by Liz K. Lorde
Tight Ass turns to look at me, and I feel my breath leave me all over again.
What the hell kind of western voodoo is she puttin’ on me?
Our eyes lock with one another in a tense match; invisible electricity flowing between us, and I say to her, “Come ‘ere,” I motion with my head towards my bedroom, “let’s see if you can put dollars to that insensitive mouth of yours.” It took considerable mental strength not to call her sexy.
Tight Ass rolls her pretty hazel eyes, and I make long strides past her, maneuvering myself over to the open door of the master bedroom. Baby Morgan, as I’ve been coming to think of her, is still wrapped up in her blanket on the bed, fussing about to herself, wondering just where in the hell I’d run off to.
It wasn’t a responsibility that I ever thought I’d be having, but I knew as a man it was one that I had to take. No matter what.
Because that’s what it means to be a man.
To take the world on for all it’s horrible faults and flaws, to suffer through them and to try and hammer some sense of truth and justice into the great uncaring void.
“She’s right in here,” I lean against the frame of the door and slide my eyes over to the pretty little thing with a mouth on her.“You’re barely an adult yourself,” I openly muse before the girl shoots me a glare and passes through the door, giving me another look at her absolutely fuckable ass. “Sure you know how to handle a babe?” I question with some degree of humor to my tone. There was a great irony in my jab, considering this was my first, and likely last, foray into taking care of a child.
“I can handle plenty,” she calls back stiffly, walking over to the baby. “It’s how I earned money when I was in highschool,” she explains, picking Morgana up carefully. “Are you always such a prick to your nannies-to-be?” She asks, batting dark lashes at me.
I snort derisively and unmoving from my spot, “Just the ones that I can tell are spoiled princesses. F’you can’t feel, she wet herself,” I explain, and I point towards the closet wear I’d been storing the babe’s diapers and things.
“I’m not some spoiled girl,” she clips, “and I’m definitely not a princess.”
CHAPTER 6
VIVIAN
PADDING OVER TO the asshole’s closet, I have to focus to keep myself steady. Just having his eyes on me felt like I had a whole crowded audience judging my every breath. Why did he have to be so unbelievably beautiful? I can’t even glance at him with feeling this bizarre ball of tightness in my stomach. Get ahold of yourself, now. When I open the closet with my free hand, I let out what I pray is a small and restrained gasp, but I can practically hear Asshole’s smirk behind me.
This is where he keeps the baby’s things?
Seriously?!
I spot the diapers on the far end of his clothes filled closet. There’s fancy suits; expensive jackets, dusters, pristinely looking button-ups, a smattering of plain tee shirts, jeans, dress pants. All sorts of those things, but the things that made me gasp? I’d never personally used or had one used on me, but there’s god damn floggers in here.
Black and blue instruments of pleasure and pain. With their soft, buttery strips at the ends of them. They rest casually on the wall of the closet, lit up by the automatic gold-white lighting. I feel like the baby shouldn’t even be seeing these things, although I’m sure there’s no way that it will remember. I can’t help but feel he made me go in here on purpose, this man knew exactly what he was doing.
He’s trying to embarrass me. Trying to make my cheeks flush with pink. Well, I won’t give him that satisfaction.
I lightly walk through the closet, making sure that nothing brushes up against the baby – in turn causing some of the man’s—rather delightfully smelling—shirts and suits to softly press against my face. How does a man even afford so many expensive things? This guy must be loaded. This whole place screamed money, from the carpets and the windows to the bed. To the damn near everything.
Picking up the unopened pack of diapers, I start making my way back. Before I leave, I hear him say to me, “You’re awfully quiet in there.”
I emerge from the closet of earthly delights and shut the door behind me, “That’s because I was trying to be,” I tell him pointedly, “to be quiet.”
“Didn’t like what you saw, huh?” He smiles, and I see his dimples.
I don’t even like guys with dimples. Yet somehow, they work on him.
Shit, no. No no no, I don’t like this asshole. Not. Happening.
