by Cara Colter
And if that wasn’t bad enough, he was opening himself up to a world that might have been his, had he hung on instead of letting go of a different baby boy in a lifetime he had left behind himself.
His son.
He wanted to be a better man, worthy of his sister’s trust, but who was he kidding? He’d lost faith in himself, in his ability to do the right thing, a long time ago. His sister didn’t even know about the college pregnancy of his girlfriend.
He found himself holding his breath, hoping Dannie Springer would not be foolish enough to say yes to his impulsive invitation, wishing he could take it back, before it drew him into places he did not want to go.
“Obviously, we have to stay somewhere for now,” she said, her enthusiasm, or lack thereof, matching his exactly. “I’m not subjecting the children to any more travel or uncertainty today.”
But his whole world suddenly had a quality of the uncertain about it. And Joshua Cole did not like it when things in his well-ordered world shifted out of his control. He didn’t like it one little bit.
CHAPTER TWO
DANNIE sat in the back seat of the cab, fuming. The next time I see Melanie, I’m going to kill her, she decided.
Thinking such a thought felt like a terrible defeat for a woman who prided herself on her steady nature and unflappable calm, at least professionally. To think it toward Melanie showed how truly rattled Dannie was. Melanie, in just a few short months, had become so much more than an employer.
But the truth was that a steady nature was not any kind of defense against a man like Joshua Cole. He was a complete masculine, sexy package, with that brilliant smile, the jade of those eyes, the perfect masculine cut of his facial features, the way he carried himself, the exquisitely expensive clothing over the sleek muscle of a toned body. All of it put together would have been enough to rattle Mother Theresa!
Dannie had known Melanie’s brother was attractive. She had seen two pictures of him in the Maynards’ home. Not that those pictures could have prepared her for Joshua Cole in the flesh.
Melanie’s two framed photos showed her brother through the lens of an ordinary family. Nothing extraordinary about Joshua at twelve, on the beach, scrawny, white, not even a hint of the man he would become. In fact, whatever had been behind that impish grin seemed to be gone from him entirely.
The other picture showed Joshua in a college football uniform, posed, looking annoyingly cocky and confident, again some mischief in him that now seemed to be gone. Though he was undeniably good-looking, that photo showed only a glimmer of the self-possessed man he now was.
“He never finished college,” Melanie had said, with a hint of sadness, when she had seen Dannie looking at that picture. For some reason Dannie had assumed that sadness was for her brother’s lost potential.
Melanie had seemed to see Joshua as the exasperating kid brother who was an expert at thwarting her every effort to interfere in his life with her wise and well-meaning sisterly guidance. From Melanie’s infrequent mentions of her brother, Dannie had thought he managed a hotel or a travel agency, not that he was the president and CEO of one of the world’s most up-and-coming companies!
So, the article in People to Watch had been a shocker. First, the photos had come a little closer to capturing the pure animal magnetism of the man. The little-boy mischief captured in his sister’s snapshots was gone from those amazing smoky-jade eyes, replaced with an intensity that was decidedly sensual.
That sensuality was underscored in the revealing photos of him: muscled, masculine, at ease with his body, oozing a self-certainty that few men would ever master.
Melanie had certainly never indicated her brother was a candidate for the World’s Sexiest Bachelor, though his unmarried status seemed to grate on her continually.
Again, the magazine portrayal seemed to be more accurate than the casual remarks Melanie had tossed out about him. The magazine described him as powerful, engaging and lethally charming. And that was just personally. Professionally he was described as driven. The timing of the openings of his adventure-based adult-only resorts was seen as brilliant.
In the article, his name had also been paired with some of the world’s wealthiest and most beautiful women, including actress Monique Belliveau, singer Carla Kensington and heiress Stephanie Winger-Stone.
By the time he’d stood them up at the airport, Danielle Springer, the steady one, had already been feeling nervous about meeting Joshua Cole, World’s Sexiest Bachelor, and had developed a feeling of dislike for him, just knowing he would exude all the superficial charm and arrogance of a man who had the world at his feet. He would move through life effortlessly, piling up successes, traveling the globe, causing heartbreaks but never suffering them.
She had already known, before the plane landed, that Melanie had made a terrible mistake in judgment sending them all here. That knowledge had only been underscored by the fact the Great One had not put in an appearance at the airport, and she had not been able to penetrate the golden walls that protected him from the annoyances of real life.
Which begged the question: Why hadn’t she jumped at the opportunity to go to Whistler when he had offered it? It was more than the fact small children and hotels rarely made a good combination, no matter how “child-friendly” they claimed to be.
It was more than the fact that the children were exhausted and so was she, not a good time to be making decisions!
It was that something about him had been unexpected.
He had not been all arrogance and charm. Something ran deeper in him. She had seen it in that unguarded moment when she had thrust Jake upon him, something in his face that said his life had not been without heartbreak, after all.
Stop it, she told herself sternly. They would spend the evening with him. Tomorrow, rested, she would regroup and decide what to do next. The original plan no longer seemed feasible. Spend a week with him? Good grief!
