on the seat beside him.

“She just got here, let me get her something to eat.”

“Later, Mama. I gotta show her some things,” he says with such a perfect little drawl I think I might faint.

Lori eyes me. “Are you hungry? Blink twice and I’ll save you.”

I laugh. “I’m alright, thank you. I really appreciate the offer though.” I go to the golf cart and climb into the seat beside Jake. His legs are straddled wide like the farm boy he is and consequently, my leg has to brush up against his.

“Have fun!” Lori cries out.

I wave to her as the golf cart zooms back down the pebble driveway, leaving Jake and me in silence.

“Thanks for…” he speaks first, thankfully. “Coming all the way out here.”

“Thanks for inviting me,” I say, tucking my hands under my thighs. I can smell him. A combination of bodywash and grass. There’s dirt under his fingernails. And for some unknown reason, I find that so sexy.

“I like your outfit,” Jake says.

I glance at him. He’s grinning ear to ear. “It’s silly, I know it’s silly.”

“With the heels and the red lipstick, maybe, but you tried, that’s what counts.”

“Can’t help being me wherever I go,” I say. It strikes me how I likely feel the way Jake feels whenever he’s on campus. If he can do it for weeks at a time, I can definitely feel like a fish out of water just once.

“That’s not a bad thing,” he says, taking one of the turnoffs. “Going to show you our tomatoes first. What we’re all about. Then… a bit of a surprise.”

I smile. “A surprise?”

“I had a feeling that’d catch your attention. Although it might be smellier than you’d like.”

I wrinkle my nose. “I can do smelly.”

“Sure, you can.”

The greenhouses are bustling with activity. Rows and rows of towering tomato plants, robust with the biggest, reddest tomatoes I’ve ever seen. No wonder Simmons Sauces are so good. They look like you could almost take a bite right out of them. “Last harvest of the season probably,” he says with a sigh as he admires one of the tomatoes.

I watch him examine the tomato. There must be a method to his madness, but what it is, I can’t be sure. He’s the expert.

And there’s nothing sexier than an expert.

He’s somehow taller here on the farm. Prouder, maybe. Each person we pass he greets and they all look happy to see them. He’s clearly liked.

“So, we harvest here and then we have a property a couple miles south where we make the sauce and do all the canning and distribution,” he explains. “Less scenic than the farm.”

I resist telling him I really wouldn’t mind seeing the factory. I love to watch an assembly line, would love to watch how the sauces are made. One thing at a time, though.

We go from one of the main growing greenhouses to the “experimental” house as Jake calls it. It’s quieter in there and messier. More like a laboratory than a farm.

An elderly bespectacled man pokes his head out from one of the aisles. “Jacob Junior!” He waves us over. “Come, come, come!”

“That’s Wexler. He’s been here since my grandfather was CEO if you can believe it,” Jake whispers to me as we walk.

From all the wrinkles on Wexler’s face, I can believe it. However, his smile is that of a child’s, full of wonder. He grabs two tiny tomatoes off the vines and holds them out to us. “Try, try,” he says eagerly.

The little tomato is a purplish hue. “I’ve never seen a tomato like this.”

“Blue tomatoes,” Wexler says.

“We’re working on getting blue tomatoes out into the world. The issue is they’re a bit temperamental and we haven’t gotten the taste quite right yet,” Jake says then pops the tomato in his mouth.

I follow suit. It’s delicious. Juicy, acidic, but also vaguely smokey. “Mm. So good.”

From the way Jake reacts, though, you’d think he’d never tasted a tomato in his life. “How did you do that?” he asks Wexler.

Wexler grins and shrugs. “Practice.”

As we wander out of the experimental greenhouse, my curiosity gets the best of me. “Jacob Junior, huh?”

“Well, Junior was my father. I’m the third one. So Junior Junior.”

“Shoulda called you Tripp,” I say with a smile.

Jake gives me a sidelong glance. “Is that one of those city people things?”

“No, that’s like a thing . Look it up.”

He smirks. “Sure, Gladstone.”

My belly warms. However, I’m caught on something he said. “Your dad…”

Jacob’s humor fades from his face and he stares at the toes of his boots as we walk. “Passed about a year ago.”

“I’m sorry, Jake.”

“S’alright.”

We settle back into the cart. I can’t help feeling I’ve made it painfully awkward asking about his dad.

However, as we pull away from the greenhouses, Jake opens up just a bit more. “It was unexpected. I have a lot of catching up to do to make up for his absence. Big shoes to fill, you know?”

“My grandmother has little shoes, but I think I know what you mean.”

Jake laughs. Like really laughs. A deep rumble from his gut and a crinkle at the corners of his eyes. I worry for a second he might run the golf cart right off the road.

I start laughing at him because he’s laughing so hard. We both continue to laugh and I’m not sure what we’re even laughing at anymore.

We laugh all the way down the third road, to the pastures where there are cows, horses, pigs, and chickens. Here, I meet two more of his brothers, Brody and Cooper. They’re just as strapping and handsome as Jake.

“Surprise is this way,” Jake says, and leads me to a smaller enclosure in the pasture.

That’s when I hear the bleating of goats. My heart soars when I lay eyes on them. Little baby goats all prancing around, chasing each other, trying to climb things that shouldn’t be climbed. “Oh my gosh! Baby goats!”

Jake opens the gate for me.

“You want me to go in?”

