by Cara Colter
She forced her attention to the view, all too aware it had nothing to do with the rapid beating of her heart. She could see the deep navy blue of an ocean bay. It was dotted with sailboats. Wet-suited sailboarders danced with the white capped waves. Outside of the bay a cruise ship slid by.
All she could think was that she had made a terrible mistake insisting on coming here with him. She touched her locket. Its powers to protect seemed measly and inadequate.
To be so aware of another human being, even in light of her recent romantic catastrophe, was terrible. To add to how terrible it was, she knew he would not be that aware of her. Since the breakup call, she had stripped herself of makeup, put away her wardrobe of decent clothes, determined to be invisible, to find the comfort of anonymity in her role as the nanny.
The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and Dannie turned away from the view to enter directly into an apartment. To her left, floor-to-ceiling glass doors that spanned the entire length of the apartment were open to a terraced deck. Exotic flowering plants surrounded dark rattan furniture, the deep cushions upholstered in shades of lime and white. White curtains, so transparent they could only be silk, waved gracefully in the slightly salt-scented breeze.
Inside were long, sleek ultramodern white leather sofas, casually draped with sheepskins. They formed a conversation area around a fireplace framed in stainless steel, the hearth beaded in copper-colored glass tile. The themes of leather, glass and steel repeated themselves, the eye moving naturally from the conversation area to a bar that separated the living area from a kitchen.
The kitchen was magazine-layout perfect, black cabinets and granite countertops, more stainless steel, more copper-colored glass tiles. A wine cooler, state-of-the-art appliances, everything subtle and sexy.
“Don’t tell me you cook,” she said, the statement coming out more pleading than she wanted.
He laughed. “Does opening wine count?”
Oh, it counted, right up there with the car and the Jacuzzi, as a big strike against him.
Thankfully, it really confirmed what she already knew. She was way out of her league, but vulnerable, too. And the apartment gave her the perfect excuse.
Was he watching her to see her reaction?
“Obviously,” she said tightly, “we can’t stay here. I’m sorry. I should never have insisted. If you can book us a flight, I need to take the children home.”
But the very thought made her want to cry. She told herself it wasn’t because his apartment was like something out of a dream, that it called to the part of her that wanted, dearly, to be pampered, that wanted, despite her every effort, to embrace fantasy instead of reject it.
No. She was tired. The children were tired. She couldn’t put them all back on a plane today. Maybe tomorrow.
“A motel for tonight,” she said wearily. “Tomorrow we can go home.”
“What’s wrong?”
Everything suddenly seemed wrong. Her whole damned life. She had never wanted anything like the elegance of this apartment, but only because it was beyond the humble dreams she had nurtured for Brent’s and her future.
So why did it feel so terrible, a yawning emptiness that could never be filled, that she realized she could never have this? Or a man like him? She hadn’t even been able to hold the interest of Brent, pudgy, owlish, safe.
Joshua Cole had the baby stuffed under his arm like a football, and was looking at her with what could very easily be mistaken for genuine concern by the hopelessly naive. At least she could thank Brent for that. She wasn’t. Hopelessly naive. Anymore.
“Obviously, I can’t stay here with the children. They could wreck a place like this in about twenty minutes.” The fantasy was about being pampered, enjoying these lush surroundings; the reality was the children wrecking the place and her being frazzled, trying to keep everything in order.
Reality. Fantasy. As long as she could keep the two straight, she should be able to survive this awkward situation.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, but uncertainly.
“Dic-u-lous,” Susie agreed, her eyes lighting on a pure crystal sculpture of a dolphin in the center of the coffee table.
Dannie took a tighter hold on Susie’s hand as the child tried to squirm free. She could already imagine little jam-covered fingerprints on the drapes, crayon marks on the sofas, wine being pulled out of the cooler.
“No,” she said. “It’s obvious you aren’t set up for children. I’d have a nervous breakdown trying to guard all your possessions.”
“They’re just possessions,” he said softly.
Of course he didn’t mean that. She’d already seen what he drove. She’d seen him eyeing that bowl in his office with grave concern every time Susie had even glanced in its direction. It was time to call him on it.
“You’re less attached to all this than the bowl in your office?” She congratulated herself on just the right tone of disbelief.
“I can move anything that is that breakable.”
“Start with the wine,” she said, just to give him an idea how big a job it was.
“The cooler locks. I’ll do it now.” As he moved across the room, he said over his shoulder, “I’ll send for some toys as a distraction.”
She had to pull herself together. She had to make the best decision for the children. The thought of moving them again, of cooping them up in a hotel room for the night suddenly seemed nearly unbearable.
They would stay here the night. One night. Rested, she would make good decisions tomorrow. Rested, she would be less susceptible to the temptations of his beautiful world. And his drop-dead-gorgeous eyes. And the brilliant wattage of his smile.
Which was directed at her right now. “What kind of toys should I get?” he asked her. He came over and gave her the key to the wine cooler, folded her hand around it.
She desperately wished he had not done that. His touch, warm and strong, filled with confidence, made her more confused about reality and fantasy. How could a simple touch make her feel as if she’d received an electric jolt from fingertip to elbow?