What she was not going to do was call Melanie and Ryan, who needed this time together desperately. At a whisper of trouble, Melanie would come home.
Still, could it really be in the best interests of the children to spend time with their uncle? He’d made it clear he was uncomfortable with children. In fact, his success was based on the creation of a child-free world! There was no sense seeing anything noble in his sudden whim to play the hero and spend time with the niece and nephew he’d invited here in the first place.
And how about herself? How much time could any woman with blood flowing through her veins spend with a man like that without succumbing?
Not, she reminded herself sourly, that there would be anything to succumb to. He was rich and powerful and definitely lethally charming. There had been no pictures in the article of him accompanied by women like her.
Women like her: unprocessed, unsophisticated, slightly plump.
She touched the locket on her neck and felt the ache. Only a few weeks ago, the locket would have protected her. Taken.
Brent had given it to her before leaving for Europe. “A promise,” he’d said, “I will return to you.”
Perhaps it would be better to take the locket off, now that it represented a promise broken. On the other hand perhaps it protected her still, reminding her of the fickleness of the human heart, and especially of the fickleness of the male human heart.
And besides, she wasn’t ready to take it off. She still looked at the photo inside it each night and felt the ache of loss and the stirring of hope that he would realize he had made a mistake ….
Though all along maybe the worst mistake had been hers. Believing in what she felt for Brent, even after what she had grown up with. Her own parents’ split up had been venomous, their passion had metamorphosed into full-blown hatred that was destructive to all it had touched, including their children. Maybe especially their children.
Thank God, Dannie thought, for the Maynards, for Melanie and Ryan, for Susie and Jake. Thank God she had already been welcomed into the fold of their household when thi
s hurricane of heartbreak had hit her. She would survive because they gave her a sense of family and of belonging, a safe place to fall when her world had fallen apart.
Bonus: loving them didn’t involve one little bit of risk!
Though since Brent’s call from London, “I’m so sorry, there’s someone else,” now when Dannie saw the way that Melanie and Ryan looked at each other, she felt a startling stab of envy.
“Hey, lady, are we going somewhere, or are we just sitting here?” the cabbie asked her, waiting for her instructions, impatient.
“When you see the horrible yellow car, follow it,” Dannie said. Delivering the variation on the line “Follow that car” gave her absolutely no pleasure.
“A yellow car?” he said, bemused. “Do you think you could be a little more specific?”
Dannie looked over her shoulder. “It’s coming now.”
The cabbie whistled. “Okay, lady, though in what world a Lamborghini is horrible, I’m not sure.”
“Totally unsuited for children’s car seats,” she informed him. The horrible yellow car, with its horrible gorgeous driver passed them slowly.
A man like that could make a woman rip a locket right off her neck!
She snorted to herself. A man like that could cause a heart to break just by being in the same room, a single glance, green eyes lingering a touch too long on her lips … Joshua’s eyes were probably always making promises he had no intention of keeping.
Unattainable to mere mortals, she reminded herself with a sniff. Not that she was a mortal in the market! Done. Brent had finished her. She had given love a chance, nurtured her hopes and dreams over the year he’d been away, lived for his cards and notes and e-mails and been betrayed for all her trouble.
Terrible how that vow of being done could be rattled so easily by one lingering look from Joshua Cole! How could his gaze have made her wish, after her terrible Brent breakup, that she had not made herself over quite so completely? Gone was the makeup, the fussing over the hair, the colorful wardrobe. On was about fifteen pounds, the result of intensive chocolate therapy!
She was done, intent on making herself invisible and therefore safe. How could she possibly feel as if Joshua Cole had seen her in a way Brent, whom she had pulled out all the makeover tricks for, never had?
The sports car was so low, she could look in the window and see Jake, his brand-new car seat strapped in securely, facing backward, his black hair standing straight up like dark dandelion fluff.
She refused to soften her view of Joshua Cole because he had insisted on the car seat to get the baby home. Once you softened your view of a man who was lethally charming, you were finished. That’s what lethally meant.
Besides, there hadn’t been enough room in that ridiculous car to put her and Susie to ride with him.
A car like that said a lot about a man. Fast and flashy. Self-centered. Single and planning to stay that way.
Since she was also single and very much planning to stay that way for the rest of her life, a poor spinster nanny in the basement room, it was probably unfair to see that as a flaw in him.
Except the car meant he was a hunter, on the prowl. Didn’t it?
“What does a car like that mean to you?” she asked the cab driver, just in case she had it wrong.
“That you can have any girl you want,” he muttered.
Bingo.
“If he opens her up, I’m not going to be able to keep up with him,” the cabbie warned.
“If he opens her up, I’m going to kill him,” she said. “He has a baby in there.” My baby. Of course, Jake was not officially her baby. Unofficially he had won her heart and soul from the first gurgle. Now, post-Brent, she had decided Jake might be the only baby she ever had.
Emotion could capsize her unexpectedly since Brent had hit her with his announcement, and she felt it claw at her throat now, defended against it by telling herself that sweet little baby boy was probably going to be lethally charming someday, just like his uncle.