“Yeah, they’re friendly, they’ll want to play.”

I nervously step in through the gate. The second Jake joins me, one baby goat bleating sets off a chain reaction. At least ten stampede in our direction.

“Now, careful, they like to roughhouse. Just tell them, ‘No’ and leave them alone,” Jake says as he gets onto his knees. Three kids leap into his arms, tumbling and bleating. “Hey guys!”

One goat mashes up against my calf and I can’t help but laugh. “You want some attention?” I bend down, following Jake’s lead. The second I’m low enough, a caramel-colored kid circles me, puts his hooves on my back and crawls up it. “Oh my God!” I scream.

“Yeah… they do that.”

I look over at Jake, who is currently fielding two kids in his lap and three fighting for position on his back as king of the hill.

I can’t stop smiling.

“They’re cute though, right?”

“Adorable,” I say.

Jake gives me a closed-mouthed smile. Like… like he actually likes me. Maybe I’m not the city girl he thought I was.

Lunch with the Simmons is like eating with giants. Thank God I have Lori there to tether me to reality where not everyone is over six two and doesn’t need three helpings of food.

Not to mention, the food is delicious. Fresh biscuits and deviled eggs, homemade sweet tea, collards, the juiciest corn I’ve ever had, and fried chicken. I feel spoiled beyond belief. If Gram saw the way my plate was piled high with all this rich food, she’d surely look at my stomach and frown.

Here, though, having a full plate is a mark of pride.

“Damn, Jake. Your girl can eat,” Sean, the only brother who inherited Lori’s dark eyes, says as he licks grease off his thumb.

“Not my girl, Sean,” Jake corrects in a low voice.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wish I was Jake’s girl. I wish I had a place at this table again and again. Must be pheromones or something, because I barely know the guy.

Something about all this feels right despite it being foreign to me.

If I was a part of all of this, I could regard the empty chair at the head of the table with some amount of respect rather than trying not to look at it, knowing it’s the chair of a dead man.

I like Jake Simmons’s world, what can I say?

For dessert, there’s peach cobbler that smells divine. My stomach feels like it's about to explode and I try to refuse, but Lori won’t take no for an answer.

“Why don’t you two take your dessert and go chat about your project out on the porch?” Lori suggests. “Bugs won’t be too bad out there this time of year.”

Jake and I sit on the porch swing hung from the veranda, negotiating space apart from one another, not like the golf cart rides that smushed our hips together and had my heart racing. I take one bite of the cobbler and though my stomach says no, my heart says yes .

“Do y’all eat like this every day?” I ask.

Jake nods sheepishly. “Mama’s way.”

“She treats you like kings,” I say and take another bite.

“And we treat her like a queen. Promise,” he says.

I’d like to see Jake treat a woman like a queen. That woman namely being me. I put my plate in my lap, waiting for my stomach to make some more room for the cobbler. “You all live in the house then?”

“Golly, no. Can you imagine?”

“I can. Although it’s sort of ridiculous. Like a fairytale or something. Mama Lori and her Five Giants.”

Jake flushes and laughs at the same time. “Naw, only Ev and Sean are still in the main house. Brody and Coop have their own places and I live over by the pasture. Converted the old hay loft into a house.”

I get a flash of Jake sawing a plank of wood shirtless with his flannel wrapped around his waist, his chest slick with sweat. Caroline, stop it. You have to work with this guy one-on-one for the next few months. And who knows when he’s going to piss you off next . “I bet your Mama loves that.”

“Yeah, she does, she does.”

We fall into silence. Midday breeze slinks around us. Our forks clink on our plates.

“So, uh… what do you think?” Jake finally asks. “About… all this,” he adds with a gesture of his hand.

I look out over the pebble driveway where my Audi sits looking very out of place and, past that, the acres and acres of land unfolding. “It’s amazing, Jake.”

His blue eyes catch in mine for a second before he smiles down at his next bite of cobbler.

“I never expected it to be anything less,” I go on. “I know I’ve given you the impression that you have something to prove, but I promise, that’s never been the case with me.”

Jake sighs. “We got off on the wrong foot.”

“Yeah. And like, I want to respect what you said, we don’t have to be friends. But we do have to work together.”

His tongue pokes into his cheek. “Of course.”

“We could probably make a good team if we weren’t both so stubborn.”

“I’m not stubborn,” Jake says.

I roll my eyes. “That’s exactly what a stubborn person would say.”

We look at each other. Silence. Then a joint chuckle. I feel like we’re flirting, but I can’t be sure. He’s a good, country boy. Probably nice to everyone. And that’s all I need from him, a willingness to be nice to me. Doesn’t need to be anything more than that.

“I gotta say,” Jake says, wiping off his mouth with a napkin. “You’re more game than I thought you’d be.”

“You didn’t think I’d be game?”

“Not when I saw those heels this morning, no.”

“The overalls?”

He tilts his head from side to side. “That gave me a little bit of hope. But no, I just didn’t expect you to be willing to eat a tomato fresh off the vine or get down on the ground with the goats or –”

“Jake, I think we both need to stop assuming the worst in each other. Otherwise, how are we going to be partners?”

His blue eyes flash in mine. “You’re right. That’s fair.”

“Good. I’m glad, now –” I’ve got to stop with all the sentimental talk or else my heart is going to start pounding for him. “Let’s get down to business.”