The Nanny Plan

A minute passed. Trish didn’t know if she should knock again or...what? She had no other options. Nate said he’d be here—that Stanley would be here. He hadn’t forgotten, had he?

She knocked again.

This time, a man shouted, “Jeez, I’m coming. I’m coming.”

The door was unlocked and thrown open. Instead of Nate Longmire’s well-dressed form, a man in a white tank top, oversize corduroy pants held up by bright red suspenders and more tattoos than God glared down at her. “What?”

“Um, hello,” Trish said, trying not to be nervous. This guy had spacers in his ears. She could see right through them. She swallowed. “I have an appointment with Mr. Longmire—”

“What are you doing here?” the man all but growled at her.

“I’m sorry?”

The man looked put out. “You’re supposed to be at his house for the interview. Didn’t they tell you that?”

They? They who? “No?”

Mr. Tattoos rolled his eyes to the sky and sighed. “You’re in the wrong place. You need to be at 2601 Pacific Street.” He looked at her dubiously. “2601 Pacific Street,” he repeated in a slower, louder voice, as if she’d suddenly gone deaf. When Trish just stared at him, he pointed again and said, “That way. Okay?”

“Yes, all right.” She stood there for a minute, too shocked to do much but not look through the holes in his ears. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, good luck—you’re gonna need it,” he called after her, then she heard the door shut and lock behind her.

Great. Trish was going to be way late. Panic fluttered through her stomach. Was this a sign—Nate had reviewed her case and decided that her charity didn’t meet his requirements? Why on earth was she supposed to go to his house—especially if he was going to turn her down? This wasn’t about to get weird, was it?

She did the only thing she could do—she started to walk. She loved walking through San Francisco, looking at all the Victorian houses and wondering what it would be like to live in one. To have a view of the bay or the Golden Gate Bridge. To not have to worry about making rent and having enough left over.

Her mother, Pat, had loved the music from the Summer of Love. When she was with a real jerk of a boyfriend—which was often enough—Pat would sometimes get nostalgic and talk about one day coming out to San Francisco to find Trish’s father. That was how Trish found out that her father had come to this city when he’d abandoned his family.

Trish did what she always did when she walked the streets—she looked in the faces of each person she passed by, hoping to recognize a little part of herself. Maybe her father had gotten remarried and had more kids. Maybe Trish would find a half sister walking around. Or maybe the woman her father had settled down with would recognize her husband’s face in Trish’s and ask if they were related.

Trish had lived here for five years. This on-the-street recognition hadn’t happened, not once. But she kept looking.

She walked to Pacific Street and turned. This was such a beautiful place, right across from the park. Nothing like the tiny garret apartment in Ingleside she rented for the subsidized sum of $350 a month.

She found the right house—she hoped. It was a sweeping three-story Victorian home, the exterior painted a soft shade of blue with bright white paint outlining the scrollwork and columns. The curtains on the ground-level windows were closed and a painted garage door was shut. Next to that was a wide, sweeping set of steps that led up to the perfect porch for a summer afternoon, complete with swing.

It was simply lovely. The small part of her brain that wasn’t nervous about this whole “interview at his house” thing was doing a little happy dance—she would finally get to see the inside of one of these homes.

But that excitement was buried pretty danged deep. To get inside the home, she had to get through the gate at the bottom of the stairs—and it didn’t budge. How was she supposed to be at the house if she couldn’t even get to the door? Then she saw a buzzer off to the right. She pressed it and waited.

Even standing here felt like she was interloping again. This wasn’t right. Nate had been very clear—she was to meet him at the office. Trish had no idea which “they” should have told her about the change, but what could she do? She needed the donation, desperately.

So she rang the bell, again, and waited. Again. She caught herself twisting her earring and forced her hands back by her sides. This was not about to go sideways on her. This was fine. She was a professional. She could handle whatever was on the other side of that door with grace and charm.

Up on the porch, the door opened and a short, stocky woman in a gray dress and a white apron stood before her. “Hello?”

