by Whitley Cox
She’d never been a live-in nanny before. How did it work?
They hadn’t even discussed hours or pay. Days off or vacation time. She still had design commissions she had to finish. Would he let her do that when she was off the clock? Would she ever be off the clock?
What did Aaron do for work? Did he still serve with whatever military organization he’d been a part of? Would he be gone for months on end on another mission, or was he taking time off to get acquainted with Sophie and figure out this parenting thing? Could he take paternity leave?
She had so many questions.
Why hadn’t she asked them when Liam had called her and offered her the job?
Why hadn’t she asked them when Aaron called?
She’d never been so impulsive accepting a job before, never been so irresponsible.
Why?
The clearing of a throat behind her made her jump and drop the bra she had in her hand. She spun around to find Aaron, cradling a groggy Sophie, staring at her.
Oh yeah, that’s why she’d thrown responsibility and protocol out the window. Because the story of the man and infant in front of her pulled at her heartstrings so hard, she thought they might snap.
“You fell asleep.” She put the bra she’d dropped in one of the dresser drawers and stepped toward them. His tired blue eyes followed her movements. “I can change and feed her if you’d like to try to get some more shut-eye.” Without asking for his permission, she took Sophie from him and brushed past his broad chest in the doorframe, taking great care not to inhale his sexy manly smell, and made her way into the living room.
Sophie started bopping her face against Isobel’s shoulder, which meant she was looking for food again. She headed into the kitchen, where she’d put the bottles. “Guess we’ll have to wait on that diaper change until after we feed you.”
She didn’t bother to look behind her, but she knew Aaron had followed them through the house.
“You cooked?” His voice was hoarse from lack of use, but it was also deep and gravelly and made her nipples instantly tighten.
“Figured you could use a good meal. How do you like your steak?”
“Steak?”
“Yeah, I picked up a couple. Plus baked potatoes, roasted veggies and apple pie for dessert.” She grabbed the prepared bottle of formula from where she’d had it warming in a cup of water on the counter and took it and Sophie back into the living room, once again not making eye contact or waiting for Aaron. He followed them anyway.
She sat down in his La-Z-Boy recliner and propped Sophie up in the crook of her arm, the infant’s hunger warbles getting stronger by the second.
“Ah, here we go.” She placed the bottle nipple into Sophie’s mouth, and immediately the baby started to guzzle. “That’s better,” she cooed, beginning to rock them in the chair. She was staring down at Sophie’s angelic little face, but she knew Aaron had stopped in front of them. He blocked out enough light from the living room window, and his red hair was like a flashing light on the top of a cop car. It was hard to miss. She lifted her head and her eyes. “Over dinner we should hammer out the details of my contract,” she said. “Go over my hours and days off and stuff.”
He was staring at her in a most unsettling way, and not serial killer going to murder you in your sleep unsettling, but more of a panther stalking his prey unsettling. But when she mentioned days off, his nose wrinkled up in confusion and the intense look was gone. “Days off?” He scratched the back of his neck. “What do you mean, days off? What do you mean, hours?”
Oh boy.
She flashed him a giant smile. “Well, this is a job. So I’m entitled to days off and scheduled hours. Do you have a job? Are you wanting me to be with Sophie while you’re at work, and then you can take over once you’re home? Would you like me to cook meals? Clean? What is my job description, besides keeping your niece alive?”
His eyes went wide. “I, uh, I have no idea. I kind of just thought you’d always be here for us. For Sophie, I mean.” The man was so lost.
Her heart went out to him.
It was so odd to see a big man, with such an intimidating presence, enormous muscles, chiseled jaw and eyes that you just knew saw absolutely everything, seem so small. So helpless and lost. So broken.
She shook her head and smiled again. “We can talk once we have some food in our systems. I figured out your barbecue, but if you’re particular about how your meat is cooked, you’re more than welcome to man the grill.”
He nodded. “Okay. Now?”
The timer for her pie in the oven started to beep.
“Sounds good. Potatoes and veggies are already on.”
He nodded, turned around and then headed toward the kitchen, appearing lost in his own home. In his own skin.
Isobel watched as he opened the door to the patio, the tongs and plate of meat in his hand. She only caught his profile, but what she could see broke her heart even more.
He was crying.
6
Once he’d collected himself and tossed the meat onto the flames, Aaron opened the patio door and stepped back into the kitchen. Isobel had her back to him and was humming a soft tune as she gently swayed in front of the counter.
It gave him another moment to compose himself and wipe his eyes before she turned around.
“What the hell is that?” He instantly berated himself until it hurt for his harsh tone. He really had to work on that. Hunger and lack of sleep had never been his friends, but right now they were his mortal enemies, and they were making his mood take a serious nosedive.
Thankfully, Isobel was unfazed by his tone. Instead she simply smiled and kissed the top of Sophie’s head. “It’s one of those stretchy baby wrap things. There’s a baby boutique next to the grocery store, so I swung in there and grabbed it. The lady who ran the place showed me how to put it on. Sophie loves it. I put her in after her diaper change, and she passed right out again. And don’t you just love the color? I love periwinkle.”