She’d given him an out, but he wasn’t taking it. She could see he was the kind of man who made up his mind and then was not swayed.
There was no point in seeing that as admirable. It was mule-stubbornness, nothing more.
“What toys?” he asked her again. He was smiling wickedly, as if he knew the touch of his hand had affected her.
Of course he knew! He radiated the conceited confidence of a man who had played this game with many women. Played. That’s why they called them playboys. It was all just a game to him.
“Princess Tasonja!” Susie crowed her toy suggestion. “And the camping play set. I have to have the tent and the backpack. And the dog, Royal Robert.” Seeing her uncle look amenable, she added a piece she coveted from a totally different play set. “And the royal wedding carriage. Don’t get Jake anything. He’s a baby.”
He took his cell phone out of his pocket and tried to dial with his thumb while still holding the baby. Apparently, he was going to have someone round up all the toys his niece had demanded.
“I wouldn’t bother with Princess Tasonja, if I were you,” Dannie managed, in a clipped undertone as Susie slipped free of her hand and skipped over to the sofa where she buried her face in a copper-colored silk pillow. Dannie was pretty sure the remnants of lunch were on that face.
“Why not?”
Why bother telling him that Susie’s attention would be held by the Princess Tasonja doll and her entire entourage for about thirty seconds? Why not let him find out on his own that attempts to buy children’s affection usually ended miserably? Susie would become a monster of demands once the first one was met.
That was a lesson he probably needed to learn about the car, too. Any woman who would be impressed with such a childish display of wealth was probably not worth knowing.
Her own awed reaction to this apartment probably spoke volumes about her own lack of character!
&
nbsp; “I suspect you think it’s going to keep her occupied—Susie do not touch the dolphin. But it won’t. Unless you are interested in playing princess doll dress up with her, the appeal will be strictly limited.”
He clicked the cell phone shut. “What do I do with her if I don’t buy her toys?” he asked.
“You are a sad man,” she blurted out, and then blushed at her own audacity.
“I don’t do kids well. That doesn’t make me sad.” He regarded her thoughtfully and for way too long.
Swooning length.
“You don’t just work for my sister,” he guessed. “You hang out with her, sharing ideas. Scary. I’m surprised she doesn’t have you married off.” He looked suddenly suspicious. “Unless that’s why you’re here.”
“Excuse me?”
“My sister has been on this ‘decent girl’ kick for a while. She better not be matchmaking.”
“Me?” Dannie squeaked. “You?” But suddenly she had a rather sickening memory of Melanie looking at her so sadly as she’d dealt with her news about Brent, as if everyone had expected it except her.
Joshua’s look grew very dark. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not at the moment,” she said coolly, as if she’d had dozens of them, when she’d had only one serious relationship, and the greatest part of that had been by long distance. “But you needn’t worry, Mr. Cole. Your sister would know me well enough to know that you are not my type!”
He had the nerve to look offended, as if he just naturally assumed he was every woman’s type, the title of World’s Sexiest Bachelor obviously having gone straight to his handsome head. “Really? And what is your type?”
She could feel heat staining her cheeks to a color she just knew would be the most unflattering shade of red ever. “Not you!”
“That isn’t really an answer.”
“Studious, serious about life, not necessarily a sharp dresser, certainly not materialistic.” She was speaking too fast, and in her panic describing a man she knew was less than ideal to a T.
“Priests aren’t generally available,” he said dryly.
“I meant someone like a college professor.” Which was what Brent had been. Rumpled. Academic. Faintly preoccupied all the time. Which she had thought was adorable!
“Your ideal man is a college professor?”
“Yes!” How dare he say it with such scorn?
“Miss Dannie Springer, don’t ever take up poker. You can’t lie. You’re terrible at it.”
“As it happens, I don’t like poker, and neither does my ideal man.” With whom her whole relationship, in retrospect, had been a lie, concocted entirely by her, sitting at home by herself making up a man who had never existed.
“The college professor,” he said dryly.
“Yes! Now, if you’ll entertain Susie for a bit, it’s time for Jake to have a bath.” Of course, it wasn’t anywhere near time Jake had a bath, but she had to get out of this room and this conversation. She doubted Mr. Playboy of the World knew anything about baby bath times. Or college professors for that matter! But he seemed to know just a little too much about women, and his look was piercing.
“Entertain Susie?” he said, distracted just as she had hoped. “How? Since you’ve nixed Princess Tasonja.”
“Try noughts and crosses.”
He frowned. “Like those notes she used to give me? Before she hated me? That were covered with x’s and o’s that meant hugs and kisses?”
Dannie steeled herself. He was not really distressed that he had fallen into his niece’s disfavor. His world was way too big that he could be brought down by the little things.
“Noughts and crosses,” she said. “Tic-tac-toe.”
He looked baffled, underscoring how very far apart their worlds were, and always would be.
“Get a piece of paper and a pencil, Susie will be happy to show you how it works,” she said.
“You mean a piece of paper and a pencil will keep her as entertained as the princess?”
“More.”
“Do I let her win?” he asked in a whisper. He shot his niece a worried look.
“Would that be honest?”