“Hi,” Trish said, trying her best to smile warmly. “I have an appointment with Mr. Longmire and—”

“Ay mia—you’re late,” the woman said—but unlike Mr. Tattoo, she looked happy to see Trish. “Come in, come in.” A buzzer sounded and the gate swung free. Trish climbed the stairs, schooling her features into a professional smile—warm, welcoming, not at all worried about the lack of communication about any changes to the plan.

“Hello,” she said when she was face-to-face with the woman. “I’m Trish Hunter and—”

The woman latched onto Trish’s arm and all but hauled her inside. The door shut with a resounding thud behind her.

“Who is it, Rosita?” Trish recognized Nate’s voice as the one calling down the stairs.

“The girl,” Rosita called back.

“Send her up.”

It was only then, with Rosita the maid shooing her up the stairs so fast that she could barely take in the beautiful details of the entry room, that Trish heard it—the plaintive wail of a deeply unhappy baby.

It was pretty safe to say that Trish had absolutely no idea what was going on. But up the stairs she went, bracing herself for what baby-related carnage awaited her.

She was not wrong about that.

Nate Longmire—the same Boy Billionaire who had given an impassioned talk on social responsibility, the same Nate Longmire who had insisted on paying her dry-cleaning bill, the very same Nate Longmire that had looked positively sinful in his hipster glasses and purple tie—stood in front of one of those portable playpens that Trish had coveted for years. Nate was in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt. That part wasn’t surprising.

What was surprising was that Nate was trying to hold a screaming baby. The child was in nothing but a diaper and, unless Trish missed her guess, the diaper was on backwards.

“What on earth?” Trish demanded.

* * *

Nate spun at the sound of the exclamation from behind him just as Jane squirmed in his arms. Oh, hell—why were babies so damned hard to hold onto?

“Uh...” he managed to get out as he got his other arm under Jane’s bottom and kept her from tumbling. The little girl screamed even louder. Nate would have thought that it was physically impossible for her to find more volume from her tiny little body, but she had.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” the woman said. The next thing he knew, Jane had been lifted out of his arms by a beautiful woman with striking dark eyes and—

Oh, God. “Trish!”

“Yes, hello,” she said, slinging the baby onto her hip with a practiced air. “Where are the diapers?”

“Why—what—I mean—you’re here?”

Trish paused in her search for diapers and gave him a look. It was a look that he deserved. Never in his entire life had he felt more like an idiot. “Yes. We had an appointment.”

He started. “Your appointment?”

“Yes,” she said, as she turned a small circle, surveying the complete and total destruction of the room that, until seven days ago, had been a sitting room and now was supposed to be a nursery. Even Nate knew that it wasn’t a nursery, not yet. It was a hellhole. He couldn’t tell if she was finding what she was looking for or not.

His mind tried to work, but that was like trying to open a bank vault where all the tumblers had rusted shut. He was so tired but Trish was here. He’d never been so happy to see a woman in his entire life. “You’re here about the nanny position?”

That got him another look—but there was more pity in her eyes this time. “Mr. Longmire,” she said in an utterly calm voice. She snagged a blanket and, with the screaming baby still on her hip, managed to smoothly lay the cloth out on the floor. “We had an appointment in your office at five today to discuss a matching grant to my charity, One Child, One World.”

Oh, hell. “You’re...not here about the nanny position?”

Trish located a diaper and then fell to her knees in an entirely graceful way. She carefully laid Jane out on the blanket. “Oh, dear, yes,” she soothed in a soft voice that Nate had to strain to hear over the screaming. “You’re so cold, sweetie! And wet, too? Oh, yes, it’s so hard to be a baby, isn’t it?” Trish changed the diaper and then looked up at him. “Does she have any clothes?”

“Why are you so calm?” he demanded.

“This is not difficult, Mr. Longmire. Does she have any clothes?”

Nate turned and dug into one of the suitcases Stanley had loaded onto his private plane. “Like a dress or something?”

“Like jammies, Mr. Longmire. Oh, I know,” she said in that soothing voice again. “I know. I think he’s trying his best, but he doesn’t know how to speak baby, does he?”

For a blissful second, Jane stopped screaming and instead only made a little burbling noise, as if she really were talking to Trish.

Then the screaming started right back up with renewed vigor.

Nate grabbed something that looked like it could be jammies. Orange terry cloth with pink butterflies and green flowers, it had long sleeves and footies attached to the legs. “This?”