What the fuck was periwinkle?
She balanced a plate on either hand and did a little hip swivel. “And see—hands free.”
“I’ll, uh … I’ll pay you back for it,” he said, putting the plate that held the raw meat into the sink. He cleared his throat. “We can talk scheduling at dinner too.”
“No need to pay me back for the wrap. I’ll get lots of use out of it, and when she grows out of it, I’ll just sell it.” She paused. “Or hang on to it for when I have my own babies.” Her cheeks flushed a brilliant, sexy pink, and she cast her eyes down to the top of Sophie’s head. “This little one is making my biological clock kick into overdrive.” She kissed Sophie as she moved about the kitchen with ease and familiarity.
Aaron stood there stunned.
He also wasn’t sure how he felt about her confidence in his home. Even though he knew she wasn’t over thirty, she was sure as hell mature. And knowledgeable. Particularly when it came to babies.
“I like my steak medium,” she said, wiping her hands on a hand towel. “If that’s what you came in here to ask?”
He grunted and nodded. “Yeah. It was. Okay.” Then he spun on his heel and opened the patio door again, wishing he had a beer in his hand … or an entire bottle of rye.
A few minutes later, with the steak steaming on the plate, along with the veggies and potatoes in the foil, he brought their dinner into the house.
Isobel had set his small two-seater kitchen table, and she’d been kind enough to pop him a bottle of beer. It looked like she was having water though.
“The meat will need to rest a bit,” she said, not turning to face him. “So you might as well leave the veggie and potatoes in the foil so they don’t get cold.”
She turned around from where she’d been hunkered over the sink. Sophie was no longer in the baby wrap thingy, and Isobel was holding a piece of blood-soaked paper towel to her finger.
Aaron plunked the plate of food down on the dark granite counter top with a thunk and wa
s around and grabbing her wrist instantly. “What happened?” He held up her hand and removed the paper towel. Blood poured down her hand and wrist from the pad of her left index finger.
She shook her head and made to pull away, but he tightened his grip on her wrist. “It was nothing. I couldn’t find your bottle opener for your beer, so I tried to use a knife like I’ve seen my dad do a million times, and I got myself good.” She tugged away again, but he fixed her with a look he hoped she took as a firm no. “Looks worse than it is, I swear. I’ll live,” she protested.
“Where’s Soph?” He dabbed the paper towel to the cut, but it immediately filled with blood again. It was a deep cut and long, too, spanning across the entire pad of her finger.
“We were both getting hot in the wrap, and I didn’t really want to eat over her head in case I dropped food on her, so I put her in her bassinet. She’s over in the living room.”
He glanced to where she pointed with her other finger but then turned back to her face. “You might need stitches.”
Her gasp made his whole body stiffen.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t do needles.”
“Well, it’s pretty damn deep, and I don’t have the proper stuff in my first aid kit to freeze the area.” He held the paper towel against the cut and applied pressure. She winced. He loosened his grip a bit. “Sorry,” he murmured. “But you really should get it looked at. They might not stitch it, but they could cauterize it.”
Her eyes went wide, and her lip wobbled. “No. No needles. No cauterizing. That means they’d burn it.”
“I know what cauterizing means,” he said blandly. The fear in her eyes tugged at something deep inside him, and he softened his tone. “If they freeze it, you won’t feel the stitches.”
Her bottom lip trembled, and her eyes grew wide with fear. “But I’ll feel the needle for the freezing.”
“Well, yeah, but … ”
She shook her head. “But no. I’ll just wrap it with some gauze and Band-Aids and stuff. Keep it clean.” Her chuckle was forced, an obvious front for her fear. “I’ll have a cool scar to share at parties, along with an embarrassing story about how I sliced my finger open because I’m too lazy to ask you where your bottle opener is.”
“I don’t have one.”
“How do you open your beer then?”
He hated to be the bearer of bad news, but she had to know. “They’re twist-off. Otherwise I use my teeth.”
She hung her head, and he heard a muttered “Fuck.”
He couldn’t stop his lips from turning up into a half smile. She was something else. “Sorry.”
She shook her head before lifting it back up to look at him. “You’ll damage your teeth if you keep doing that, and you have such a nice smile.” Long lashes blinked over sapphire-blue eyes. Eyes he could easily get lost in. Eyes he could easily picture staring up at him as he hammered her body into a mattress until she was forced to squeeze them shut as she opened her plump lips and screamed out his name.
Fuck, where did that thought come from?
He dropped her wrist and turned away. “I’ll go to the garage and grab my first aid kit if you’re going to be a stubborn ass and not go to the ER.” Then he vacated the kitchen as fast as he could, stopping only half a second to stare at a snoozing Sophie on the floor in her bassinet, but it was enough time to hear Isobel murmur from the kitchen, “I’m not the stubborn ass. You’re the stubborn ass.”
He returned from the garage with his first aid kit moments later, only to find Isobel bouncing a crying baby in one arm while holding yet another blood-soaked paper towel over her bleeding finger.
