ROMANCE: The Summer Nanny (A Sweet & Clean Romance Novella) (Women's Adventure in Alaska Romance Book 2)

by Renee Hart

  “I think she trusts me. She seems to like living here,” Arjun said. He gently placed Luna into the box that was placed by his feet.

  “I’m getting used to her. I almost like having her around too.”

  “I think it’s because you have the right kind of energy to want to be around,” he winked.

  “Are you always this nice?” Chleo asked. She picked up a mug from the table and smelled the fresh coffee smell. She blew into the mug and watched the soft steam dance and float towards the ceiling.

  “I’d like to think I can be. I’m not just trying to be nice though. I’m just being myself because I’d like to get to know y-…”

  Chleo’s phone buzzed and rang suddenly. She wasn’t expecting it, and it broke her away from concentrating on her coffee and the gorgeous man now sitting on her couch.

  It was Jessica.

  “Hey baby babe. You miss me?”

  “I do. So much. I’ll call you back though.”

  “Aw man! We haven’t spoken in days! At least let me know Petey didn’t burn down our store or turn it into a drug den.”

  “Petey didn’t burn down our store or turn it into a drug den. Then again, you have two more weeks before you get back, so we’ll see.”

  “Placing bets?”

  “Not quite. But there have been a lot of…interesting things that have been happening as of late,” Chleo paused when she said interesting and looked over at Arjun. He was enjoying a sip of coffee. When Chleo turned to look at him, he paused and looked back at her, offering a sweet smile. He blew a tuft of hair out of his face and went back to enjoying his coffee.

  “Interesting how? Is it a guy?!”

  “I’ll call you back, Jess,” Chleo said as she grinned through her teeth.

  “You bastard! I bet it’s a guy. I hope he’s a really hot guy. I hope he’s treating you nice.”

  “I hate you. Good night.”

  “I love you more,” Jessica said with a maniacal laugh. “Bye!”

  “Sorry about that,” Chleo said when she hung up. “My best friend is on her honeymoon, and she’s as nosy as my mom.”

  “She sounds like a lot of fun.”

  “She is. I’ll tell you all about her some time.”

  “You can add it to your bucket list,” Arjun said. He took a long sip of coffee and sighed silently after he swallowed. Luna wriggled in her box beside him.

  “I have a bucket list?”

  “Sure you do. There are so many things you want to accomplish. I thought I’d find a way to squeeze myself into your plans somewhere. I take care of your cat, and in return we can get to know each other.”

  “So, on the record, you’re saying conversation trumps remuneration in this case?” Chleo cocked an eyebrow his way. She looked at him while he jokingly weighed the pros and cons in his head.

  “I think I’ll take the money to be honest. A man’s gotta eat.”

  “Very true. But I’d also like to take you up on that offer.”

  “And which offer is that?”

  “The offer to get to know you. In a single day you and I have met, you’ve hypnotized my cat to the point that she sleeps more than she stares up at me, we’ve debated fate versus coincidence, you’re a self-proclaimed jazz rapper, and…” Chleo paused to think about it. Her eyes floated up to the ceiling just like the steam from her warm coffee cup. Her eyebrows furrowed in concentration. She was sure there was more to the day than she had just stated. She felt like she’d known Arjun for weeks.

  That was the funny thing about time, she thought to herself. Jessica had waited almost 15 years to be reunited with Alfie, and it was like no time had passed at all between them. The two had fallen right back into place. Now it felt like the opposite with Chleo and Arjun. The moment her heart skipped when she saw him at his office felt like so long ago. She almost felt like a changed woman. She felt completely renewed around him. There was a warm seriousness about his humor, and he spent most of his time letting her know that he believed in her. He seemed so genuine.

  “And we’ve kissed…” he said. His deep voice wrapped around her like silk. She of course knew that they had not yet kissed. The offer caught her off guard, but not to the point that it turned her off. Instead, it excited her.

  “That’s very interesting. I don’t recall a kiss. It was something I was considering for that bucket list that I need to write.”

  “And what number would it be on the list?”

  “Right now it falls somewhere above get back into tap dancing and jumping out of a plane. But this kiss that you mentioned. I’m really not sure if I remember it happening. You may need to jog my memory,” Chleo said. She leaned in closer to him. Her eyes moved back and forth between his dark brown eyes and his inviting lips. He had been right all along, she really was bold.

  “I’d be delighted to,” he breathed. He placed a hand on her face, tracing over her cheekbones, dimples, and jawline with his thumb. He studied the way his touch made her feel. She closed her eyes and gave into the moment. She tilted her head back and moved closer to him. The touch of his hand was so gentle against her face that she couldn’t contain her emotions much longer.

  Their lips met, and in that moment, they were more in sync than they had been for the entire day. The way his lips brushed against hers felt right. It was a kiss unlike any other she had experienced. It was like he knew more about what their relationship could be than she did. It truly was as if they had kissed before. Feeling his skin on hers now felt like home.