“That’s perfect,” Trish said in that soothing tone again. Nate handed over the clothes and watched, stunned, as Trish got the wriggling arms and kicking legs into the fabric.

“How do you do that? I couldn’t get her into anything. And I couldn’t get her to stop screaming.”

“I noticed.” Trish looked up at him and smiled. “How are you feeding her?”

“Um, my mom sent some formula. Down in the kitchen.”

Trish rubbed Jane’s little tummy. Then, like it was just that easy, she folded the blanket around Jane and tucked in the ends and suddenly, Nate was looking at a baby burrito.

“One second, baby.” Then, to Nate, she said, “Don’t pick her up—but watch her while I wash my hands, okay?”

“Okay?” What choice did he have? The baby was still crying but, miraculously, her volume had pitched down for the first time since Nate had seen her.

“Bathroom?” Trish asked.

“Through that door.” As he stared at Jane, he tried to think. For a man who had done plenty of thinking while pulling all-nighters, he was stunned at how much his brain felt like the sludge at the bottom of a grease trap.

Trish Hunter. How could he forget her? Not even a funeral or a solid two weeks of sleep deprivation could erase the memory of her talking with him in a coffee shop. She’d been smart and beautiful and he’d—he’d liked her. He’d gotten the distinctive feeling that she’d been interested in him—not just his money.

Crap. He must have forgotten about their appointment entirely when his world fell apart. Which—yes, now he remembered—had occurred moments after his conversation with Trish in the coffee shop.

The woman he’d felt a connection with was the same woman who had just walked into his house and changed his niece’s diaper.

Wait.

A woman he’d felt a connection with had just changed his niece’s diaper. And gotten her dressed. And wrapped her into a burrito. And, if the indications were to be believed, was about to go down and fix a bottle of formula.

He’d been expecting a candidate for the position of nanny.

Maybe she had arrived.

Trish came out, looking just as elegant as she had before. “There now,” she said in that soft voice as she scooped Jane up and cuddled the baby against her chest. “I bet you’re hungry and I bet you’re sleepy. Let’s get some milk, okay?” Jane made a little mewing sound that came close to an agreement.

Trish looked at Nate, who was staring. “Kitchen?”

“This way.”

Nate felt like he needed to be doing something better here—but he was at a loss. All he could do was lead the way down stairs and into the back of the house, where Rosita was looking like the last rat on the ship. When his maid saw Trish cuddling the slightly quieter baby, her face lit up. “Oh, miss—we’re so glad you’ve come.”

Trish managed a smile, but Nate saw it wasn’t a natural thing. “Any clean bottles and nipples?”

Rosita produced the supplies, babbling on in her faint accent the whole time. “I tried, miss, but I never much cared for children.” She got out the tub of formula and a gallon of milk and started to mix it.

“Wait—stop.” Trish’s voice was one of horror. Then she looked at Nate and then around the room again, just like she had in the nursery. When she settled upon the breakfast bar with the stools, she said, “Mr. Longmire—sit.”

He sat.

“Hold out your arms like this.” She slid Jane down into a cradled position. Nate did as she asked. “Good. Now. Don’t drop the baby.” Trish set Jane into his arms and then ran her hands over him, pushing his arms tighter here, looser there. Even in his exhausted state, he didn’t miss the way her touch lingered on his skin.

He looked up at her. Her face was only inches away from his. If possible, she was even prettier today than she’d been in the coffee shop.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said. It came out quiet and serious.

She paused and met his gaze, her hands still on his bare skin. Heat flashed between them, that attraction he’d felt before.

She didn’t say anything, though. She just kept arranging his body until—for the first time—Nate felt like he had a good grasp on his niece.

Although he still didn’t have a good grasp on the situation. Well, one thing at a time. Baby first. Attraction second.

“All right,” Trish said, sounding very much like a general about to engage in battle. “Dump that out, please. Do you have any other clean bottles?”

“Miss?” Rosita said, hesitantly.

“No milk, not yet. The formula’s supposed to be mixed with water.”

“Oh,” Rosita and Nate said at the same time. Nate went on, “My mom just said she needed her milk every three hours and I thought...damn. I mean dang,” he corrected, looking down at Jane.

