At His Service: Nanny Needed. Cara Colter
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though in what world a Lamborghini is horrible, I’m not sure.”
“Totally unsuited for children’s car seats,” she informed him. The horrible yellow car, with its horrible gorgeous driver passed them slowly.
A man like that could make a woman rip a locket right off her neck!
She snorted to herself. A man like that could cause a heart to break just by being in the same room, a single glance, green eyes lingering a touch too long on her lips … Joshua’s eyes were probably always making promises he had no intention of keeping.
Unattainable to mere mortals, she reminded herself with a sniff. Not that she was a mortal in the market! Done. Brent had finished her. She had given love a chance, nurtured her hopes and dreams over the year he’d been away, lived for his cards and notes and e-mails and been betrayed for all her trouble.
Terrible how that vow of being done could be rattled so easily by one lingering look from Joshua Cole! How could his gaze have made her wish, after her terrible Brent breakup, that she had not made herself over quite so completely? Gone was the makeup, the fussing over the hair, the colorful wardrobe. On was about fifteen pounds, the result of intensive chocolate therapy!
She was done, intent on making herself invisible and therefore safe. How could she possibly feel as if Joshua Cole had seen her in a way Brent, whom she had pulled out all the makeover tricks for, never had?
The sports car was so low, she could look in the window and see Jake, his brand-new car seat strapped in securely, facing backward, his black hair standing straight up like dark dandelion fluff.
She refused to soften her view of Joshua Cole because he had insisted on the car seat to get the baby home. Once you softened your view of a man who was lethally charming, you were finished. That’s what lethally meant.
Besides, there hadn’t been enough room in that ridiculous car to put her and Susie to ride with him.
A car like that said a lot about a man. Fast and flashy. Self-centered. Single and planning to stay that way.
Since she was also single and very much planning to stay that way for the rest of her life, a poor spinster nanny in the basement room, it was probably unfair to see that as a flaw in him.
Except the car meant he was a hunter, on the prowl. Didn’t it?
“What does a car like that mean to you?” she asked the cab driver, just in case she had it wrong.
“That you can have any girl you want,” he muttered.
Bingo.
“If he opens her up, I’m not going to be able to keep up with him,” the cabbie warned.
“If he opens her up, I’m going to kill him,” she said. “He has a baby in there.” My baby. Of course, Jake was not officially her baby. Unofficially he had won her heart and soul from the first gurgle. Now, post-Brent, she had decided Jake might be the only baby she ever had.
Emotion could capsize her unexpectedly since Brent had hit her with his announcement, and she felt it claw at her throat now, defended against it by telling herself that sweet little baby boy was probably going to be lethally charming someday, just like his uncle.
Twice, in the space of five minutes, steady, dependable Dannie had thought of killing people.
That’s what heartbreak did: turned normal, reliable people into bitter survivors, turned them into what they least wanted to be. In fact, it seemed to her, her recent tragedy had the potential to turn her into her parents, who had spent their entire married lives trying to kill each other.
Figuratively. Mostly.
“You shouldn’t say you’re going to kill people,” Susie told her, a confirmation of what Dannie already knew. Susie was hugging the new teddy bear that had arrived in her uncle’s office along with the car seat. The teddy bear did not seem to have softened the child’s view of her uncle at all.
In Susie’s view, Uncle Josh was the villain who had torn her mother away from her. A teddy bear was not going to fix that.
A lesson Uncle Josh no doubt needed to learn! You could not buy back affection.
The car seat and the teddy bear had arrived within minutes of a quiet phone call. Dannie had heard him giving instructions to have a baby crib set up at his apartment. In the guest room with the Jacuzzi. Which begged the question not only how many guest rooms were there, but why did you need a guest room with a Jacuzzi?
Obviously, for the same reason you needed a car like that. Entertaining.
Still, she had gotten the message. He spoke; people jumped.
And he’d better not even think of trying that with her! She might have been the kind of person who jumped before Brent’s betrayal. She was no longer!
They arrived at a condominium complex not far from his office building, and Dannie tried very hard not to be awed, even though a guest room with a Jacuzzi should have given her ample time to prepare herself for something spectacular.
She was awed, anyway. Even though Melanie and Ryan certainly had no financial difficulties, she knew she was now moving in an entirely different league.
The high-rise building appeared to be constructed of white marble, glass and water. The landscaping in front of the main door was exquisite: lush grass, exotic flowers, a black onyx fountain shooting up pillars of gurgling foam.
She was fumbling with her wallet when Joshua appeared at the driver’s window, baby already on his hip, and paid the driver. He juggled the baby so he could open the door for her. There was no sense noticing his growing comfort with the baby!
Instead, she focused on the fact that if the great Joshua Cole was aware he had parked the horrible yellow thing in a clearly marked no-parking zone, it didn’t concern him.
But she’d do well to remember that: rules were for others.
A doorman came out of the building to move the car almost instantly. Another unloaded her luggage from the trunk of the cab.
Joshua greeted both men by name, with a sincere warmth that surprised her. And then he was leading her through a lobby that reminded her of the one and only five-star hotel she had ever stayed at. The lobby had soaring ceilings, deep carpets over marble tile, distressed leather furniture.
For all that, why did it feel as if the most beautiful thing in the room was that self-assured man carrying a baby, his strength easy, his manner unforced?
Few men, in Dannie’s experience, were really comfortable with children. Brent had claimed to like them, but she had noticed he had that condescending, overly enthusiastic way of being around them that children hated.
She hoped it was a sign of healing that she had remembered this flaw in her perfect man!
It was a strange irony that, while Joshua Cole had not made any claims about liking children and in fact radiated unapologetic discomfort around them, he was carrying that baby on his hip as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be doing.
Joshua chose that moment to glance down at the bundle in his arms. She caught his look of unguarded tenderness and felt her throat close. Had she just caught a glimpse of something so real about him that it made her question every other judgment she had made?
What if the World’s Sexiest Bachelor was a lie? What if the sports car and clothes and office were just a role he’d assumed? What if he was really a man who had been born to be a daddy?
Danger zone, she told herself. What was wrong with her? She had just been terribly disappointed by one man! Why would she be reading such qualities into another that she barely knew?
Besides, there was no doubt exactly why men like Joshua Cole were so successful with women. They had charm down to a science.
It made it so easy to place them in the center of a fantasy, it was so