“Shit,” he said, staring morosely out at the four inches of white fluff already piled up on the lawn. He recalled an image of the blackened frying pan landing in more of the stuff just moments before—he'd just been too distracted to pay attention. His gaze went back to the uninvited guest on his doorstep, traveling from head to toe. A woman, wearing a bright red jacket, pleated slacks, and the kind of furry boots Rachel had whined about for the last three Christmases and he had deemed ridiculous. He looked up again. A tiny frown had appeared between the smoky blue eyes.
“Mr. Abrams?”
He scowled. How in heck was he going to talk Kiana into anything halfway suitable for going to school? “Who wants to know?”
A white-mittened hand extended. “I'm Abigail Jamieson.”
He stared at the hand.
“From the agency?” she prompted.
He stared at her.
“The nanny agency. Nannies to Go? I left you a voicemail message on Friday telling you I'd be here at 8:00 this morning.”
“Daddy? Who's that?” Brittany wedged herself between Mitch's hip and the doorframe.
Smoky Eyes smiled down at her and again held out the hand Mitch had refused to shake. “My name is Abigail,” she said. “But you can call me Abby. And I'm guessing you must be Brittany.”
Brittany eyed the offered mitten for a second, then she accepted it and gave it a hearty pump. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “Are you really our new nanny?”
“I am,” the woman said.
“No. She's not,” Mitch overrode her words. He ran a hand over his chinstrap beard. The scrape of stubble against his palm outside the normal confines reminded him he had yet to tidy it this morning. Or shower. He held back the choice epithets growling through his brain. Maybe he should just give up and see if he could talk Derek into handling the meeting for him. Hell, maybe he should just give up on the whole blasted—
He cut the thought short and waved a hand in half-hearted apology. “Look, I'm sorry, but I haven't checked my voicemail all week, I know nothing about a new nanny, and I don't have time to interview anyone right now. Tell the agency to call me again next week, and we'll set something up.”
His hand on Brittany's shoulder, he stepped back and started to close the door.
“Wait!” The white mitten shot through the opening and fastened around the edge. “I'm not here for an interview. I'm here to work.”
Mitch pulled the door open a fraction again and peered around it. For the first time, he noticed the pile of luggage on the snow-covered sidewalk behind her. One large roll-along suitcase, one medium-sized one, and an overnight bag. He raised an eyebrow. Met the blue gaze. Raised the other eyebrow. “Work?” he echoed. “As in move in?”
The fur-framed face went even paler as the woman's expression wobbled, then tightened. Her voice dropped to barely a whisper. “I thought—I was told—Estelle said—”
“Estelle?”
“Ms. Gagnon. At Nannies to Go.” The woman bit her bottom lip. “She said it was a live-in position.”
“Not without a freaking interview, it isn't.” Mitch looked her up and down again. “Do you really think I'd let someone move in with my children without meeting them first? Seeing their references? What the hel—heck kind of a parent would that make me?”
The blue gaze traveled past him to the shambles that was his front hall, and Mitch was pretty certain the words “a desperate one” hovered on her lips. He bristled, but to her credit, she kept the comment to herself as she squared her shoulders and nodded.
“Of course. I should have—I'm sorry. I'll let Est—Ms. Gagnon know. We can do an interview whenever you're ready.” She waved her mitten at the luggage. “I'll need a cab, if you wouldn't mind calling one for me?”
His gaze went to the driveway, empty of any vehicle but his own pickup. Great. Now he was turning her away in the snow and cold? His conscience twinged, but sheer practicality overruled it. He was in no way prepared to take in a new nanny without any kind of warning, he knew nothing about this particular wannabe, he was growing later by the second for that meeting, and he still had three girls to crowbar and/or cajole out of the house. He firmed his jaw. “Of course,” he said. “And we'll set up something for later this week. Maybe Thursday evening?” Then, because he'd been rather shorter with her than was needed, he added, “I'm sorry for the mix-up.”