“I am so sorry, Señor Nate,” Rosita said in a low voice. “I...”

“Don’t worry about it, Rosita. We both missed it. No harm done.” He glanced back at Trish. “Right?”

“Probably not,” Trish replied as she fixed a fresh bottle. “Is there somewhere we can go sit? I have a few questions.”

“Yeah.” She took the baby out of his arms and waited for him to lead the way.

Nate couldn’t go back up to the disaster zone that was supposed to be the nursery. That was no image to present to anyone, but especially a lovely young woman who had a way with a baby and hadn’t run screaming at the sight of Nate at his worst.

“Rosita, if you could try and make some sense of the nursery while Ms. Hunter and I talk?”

“Yes,” Rosita said, sounding relieved to be off the hook. She scurried out of the kitchen faster than Nate had ever seen her move in the three years she’d worked for him.

Nate led Trish to his front parlor. He liked this old house, these old rooms. He kept his technology in a separate room so that this room, where he received visitors, had a timeless feel to it. The front parlor was an excellent room within which to think. No blinking lights or chiming tones to distract him—or disturb an upset infant. “Where do you want to sit?”

“This will be fine.” She settled herself in his favorite chair, the plush leather wingback with a matching footstool. She propped her arm on the armrest and got Jane to take the bottle on the second try. Nate watched in surprise. He had hardly been able to get Jane to drink anything.

Of course, if they’d been making it wrong...

“So,” she said when he perched on the nearby sofa. “Tell me about it.”

Nate didn’t like to talk about his family. He liked to keep that part of himself—his past, their present—private. It was better that way for everyone. But he was desperate here. “This doesn’t leave this room.”

She lifted her eyebrows, but that was the only sign that his statement surprised her. “Agreed.”

“I didn’t mean to forget our appointment.”

“It’s pretty obvious that something came up. Didn’t it, sweetie?” she cooed at Jane, who was making happy little slurping noises. Nate was thrilled to see her little eyelids already drifting shut.

“I haven’t slept more than two hours at a shot in the last two weeks. I don’t...I told my parents I couldn’t do this. I don’t know anything about babies.”

“Agreed,” Trish repeated with a smile. Nate became aware of a light humming that sounded like...a lullaby?

He took a deep breath. He’d only told two other people about what had happened—Stanley and Rosita. “My brother, my perfect older brother, and his wife left Jane—that’s the baby—with my parents to go out to dinner.”

The humming stopped and Trish got very still. “And?”

He knew how bad it was to look weak—he’d almost lost his company back at the beginning because he’d been trying to be a nice guy and Diana didn’t play by those rules. He’d learned never to show weakness, especially not in the business world.

But the horror of the past two weeks was almost too much for him. He dropped his head into his hands. “And they didn’t make it back. A semi lost control, flipped over. They...” The words clogged up in his throat. “They didn’t suffer.”

“Oh my God, Nate—I’m so sorry.” He looked at her and was surprised to see tears gathering in her eyes. “That’s—oh, that’s just horrible.”

“I mean, Brad—that was my brother—you know, it was hard to grow up in his shadow. He was good-looking and he was the quarterback and he got all the girls. He took—” Nate bit down on the words. He’d made his peace with Brad. Mostly. He’d done his best to put aside the betrayal for the sake of their mother. “We’d...we’d started to become friends, you know? It wasn’t a competition anymore because he could never beat me in money and I could never beat him in looks and we were finally even. Finally.”

In the end, Brad had done him a favor, really. At least, that’s how Nate had to look at, for his sanity’s sake.

There was a somewhat stunned silence as Trish stared at him, punctuated only by the noises of Jane eating. “For what it’s worth,” she said in a quiet voice, deeper than the one she used on the baby, “you are an incredibly attractive man.”

There it was again—that challenge, that something else that seemed to draw the air between them tighter than a bowstring. For a second, he was too stunned to say anything. He didn’t feel attractive right now—just as he hadn’t felt attractive when he’d been named one of Silicon Valley’s Top Ten Bachelors.

But Trish—beautiful and intelligent and obviously much more knowledgeable about babies than he’d ever be—thought he was attractive. Incredibly attractive.