I clear my throat and bring both the baby and the package of diapers over to the bed. At least she seems to like me well enough, seeing as how she’s not fussing. I spread out the little one’s blanket and begin to change her diaper.
“You know I can tell when a woman isn’t comfortable with something,” he says behind me, “tend to ignore it, instead of addressing it.”
“Really,” I say dryly, “sounds like generalizing to me.”
I can practically feel his eyes on me… is he looking at my ass? No, no. There’s no way that he’s checking me out.
“Just go by what I see,” the man explains, and I can’t get his perfectly sexual voice out of my body. It’s like his accent was made to growl in my ear. Tightness massages the place right behind my clit, and I can’t believe what I’m feeling right now.
Focus on the baby.
Ignore the hot bearded lumberjack of a man. God, I wonder what it’d be like to lick down his thick neck and past his no doubt amazing pecs…
Dammit.
“And?” I raise a brow, not that he will see. I fashion the new diaper onto the baby, and she smiles up at me with those pretty blue eyes. She’s got a small tuft of black hair, and I have to admit, if it wasn’t for the stench of pee, she’d be pretty darn cute.
“And…” he starts, his voice making me want to freeze in place – I feel like I need permission just to breathe like normal. “If you’d any experience at all,” he continues, “outside ‘ah takin’ care of babes, that be; you would have said somethin’ about what I’ve got in there.”
I snort and look towards the open bathroom door, figuring that there must be a waste basket or something in there. “Why? Is this something your normally do?” I ask and turn my head, finally summoning the nerve to glance at the man.
Drinking him in, even for a second, is still enough to make me feel a couple inches smaller. Heat rises up through my chest and to my throat when I meet his lake blue eyes. “Just a little game I play with the new nannies, don’t get to thinking you’re special now.”
I roll my eyes and glide through the bedroom towards the handsome man’s bathroom, “I’m not going to find chains in here am I?” I say in sing-song.
“No chains are reserved for the attic. You know, where I keep all of the bodies,” his sense of humor couldn’t be any dryer even if he were standing admits the Sahara.
Stepping through the bathroom door, I look for the light switch on the wall, and when I finally find it, the room lights up in a wash of brilliant gold.
My god, just how much money did this dude have? The tiles are a pristine white and the walls are a striking deep blue, and they kind of remind me of the man’s eyes.
“You lost in there?” The Irish sounding hunk of a man says.
Yeah actually, a little bit. My eyes catch on the shower that has more space to it than the bedroom that I rent out with Ray. It has not only one, but two shower heads. One on each end. Padding forward, I turn my head to look at the carved out, white stone sink, and I resist the impulse to touch and feel how smooth it looks.
I finally spot the garbage bin just beside the toilet that looks like it costs more than my organs could sell for on the black market, and I dispose of the previous diaper; I then turn on my heel and quickly make my way back to the baby.
She’s looking up at me with those cute eyes and trying to reach for me.
Maybe she likes me. If there was one thing I was blessed with, maybe because of the absence of my mother, perha
ps it was a maternal instinct.
Where men never seemed to be interested in me, babies on the other hand, simply were.
I pick up the baby and gently cradle her against me, and then I look to the hunk of a man in the doorway, still looking at me with those intense lake blue eyes. Eyes that I could get lost in. Eyes that could make me slip away into nothing, and everything, all the same.
“She really seems to like ya,” Asshole moves from his place against the frame of the doorway, and with every step that he takes towards me—every swagger of his hips—I feel another punch of heat strike just below my belly button.
What was this man doing to me? I’ve never had someone make me feel so… funny, before.
“It’s my blessing,” I tell him, trying to shrug my shoulders a little bit. Trying not to let it show just how small, but in a good way, that I felt around the man.
Maybe I shouldn’t take this job. If I feel like I’m going to have butterflies nonstop, I’ll never be able to focus right. “And it’s my curse,” I continue, rocking the baby in my arms.
He steps closer to me and I swear that I feel my heartbeat quicken in my chest, “Why’s that?” He asks.
