Hired: Nanny Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 beautifulthing 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 easy to give them a starring role in a dream that she had to convince herself she did not believe in anymore.
    Enough of fantasies, she told herself. She had spent the entire year Brent was away building a fantasy around his stupid cards and e-mails, reading into them growing love, when in fact his love had been diminishing. She was a woman pathetic enough to have spent her entire meager savings on a wedding dress on the basis of a vague promise.
    Joshua went to a door off the bank of elevators and inserted a key.
    The door glided open, and