“For God’s sake, I’m not interested in honest.”
“I’m sure truer words were never spoken,” she said meanly, getting back at him for being so scornful of her college professor.
“I’m interested in not making a little girl cry.”
“It’s about spending time with her. That’s the important part. Not winning or losing.”
“I have a lot to learn.”
“Yes, you do, Mr. Cole,” she said, aware of a snippy little edge to her voice.
“You have a lot to learn, too,” he said, quietly, looking at her with an unsettling intensity that she would have done anything to escape.
“Such as?” she said, holding her ground even though she wanted to bolt.
“The college professor. Not for you.”
“How would you know?”
“I’m an astute judge of people.”
“You aren’t! You didn’t even know whether or not to be honest playing noughts and crosses.”
“Not miniature people, the under-five set. But you, I know something about you. I wonder if you even know it yourself.”
“You know nothing about me that I don’t know about myself!” she said recklessly. To her detriment, part of her wanted to hear what he had to say. How often, after all, did an invisible nanny get to hear love advice from the World’s Sexiest Bachelor?
But he didn’t say a word, just proved exactly why he was the World’s Sexiest Bachelor. He lifted her chin with the tip of his finger and looked deep into her eyes. Then he touched her lip with his thumb.
If it was possible to melt she would have. She felt like chocolate exposed to flame. She felt every single lie she had ever told herself about Brent. Dannie yanked away from him, but he nodded, satisfied that he did know something she didn’t know herself.
Except now she had an idea.
That she was as weak as every other damn woman he’d ever met. Not that he ever had to know that!
“You’re in the bedroom at the end of the hall,” he said, as if he hadn’t shaken her right to the core. “I had the crib set up in there. Is that okay?”
“Perfect,” she said tightly, and she meant it. A pint-size chaperone for weaklings, not that she needed to worry about this man sneaking into her room in the dead of night. That was fantasy.
Of the X-rated variety, and she didn’t mean tic-tac-toe, either.
“Hey, Susie,” he said turning from her, after one last look that seemed more troubled than triumphant, “do you want to play noughts and crosses?”
Susie glared at him, clearly torn between personal dislike and the temptation of her favorite game. “All right,” she said grudgingly.
Danielle marched down the hall with the baby. The room at the end had the same spectacular views and windows as the rest of the apartment.
The decorating was so romantic it was decadent, the whole room done in shades of brown, except for the bed linens that were seductively and lushly cream colored, inviting in that sea of rich dark chocolate.
Her suitcases were on the bed. How that had happened she wasn’t quite sure. A crib had been set up for Jake, too.
Through a closed door was a bathroom, with the Jacuzzi.
A jetted tub built for two.
“We have to get out of here,” she confided in the baby as she took his plump, dimpled limbs out of his clothes. The fact that Joshua thought his sister might be matchmaking—and that she could not say with one hundred per cent certainty that Melanie was not—just added an element of humiliation to the urgency she felt to go.
Was Melanie matchmaking? She frowned, thinking back over her conversations with her employer. As eager as Mel was to have everyone in the world enjoy the same state of wedded bliss she lived in, she had always been reserved about Brent.
Dannie assumed because she had never met him.
She had assumed Mel’s eagerness to have her join her children with their uncle had only been her effort to help her nanny over her heartbreak, to give her a change of scenery. A hidden agenda? Wouldn’t that be humiliating?
But Mel had never alluded, even subtly, to the possibility she considered her nanny and her brother to be anything of a match.
Because we so obviously are not, Dannie thought, and detected just a trace of sulkiness in that conclusion.
As always, the baby worked his magic on her sour mood, her tendency toward dour introspection. Dannie put about two inches of water in the gigantic tub, and Jake surrendered his little naked self gleefully into the watery playpen.
When the baby began to laugh out loud, she was drawn in, and she laughed back, splashing his little round tummy with warm water until he was nearly hysterical with joy.
“Do I take myself and life way too seriously, Mr. Jake?”
What if Mel had sent her here with some kind of hidden agenda? So what? What if she just played along?
“Oh, Dannie,” she chided herself, “that would be like playing patty-cake with a powder keg.”
Jake recognized the term, cooperatively held out his hands and crowed.
Relax, she ordered herself. If you still know how, and then sadly, if you ever knew how.
CHAPTER THREE
“PATTY cake, patty cake, baker’s man, bake me a cake as fast as you can.”
Dannie’s voice and her laughter, intermingled with happy shouts from the baby and splashing noises, floated down the hallway to where Joshua sat opposite Susie on the couch.
Who would have imagined the serious, rather uptight nanny could sound like that? So intriguingly carefree?
Not that that was the truth about her. No, the truth was what he had felt when he had touched her lip—
“Tic, tac, toe,” Susie cried and drew a triumphant line though her row of crosses.
Susie was trouncing him at noughts and crosses.
Something unexpected was happening to him. Given that his carefully executed schedule had gone out the window, he felt unexpectedly relaxed, as if a tightly wound coil inside of him was unwinding. Watching his niece, whose tongue was caught between her teeth in fierce concentration, listening to Dannie and the baby, he felt a feeling unfurling inside him.
