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“Try noughts and crosses.”
He frowned. “Like those notes she used to give me? Before she hated me? That were covered with x’s and o’s that meant hugs and kisses?”
Dannie steeled herself. He was not really distressed that he had fallen into his niece’s disfavor. His world was way too big that he could be brought down by the little things.
“Noughts and crosses,” she said. “Tic-tac-toe.”
He looked baffled, underscoring how very far apart their worlds were, and always would be.
“Get a piece of paper and a pencil, Susie will be happy to show you how it works,” she said.
“You mean a piece of paper and a pencil will keep her as entertained as the princess?”
“More.”
“Do I let her win?” he asked in a whisper. He shot his niece a worried look.
“Would that be honest?”
“For God’s sake, I’m not interested in honest.”
“I’m sure truer words were never spoken,” she said meanly, getting back at him for being so scornful of her college professor.
“I’m interested in not making a little girl cry.”
“It’s about spending time with her. That’s the important part. Not winning or losing.”
“I have a lot to learn.”
“Yes, you do, Mr. Cole,” she said, aware of a snippy little edge to her voice.
“You have a lot to learn, too,” he said, quietly, looking at her with an unsettling intensity that she would have done anything to escape.
“Such as?” she said, holding her ground even though she wanted to bolt.
“The college professor. Not for you.”
“How would you know?”
“I’m an astute judge of people.”
“You aren’t! You didn’t even know whether or not to be honest playing noughts and crosses.”
“Not miniature people, the under-five set. But you, I know something about you. I wonder if you even know it yourself.”
“You know nothing about me that I don’t know about myself!” she said recklessly. To her detriment, part of her wanted to hear what he had to say. How often, after all, did an invisible nanny get to hear love advice from the World’s Sexiest Bachelor?
But he didn’t say a word, just proved exactly why he was the World’s Sexiest Bachelor. He lifted her chin with the tip of his finger and looked deep into her eyes. Then he touched her lip with his thumb.
If it was possible to melt she would have. She felt like chocolate exposed to flame. She felt every single lie she had ever told herself about Brent. Dannie yanked away from him, but he nodded, satisfied that he did know something she didn’t know herself.
Except now she had an idea.
That she was as weak as every other damn woman he’d ever met. Not that he ever had to know that!
“You’re in the bedroom at the end of the hall,” he said, as if he hadn’t shaken her right to the core. “I had the crib set up in there. Is that okay?”
“Perfect,” she said tightly, and she meant it. A pint-size chaperone for weaklings, not that she needed to worry about this man sneaking into her room in the dead of night. That was fantasy.
Of the X-rated variety, and she didn’t mean tic-tac-toe, either.
“Hey, Susie,” he said turning from her, after one last look that seemed more troubled than triumphant, “do you want to play noughts and crosses?”
Susie glared at him, clearly torn between personal dislike and the temptation of her favorite game. “All right,” she said grudgingly.
Danielle marched down the hall with the baby. The room at the end had the same spectacular views and windows as the rest of the apartment.
The decorating was so romantic it was decadent, the whole room done in shades of brown, except for the bed linens that were seductively and lushly cream colored, inviting in that sea of rich dark chocolate.
Her suitcases were on the bed. How that had happened she wasn’t quite sure. A crib had been set up for Jake, too.
Through a closed door was a bathroom, with the Jacuzzi.
A jetted tub built for two.
“We have to get out of here,” she confided in the baby as she took his plump, dimpled limbs out of his clothes. The fact that Joshua thought his sister might be matchmaking—and that she could not say with one hundred per cent certainty that Melanie was not—just added an element of humiliation to the urgency she felt to go.
Was Melanie matchmaking? She frowned, thinking back over her conversations with her employer. As eager as Mel was to have everyone in the world enjoy the same state of wedded bliss she lived in, she had always been reserved about Brent.
Dannie assumed because she had never met him.
She had assumed Mel’s eagerness to have her join her children with their uncle had only been her effort to help her nanny over her heartbreak, to give her a change of scenery. A hidden agenda? Wouldn’t that be humiliating?
But Mel had never alluded, even subtly, to the possibility she considered her nanny and her brother to be anything of a match.
Because we so obviously are not, Dannie thought, and detected just a trace of sulkiness in that conclusion.
As always, the baby worked his magic on her sour mood, her tendency toward dour introspection. Dannie put about two inches of water in the gigantic tub, and Jake surrendered his little naked self gleefully into the watery playpen.
When the baby began to laugh out loud, she was drawn in, and she laughed back, splashing his little round tummy with warm water until he was nearly hysterical with joy.
“Do I take myself and life way too seriously, Mr. Jake?”
What if Mel had sent her here with some kind of hidden agenda? So what? What if she just played along?
“Oh, Dannie,” she chided herself, “that would be like playing patty-cake with a powder keg.”
Jake recognized the term, cooperatively held out his hands and crowed.
Relax, she ordered herself. If you still know how, and then sadly, if you ever knew how.
CHAPTER THREE
“PATTY cake, patty cake, baker’s man, bake me a cake as fast as you can.”
Dannie’s voice and her laughter, intermingled with happy shouts from the baby and splashing noises, floated down the hallway to where Joshua sat opposite Susie on the couch.
Who would have imagined the serious, rather uptight nanny could sound like that? So intriguingly carefree?
Not that that was the truth about her. No, the truth was what he had felt when he had touched her lip—
“Tic, tac, toe,” Susie cried and drew a triumphant line though her row of crosses.