Twice, in the space of five minutes, steady, dependable Dannie had thought of killing people.
That’s what heartbreak did: turned normal, reliable people into bitter survivors, turned them into what they least wanted to be. In fact, it seemed to her, her recent tragedy had the potential to turn her into her parents, who had spent their entire married lives trying to kill each other.
Figuratively. Mostly.
“You shouldn’t say you’re going to kill people,” Susie told her, a confirmation of what Dannie already knew. Susie was hugging the new teddy bear that had arrived in her uncle’s office along with the car seat. The teddy bear did not seem to have softened the child’s view of her uncle at all.
In Susie’s view, Uncle Josh was the villain who had torn her mother away from her. A teddy bear was not going to fix that.
A lesson Uncle Josh no doubt needed to learn! You could not buy back affection.
The car seat and the teddy bear had arrived within minutes of a quiet phone call. Dannie had heard him giving instructions to have a baby crib set up at his apartment. In the guest room with the Jacuzzi. Which begged the question not only how many guest rooms were there, but why did you need a guest room with a Jacuzzi?
Obviously, for the same reason you needed a car like that. Entertaining.
Still, she had gotten the message. He spoke; people jumped.
And he’d better not even think of trying that with her! She might have been the kind of person who jumped before Brent’s betrayal. She was no longer!
They arrived at a condominium complex not far from his office building, and Dannie tried very hard not to be awed, even though a guest room with a Jacuzzi should have given her ample time to prepare herself for something spectacular.
She was awed, anyway. Even though Melanie and Ryan certainly had no financial difficulties, she knew she was now moving in an entirely different league.
The high-rise building appeared to be constructed of white marble, glass and water. The landscaping in front of the main door was exquisite: lush grass, exotic flowers, a black onyx fountain shooting up pillars of gurgling foam.
She was fumbling with her wallet when Joshua appeared at the driver’s window, baby already on his hip, and paid the driver. He juggled the baby so he could open the door for her. There was no sense noticing his growing comfort with the baby!
Instead, she focused on the fact that if the great Joshua Cole was aware he had parked the horrible yellow thing in a clearly marked no-parking zone, it didn’t concern him.
But she’d do well to remember that: rules were for others.
A doorman came out of the building to move the car almost instantly. Another unloaded her luggage from the trunk of the cab.
Joshua greeted both men by name, with a sincere warmth that surprised her. And then he was leading her through a lobby that reminded her of the one and only five-star hotel she had ever stayed at. The lobby had soaring ceilings, deep carpets over marble tile, distressed leather furniture.
For all that, why did it feel as if the most beautiful thing in the room was that self-assured man carrying a baby, his strength easy, his manner unforced?
Few men, in Dannie’s experience, were really comfortable with children. Brent had claimed to like them, but she had noticed he had that condescending, overly enthusiastic way of being around them that children hated.
She hoped it was a sign of healing that she had remembered this flaw in her perfect man!
It was a strange irony that, while Joshua Cole had not made any claims about liking children and in fact radiated unapologetic discomfort around them, he was carrying that baby on his hip as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing.
Joshua chose that moment to glance down at the bundle in his arms. She caught his look of unguarded tenderness and felt her throat close. Had she just caught a glimpse of something so real about him that it made her question every other judgment she had made?
What if the World’s Sexiest
Bachelor was a lie? What if the sports car and clothes and office were just a role he’d assumed? What if he was really a man who had been born to be a daddy?
Danger zone, she told herself. What was wrong with her? She had just been terribly disappointed by one man! Why would she be reading such qualities into another that she barely knew?
Besides, there was no doubt exactly why men like Joshua Cole were so successful with women. They had charm down to a science.
It made it so easy to place them in the center of a fantasy, it was so easy to give them a starring role in a dream that she had to convince herself she did not believe in anymore.
Enough of fantasies, she told herself. She had spent the entire year Brent was away building a fantasy around his stupid cards and e-mails, reading into them growing love, when in fact his love had been diminishing. She was a woman pathetic enough to have spent her entire meager savings on a wedding dress on the basis of a vague promise.
Joshua went to a door off the bank of elevators and inserted a key.
The door glided open, and Dannie tried not to gawk at the unbelievable decadence of a private glass elevator. How was a girl supposed to give up on fantasy in a world where fantasy became reality?
The glass-encased elevator eased silently upward, and even Susie forgot to be mad at her uncle and squealed with delight as they glided smoothly higher and higher, the view becoming more panoramic by the second.
The problem with elevators, especially for a woman trying desperately to regain control of suddenly undisciplined thoughts, of her fantasies, was that everything was too close in them. She could smell the tantalizing aroma of Joshua, expensive cologne, mixed with soap. His shoulder, enormously broad under the exquisite tailoring of his suit jacket, brushed hers as he turned to let the baby see the view, and she felt a shiver of animal awareness so strong that it shook her to the core.
The reality of being in this elevator with a real man made her aware that for a year Brent had not been real at all, but a faraway dream that she could make into anything she wanted him to be.
Had she ever been this aware of Brent? So aware that his scent, the merest brush of his shoulder, could make her dizzy?