Horror filled him as the blue eyes turned shiny. Oh hell, no. She wasn't going to cry, was she? Could this morning possibly get any worse? As he debated closing the door on her—admittedly not his most stellar moment as a human being—a car horn tooted curbside and a cheery voice called out, “Morning, Mitch! The girls ready to go?”
Rachel shoved him aside and waved to her best friend's mother, a woman as comfortable with her generous curves as she was with her status as a divorcée.
“We'll be there in a minute, Jessica!” she called. Then, ignoring the woman standing on the porch, she crossed her arms and scowled up at Mitch. “You forgot that you asked Mandy's mom to pick us up for school starting this week, didn't you?”
“I—”
“And we still haven't had breakfast. What are we supposed to do, starve?”
Mitch bit back the uncharitable yes that hovered and instead said, “Just get ready. I'll get some granola bars from the kitchen.” He turned back to the open door. “Ms. Jamieson, was it? I'm sorry, but I really ha—” He stopped mid-sentence as Jessica Perkins danced up onto the porch to join the wannabe nanny. Hell.
“Oh dear.” Jessica pulled a face as her gaze went to the hallway behind him. “Rough morning? You really should take me up on my offer to get you guys organized, Mitch, my friend. A couple of weeks and you won't even recognize the place.”
The air wheezed from Mitch. Oh, he'd seen Jessica's house, all right. The woman had invited the girls to go swimming in her pool in August, and then insisted on giving him the grand tour while wearing the skimpiest bikini he'd ever tried not to lay eyes on. He all but broke out in a cold sweat at the memory of how many times he'd had to extricate himself from various corners of that place. He didn’t think the woman had any serious designs on him, but she had made it abundantly clear that she thought two lonely people could—and should—find solace in one another’s company. She was right—her corners had been organized. He just had no intention of putting himself in a similar situation again.
“Thanks, Jessica, but—”
“Oh, pooh,” Jessica waved away the objection. “You know it's no trouble. I'm happy to help. Why don't Mandy and I come over tomorrow after school? The girls can hang out, and I can get a start on things. We'll order pizza for dinner. It will be fun!” Without waiting for a response, she turned to the other woman. “I'm so sorry. How rude of me not to introduce myself. I'm Jessica Perkins, a family friend.”
“Abigail Jamieson,” Smoky Eyes murmured.
Was it Mitch's imagination, or was she trying not to laugh?
“I see,” Jessica said, when no further information was offered. She nodded at the luggage pile she'd skirted on her way up the sidewalk. “And you're here... for a visit?”
“I'm—”
“She's moving in with us!” Brittany poked her head past Mitch, her voice muffled by the scarf she'd wound around her face. “She's our new nanny.”
“Oh?” Jessica looked over her shoulder at Mitch. “Rachel didn't mention you'd found someone new.”
Mitch opened his mouth to explain, then closed it as an image of Jessica Perkins organizing his house popped into his head. Another one followed of her wearing a bikini while doing so.
On the porch, Abigail Jamieson steadfastly refused to meet his gaze.
Abigail Jamieson, his unexpected—and unsuspecting—lifeline.
“It was a last-minute thing,” he heard himself reply.
“I see.” Jessica's narrow gaze traveled between Mitch and Abigail Jamieson, who stared down at a hole she'd made in the snow with the toe of her furry boot. Then Jessica’s ex
pression cleared, becoming cheerful again and leaving Mitch wondering what she saw.
“Well then,” she said, “Welcome, Abigail Jamieson. I’ll leave you to get settled in, but make sure Mitch leaves you my number in case you need anything while he’s at work. I’m happy to help if I can. Come on, girls, we're running late.”
With a cheery wave, she trotted back down the driveway to the car she’d left idling. The snow swallowing the sound of her door closing as Rachel shoved past him, Brittany on her heels.
“Bye, Daddy!” Brittany sang over her shoulder. “Bye, Abby! See you after school!”
“Wait,” Mitch called after them. “Granola bars!”
