Hired: Nanny Bride (11 page)

She reacted as he had hoped, by glaring at him as if he had desecrated a sacred site. It was important that she know that distinction existed between them. He cynical and pragmatic, she soft and dreamy. It was important she know that that distinction existed between them, so the wall was up.

And a man needed a wall up in a place like this! He needed a wall up when he was beginning to feel all
enthused about playing the protector and warrior. When he felt strangely uncertain if they should enter that sanctuary. What if whatever was in there—the spirit of romance—overcame them? What if he was helpless against it?

Annoyed with himself for so quickly breaking his vow to make the day about her instead of about him, Joshua pushed past her and shoved open the door.

His first reaction to the interior was one of relief, because the cabin was dark and musty smelling. There was absolutely nothing in it to speak of. An old antique bed, with the mattress rolled up, and the linens stored, a little table, a threadbare couch and a stone fireplace just like the one at Angel’s Rest.

And yet, the fact there was so little in here, seemed to highlight that there was something in here, unseen.

“Look,” she whispered, wandering over to one of the walls. “Oh, Joshua, look.”

Carved lovingly into the walls, were names. Mildred and Manny, April 3, 1947, Penelope and Alfred, June 9, 1932. Sometimes it was just the couple’s name, other times a heart and arrow surrounded it, sometimes a poem had been painstakingly cut out in the wall. It seemed each couple who had ever honeymooned here had left their mark on those walls.

It was hard not to be moved by the testament to love, to commitment. There really was nothing at all of material value in this cabin.

And yet there was something here so valuable it evaded being named: a history of people saying yes to the adventure of beginning a life together.

In this funny little cabin, it felt as if it was the only adventure that counted.

Cynicism would protect him from the light shining
in her eyes. But what of his vow to let her have the day she wanted?

So, when they left the cabin he took her hand again, despite the fact he wanted to shove his into his pockets, defending against what had been in there. Strangely, holding her hand seemed to still the uncertainty in him.

The island was small. They walked around the whole thing in an hour. He soon forgot his discomfort in the cabin, and found himself making it about her with amazing ease. But then, that’s what being with her was like: easy and comfortable.

With just the faintest hint of sexual awareness, tingling, that added to rather than detracted from the experience of being together.

Finally they returned to the beach and opened Sally’s picnic basket. She had sent them hot dogs and buns, matches and fire starter.

They gathered wood, and he lit the fire, feeling that
thing
again, the shouldering of the ancient role:
I will start the fire that will warm you.

Obviously, the corniness from the cabin was catching!

With hot dogs blackening on sticks over an open fire, and the magic of the cabin behind him, he found himself taking a tentative step forward, wanting to be more but also to know more. Soon she would go her own way, and he would go his. It made the exchange seem risk-free.

“Tell me why you’re content to raise other people’s children,” he said, touching the mustard at the edge of her mouth with his finger, putting that finger to his own lips, watching her eyes go as wide as if he had kissed her.

“I told you, it’s a job I love. I never feel as if I’m working.”

“But doesn’t that make you think you are ideally suited to be a mother yourself, of your own children?”

Maybe that was too personal, because Dannie blushed wildly, as if he had asked her to be the mother of his children!

He loved that blush! Before her, when was the last time he had even met a woman who still blushed?

“It’s because of the heartbreak,” he guessed softly, looking at the way she was focusing on her hot dog with sudden intensity. “Will you tell me about it?”

This was exactly the kind of question he
never
asked. But suddenly he really wanted to know. He knew about things you kept inside. You thought they’d gone away, when in fact they were eating you from the inside out.

“No,” she said. “You’re burning your hot dog.”

“That’s how I like them. What was his name?”

She glared at him. Her expression said,
leave it.
But her voice said, reluctantly, “Brent.”

“Just for the record, I’ve always hated that name. Let me guess. A college professor?”

“It’s not even an interesting story.”

“All stories are interesting.”

“Okay. You asked for it. Here is the full pathetic truth. Brent was a college professor. I was a student. He waited until I wasn’t in any of his classes to ask me out. We dated for a few months. I fell in love and thought he did, too. He had a trip planned to Europe, a year’s sabbatical from teaching, and he went.”

“He didn’t ask you to go?”

“He asked me to wait. He made me a promise.”

Joshua groaned.

“What are you making noises for?”

“If he loved you he would never, ever have gone to Europe without you.”

“Thank you. Where were you when I needed you? He promised he would come back, and we’d get married. I took the nanny position temporarily.”

