Marrying the Northbridge Nanny

by Victoria Pade

  But by nine o’clock Theresa and her caregiver, Mary Pat, had disappeared, and an overly tired Tia was turning cranky. Since the cake had been cut and served, Hadley—who was feeling progressively sicker—suggested that she take Tia home, and that Meg drive Logan back later.

  Tia didn’t like that idea but, while Meg looked on, Logan carried the three-year-old out to his SUV anyway, buckled her into her car seat and bid her and the moon good-night.

  Which then left Logan all to Meg…

  At least that was how Meg saw it.

  They hadn’t made any kind of formal date for the evening but from the moment the wedding ceremony ended, they’d been together as if they had. With Hadley and Tia. But now Hadley and Tia were gone…

  Meg had been feasting on the sight of Logan all evening and as he watched his sister drive off with his daughter and then rejoined Meg, Meg again devoured the sight of him in a suit that fit him to a T. His strong, straight back and broad shoulders made the perfect hanger for the jacket, and the pants accentuated the length of his legs and only hinted at the massiveness of his thighs.

  His hair was rakishly sexy tonight, he smelled wonderful, and Meg wished her sister had chosen a band that played soft, slow music so she could dance in those powerful arms of his.

  But as it was, when he smiled and said, “How about a dance?” that meant diving into the fast dancing going on behind the house, not dancing in his arms.

  Still, she would be with him, Meg reasoned. And while she told herself that now that the need to help with Tia was gone she should mingle rather than focusing on Logan alone, that didn’t make her actually do it. Instead she just said, “Sure,” as they returned to the reception.

  And dance they did, though only twice before the music was suspended so Kate could toss the bouquet.

  After that the band started up again even louder and more stridently than before and the older guests began to leave. Meg found herself wishing she and Logan could, too.

  So when—after Meg missed catching the bride’s bouquet—Logan leaned close to her ear and asked if she wanted to dance again, Meg answered, “Actually, unless you want to stay, I wouldn’t mind leaving…”

  Logan grinned as if she’d read his mind and they began to say their goodbyes so they could make an exit.

  Meg’s car was parked in the Graysons’ driveway and halfway there she paused. “I can’t go another step in these shoes or I might die,” she said, slipping off the three-inch heels that went with the drop-waist, knee-length yellow chemise that all the bridesmaids had worn.

  “You’re gonna drive barefoot?”

  “Unless you want to.”

  “Not barefoot, but I’d be happy to drive,” he offered.

  Meg handed him the keys and they went the rest of the distance to her car.

  There was something liberating about being barefoot, about having the day and the wedding behind her, and Meg ignored her safety belt and sat angled in the passenger seat with her legs tucked under her.

  “Home, driver,” she ordered when Logan was behind the wheel. She knew she was going to regret it if they got to his place and the evening ended. But she was hoping that it wouldn’t. That instead they might sit on the steps to her apartment the way they had other nights. And that was so much more what she wanted to do than stay in the blaring music of the reception.

  But apparently Logan had other ideas because with an air of command, he answered her by saying, “I don’t think so. I have the perfect solution to those sore feet of yours.”

  “Anything that doesn’t involve listening to that band!” Meg said as if the group had been bad when they hadn’t been.

  Logan cast her a smile as he backed out of the driveway. “The music got to you?”

  “It’s just been a long day and it was sooo loud.”

  “It was a nice wedding, though,” he said as he headed farther out South Street into the countryside.

  “It was,” Meg agreed. “And getting married is what Kate has always wanted. I’m happy for her.”

  “What about you? Isn’t it something you’ve always wanted?”

  Meg shrugged, resting her head on the headrest in order to look at his sculpted profile as if that wasn’t what she was trying to do. “I’ve concentrated more on my education and career. But from the time Kate was a teenager, she just wanted to be married and have a family. She kept thinking she was getting there with other guys, but they were only stringing her along. I’m glad she finally found someone who wasn’t.”

  They were well outside of Northbridge proper by then and Meg said, “Are we going somewhere special or just driving?”

  “We’re going right—” he slowed the car, switched to the bright lights to find a dirt road that was so rustic it almost wasn’t a road at all “—here,” he finished as he turned onto it.

  “Isn’t this the Pritick place?” Meg asked when she had her bearings.

  “Old man Pritick, yep,” Logan said. “Who still lives here, according to my sources.”

  The old farmhouse wasn’t visible from there so she took his word for it.

  “If this is still Pritick’s private property, though, should we be here?” Meg asked.

  “Probably not,” Logan admitted. “But in the summers when Chase was fed up with old man Pritick and I couldn’t take any more of my stepmother, Chase would say he was spending the night at my house and I’d say I was staying at his, and we’d camp by the lake. Pritick never knew we were out here, so we’ll take our chances that he won’t now, either.”

  Logan drove right up to the lake and the small boat dock that went out into it. Then he turned off the car and the lights.

  “It’s a great big footbath,” he told her, getting out of the car.

  Meg wasn’t sure about trespassing but she ignored her qualms and got out, too.

