Hired: Nanny Bride

by Cara Colter

  She plucked a noodle from her bowl, and he felt that surge of heat, of pure wanting. He knew himself. Part of it was because she was such a good girl, prim and prissy, a bit of a plain Jane.

  It was the librarian fantasy, where a beautiful hellcat lurked just under the surface of the mask of respectability.

  Except that part wasn’t a fantasy. Unleashed, Danielle Springer was a hellcat! And the beauty part just deepened and deepened and deepened.

  He wanted back what he had lost. Not the heated kisses; he’d had plenty of those and would have plenty more.

  No, what he wanted back was the rare trust he felt for her and had gained from her. What he wanted back was the ease that had developed between them over the past few days, the sense of companionship.

  “Want to play cards?” he asked her.

  The look she gave him could have wilted newly budded roses. “No, thanks.”

  “Charades?”

  No answer.

  “Do you want dessert?”

  The faintest glimmer of interest that was quickly doused.

  “It’s going to be a long evening, Dannie.”

  “God forbid you should ever be bored.”

  “As if anybody could ever be bored around you,” he muttered. “Aggravating, annoying, doesn’t listen, doesn’t appreciate when sacrifices have been made for her own good—”

  She cut him off. “What were the dessert options?”

  “Chocolate cake. No oven, but chocolate cake.” Just to get away from the condemnation in her eyes, he got up, his blanket held up tightly, and went and looked at the cake mix box he had found in one of the cupboards.

  He fumbled around in the poor light until he found another pot, dumped the cake mix in and added water from a container he had filled at the lake. He went and crouched in front of the fire, holding the pot over the embers, stirring, waiting, stirring.

  Then he went and got a spoon, and sat on the couch. “You want some?” he asked.

  “Sure. The girl who can’t even squeeze into her jeans will forgive anything for cake,” she said. “Even bad cake. Fried cake. I bet it’s gross.”

  “It isn’t,” he lied. “You looked great in those jeans. Stop it.” And then, cautiously, he said, “What’s to forgive?”

  “I wanted to keep kissing. You didn’t.”

  “I need a friend more than I need someone to kiss. Do you know how fast things can blow up when people go there?” He almost added before they’re ready. But that implied he was going to be ready someday, and he wasn’t sure that was true. You couldn’t say things to Dannie Springer until you were sure they were true.

  Silence.

  “Come on,” he said softly. “Forgive me. Come eat cake.” He wasn’t aware his heart had stopped beating until it started again when she flopped down on the couch beside him.

  He filled up the spoon with goo and passed it to her, tried not to look at how her lips closed around that spoon. Then he looked anyway, feeling regret and yearning in equal amounts. He’d thought watching her eat spaghetti was sexy? The girl made sharing a spoon seem like something out of the Kama Sutra.

  The cake was like a horrible, soggy pudding with lumps in it, but they ate it all, passing the spoon back and forth, and it tasted to him of ambrosia.

  “Tell me something about you that no one knows,” he invited her, wanting that trust back, longing for the intimacy they had shared on the lakeshore. Even if it had been dangerous. It couldn’t be any more dangerous than sharing a spoon with her. “Just one thing.”

  “Is that one of your playboy lines?” she asked.

  “No.” And it was true. He had never said that to a single person before.

  Still, she seemed suspicious and probably rightly so. “You first.”

  When I put that spoon in my mouth, all I can think is that it has been in your mouth first.

  “I was a ninety-pound weakling up until the tenth grade.”

  “I already knew that. Your sister has a picture of you.”

  “Out where anyone can see it?” he asked, pretending to be galled.

  “Probably posted on the Internet,” she said. “Try again.”

  There was one thing no one knew about him, and for a moment it rose up in him begging to be released. To her. For a moment, the thought of not carrying that burden anymore was intoxicating in its temptation.

  “Sometimes I pass gas in elevators,” he said, trying for a light note, trying to be superficial and funny and irreverent, trying to fight the demon that wanted out.

  “You do not! That’s gross.”

  “Real men often are,” he said. “You heard it here first.”

  “Wow. I don’t even think I want to kiss you again.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Was it that terrible?” she demanded.

  Could she really believe it had been terrible? That made the temptation to show her almost too great to bear. Instead, he gnawed on the now empty spoon. “No,” he said gruffly, “It wasn’t terrible at all. Your turn.”

  “Um, in ninth grade I sent Leonard Burnside a rose. I put that it was from Miss Marchand, the French teacher.”

  “You liked him?”

  “Hated him,” she said. “Full-of-himself jock. He actually went to the library and learned a phrase in French that he tried out on her. Got kicked out of school for three days.”

  “Note to self—do not get on Danielle Springer’s bad side.”

  “I never told anyone. It was such a guilty pleasure. Your turn.”

  “I don’t floss, ever.”

  “You are gross.”

  “You mean you could tell I didn’t floss?” he asked sulkily. “I knew if you really knew me, you wouldn’t want to kiss me.”

  And then the best thing happened. She was laughing. And he was laughing. And they were planning cruel sequences that she could have played on full-of-himself Lennie Burnside.