“No ring, though,” Joshua guessed cynically.

“He gave me a locket!”

“With his own picture inside? Thought pretty highly of himself, did he?” It was the locket she’d worn when he first met her. That she’d put away. What did it mean that she had taken it off?

That it was a good time for her to have this conversation? He knew himself to be a very superficial man, the wrong person to be navigating the terrifying waters of a woman’s heartbreak. What moment of insanity had gripped him, encouraged her confidences? But now that she’d got started, it was like a dam bursting.

“At first he e-mailed every day, and I got a flood of postcards. It made me do really dumb things. I…I used all my savings and bought a wedding gown.”

Her face was screwing up. She blinked hard. Maybe wheedling this confession out of her hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

“It’s like something out of a fantasy,” she whispered. “Lace and silk.” She was choking now. “It was all a fantasy. Such a safe way to love somebody, from a distance, anticipating the next contact, but never having to deal with reality.

“Can I tell you something truly awful? Something I don’t even think I knew until just now? The longer he stayed away, the more elaborate and satisfying my fantasy love for him became.”

She was crying now. No mascara, thank God. He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, and when that didn’t seem to give her any comfort, or him either, he
threw caution to the wind, and his hot dog into the fire. He pulled her into his chest.

Felt her hair, finally.

It felt as he had known it would feel, like the most expensive and exquisite of silks.

It smelled of Hawaii, exotic and floral. This was why he was so undeserving of her trust: she was baring her soul, he was being intoxicated by the scent of her hair.

“Actually,” she sniffed, “Brent was the final crack in my romantic illusions. My parents had a terrible relationship, constant tension that spilled over into fighting. When I met Brent, I hoped there was something else, and there was, but it turned out to be even more painful. Oh, I hope I don’t sound pathetic. The I-had-a-bad-childhood kind of person.”

“Did you?” he asked, against his better judgment. Of course the smell of her hair and her soft curves pressed into his body made him feel as if he had no judgment at all, wiped out by sensory overload. And yet even for that, he registered her saying she’d had a bad childhood and he ached for her. There were things even a warrior could not hope to make right.

“Terrible,” she said with a defeated sigh. “Filled with fighting and uncertainty, making up that always filled us kids with such hope and never lasted. It was terrible.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re so invested in children. Giving them the gift of happiness that you didn’t have. You do have that gift, you know. So engaged with them, so genuinely interested in them.”

“Did you have a good childhood?” she asked, and her wistfulness tore through the barriers around his heart that usually kept him from sharing too deeply with anyone.

“Camelot,” he said. “I can’t remember one bad thing.
I often wonder if every family is only allotted so much luck, and we used ours up.”

“Oh, Joshua,” she said softly.

“My parents were crazy about each other. And about us. We were the fun family on the block—my dad coaching the Little League team, my mom filling the rubber swimming pool for all the neighborhood kids. And it was all so genuine. I see parents sometimes who I think are following a rule book, thinking about how it all looks to other people, but my folks weren’t like that. They did these things with us because they loved to do it, not because they wanted to
look
like great parents.”

“And because of that they were great parents.”

“The best,” he remembered softly. “Every year for three weeks they rented a cottage on the seashore. We had these long days of swimming and playing in the sand, we had bonfires out front on the beach every night. There wasn’t even a TV set. If it rained, we played Monopoly or Sorry or cards.”

He realized he had never felt that way again. Ever. Not until he had come here.

And to feel that way was to leave yourself open to a terrible hurt.

Was he ready?

A sudden sound made him jerk up from her. Without his noticing, so engrossed in protecting her and comforting her, and sharing his own secret memories with her, the wind had come up on the lake.

Some warrior. Some protector! He had not tied the canoe properly. It had yanked free of its mooring, the sound he had heard was it crashing into a rock as it bounced away from the small island.

He ran for the water, plunged in, could not believe the cold and stopped.

“Leave it,” Dannie cried.

Good advice. He should let the canoe go, but everything about Moose Lake Lodge said the Bakers were operating on a shoestring. He’d been entrusted with their canoe.

“I can’t,” he shouted at her, moving deeper into the water. “Can you imagine how the Bakers will react if the canoe drifts back there, empty? What about Susie?”

He took a deep breath and moved deeper into the water, felt her movement on the beach behind him.

“Stay there,” he called. “I’ve got it under control.”

He was used to speaking, and people listened. Naturally, Dannie did not. He heard her splash into the water, her shocked gasp as the icy water filled her shoes.