  Logan took off his suit coat, tossing it over the seat back and removed his tie to get more comfortable. So Meg leaned her back to her side of the car, discreetly rolled down her pantyhose and shed them, too. By the time she turned to him again he’d unbuttoned his collar button and rolled his sleeves to the elbows.

  His shoes were still on, though, when she met him at the front of the car.

  “What about those?” she asked, pointing at them.

  “It’s not me who has sore feet,” he said, leading the way out to the end of the squeaky wooden pier.

  Her feet really were killing her so when they reached the end she didn’t hesitate to sit and dangle them over the edge into the cool water.

  “Ahhh, you don’t know what you’re missing,” she sighed.

  Logan merely smiled and sat beside her, angled slightly toward her, slightly toward the lake, one of his long legs curved against the deck, the other bent at the knee to brace his elbow.

  “Is Chase Mackey related to Homer Pritick?” Meg asked then.

  “The Priticks were his foster family—no relation. And no warm memories. At least not after Mrs. Pritick died.”

  Logan didn’t offer any more information on the subject so Meg didn’t explore it. Instead she said, “When will he be coming here?”

  “Chase? It’s looking like it might not be until autumn now. He still has some things to wrap up in New York and we’re closing our Connecticut showroom to set up here—he has to oversee packing the whole place into a truck yet and then he’ll drive it all cross-country.”

  “Why not just hire movers?”

  “Paranoia, I guess. We want to make sure everything gets here and gets here undamaged, so we thought it was better if one of us did it.”

  Meg nodded. “I suppose it would be a pretty big coup to take off with a truck full of Mackey and McKendrick furniture prototypes.”

  He didn’t confirm that but Meg had logged on to their Web site out of curiosity while he was gone and knew that nothing from Mackey and McKendrick Furniture Designs was cheap. She’d also done some research and read more than merely the hometown newspaper article on Logan, Chase and their business
. She’d pored over a number of reviews and other newspaper and magazine articles that touted their pieces as world-renowned functional art.

  “How did you get into this business in the first place?” she asked then, one of many things she’d come away from the Internet search curious about.

  “When we were kids, Chase and I wanted out of here,” he said a bit wryly. “As soon as we graduated from high school we put what we could carry in a couple of duffel bags and took off—we figured we’d travel and have some adventures.”

  “Did you have adventures?”

  “We had some good times, but adventures? Not so much,” he answered with a laugh. “It was mostly hitchhiking from one place to another, finding whatever work we could get and soaking things in until we felt like moving on.”

  “Soaking things in?”

  “Sure, you know—beaches and mountains, big cities and backwaters that make Northbridge look like a big city. We got a taste of what it was like to live where it rains instead of snows, where it’s sunny all the time. We tried out different foods, different—”

  “Women?”

  “Those, too,” he admitted with another laugh. “There weren’t really adventures, the adventure was just in being on our own, doing whatever we pleased, whenever we pleased, checking things out.”

  “How did that translate into furniture-making?”

  “We did more jobs than you can imagine—food service, ranching, parking cars, fishing, lifeguarding, operating ski lifts in Vail—anything we could do to support ourselves. But in North Carolina we worked in some of the furniture factories and actually found our niche.”

  “Both of you?”

  “Chase and I have always been more like brothers than friends—as alike as if we were blood—so yeah, both of us. It probably didn’t hurt that we’d been nomads for about seven years by then and we were both okay with settling in a little. So that’s what we did, and we learned a lot about making furniture. But factory work wasn’t what either of us saw for the long haul and when we’d had our fill we went north—”

  “To New York?”

  “To New York. Where we really didn’t want to do factory work. But we still had the furniture bug, we’d both been sketching some things, and New York was a good place to explore the artsy side of it, so we just thought why not give it a try—we didn’t have anything to lose.”

  “And Mackey and McKendrick Furniture Designs was born?”

  “Not overnight, but ultimately, yes.”

  “Then you conquered New York, moved on to Connecticut and now you’re out to take over Northbridge, too?” she teased.

  “I’m the only one of us who moved to Connecticut and that was personal, not business. We just opened a workshop and showroom there because I ended up being there so much while Chase stayed strictly in New York. And as for being out to take over Northbridge? Coming back here was just something we decided to do when we felt like we’d been away long enough. When we both realized that—good or bad—it was still home and since we needed to make some changes, we might as well make them in this direction.”

  It seemed obvious that he didn’t want to outline why he and his partner had decided they needed to make some changes so Meg left him that morsel of privacy and said, “And Hadley came to do the upholstery portion of the furniture—from Paris.”

  “Hadley was ready for a change, too.”

  Which Hadley had told Meg herself last week, confiding in her about a bad experience with a man.

  But Meg wasn’t sure how much Logan knew—and didn’t know—about his sister’s love life and she didn’t want to inadvertently say anything she shouldn’t. So instead she said, “I hardly remember Chase Mackey, either.”

  “You’ll like him—everybody does,” Logan assured.

  “Is he married?”

  Logan nudged her shoulder with his elbow. “Why? Did your sister’s wedding give you ideas?”