  Arjun kept his face close to hers when he moved away. His dark eyes were full of wonder. Chleo didn’t want to pull away; she was still so transfixed and caught up in how beautiful the moment was. They understood each other beyond words, and she nodded when he pulled away. She understood.

  Arjun stood up.

  “Thank you very much for the coffee,” he took a slight bow. He took his phone out of his pocket and started to type. Chleo’s phone buzzed and lit up. “Don’t look at it until I’ve left.”

  “Left?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to overstay my welcome. I suspect there will be more times in the future for us to show how bold we can be,” he leaned over her and gave her a soft peck on the lips. Chleo blushed in response and nodded again quickly.

  She waited to hear the front door click shut before burying her face in a cushion and squealing. She collected herself and then reached for her phone.

  “Arjun’s Bucket List,” the text message said. “1. Kiss Chleo Matthews. 2. Take her out to dinner. 3. Help her with her bucket list for as long as she’ll allow me to.”

  Chleo couldn’t help but smile from ear to ear. She looked down into the box where her little cat was sleeping soundly. She really was going to have to thank Petey on Monday morning. If it weren’t for trying something new, she would have never met Arjun.

  She was just about to type a message when the phone buzzed in her hand. She expected it to be Arjun, but it was a message coming in from Jessica.

  “If you’re not having sex. Text me! And please, don’t spare any details!!! ;} ”

  THE END

  Look for the next installment:

  Crazy Sweet Love

  by Marisa Logan on Amazon.com.

  The Makeover 2

  A Contemporary Romance

  J.L. STARR

  Copyright © 2016 by J.L. Starr

  All rights reserved, worldwide.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Book Description

  Shea Gordon has a problem. He's a senior vice president of a nationwide corporation, and he just learned that his grandfather, founder and CEO of the company, is planning to retire. And unless Shea can turn his life around fas
t and show his grandfather that he is a man with great plans for the future, his grandfather might end up selling the company to a larger, heartless corporation that would lay off thousands of workers after the merger.

  Enter Jane Decker. She's a factory worker and one of the people whose job is on the line with all of the changes being made to the company. But when she gets hired by Shea as part of a plan to impress his grandfather and show how much he's changed, Jane has the chance to help save her own job and the jobs of all of her friends. There's just one catch. She has to spend the holidays pretending to be Shea's fiance.

  This is a 30,000 word standalone romance with HEA ending and no cliffhanger. The first standalone in the series The Makeover 1 is available on Amazon.com. FREE with Kindle unlimited.

  Chapter 1

  Jane pulled on a safety mask and pulled one of the molds out of her bin, then set to work sanding off any rough edges. The mold in her hand had been made from a cast of a child's foot to fit them for a custom-fitted brace that would, hopefully, help correct the deformity and misalignment of the child's foot and ankle. When the mold was properly made, it went a long way towards relieving pain and helping the patient walk without a limp or the use of a cane.

  White dust filled the air as Jane sanded the mold until it was as smooth as skin. She ran her bare fingers along the material, searching for any minor bump or rough edge. A flaw in the mold would lead to a flaw in the brace itself, and even a minor defect could cause the patient serious problems. A flaw the size of a grain of sand, when the brace was worn skin tight, could rub the patient's skin raw and lead to a blister, or worse. Part of Jane's job was to make sure every brace her factory produced was perfectly formed and would fit a patient's body like a second skin.

  She pulled down her mask and blew off some of the plaster dust, eyeing the mold for defects. When it met with her approval, she returned it to its box and set it in a bin with the other completed molds, ready to be sent down to the next stage of production. She'd gone through several dozen molds already today. It was steady, boring work that kept her hands busy but mostly let her mind wander. After the thousands of molds she'd worked on over the years she'd been working there, even the most precise work didn't begin to hold her attention anymore.

  Her mind was wandering a bit when a voice called out, “Decker! I need a copy of your quota reports. Before lunch, please.”

  Jane pulled off her mask and looked across the floor towards her manager's office. He had already moved on to talking to Laura about her shipping reports, and it looked like he was too busy for Jane to ask for a clarification. But it was strange for him to ask her for a copy of a report on a Tuesday. Normally she handed in her sheets on Friday, recording her day by day productivity. Most weeks the paperwork was a complete waste of time, but Harold insisted that he needed the reports to help set quotas and deadlines.

  She washed the plaster dust from her hands, then took her clipboard with all of her recent forms and headed for the main office to use the Xerox machine. She didn't know for sure if Harold wanted this week's numbers, which only included a day and a half of work, or last week's numbers, which she'd already submitted to him last Friday. She made copies of both sheets, just to be safe, then headed to Harold's office to hand them in.

  He barely glanced up at her when she walked in and set the pages on his desk. “Thanks, Decker,” he said. He kept his attention on his computer screen.