  It grew very quiet. The fire sputtered, and he felt warm and content, drowsy. She shifted over, he felt her head fall onto his shoulder. Even though he knew better, he reached out and fiddled with her hair.

  “The part I don’t get about you,” she said, after a long time that made him wonder if she’d spent all that time thinking of him, “is if you had such a good time with your family on family holidays, why is your own company geared to the young and restless crowd?”

  The battle within him was surprisingly short. He had carried it long enough. The burden was too heavy.

  He was shocked that he wanted to tell her. And only her.

  Shocked that he wanted her to know him completely. With all his flaws and with all his weaknesses. He wanted her to know he was a man capable of making dreadful errors. He wanted to know if the unvarnished truth about him would douse that look in her eyes when she looked at him, dewy, yearning.

  “When I was in college,” he said softly, “the girl I was dating became pregnant. We had a son. We agreed to put him up for adoption.”

  For a long time she was absolutely silent, and then she looked at him. In the faint light of the fire, it was as if she was unmasked.

  What he saw in her eyes was not condemnation. Or anything close to it.

  Love.

  Her hand touched his face, stroked, comforting.

  “You didn’t want to,” Dannie guessed softly. “Oh, Joshua.”

  He glanced at her through the golden light of the dying fire. She was looking at him intently, as if she was holding her breath. Her hand was still on his cheek. He could turn his head just a touch and nibble her thumb. But it would be wrong. A lie. Trying to distract them both from the real intimacy that was happening here, and from her deepest secret, which he had just seen in her eyes.

  “No, I didn’t want to. I guess I wanted what I’d had before, a family to call my own again, that feeling. I cannot tell you how I missed that feeling after Mom and Dad died. Of belonging, of having a place to go to where people knew you, clean through. Of being held to a certain standard by the people wh
o knew you best and knew what you were capable of.”

  He was shocked by how much he had said, and also shocked by how easily the words came, as if all these years they had just waited below the surface to be given voice.

  “What happened to the baby?” Dannie asked quietly.

  “Sarah didn’t want to be tied down. She wasn’t ready to settle down. I considered, briefly, trying to go it on my own, as a single dad, but Sarah thought that was stupid. A single dad, just starting in life, when all these established families who could give that baby so much stability and love were just waiting to adopt? My head agreed with her. My heart—”

  He stopped, composing himself, while she did the perfect thing and said nothing. He went on, “My heart never did. Some men could be unchanged by that. I wasn’t. I couldn’t even finish school. I tried to run away from what I was feeling. I had abandoned my own son to the keeping of strangers. What kind of person did a thing like that?

  “I traveled the world and developed an aversion for places that catered to families. Wasn’t there anywhere a guy like me could get away from all that love? I kind of just fell into the resort business, bought a rundown hotel in Italy, started catering to the young and hip and single, and became a runaway success before I knew what had hit me.”

  Her hand, where it touched his cheek, was tender. It felt like absolution. But he knew the truth. She could not absolve him.

  Silence for a long, long time.

  And then she said, “Funny, that your company is called Sun. If you say it, instead of spell it, it’s kind of like you carried him with you, isn’t it? Your son. Into every single day.”

  That was the problem with showing your heart to someone like Dannie. She saw it so clearly.

  And then she said, “Have you considered the possibility that what you did was best for him? That he did get a family who were desperate for a child to love? Who could give him exactly what you missed so much after your parents died?”

  “On those rare occasions that I allow myself to think about it, that is my hope. No, more than a hope. A prayer. And I’m a man who doesn’t pray much, Dannie.”

  “Have you ever thought of finding him?” she asked softly.

  “Now and then.”

  “And what stops you?”

  “How complicated it all seems. Just go on the Internet and type in adoption to see what a mess of options there are, red tape, legal ramifications, ethical dilemmas.”

  Dannie wasn’t buying it, seeing straight through him. “You must have a team of lawyers who could cut to the quick in about ten minutes. If you haven’t done it, there’s another reason.”

  “Fear, then, I guess,” he said, relieved to make his truth complete, wanting her to know who he really was. Maybe wanting himself to know, too. “Fear of being rejected. Fear of opening up a wanting that will never be satisfied, searching the earth for what I can’t have or can’t find.”

  “Oh, Joshua,” she said sadly, “you don’t get it at all, do you?”

  “I don’t?” He had told her his deepest truth, and though the light of love that shone in her eyes did not lessen, her words made him feel the arrow of her disappointment.

  A woman like Dannie could show a man who was lost how to find his way home. Like being in a family, she would never accept anything but his best. Like being in a family, she would show him how to get there when he couldn’t find his way by himself.

  For the first time in a very, very long time, the sense of loneliness within him eased, the sense that no one really knew him dissipated.

  “When you gave your son up for adoption, it wasn’t really about what you needed or wanted, Joshua,” she said gently. “And it isn’t now, either. It’s about what he needs and wants. What if he wants to know who his biological father is?”

  And suddenly he saw how terribly self-centered he had always been. He had become more so, not less, after he had walked away from his baby seven years ago. He had layered himself in self-protective self-centeredness.

