At His Service: Nanny Needed: Hired: Nanny Bride / A Mother in a Million / The Nanny Solution

“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.

CHAPTER SIX

DANIELLE SPRINGER 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!

She wrapped the blanket around herself, lurched off the bed, nearly tripped in the folds.

He reached out to steady her. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “Don’t be embarrassed.”

She looked at where his hand rested on her arm. There was that potential for fire again. She pulled her arm away. “I have to go to the bathroom. Now can I be embarrassed?”

“Yeah, okay. Everybody on the planet has to go to the bathroom about four times a day, but if you want to be embarrassed about it be my guest.” And then he grinned at her in a way that made embarrassment ease instead of grow worse, because when he grinned like that she saw the person he really was.

Not a billionaire playboy riding the helm of a very successful company. Not the owner of a grand apartment, and the pilot of his own airplane.

The kid in the picture on the beach, long ago.

And in her wildest fantasies, she could see herself sitting around a campfire, wrapped in a blanket like this one, her children shoulder to shoulder with her, saying,

“Tell us again how you met Daddy.”

She bolted out of the cabin, then took her time trying to regain her composure. Finally she went back in.

He had pulled the couch in front of the fire and patted the place beside him. “Nice and warm.”

Cottage. Fire. Gorgeous man.

In anyone else’s life this would be a good equation! She squeezed herself into the far corner of the couch, as far away from him as she could get.

He passed her half a chocolate bar.

She swore quietly. Cottage. Fire. Gorgeous man. Chocolate.

“Nannys aren’t allowed to swear,” he reprimanded her lightly.

“Under duress!”

“What kind of duress?” he asked innocently.

She closed her eyes. Don’t tell him, idiot. Naturally her mouth started moving before it received the strict instructions from her brain to shut up. “You’ll probably think this is hilarious, but I’m finding you very attractive.”

At least it wasn’t a declaration of love.

“It’s probably a symptom of getting too cold,” she added in a rush. “Lack of oxygen to the brain. Or something.”

“It’s probably the way I look in a blanket,” he said, deadpan.

“I suppose there is that,” she agreed reluctantly, and then with a certain desperation, “Is there any more chocolate?”

“I find you attractive, too, Dannie.”

She blew out a disbelieving snort.

He leaned across the distance between them and touched her hair. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to do this.” His hands stroked her hair, his fingers a comb going through the tangles gently pulling them free. He moved closer to her, buried his face in her hair, inhaled.

She was so aware this was his game, his territory, he knew just how to make a woman melt. Spineless creature that she was, she didn’t care. In her mind she took that stupid locket and threw it way out into Moose Lake.

What kind of fire she could or could not put out suddenly didn’t matter. So close to him, so engulfed in the sensation of his hands claiming her hair, she didn’t care if she burned up on the fires of passion!

She turned her head, caught the side of his lip, touched it with her tongue. He froze, leaned back, stared at her, golden light from the fire flickering across the handsome features of his face.

And then he surrendered. Only it was not a surrender at all. He met her tentativeness with boldness that took her breath away. He plundered her lips, took them captive, tasted them with hunger and welcome.

She knew then the totality of the lie she had told herself about loving another, about pining for another.

Because she had never felt this intensity of feeling before, as if fireworks were exploding against a night sky, as if her heart had started to beat after a long slumber, as if her blood had turned to fire. There was not a remnant of cold left in her.

Burn, she told herself blissfully, burn.

“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time, too,” he whispered, his voice sexy, low and hoarse. “You taste of rain. Your hair smells of flowers, you do not disappoint, Danielle.”

She tasted him, rubbed her lips over the raspiness of whiskers, back to the softness of his mouth, along the column of his neck. She gave herself permission to let go.

And felt the exquisite pull of complete freedom. She went back to his mouth, greedy for his taste and for the sensation of him. She let her hands roam his bare skin, felt the exquisite texture of it, soft, the hardness of male muscle and bone just beneath that surface softness.