Rachel waved a handful of wrapped bars aloft as she trudged across the lawn. She didn't deign to look back. Seconds later, Jessica's car disappeared down the road, and silence fell over the yard, as thick and muffled as the flakes descending now in earnest. On the porch, Abigail Jamieson stamped her ridiculous boots and wrapped her arms around herself.
Mitch sighed. Now that he'd made it past the knee-jerk reaction to her arrival, maybe giving her a try wouldn't be such a bad idea. Because the look she'd given his hallway was right. He was desperate. And he'd run through so many nannies in the last year that he'd been blacklisted by just about every agency in town. And Estelle Gagnon had assured him that every nanny she sent out had already passed a police check. And if he didn't find help soon, a lot more than the house was going to go south in his life. And—
He held the door wide. “I assume you have references?” he asked.
Chapter 3
Abigail didn't want to stare at the giant of a man standing in the middle of a pile of running shoes, backpacks, coats, and various other sundries—was that really a sparkly purple tutu sticking out from under his slipper?—but when he took up as much space as he did, it was hard not to. He had to be at least six-two, and he had shoulders on him like a linebacker, and, holy Hannah, did he have to keep glowering like that? She raised her chin in an attempt to look one part more confident and one part taller. The glower deepened.
Abigail shifted from one foot to the other amid her pile of luggage. Two pull-along suitcases and an overnight bag that represented all her worldly possessions except for the contents of a cardboard box left in Gwyn's care. Contents that made her breath hitch just at the thought of them, so she kept her attention on the scowl instead. It was an impressive one. She hoped at least part of it was attributable to the... interesting... Jessica Perkins, who for some reason seemed to strike a kind of terror into Mitch Abrams’s heart.
And speaking of terror...
She summoned a determined smile to hide—she hoped—the utter panic roiling in her belly and tugged off her mitten. Once again, she held out her hand to her new employer. This will work, she assured herself. It has to work. “Abigail Jamieson,” she said, as if for the first time. “And I'm so sorry we got off on the wrong foot.”
The tall man with dark skin, surprising pale green eyes, and short-cropped, graying-at-the-temples hair still looked undecided about her presence in his house, but he let out a long exhale and reached to accept the handshake, his hand engulfing hers. “Mitchell Abrams,” he replied. “And I'm sorry, too.” He pulled his hand back and scratched at the strip of beard along his jaw. “It's been a challenging morning.”
Abigail surveyed the catastrophe of a hallway. “I can see that.”
“Coffee?” he asked. “I think there's some made, unless I forgot to turn on the pot.”
She shook her head. “Thank you, but I already had some. Maybe my room, so I can get this”—she waved a hand at the suitcases surrounding her feet—”out of the way?”
“Of course. Except...” Mitchell Abrams grimaced. “I'm afraid it's not ready. I really haven't checked my voicemail lately. I'd given up on—I didn't think anyone—” He sighed. “In the interests of full disclosure, you do know we've had difficulty retaining someone, right?”
Abby nodded. “Estelle mentioned something, yes.”
“Eleven in nine months. You're number twelve.”
“I know.” Darned good thing she wasn’t superstitious, now that she thought about it.
“And yet you still took the job.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, green eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“You need a nanny. I need a job.”
“That's not much of an answer.”
She shrugged. “I have experience and I'm good at managing a house.”
His gaze grew hooded as he studied her. “Still not much of an answer,” he said finally, “but I suppose beggars can't be choosers.”
Again, deliberately, Abby surveyed the chaos surrounding them, then she looked up at him, one eyebrow lifted just enough to underline her words. “No,” she said. “I suppose we can't.”
Her new employer gave a surprised bark of laughter and straightened up from his leaning post. “Touché. So, trial run? Three months.”
Her feet itching to flee the madness that had become her life, Abby took a deep breath. “Trial run,” she agreed.
“Good. I'll call my business partner while you take off your coat and boots, and then I'll meet you in the kitchen”—he pointed down the hall toward the back of the house—”in five.” With those directions issued, Mitchell Abrams unhooked a cell phone from his belt, stepped into a room to the left of the stairs leading to the second floor, and closed an opaque French door.