“No reason,” I clip, not wanting to explain that it reminds me of the fact that I never had a mother growing up. That every time I hold a child I can’t help but think of all of the times that I missed with my own mother.
Wherever she is.
I continue to cradle the child in my arms, and her eyes begin to droop. “I think that she’s getting tired,” I announce softly and feel my lips curl into a slight smile. “If I can put her to sleep that quick, that means I’m hired on, right?”
The man’s dimples show once more, “Seems like a promising start. Follow me,” he insists and gestures with his head towards out the door.
I follow him with the baby girl pressed close to my chest, and we move through his wondrous (I’m totally not envious, nope) apartment and into the guest bedroom. It’s much more sparse than the master bedroom. There’s one giant bed with red covers and white fluffy pillows, an expertly crafted crib towards the far end wall of the room, a desk and office chair, and a large TV near the foot of the bed itself.
Connifer flips on the lights, crosses his arms over one another and stands between the foot of the bed and the TV. He gives me a smoldering look that I can tell he didn’t even have to try and make. He has a hard face, as though it were chiseled from the finest stone; his eyes have a sorrowful pull to them, like they hold mysteries that only the dead could somehow know.
Some part of me wanted to know them, for some reason.
“Just going to stand there?” He asks with a small laugh, making me feel all the more a fool for being enraptured by his simple aura of being.
“Sorry,” I say, “I didn’t sleep well last night,” I hope that’s enough to throw him off of the fact that just looking at his beauty makes me dumbfounded.
“Right,” he says simply, and I move right on by him, catching a whiff of something divine – just subtle enough to maybe be a body wash, or a shampoo perhaps, and not a cologne. It reminds me of the smell of pine, of trees and adventure and above all else: Man.
I place the baby in her crib and make sure that she’s snug in her blankets. It’s a very nice crib, smoothed and polished it holds a certain sheen from the ceiling lights. Craning my head, I look to Connifer and ask, “How much gold did you melt down for the crib?”
He blinks and laughs softly to himself, “Not much. Made it myself,” he reveals.
“Oh,” I say with some genuine surprise, I don’t even know how to properly cut wood… let alone craft it into something so fine as this crib. “It’s beautiful,” I compliment.
Connifer cocks his head and closes his eyes, and I get the feeling he’s trying to imply that it’s not that big of a deal. “Father was a ship builder, so, I ought to know how to make somethin’ as simple as that,” he says, his hint of Irish accent carrying me away to another world.
I spend the next few minutes lulling the baby to sleep, and when I’m sure that she’s good and well into the hands of rest, I turn to face Connifer and mouth that she’s fallen to sleep.
He gives me the ghost of a smile and nods his head short and quick. We then cross from the guest bedroom, leave the door ajar, and move to his luxurious kitchen that overlooks the city. I glide over towards the pristine windows of the kitchen, admiring the way they stretch from floor to ceiling; only golden colored bricks act as dividers for the panes. Just outside, I can see the chaotic bustle of the city; with it’s citizens rushing like ants along the careless grey sidewalks. Cars zip along the intersections. Lights change from green to yellow, and yellow to red. Some brazen dwellers of this messed up concrete field of broken dreams charge between traffic, with their cellphones practically surgically attached to their ears.
“Time seems different out there,” Connifer husks thoughtfully, only a couple of steps behind me. A jolt of anxiety from his closeness—mixed with basic intoxication—shoots through me. “You handled the babe pretty well, too.”
For some reason I’m afraid to look over my shoulder and glance at the man. Like I’ll be looking at something that I shouldn’t see. A beat later and I find my nerve, “It’s pretty much the only thing I’ve ever been good at.”
“That’s not true,” Connifer says, his presence looming heavy behind me. “You’re also very talented at being late.”
“Thanks,” I reply dryly. Let me guess, his talent is knowing really well on how to be a good-looking jerk. I turn to face the man, and feel a stone form in my throat when I drink in his features once more. Broad shoulders, powerful and well groomed beard; he’s dressed in a tight fitting black v-neck shirt and athletic black denim jeans. But it’s his pensive blue eyes that look like they can read all of my sins that truly pulls me, that makes me never want to look away and yet feel like I can’t look for too long or I’ll become lost in them.