It made him desperate to get that canoe before they were both in deep trouble. He was up to his waist, he lunged forward, and just managed to get the rope that trailed off the bow of the boat.

He pulled it back toward shore, grabbed her elbow as he moved by, steering her in the right direction.

“I told you not to come in,” he said.

“I was trying to help!” she said, unrepentant.

“Now we’re both wet.” But what he was thinking was it had been a long time since he had been with the kind of woman who would plunge into that water with him. He knew a lot of women who would have stood on shore, unhelpfully hysterical or more worried about her haute couture than him!

Still, they both could have got in trouble and it would have been his fault. He was aware of freezing water squeezing out of his shoes and that, wet up to his chest, his teeth were chattering wildly and in a most unmanly way.

Except for the fact it might save the Bakers some
distress, his rescue was wasted. When he inspected the canoe it had a hole the size of his fist in the bottom of it from where it had smashed into a rock.

He inspected her, too. She was wet past her waist, had her arms wrapped around herself. She was reacting to the cold in a very womanly way, and he did his best not to whistle with low appreciation.

Think,
Joshua snapped at himself.

He was stranded on an island. With a beautiful woman. Who was shivering, and who had hair that smelled of Hawaii.

They were both going to have to get these wet clothes off quickly. And not in the way any red-blooded man wanted to have the first disrobing happen.

But because the May wind was like ice as the spring day lengthened and chilled, if they didn’t get out of these wet clothes, there was a real chance of hypothermia.

There was only one option.

They were going to have to seek shelter in the honeymoon cabin.

Just his luck that he was going to end up half-naked in the honeymoon cabin with Dannie Springer. Maybe it was because he was shaking with cold that he couldn’t quite figure out if he had landed in the middle of a dream or a nightmare.

D
ANIELLE
S
PRINGER
had been in a few awkward situations, but this one definitely rated as Most Embarrassing, especially given the fact she was in the company of Most Sexy. If she hadn’t known that about him before, she certainly couldn’t miss it now that she had seen his soaked clothes mold every inch of his fine male body.

What had started off as a day full of potential, was now quickly declining toward disastrous, as quickly as darkness was sweeping over the small island.

She had broken down in front of him, shared confidences she never should have shared. When the canoe had ripped away, she’d been devastated. He had been in the middle of telling her important things,
real
things about himself. Thankfully, his own confidences had snapped her out of her self-pitying recital of woe.

Watching him push out into the water to save the canoe, she had thought sadly, only Dannie Springer would be alone on an island with a man like that, lamenting her last, lost boyfriend. It was no excuse that Joshua had encouraged her. That’s what men who were successful with women did. That was their secret weapon. They listened.

Except it was becoming increasingly difficult to see Joshua in the light of his playboy reputation.

Especially after the way he had looked talking about his family, the tenderness in his voice, he seemed like the most real man she had ever met. Poor Brent seemed like a comic book character in comparison. Joshua Cole seemed genuine. That’s why the
trust
element was there, despite the fact she had known him only a matter of days. That’s why she had let her guard down, when she of all people, jilted, should have her guard up higher.

When had she decided it would be okay to trust him with her heart? It was the way he looked at her, compassionate intensity darkening the shade of green of his eyes. Something she interpreted as
interest,
hot, male and intoxicating was brewing just beneath the calm surface.

Yet for all that male energy—sure and strong—the way he had conducted himself over the past few days was nothing short of admirable. He was a man navigating a foreign land with the children, and yet he was doing it with grace and openness.

Even the way he plunged into the water after that canoe spoke to character. It was him, supposedly the self-centered bachelor, not her, the supposedly compassionate nanny, who had considered how others would react to the empty canoe showing up somewhere.

Dumb to plunge into the water after him, because what was she going to do? But somehow, ever since they’d gotten in that canoe together, she had felt the delicious sense of teamwork. She had plunged into the water almost on instinct. They were in this
together
.

But she was paying for her altruism now.

They were in the honeymoon cottage where hundreds of couples had shyly taken off their clothes for each other for the very first time.

And not a single one of them like this, she thought dourly. Not a single one of them because they were in imminent danger of shivering to death.

“Embarrassing,” she muttered out loud.

“Forget embarrassment,” he said, glancing back at her from where he was crouched in front of the fireplace, feeding little sticks into it, coaxing a bright blaze to life.

He had peeled off his sodden trousers as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Of course, for him, World’s Sexiest Bachelor, it probably was.