Abby wasted four and a half of the allotted five minutes standing in befuddled, unmoving bemusement, wondering how her life had become so surreal in so short a time. She stared down at the entry's ceramic tile floor, almost buried beneath an avalanche of boots and shoes and balls and bags. At the warm white walls smudged by fingerprints and life, the stairs rising to the second floor, the hallway stretching to the kitchen. Into the living room to the right of the hallway, where enough light filtered between the drapes to outline a loveseat on one side of a coffee table and two overstuffed armchairs on the other. And finally, at the luggage heaped by her feet and the mitten she'd removed, still gripped in her other hand.
If she'd had anywhere else she could have gone in those four and a half minutes, she would have turned tail and run. But she didn't, and so in the final few seconds, she slipped off her boots and parka, wedging the latter into the closet between a bright yellow child's raincoat and the worn, roughened jacket of a working man. And then she stepped across the avalanche and went to wait in the kitchen.
When the five minutes became ten, and then fifteen, she dug through the dishes piled in the sink until she found a mug. She washed and dried it, then poured coffee from the pot that Mitchell Abrams had indeed remembered to turn on. A quick perusal of the fridge turned up neither cream nor milk, but she'd learned to do without over the last year of rarely remembering to buy any herself, and so, black coffee in hand, she idly toured the room, closing dark wood cabinet doors as she went. A half-open dishwasher sat filled with more dirty dishes, but her search for detergent was unsuccessful. She closed the appliance and, using the pen hanging from a notepad stuck to the fridge door, added 'DW det' to the list already started there. Then she did another trip around the perimeter.
By the time she'd finished her third circuit of the room, she'd stacked papers and school books into a neat pile on the white table in the eating nook, cleared the island, run a sink of hot soapy water to soak dishes that appeared to have held a spaghetti dinner, wiped the newly liberated counters, and discovered the blackened remains of a frying pan half buried in the snow outside the sliding glass doors. She stared at the pan for a long moment, watching as the clean, falling flakes buried the mistakes it contained. Wishing life could be like those flakes but knowing it couldn't. With the back of her hand, she wiped away the tears gathering on her lower lashes.
She really, really had to stop crying every time she turned around.
Really.
Something scraped against the floor behind her, and she blinked, drawing herself tall and pasting the fake bri
ght smile on her face again before she turned. But instead of finding Mitch Abrams there, she found a little girl seated on a stool at the island, black hair drawn up into two lopsided puff ponytails and a dingy stuffed rabbit hugged against her pink t-shirt. Solemn dark eyes regarded Abby.
“Well, hello there,” Abby said in a voice that matched her smile. She winced and toned it down a few hundred notches. “You must be Kiana.”
A cautious nod.
Abby crossed the room to join her, setting the now-empty mug on the counter. “I'm Abby.” She held out her hand, and after a long hesitation, Kiana slipped a much smaller one into it, just for an instant. Abby waved at the sink. “We should do some of these dishes, don’t you think? You want to wash or dry?”
“Wash.” No hesitation there.
Abby smiled a real smile this time. Small, but real. “I thought you might choose that. Why don't you leave your bunny on the counter and pull one of the chairs from the table over to the sink?”
She tugged open a drawer where she'd already discovered aprons alongside the tea towels—and a smoke alarm—and pulled out a frilly blue one. When Kiana arrived with the chair, Abby helped her position it in front of the sink of water and then, with a detachment underscored by her determination to succeed at this job, she wrapped the apron around the little girl at chest height. Twice. And only had to swallow hard once.
See? She could totally handle this.
Kiana was tall for her age and didn't need to stand on the chair, only kneel. Abby tested the water temperature, handed the little girl a dishcloth, and said, “Go for it,” as she took a clean tea towel from the drawer for drying.
They worked together in silence, with Kiana proving to be a slow but thorough washer of even the gummiest plates. As the clean dishes accumulated on the countertop, Abby cleared her throat. “So how come you're not in school today?”
“I lost a shoe. It's Wonder Woman.”
Abigail Always Page 2
