Hired: Nanny Bride by Cara Colter

nothing had happened. He was part of what she left behind, but really, he had continued with her throughout the pregnancy out of a sense of honor and decency. But he had never forgiven her the “it.”
    He dropped out of college a month before he was supposed to graduate, packed a backpack, bought a ticket to anywhere. He’d traveled. Over time, he had come to dislike going to places with children. The sound of their laughter, their energy, reminded him of what he was supposed to be and was not.
    When he’d come across Sarah’s obituary a few years ago, killed in a ski accident in Switzerland, he had taken his lack of emotion as a sign he’d been a man unworthy of raising that child, anyway.
    “Are you all right?”
    He hadn’t seen her come down the hallway, but now Dannie was standing in the doorway, Jake wrapped up in a pure white towel, only his round, rosy face peeking out, and a few spikes of dark hair.
    Her blouse was soaked, showing off full, lush curves, and she looked as rosy as the baby.
    Dannie looked at home with Jake, comfortable with her life. Why was she content to raise other people’s children, when she looked as if she’d been born to hold freshly bathed babies of her own?
    “All right?” he stammered, getting up from the couch. “Yeah. Of course.”
    But he wasn’t. He was acutely aware that being around these kids, around Dannie, was making him feel things he had been content not to feel, revisit places he had been relieved to leave behind.
    All he had to do was get through the rest of tonight. Tomorrow he’d figure out how to get rid of them, or maybe she would decide to go.
    That would be best for everyone involved, and to hell with his sister’s disapproval.
    Though what if Mel cut her own vacation short? She needed it.
    “Are you sure you’re all right?” Dannie asked, frowning.
    He pulled himself together, vowed he was not going back to the memory of holding his baby. He could not revisit the pain of letting that little guy go and survive. He couldn’t.
    He was going to focus totally and intensely on this moment.
    He said, with forced cheer, “As all right as a guy can be whose been beaten at noughts and crosses by a four-year-old, thirty-three times in a row.”
    Because of his vow to focus on the moment, he became acutely aware of what it held. Dannie. Her hair was curling from the moistness, her cheeks were on fire, her blouse was sticking to her in all the right places.
    He glanced at Susie, who was drawing a picture on the back of a used piece of paper, bored with the lack of competition.
    Her picture showed a mommy, a daddy, a child suspended between their stick arms, big smiles on their oversize heads.
    Despite his vow, the thought hit him like a slug. The world he had walked away from.
    His son would have been three years older than his niece. Did he look like Susie? Worse, did he look like him?
    He swore under his breath, running a hand through his hair.
    “Mr. Cole!”
    Susie snickered, delighted at the tone of voice he’d earned from her nanny.
    “Sorry,” he muttered, “Let’s go get something to eat.” His mind wandered to the thought of Danielle eating spaghetti. “There’s a great Italian restaurant around the corner. Five-star.”
    Dannie rolled her eyes. “Have you ever taken a baby and a four-year-old to a restaurant?”
    No, he wanted to scream at her, because I walked away from that life.
    “So, we’ll order pizza,” he snapped.
    “Pizza,” Susie breathed, “my favorite.”
    “Pizza, small children and white leather. Hmm,” Dannie said.
    “I don’t care about the goddamned leather!” he said.
    He expected another reprimand, but she was looking at him closely, way too closely. Just as he had seen things about her that she might have been unaware of, he got the same feeling she saw things like that about him.
    “Pizza sounds great,” she said soothingly.
    Glad to be able to move away from her, to take charge, even of something so simple, he