Growling at the impossible woman who had just entered his life, he set the first aid bag down on the kitchen counter and opened it up. Isobel wandered past him, grabbed another bottle for Sophie off the counter and attempted to juggle the newborn into the crook of her arm without releasing the paper towel.
“Whoa!” he said, abandoning the kit on the counter and rushing to save Sophie from the fate of the floor. “What the hell?” Aaron wasn’t sure, but had he not swept in, the baby probably would have been face-first on the tile before either of them could blink.
“I had it,” Isobel grumbled.
“No, you didn’t. Learn to ask for help. Learn to recognize when you need to go to the hospital. Don’t be a baby. Only babies are afraid of needles.” He positioned Sophie into the crook of his arm and snatched the warm bottle from Isobel’s hands before she could protest. He turned around, showing her his back, and proceeded to feed his niece. “Seeing as you’re such a know-it-all, you can bandage yourself up.” Then he wandered into the living room to continue feeding Sophie in peace.
Isobel glared at Aaron’s back as he stalked his sexy frame into the living room with Sophie.
What a complete ass.
A complete ass with a very fine ass.
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
Continuing to glare at him, with a small bit of hope that lasers might eventually shoot out of her eyes and singe him a little, she opened up the first aid kit.
And holy shit! What a first aid kit.
It was like something you’d see in an ambulance car or something.
More than just the little pocket kit of Band-Aids and iodine the Boy Scouts used. No, this was a proper medical kit with defibrillator pads and a big round squeezy thing for when a person is intubated and everything.
Keeping the pressure on her cut, she rummaged through the kit for the gauze and bandages. It would be interesting to do it all one-handed. She glanced at the man next to the window rocking gently, but like hell was she going to ask for help after his little outburst.
She got it. He was grieving.
But did he have to be such an ass?
Everyone grieves differently. There is no right way to grieve. No timeline. No cure. It’s an entity all on its own. Her mother’s words came back to her. She’d said the exact thing to Tori and Isobel after their grandmother died and they were struggling to make sense of it all. Tori had lashed out in anger, Isobel had grown quiet, and their father, who had lost his mother, had retreated to their family cabin for a week, where he didn’t speak to a soul.
She blew out a breath. “Everyone grieves differently,” she muttered, the frustration in her shoulders leaving with her exhale.
She grabbed a roll of soft, white gauze and began to unravel it.
“That’s not how you do it.”
Jeez, the man was like a ninja. How did he sneak up on her like that?
With a grunt, he placed a once-again sleeping baby into Isobel’s arms, grabbed her finger and went to task cleaning the cut.
“Thank you,” she whispered, resting her nose against the top of Sophie’s head.
He grunted again, his eyes barely flicking up to her, but when they did, his gaze quickly moved from her eyes to Sophie’s. “Are babies supposed to sleep this much?” He put his head back down and began wrapping the gauze around her finger.
“Wake cycle of about forty-five minutes or so,” she said. “But that might also mean she’s up a lot tonight. Her days and nights could still be switched. She’s also not technically a month old. She’s brand new, as she was a preemie. Their sleep patterns are all over the place, and they get hungry a lot because their tummies are about the size of an egg.”
“How do you know all this shit?” With medical tape, he secured the gauze in place, the force of breaking the tape from the roll making his arm muscles bunch in an incredibly sexy way.
“After Liam called and asked me to take the job, I bought a few books on infant care. The youngest child I’ve looked after was three months and hadn’t been preemie or in the NICU, so Sophie is foreign territory for me. I wanted to be prepared.”
He released her finger, then went about cleaning up the first aid kit. “I guess I should have read some books too.” She could tell he was deliberately avoiding making eye contact with her. He was looking anywhere and everywhere but her face.
Not saying a word, Aaron zipped up the first aid kit and left the room.
Was he always a man of such few words?
She walked over to the bassinet in the living room and put Sophie back down. The baby squeaked a bit, but when Isobel found a soother in the diaper bag and offered it to her, Sophie settled right back down.
Wandering back into the kitchen, she went about plating their dinner. Hopefully, the meat wasn’t overdone now, or even worse—cold.
This time she heard his footsteps behind her.
How could he sometimes be in stealth mode and other times elephant mode? Was it a conscious thing?
She set Aaron’s meal in front of his beer and then took a seat in front of her own plate across from him.
He sat down, picked up his knife and fork and dove in like a man who hadn’t eaten in days—possibly weeks.
The sound of cutlery on the plate as he sawed away at his steak was intense and echoed around the quiet kitchen like a chainsaw on an old-growth fir.
With far less vigor, she started on her own meal.
The silence between them was deafening. Awkward. Strained.
At least that’s how it felt to her.
Was it all in her head, or did he feel the tension too?
She took a sip of her water and cleared her throat. She could have had one of his bottles of beer, but she didn’t want to assume she could, and plus, she was on the job and didn’t really want to be drinking on her first day of work.
“So, um … ” She exhaled, clenched her jaw, unclenched and then stared straight at him until he lifted his head to look at her. It was a damn long moment before he did. But once he did, she struggled to get a read on his mood. Hopefully it was a touch happier now that he had some food in his belly.