Jesus, what’s he doing to me?
“So,” I start, “I can put kids to sleep, for a price, and you seem to have…” I look around the apartment one more time, before he steps from my presence over towards the black cupboards of his kitchen. “Lots, and lots of money. That sounds like a good working relationship to me, don’t you think?”
Connifer ignores me, and this sends a ribbon of heat right through me. I loathe being ignored. He reaches a hand to the handle of the cupboard and pulls it open, turning his head to look at me, “You drink coffee?”
I raise my brows, “Uhm, not really.”
“I won’t take you on unless you do,” he gives me an infectious grin that sends butterflies through my stomach. Really? Is that how he’s going to play this game?
“That’s ridiculous,” I say in response.
“No,” he says sternly, the lines of his face evening out into a cool and amused smirk, “that’s the rules of this agreement, lass.”
I roll my eyes with excess exaggeration, “Fine,” I say, putting up my hands, “but I’m not going to like it. And I’m not drinking it for every day that I’m here.”
“Fair’s fair,” that booming, pantie melting voice assures. He grabs two white mugs from the cupboard and shifts over to some fancy coffee machine; Connifer then places a large plastic cup into the machine’s holster, and not but seconds later, comes out a blackened amber liquid that smells a lot better than the stuff that Dad used to always press on me. “You’re a sugar kind ah girl,” Connifer teases.
“Cream,” I say, my voice sotto.
A smile walks along the lines of his face, bringing my attention to his strong and handsome jaw. “Heavy cream?”
Is he flirting with me? “Only the heaviest of creams.”
Connifer raises his brows, “Wow,” he says and steps over to the great sized fridge and pulls out a bottle of Irish Cream. He puts a dash of cream and sugar into each cup of coffee, finds a spoon from one of the sliding drawers, and I can hear the spoon clinking against the cup as he mixes it. He han
ds me the cup, and I catch a few wisps of steam coming from the cup as I reach my hand out to him.
When I brush against his big hand to grab the handle of the coffee, I feel a rush of electricity pound through my body.
Whoa. That’s not normal. Definitely, definitely not normal.
“You okay?” Connifer asks.
“Yeah, yeah I’m fine,” I say too quickly, taking the hot cup of coffee in both hands now.
“You look nervous,” he says, “I’ve been told that I can be… intimidating.”
“No, no, not at all,” I lie. It wasn’t intimidation in a bad way, it was something closer to fascination.
Connifer brings up a hand and sips his coffee rather loudly, pointing towards the chairs at his kitchen island. “Come and sit,” he commands more so than he suggests.
I shake my head while he moves over to one of the kitchen stools and sits down, “I’m good standing.”
He drinks some more of his coffee, which I have yet to touch still, and I feel like I’ve somehow gravely offended him. Maybe that was a mistake.
“Sit,” he repeats simply, “or are ya always intending to be so stubborn?”
I bring the hot cup of coffee to my lips and sip it gingerly. The warmth of it fills my mouth, and it actually tastes quite delightful. Still too hot though. “I don’t intend anything,” I reply haughty.
Connifer blinks and cuts right through me with that gaze. For some reason, I can’t get that warm feeling from my chest, that living memory of when I grazed his hand. “I think that you do,” Connifer says, “but regardless… I need a sitter. What’s your rate?”
Including the man candy discount? “Well considering how little of a fuss your beautiful girl just gave me—“
“To be clear,” Connifer starts, upturning a hand in gesture, “she’s not my girl.” Oh? “She’s my cousins. I just need someone to look after her when I can’t be here, and, well, I can’t be here too much.” The rhythm of his voice slows, and I can sense pain in those lake blue eyes, and I think too, in his voice, “but family’s family. And that little lass… she’s pure. Innocent. I don’t want her to want for a thing in this world, you understand?” His face tightens into a solemn look.