  Jane turned to leave, but not before casting a glance over the other man in the room. She vaguely recognized him as upper management, possibly a regional director or a vice president. He'd been at the factory for the past two days, spending a lot of time behind closed doors with Harold. When she handed in her paperwork, the man was working on a laptop, using one of Harold's bookshelves as a second desk. She had no idea what he was working on or why he was in the factory, but from her past experience, when corporate types came down to the factory floor, the best thing you could do was to keep your head down and try not to get noticed. Some corporate people liked to interfere with production by offering “suggestions” about how to “improve” the work, but since none of them had ever worked with their hands for a single day in their lives, all they really did was cause problems and screw everything up. Like the time the regional director insisted she rearranged her entire worktable because it was “too cluttered.” She had put everything back where it belonged as soon as the director left, since she had things organized in her own way to boost her speed and efficiency.

  The man glanced up at her just as she was leaving. He flashed a charming smile at her, his eyes moving up and down her figure. Jane resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the idea of the man checking her out when she was dressed in a frumpy dark blue factory jumpsuit, with plaster dust in her hair and under her fingernails.

  She went back to her work station and wasted a few minutes tidying up. It was almost time for lunch, and there was no real point in getting back to work until after the lunch break. But with someone from upper management in the building, she had to at least look busy. She kept herself occupied until she figured it was close enough to break time that she wouldn't get in trouble, then she headed down to the cafeteria with the rest of the crew.

  “So, who's the suit in Harold's office?” she asked her coworkers when they sat down for lunch. She shared a table with three of her friends, Holly, Suzanne, and Laura.

  “I don't know,” Laura said, glancing over her shoulder and lowering his voice. “Do you think he's here to do more layoffs? I can't afford to get laid off right now. I've got a baby coming in June.”

  “They wouldn't lay anyone off right before Christmas,” Holly said. “That would be too cruel.”

  “You don't think a man in a suit that expensive can be cruel?” Jane said. She snorted, opening her lunch bag and pulling out her sandwich. “They don't care about us. People like that only care about the bottom line. Why else do you think they keep increasing our quotas?”

  Jane and a few of the others had been deliberately slowing down production a bit since the summer, when several workers from their floor had been cut from the payroll. If the management saw that they could get things done faster than they already were, they'd fire someone else and increase quotas for whoever was left, all in the name of “greater efficiency.”

  “Even still,” Holly said, gesturing with her fork as she spoke, “they can't cut anyone else and still expect us to keep up. I'm not taking on another person's work load so they can meet production demand.”

  “I heard,” Suzanne said, lowering her voice and leaning closer, “they might be shutting down assembly, and dumping their work on us.”

  “That's insane,” Jane said. The assembly crew worked in a different part of the building, manually assembling parts for various medical devices after production on them was completed. The molds Jane worked on would be used to create the polymer casts that were the main component of the orthopedic braces they produced, but after the casts were complete, it was the assembly crew's job to put the finishing touches on them. Depending on the product being made, that could include adding rubber soles, extra supports, or nylon straps to hold the braces in place.

  Jane's friends often complained that the assembly crew were the laziest and least-skilled people on the factory floor, since all they did was put together the parts that had been crafted elsewhere. Jane herself didn't consider that to be particularly fair, but she did know a few particular members of the assembly crew that spent more time on their phones than they did getting any work done.

  “You guys are just overreacting,” Holly said. “Trust me, it can't possibly be that bad. If there were any more layoffs, there wouldn't be enough people left to keep production running. This place would shut down without us.”

  “I hope you're right,” Jane said. She needed her job. She was still paying off student loans, and she didn't even have her bachelor's degree to show for it. She'd switched majors twice in college, then eventually dropped out when she couldn't af
ford to keep up with classes anymore. She'd managed to transfer her credits to a community college in order to at least earn an associate's degree, and between that and the extra credits she had on her transcript, she only needed another year or so to finish school. If she could ever get back in, of course. She was already twenty-six, and at the rate she was going, she'd be in her thirties before she could pay off her student loans and afford to go back to school. To say nothing of her long-forgotten dreams of running her own business and being her own boss.

  Jane finished her lunch, then got up to leave. Laura looked up at her and asked, “Are you in some kind of rush to get back to work? We don't get paid enough to cut lunch short.”

  “I want to make sure I hit my quota,” Jane said. “Just in case.” All the talk of layoffs had her worried, especially since Harold had asked her for her reports so early in the week. She was starting to think that taking it slow and milking the clock wasn't the best idea this week. Not with someone from corporate in the building.

  She managed to get through the rest of the shift without incident, right up until she saw Mr. Corporate heading her way. She'd spotted him checking in at a few of the other stations, talking to the other workers. He had a clipboard with him, and he kept jotting down notes about whatever the factory workers said. Jane kept her head down when he headed her way, hoping he would ignore her.

  She watched him from the corner of her eye as he approached. His polished shoes clearly didn't belong on the factory floor, where all of the workers wore boots. The black polish had already been smudged, and there was a white smear of plastic dust staining the dark leather. Jane just hoped no one in the factory would be blamed for it. It wasn't like they could keep the floor clean while they were working, and the janitorial crew didn't come in to sweep up until the end of the day.