Except for the part where he’d warned her he was doing it, giving her time to turn around.

Except for the part where he’d unearthed a container full of bedding, snapped off the lid, and tucked a blanket around himself.

He should have looked like an idiot with his flowing red tartan blanket tied in a knot at his taut stomach. Instead he looked like a chieftain, his shoulders and chest bare, his arms rippling with sinewy strength. There was a warrior cast to his face, remote and focused, as he had turned his attention to getting a fire going in the old stone fireplace.

“I can’t get my jeans off,” she wailed.

“What?”

“I can’t get them off,” she said, annoyed he was making her say it again. He had heard her the first time!

The soaked denim, which had probably been a touch snug to begin with, was stuck to her now. Her hands were so cold she couldn’t make them do one thing she wanted them to do.

He turned and looked at her. “Are you asking me to help you get your pants off, Miss Pringy?”

“No!” Then with sudden rueful understanding, she said, “You like making me blush, don’t you?”

“If I was considering a new hobby that would be it. I could while away hours at a time thinking up things like—”

“Now is not the time for games, Joshua! I’m just telling you I’m stuck. Just hand me a blanket.”

He came across the room toward her, without the covering she had ordered, and his own blanket slipped. She held her breath, shamelessly hopeful, but he stopped and reknotted it, moved toward her.

“Just relax,” he said soothingly, looking at the situation with what struck her as an annoying bent toward the analytical. She had the button undone on her jeans, and the zipper down. She had wrested the uncooperative, sodden, freezing fabric about three inches down her hips and there it was stuck, hard.

“It’s because you’re tense,” he decided.

Taking off my pants in a room with the World’s Sexiest Bachelor, and I’m tense. Go figure.

“It’s because my hands are too cold.” It was true her hands felt as if they had turned into icy basketballs at the ends of her wrists. But there was another problem. She was just going to have to admit it and get it over with.

“The jeans might have been a little too tight to begin with. Marginally.”

“They looked fine to me,” he said, apparently thinking about it. “More than fine. Great.” She might have been thrilled that he’d noticed in different circumstances.

As it was, the jeans had been a bit of a challenge to get on, and that’s when they’d been dry. What little devil of vanity had made her think her rear end looked good enough in them to put up with a tiny bit of discomfort?

“Look, no matter how reasonable a choice they were when they were dry, they won’t come off now. They won’t fit over my hips. There, am I blushing enough for you?”

His lips twitched.

“Don’t laugh,” she warned him.

“I won’t,” he said, but she could tell he was biting the inside of his cheek. Hard. He didn’t speak for a minute, containing himself. “Let me help,” he finally managed, and then choked. “I sound like a butler.”

“Only one of us here would know what that sounded like,” she warned him, but it was too late.

He was laughing, moving toward her with singleness of purpose written all over him.

“Don’t touch me!” There. Self-preservation finally rising to the occasion. Where had that fine attribute of character been when she had been sobbing her heart out in his seemingly sympathetic ear?

“I can’t help you without touching you.”

“I don’t need your help.” That was a lie obvious to both of them. “You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m trying not to.”

“Try harder.”

“Okay.” He crouched down, and was looking at the area where the soaked jeans were bound up around the wideness of her hips. Oddly enough, the way his eyes rested there, briefly and with heat, before returning to her face did not make her feel like a whale. At all. In fact, his laughter seemed to have died, too.

“Yes, you do,” he said firmly, “need my help.”

“Okay, then.” She was shaking too hard to deny it any longer. She closed her eyes hard against her humiliation. “Just be quick.”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that in this particular situation,” he muttered.

“We are not in a
situation,
” she warned him, “or not one you’ve ever been in before.”

“You’re absolutely right about that,” he said.

His hands settled around the jeans. Her skin was so cold she actually felt scorched from the heat of his hands. She had to resist an impulse to wiggle into that warmth. Instead she made herself stand rigidly still. She opened her eyes just enough to squint at him undetected through the veil of her lashes.

He yanked with considerable strength, enough that she saw that lovely triceps muscle in his arm jump into gorgeous relief. Unfortunately the jeans did not budge, not a single, solitary fraction of an inch.

“Your skin feels like ice-cold marble,” he noted clinically.

Somehow in her imagination, she had imagined him saying softly,
Your skin is like silk that’s been heating in the sun, soft and sensual.

When had she imagined such a thing? Practically every damn minute since she had met him, a dialogue of lust and wanting running just below her prim surface.