He realized he was probably blushing. “Sorry,” he said, trying to keep control of himself. “I don’t know why I told you that about my brother. I...”

“You’ve had a long couple of weeks. When did the accident happen?”

“I got the call as I was leaving the coffee shop. I guess that’s why I didn’t remember you were coming. I’m sorry about that, too.”

“Nate,” she said in a kind voice and Nate’s mind went back to the way she’d touched him in the kitchen. If only he could think straight... “It’s all right. I understand. Life happens.”

“Yeah, okay.” He could do with a little less life happening right now, frankly.

“So your brother and sister had a baby girl?”

“Jane. Yes.”

“Jane,” Trish said, the name coming off her tongue like a sigh. “Hello, Jane.” But then she looked back at Nate. “If you don’t mind me asking, why do you have Jane? What about your parents?”

Nate dropped his head back into his hands. It was still so hard to talk about. There wasn’t the same stigma now, but back when he’d been a kid... “They couldn’t take her.”

“Not even for a week or so? No offense, but you don’t have a baby’s room up there. You have a death trap.”

“I—” He swallowed. “I have another brother.”

There was that stillness again. She was 100 percent focused on him.

“He’s severely mentally ill.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s not. Not anymore. But there were...problems. He was institutionalized for a while until we could get the meds straightened out.” He shrugged. “He’s my brother and I love him. He loved Brad, too. Brad was his buddy. They’d go out and throw the football around...” His throat seemed to close up on him and he had to swallow a couple of times to get things to work again.

Trish looked at him like she wanted to comfort him. But she said, “No one knows about your brother?”

“In the past, other people have tried to use that against me. Against my family. And I will not stand for it.” The last part came out meaner than he meant it to. She wasn’t a threat. She wasn’t Diana.

“You give to mental illness research.”

“Because of Joe, yeah.” He sighed. “He needs his routine. My mom takes care of him and I pay for home health workers. But the last few weeks, my parents have been so upset about Brad and Elena... Besides,” he added, feeling the weight of the words, “I’m her legal guardian.”

“I see,” she replied. “Oh, that’s a good girl, Jane. Here.” She handed Nate the bottle and then casually moved the baby to her shoulder and began patting Jane’s back. “So you’re trying to hire a nanny?”

“Yeah. You want the job?”

Trish paused in midpat, and then laughed a little too forcefully. “That’s not why I’m here.”

He wasn’t about to take no as an answer. So he didn’t always know what to do around members of the opposite sex. He knew how to negotiate a business deal. He needed a nanny. She needed money.

“What do you mean? You obviously know what you’re doing.” The more he thought about it, the better he liked this idea. He’d already sort of interviewed her, after all. He liked her. Okay, maybe that wasn’t a good enough reason to offer her a job changing diapers and burping a baby, but he was comfortable with her and she knew what she was doing and that counted for something.

She sighed. “Of course I do. My mom had nine kids with...four different men. Then she married my current stepfather, who had four kids of his own with two other women. I’m the oldest.”

Nate tried to process that information. “Your mom had ten kids?”

“Not that she took care of them,” Trish replied and for the first time, he heard a distinctive note of bitterness in her voice.

“You?”

Her smile was tight. “Me.”

“Perfect.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look, I need a nanny. More than that, I need you. I’ve had three people come to the door and no one’s made it past five minutes, whereas you’ve gotten Jane to calm down and stop screaming. I swear this is the first time in two weeks I’ve been able to hear myself think.”

And all of that had nothing to do with the way Trish had touched him, so he was still acting aboveboard here.

“Mr. Longmire,” she said in a deeply regretful tone, “I can’t. I’m due to graduate with my master’s degree in a month and a half. I need to finish my studies and—”

“You can study here. When she sleeps.”

Trish’s eyes flashed in defiance, which made him smile. “I work two jobs,” she went on, in a stronger voice. “I do research for the professor who nominated me for the Glamour award and I answer phones in the department.”

This was much better. She was negotiating. And God knew that, despite the fact that he was so tired he was on the verge of seeing two Trishes cuddling two babies, he could negotiate a business deal. “For, what? Ten dollars an hour?”