  The only ideas she had were about Logan. Not that she was going to say that…

  “Just curious,” she said with a coyness that she hadn’t intended.

  It made Logan grin. “No, Chase isn’t married but you might have to fight Hadley for him.”

  Nowhere in her girl talk with Hadley had there been any indication of that.

  “Why?” Meg asked, slowly moving her feet back and forth through the water.

  “Hadley had a huge crush on Chase when we were young.”

  “Really? His name came up a few times while you were gone but not in any way that hinted that he was anything but your friend and business partner.”

  “Chase never knew it, but she was nearly obsessed with him.”

  “And now—”

  “Yeah,” Logan guessed what she was thinking, “now she’ll be working with us and living communally with the guy she worshipped like a rock star when she was a kid.”

  Meg didn’t think she was ever going to live down her reaction to his comment on communal living that first day.

  She opted not to acknowledge it and pulled her feet out of the water. Swiveling on her hip, she curled her legs to the side so her feet could dry. And so she could look directly at Logan. “Do you think that Hadley isn’t over her feelings for Chase?”

  “She says she is. She says it was a teenage thing, that she got over it a long time ago and I shouldn’t give it a second thought.”

  “But you aren’t so sure.”

  “Their paths haven’t crossed since Chase and I left Northbridge. Hadley and I kept in touch by phone and e-mail but we only saw each other three times all those years because I was traveling around and she lived in Europe. It was two funerals and our father’s heart attack that got us both in the same place at the same time, and Chase didn’t have any reason to be in on those.”

  “So you’re thinking that since Hadley hasn’t even set eyes on him, there hasn’t ever been a test of whether or not her crush on him could be re-sparked.”

  Logan confirmed that with a tilt of his head. “I guess we’ll see. All I know is that those things can sometimes have a will of their own…”

  Was he speaking for himself or letting her know that he was aware of what he could rouse in her?

  Because he was rousing things in her right at that moment when he raised an index finger to her face to smooth a stray wisp of her hair back and that simple, light trail left her skin atingle.

  What had they been talking about?

  Meg couldn’t recall and she had the sense that whatever it was, Logan wasn’t thinking about it anymore either. Not when he was looking deeply into her eyes, smiling a small, secret smile.

  Not when he said, “Did I tell you how beautiful you look tonight?”

  Meg liked hearing it even though she wasn’t comfortable with compliments. She never knew what to say to them. “Kate will be happy to know she didn’t choose dresses that made us look ugly.”

  Logan smiled again, as if he knew she was deflecting the flattery, and brought his hand up again to slip around to the back of her neck at the same moment that he leaned forward and kissed her.

  There was something very different in the way he did it tonight. Right from the beginning his lips were parted, his mouth, his every action was more commanding, more bold. There was no easing into this kiss, no hesitation, no reticence. It was an all-out, no-holds-barred, he-wanted-to-kiss-her-and-he-was-kissing-her kiss that sent his tongue to make a move, too.

  She didn’t know what had changed. She didn’t really care because she was instantly lost in that kiss, carried away by it as he sought out her tongue and played a sensuous game of cat and mouse.

  The hand at her nape moved down to her back and his other arm came around her, pulling her toward him.

  Her hands pressed against his chest, savoring the feel of hard muscle beneath the smoothness of his shirt as she answered that kiss with an abandon of her own that surprised her.

  He laid her onto the dock then, stretching out beside her, above her enough to go on kissing her, plundering
her mouth with his.

  Meg’s hands went around to his broad shoulders, to his head, combing her fingers into his hair, all the while meeting and matching that tongue in a kiss that was out of control. A kiss that she never knew she was capable of.

  Logan’s hand was riding her side, her hip. The warmth of his skin seeped through the thin chiffon of her dress and radiated from every touch, making her want more of it, more of him.

  Skinny-dipping popped into Meg’s mind. She’d never done it. But in this small, private lake she imagined that Logan probably had, long ago, and she suddenly couldn’t get the image out of her head.

  Logan naked in the water…

  Her naked in the water with him…

  Their mouths and tongues intimately acted out the opening scene of something that could go so much further. That could easily go to shedding clothes and getting into the drink and…

  And what? a more rational portion of Meg’s brain asked.

  Was she really going to strip off her clothes and go skinny-dipping with this man?

  There was a part of her that was slightly embarrassed just to have thought about it. And no, of course she wasn’t going to do it!

  Kissing him was one thing—one very big thing, especially the way they were kissing at that moment. But doing anything else? That would be insane…

  As if Logan sensed the sudden rise of her inhibitions he began to draw their kiss to a close. His tongue did a final pirouette with hers and bid it adieu. After a moment, he returned for another lingering but more chaste kiss. And then he raised his head and merely peered down at her.

  “I don’t suppose we want old man Pritick coming out here and catching us like this,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose we do,” Meg agreed, sounding reluctantly resigned.

  Logan sat up and took her with him. Then he stood and with a hold of both of her hands, he brought her to her bare feet, too.

  “It was a good footbath, though,” Meg said. And an amazing kiss…

  “I’m glad,” Logan answered with a lopsided smile.