“Can’t you relax?”

“I doubt it,” she moaned, and then made the confession that made her humiliation complete. “You’re going to have hurry. I think I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Dannie, it would be really inadvisable for you to get us laughing right now. Really.”

“Believe me, I am nowhere close to laughing.” But his lips were twitching again. How had she ever thought he was handsome? He wasn’t. He was like an evil leprechaun.

“Someday you’ll see the humor in this,” he assured her. “You’ll tell your kids about it.”

No, she wouldn’t. Because a story like that would begin with, “Did I ever tell you how I met your dad?”

And he was not going to be the father of her children. Though suddenly she was aware she had a secret self that not only conducted entire conversations just out of range of her conscious mind, but
wished
things. Impossible things.

Green-eyed babies.

She told herself she had just gotten over another man. This was rebound lust, nothing more. But she was very aware of quite a different truth. There never had been another man, really, just a convenient fantasy, a risk-free way to play at love, a safe way to withdraw from the game while pretending to be engaged in it.

Joshua tugged again. The wet, cold, thick fabric shifted a mean half inch or so.

“Ouch. Who invented denim? What a ridiculous material,” she complained.

“There’s a reason they don’t make swimsuits out of it,” he agreed, and then broke it to her gently. “You’re going to have to lie down on the bed. Hang on. I’ll cut the mattress open.”

He found a knife and cut the strings that were wrapped tightly around the mattress, a defense against mice.

Mice, which had probably been her greatest fear until about thirty seconds ago. Now her greatest fear was herself!

“Maybe you could just cut the jeans off,” she said. She shuffled over to the bed, the jeans just down enough to impair her mobility, no dignified waltz across the cold cabin floor for her. She left great puddling footsteps in her wake.

“I’ll keep that in mind as a last resort, but I might cut you by accident, so we’ll try this first. Lie down.”

Why didn’t her fantasies
ever
work out? Every woman in the world would die to hear those words from his lips. “Don’t get bossy,” she said, so he’d never guess how great her disappointment was at the
way
he said that.

“Hey, if you could have followed simple instructions in the first place, you wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

She turned around and flopped down on the mattress, her knees hanging over. “I wasn’t letting you go in that water by yourself.”

“Why not?”

The truth blasted through her.
I think I’m falling in love with you. For real, damn it, not some romantic illusion I can take home and satisfy with buying dresses and planning honeymoons I know are never going to happen
.

Out loud she said, “The team thing. Okay, pull. Pull hard.”

Real, she scoffed at herself. She was getting more pathetic by the day. You did not fall in love with a man in four days. Unless you were a Hollywood celebrity, which she most definitely was not.

She felt his hands, scorching hot again against the soft flesh of her hips and looked at the frown of concentration marring his handsome features.

It felt real, even if it wasn’t. Of course, people who heard little voices swore that was real, too.

“Hang on,” he said. He took a grip and pulled. The jeans inched down. Finally he was past the horrible hip obstacle, but now his hands rested on the top of her thighs, his thumbs brushing that delicate tissue of pure sensitivity on her inner leg. Thankfully, the skin was nearly frozen, not nearly sensitive enough to make her reach up grab his ears and order him huskily to make her warm.

He tugged again. His hands moved from the thigh
area and the jeans reluctantly parted from her frozen, pebbled skin. He yanked them free triumphantly, held them up for her to see, as if he was a hunter holding up a snake he had killed and skinned just for her.

“My skin looks like lard, doesn’t it?” she demanded, watching his face for signs of revulsion. If she had seen any, she would have gotten up and marched straight back into that lake!

He was silent for a long moment. “Alabaster,” he said softly.

“Huh!” Nonetheless, she was mollified for a half second or so until she thought of something else. “I hope I don’t have on the panties that say Tuesday.”

“Uh, no, you don’t.”

Suddenly she saw why he delighted so in making her blush, because when she saw that brick red rise up from his neck and suffuse his cheeks, she felt gleeful.

“Wednesday?” she asked, shocked at herself.

“I am trying to be a gentleman!”

Of course he was. And it didn’t come naturally to him, either. One little push, and he wouldn’t be a gentleman at all.

But did she know how to handle that?

“Here’s a blanket,” he said, sternly, handing it to her.

She glanced down before she took the blanket from him. Plain white, the perfect underwear for the nanny to have her encounter with the billionaire playboy! Of course the encounter was tragic, rather than romantic. She really didn’t have what it took to start a fire that she didn’t know how to put out!