Hired: Nanny Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

claimed to be.
    It was more than the fact that the children were exhausted and so was she, not a good time to be making decisions!
    It was that something about him had been unexpected.
    He had not been all arrogance and charm. Something ran deeper in him. She had seen it in that unguarded moment when she had thrust Jake upon him, something in his face that said his life had not been without heartbreak, after all.
    Stop it, she told herself sternly. They would spend the evening with him. Tomorrow, rested, she would regroup and decide what to do next. The original plan no longer seemed feasible. Spend a week with him? Good grief!
    What she was not going to do was call Melanie and Ryan, who needed this time together desperately. At a whisper of trouble, Melanie would come home.
    Still, could it really be in the best interests of the children to spend time with their uncle? He’d made it clear he was uncomfortable with children. In fact, his success was based on the creation of a child-free world! There was no sense seeing anything noble in his sudden whim to play the hero and spend time with the niece and nephew he’d invited here in the first place.
    And how about herself? How much time could any woman with blood flowing through her veins spend with a man like that without succumbing?
    Not, she reminded herself sourly, that there would be anything to succumb to. He was rich and powerful and definitely lethally charming. There had been no pictures in the article of him accompanied by women like her.
    Women like her: unprocessed, unsophisticated, slightly plump.
    She touched the locket on her neck and felt the ache. Only a few weeks ago, the locket would have protected her. Taken .
    Brent had given it to her before leaving for Europe. “A promise,” he’d said, “I will return to you.”
    Perhaps it would be better to take the locket off, now that it represented a promise broken. On the other hand perhaps it protected her still, reminding her of the fickleness of the human heart, and especially of the fickleness of the male human heart.
    And besides, she wasn’t ready to take it off. She still looked at the photo inside it each night and felt the ache of loss and the stirring of hope that he would realize he had made a mistake….
    Though all along maybe the worst mistake had been hers. Believing in what she felt for Brent, even after what she had grown up with. Her own parents’ split up had been venomous, their passion had metamorphosed into full-blown hatred that was destructive to all it had touched, including their children. Maybe especially their children.
    Thank God, Dannie thought, for the Maynards, for Melanie and Ryan, for Susie and Jake. Thank God she had already been welcomed into the fold of their household when this hurricane of heartbreak had hit her. She would survive because they gave her a sense of family and of belonging, a safe place to fall when her world had fallen apart.
    Bonus: loving them didn’t involve one little bit of risk!
    Though since Brent’s call from London, “I’m so sorry, there’s someone else,” now when Dannie saw the way that Melanie and Ryan looked at each other, she felt a startling stab of envy.
    “Hey, lady, are we going somewhere, or are we just sitting here?” the cabbie asked her, waiting for her instructions, impatient.
    “When you see the horrible yellow car, follow it,” Dannie said. Delivering the variation on the line “Follow that car” gave her absolutely no pleasure.
    “A yellow car?” he said, bemused. “Do you think you could be a little more specific?”
    Dannie looked over her shoulder. “It’s coming now.”
    The cabbie whistled. “Okay, lady, 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