Susie was trouncing him at noughts and crosses.
Something unexpected was happening to him. Given that his carefully executed schedule had gone out the window, he felt unexpectedly relaxed, as if a tightly wound coil inside of him was unwinding. Watching his niece, whose tongue was caught between her teeth in fierce concentration, listening to Dannie and the baby, he felt a feeling unfurling inside him.
It couldn’t possibly be yearning.
He had the life every man worked toward, success beyond his wildest dreams, the great car, the fabulous apartment, gorgeous women as abundant in his life as apples on a tree. Just as ready to be picked, too.
And yet all of that paled in comparison to a baby’s laughter and a little girl playing noughts and crosses. All that paled in comparison to the softness of a woman’s lip beneath his thumb.
His sister, diabolical schemer that she was, would be thrilled by this turn of events.
What had he been thinking when he had touched Dannie’s lip? When he had said to her with such ridiculous confidence, “I know something about you. I wonder if you even know it yourself.”
The truth was he hadn’t been thinking at all. Thinking belonged to that other world: of deals, successes, planning. That other world of accumulating more and more of the stuff.
The stuff that had failed to make him feel as full as he felt in this moment.
No, the truth was that thought had abandoned him when he touched her. Something deeper had temporarily possessed him.
He had seen her, not through his mind, but with his heart. He had seen her and felt the lie she had told him about the college professor. How could she even kid herself that she would ever be happy with a staid life?
From the second she had appeared in his office, she had presented the perfect picture of a nanny. Calm, controlled, prissy.
And from the beginning, he had seen something else. A gypsy soul, wanting to dance. That is what he knew about her that she did not know about herself.
That the right man—and probably not a college professor—was going to make her wild. Would make her toss out everything she thought she believed about herself. Under that costume of respectability she wore beat the drum of passion.
Stop, he told himself. What is wrong with me?
“I win,” Susie said, carefully checking the placement of her crosses. “Again. You’re dumb.”
He stared at her, and then started to laugh. Yesterday he would have disagreed, probably argued, but today, since he had done one extremely dumb thing after another, starting with inviting them here, and ending with touching Dannie Springer’s most delectable lip, he knew Susie was right.
“Let this be a lesson to you,” he said. “Don’t drop out of school.”
“I don’t even go to school yet,” Susie informed him. “But when I do, I will love it. I will never ever stop going. I will go to school until I am one hundred.”
That was precisely how he had felt about college. From the first day, he’d had a sense of arrival. This was where he belonged. He loved learning things. He loved playing football. He loved the girls, the parties, all of it.
And then, in his senior year, along came Sarah. They were “the” couple on campus. The cool ones. The ones everyone wanted to be. She played queen to his king. Looking back, something he rarely did, what they had called love seemed ridiculously superficial.
And in the end it had been. It had not stood up to the test life had thrown at it. Despite the fact they had taken every precaution, Sarah was pregnant.
Funny how, when he’d found out, he’d felt a rush, not of fear, but of excitement. He’d been willing to do whatever it took to give his baby a family, a good life.
Sarah had been stunned by his enthusiasm. “I’m not keeping it.”
To this day, he could feel the bitterness, a force so real and so strong, he could nearly taste it on his tongue, when he remembered those words and the look on her face when she’d said them. “It.”
He’d actually, briefly and desperately, considered keeping the baby himself. But reality had set in, and reluctantly he had gone along with Sarah. He’d stuck with her through the pregnancy and the birth.
It was a boy.
And then he’d made the mistake.
He’d held his son in his arms. He had felt the incredible surge of love and protectiveness. He had felt that moment of connection so intense that it seemed nothing else in his life but that moment had ever mattered.
He had known, I was born to do this.
But it was too late. He’d held his baby, his son, his light, for about five minutes. And then he’d let go. He had not met the adoptive parents.
Every other reality had faded after that. Nothing mattered to him, not school, not life, not anything at all. His grief was real and debilitating.
Sarah, on the other hand, had chosen not to see the baby, and she moved on eagerly, as if nothing had happened. He was part of what she left behind, but really, he had continued with her throughout the pregnancy out of a sense of honor and decency. But he had never forgiven her the “it.”
He dropped out of college a month before he was supposed to graduate, packed a backpack, bought a ticket to anywhere. He’d traveled. Over time, he had come to dislike going to places with children. The sound of their laughter, their energy, reminded him of what he was supposed to be and was not.
When he’d come across Sarah’s obituary a few years ago, killed in a ski accident in Switzerland, he had taken his lack of emotion as a sign he’d been a man unworthy of raising that child, anyway.
“Are you all right?”
He hadn’t seen her come down the hallway, but now Dannie was standing in the doorway, Jake wrapped up in a pure white towel, only his round, rosy face peeking out, and a few spikes of dark hair.
Her blouse was soaked, showing off full, lush curves, and she looked as rosy as the baby.
Dannie looked at home with Jake, comfortable with her life. Why was she content to raise other people’s children, when she looked as if she’d been born to hold freshly bathed babies of her own?
“All right?” he stammered, getting up from the couch. “Yeah. Of course.”
But he wasn’t. He was acutely aware that being around these kids, around Dannie, was making him feel things he had been content not to feel, revisit places he had been relieved to leave behind.
All he had to do was get through the rest of tonight. Tomorrow he’d figure out how to get rid of them, or maybe she would decide to go.
That would be best for everyone involved, and to hell with his sister’s disapproval.
