Page 100 of Marrying the Nanny

Trystan and Logan gave her the same expression they wore with their baby sister most days, bewildered but affectionate. Her heart swelled.

She was finally getting the family she’d always longed for.

*

The next two weeks were busy for all of them. Emma had Storm for long stretches, but the men weren’t avoiding childcare on purpose. Trystan disappeared for five days at a time on tour, working out kinks and saving money before he hired a second guide. The season had started in earnest so Logan and Reid had their own challenges at the marina and with the lodge guests.

One morning, after a particularly crummy night with Storm cutting one of her top teeth, Emma woke to find the house empty. It was Logan’s day with Storm, and he often took her for a few hours in the morning when he was walking around talking out the day’s issues. He usually brought her back to eat lunch and nap.

Emma made fresh coffee and brought her mug back up to the top floor balcony. Logan and Trystan had finished the suite while she and Reid had been in Victoria, right down to leaving wildflowers in a vase on the dresser—from Storm, they had insisted. It looked gorgeous and magazine perfect. Even Reid had admitted the color of the walls made it a calm retreat from the chaos below.

It was the space a pair of newlyweds could use to make love and work out small disputes, share silly, private jokes, and connect as a couple.

As she stepped onto the balcony in her pajamas and gazed at a view that would never grow old, she asked herself how could she be so happy, so sexually satisfied she ought to need a license, yet still experience such longing? Such fear and doubt in herself and her future?

Part of it was the bureaucracy that would take time to work through. She had to keep reminding herself it had only been two months since she and Reid had met. Of course she was still processing her decision to marry him so abruptly.

Not that she had any regrets, but she did waver hourly between holding back and fully expressing herself. In this moment, half of her wanted to take Reid’s lunch to him. The other worried it would smack of trying too hard, the way she had with her first marriage. She was terrified of expecting more than Reid was willing to give, and she was terrified of never getting more than what he already offered.

Which was more than she’d ever had. She honestly had nothing to complain about. If he seemed distant, Raven’s Cove was the reason. All of them were under enormous pressure, buried in the daily work here and still trying to keep their respective careers alive. Reid also had the settling of his father’s affairs on his plate. He was filing for guardianship and sponsoring her immigration.

She shouldn’t ask for or need more of his attention. Her days of pinning her self-worth on a man’s ability to say “I love you” and mean it were over.

She couldn’t help thinking, however, that the old Emma wouldn’t dare push. She would have been patient and would have gone along with whatever she was told to accept. Which was how the old Emma had wound up married to a man she had talked herself into believing she loved and who definitely hadn’t loved her.

Did Reid love her?

That was the question she had been avoiding asking herself because the accompanying question was Did she love him?

She did.

Closing her eyes, she let the acknowledgment radiate into her like the early June sunshine, warm and bursting with promise. Her lungs inhaled deeply, trying to make room for the swell of her heart and the butterflies that came to life in her stomach.

She loved him. So much. It felt good to love him because Reid deserved to be loved. He was tender and considerate and funny and gave her orgasms like he was collecting frequent flyer points on them. He was a good big brother, not just to his baby sister, but to a pair of men who didn’t need mollycoddling. Even so, he made them a sandwich and threw their laundry into the dryer without being asked.

With his sister, Reid was turning into a dad before her very eyes—protective and proud of Storm’s little milestones and concerned about any little red mark or sniffle she exhibited.

Reid was everything Emma had dreamed of in a husband. Of course she had tumbled oceans deep in love with him.

But she didn’t know how he felt. Not really. And it scraped a hollow place open behind her heart.

Be patient, she told herself. She had seen with her own eyes why he thought love was a tangled jungle that one should only enter with great caution.

But the new Emma said, Screw patience. She slipped on her new V-neck beach dress, left her hair loose, and walked down to the village to see her husband.

*

Reid was swearing at the invoice for the pub roof, which negated any money they’d saved by putting their own sweat into the renovations at the house. This damned place was such a money pit. The minute the balance sheet showed a chance of generating a profit, he would put it on the market. At this point, he would settle for breaking even.

“Hi.” Emma came in and closed the door, two takeout coffee cups stacked in one hand. “Spare a minute for a girl who hasn’t been on a date since before she got married?”

It was coffee, for Christ’s sake, but the world fell away, and his heart soared. It wasn’t the first time he’d experienced this fierce, overwhelming high at the mere glimpse of her, but it unnerved him every time. Scared him, if he was honest. In so many ways, Emma was proving to be a grounding source for him, reliable and earnest and glass-half-full even when it was mostly empty.

Other times, like now, she caused such acute emotions to ambush him—lust and elation and craving—he had to choke off the rush. Otherwise… Hell, he didn’t know what he would do. He just couldn’t let it happen. He’d be eaten alive.

Despite how she shook him, he couldn’t help but admire how pretty she was, all breezy and carefree. She was so Em. Thoughtful and good-humored and legs that made him itch.

“Divorce the bastard,” he advised, voice gritty while his eyes refused to lift from those naked stems beneath the colorful skirt that swished across the tops of her thighs. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

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