  And he was so glad he had not taken that kiss with Dannie to where it wanted to go.

  Because he had things he needed to do, roads he needed to travel down, places he needed to visit. Places of the heart.

  For a moment, sitting here by the fire, exchanging laughter and confidences, eating off the same spoon, slurping spaghetti, he had thought it felt like homecoming.

  Now he saw he could not have that feeling, not with her and not with anyone else, not until he had made peace with who he was and what he had done.

  A long time ago he had given his own flesh and blood into the keeping of strangers. He had tried to convince himself it was the right decision. He had rationalized all the reasons it was okay. But in the back of his mind, he had still been a man, self-centered and egotistical, knowing that child would have disrupted his plans and his life and his dreams.

  Ironically, even after he’d made the decision that would supposedly set him free, he had been a prisoner of it.

  Dannie had seen that right away. Sun. Son.

  A nibbling sense of failure, of having made a mistake in an area where it really counted, had chased him, and chased him hard. He had barely paused to catch a breath at each of his successes before beginning to run again. He had lost faith in himself because of that decision.

  And no amount of success, money, power or acquisition had ever absolved him.

  But Dannie was right. It was about the child, not about him. If he found out if his boy was okay, then would the demons rest? If he was able to put the needs of that babe ahead of his own, then was he the man worthy of what he saw in Dannie’s eyes?

  Joshua realized when he had come back into this cabin, after Michael had roared away in the motorboat, leaving them here together until morning, he had thought his mission was to get her to trust him again, the way she had when she had told him about her disastrous nonrelationship with the college professor. The way she had when she had told him about a wedding gown that she had spent all her money on and that she would never wear.

  But now he saw that mission for what it was: impossible.

  He could not ask anyone else to place their trust in him until he had restored his trust in himself, his belief that he could be counted on to do the right thing.

  Where did that start? Maybe his journey had begun already, with saying yes to the needs of his niece and nephew. And then again, maybe that didn’t count, since he’d had an ulterior motive.

  Maybe his journey had begun when he had backed away from Dannie, backed away from the soft invitation of her lips and the hot invitation of her eyes, because he had known he was not ready and neither was she.

  And maybe he could win back his trust in himself by taking one tiny step at a time. Was it as simple—and as difficult—as adding his name to an adoption registry, so that his son would know if he ever wanted him, he would be there for him?

  “Thank you for trusting me,” Dannie said softly.

  The last of the embers were dying, and her voice came at him out of the darkness.

  “Dannie, you are completely trustworthy,” he said. And he wondered if someday he was going to be a man worthy of that.

  But he had a lot of work to do before he was. The darkness claimed him, and when he woke in the morning, it was to the sound of a powerboat moving across the lake. His neck hurt from sleeping on the couch; he could not believe how good it felt to have her cuddled into him.

  Trusting.

  He sighed, put her away from him, got up and pulled his stiff slacks from where they were strung in front of the now-dead fire.

  Trust. He could not even trust himself to look at her, did not think he was strong enough to fight the desire to say good morning to her with a kiss.

  Dannie barely spoke on the way back across the water. Neither did he. There was something so deep between them now it didn’t even need words. That was what he wanted to be worthy of.

  They had barely landed when Susie greeted them, by dancing between the two of them,
and throwing her sturdy arms around their knees, screeching as if it was Christmas morning. Even the baby seemed thrilled to see them.

  Worthy of this kind of love.

  “Were you okay over there?” Sally asked. “What a terrible thing to happen.”

  “We were fine, but I think the canoe is beyond repair,” Joshua said. “I’ll replace it.”

  Sally made a noise that sounded suspiciously close to disgust. “I’m not worried about stuff,” she said annoyed. “Stuff can be replaced. People can’t.”

  A little boy in a blue blanket. Never replaced. Not with all the stuff.

  “I’ve made a farewell breakfast,” Sally said, turning away from them and leading the way back to the lodge. “Come.”

  With Susie holding his one hand, as if he completely deserved her love and devotion, and the baby in the crook of his arm, he followed Sally up to the lodge. Dannie trailed behind, lost in her own thoughts.

  Sally had made a wonderful feast: bacon, eggs, pancakes, fresh-squeezed juice. For them. For people she barely knew. Still, she looked a little sad and Joshua realized that was part of the magic of this place. It made everyone who came here into family, it made every farewell difficult.

  He had not once discussed business with Michael, and suddenly he was glad. He had not made any promises he could not keep.

  Trust. It was time to be a man he could be proud of. That Dannie would be proud of. That maybe his son would be proud of one day.

  “I have a confession to make,” he said, when the remnants of breakfast had been cleared away. Susie was in front of the fire, playing with an old wooden fire engine, out of earshot.

  He looked Michael in the eye. “Michael, I was trying to get rid of my niece and nephew when you called. They’d arrived in my life because of an error in dates. I didn’t want them there. They made me feel inadequate and uncomfortable. But when I got the feeling that they might improve my chances of acquiring the lodge, I jumped at your invitation and I brought them with me. I was going to play devoted uncle to manipulate your impressions of me.”

  He glanced at Dannie, could not read the expression on her face. Had he disappointed her again?