Page 15 of Marrying the Nanny

He’d been told by a social worker that he would get to live with his brothers like that was a selling feature. He had known the two boys existed but had been conditioned to resent them. He hadn’t had anything in common with either of them. He still didn’t know how to relate to them, not that he tried. Despite Glenda’s best efforts to make him feel as though he had a home with them, his mother had always taken his living with his father’s family as a direct betrayal against her. Reid would have swum off that island the day he graduated if he’d had to.

“Shotgun,” Logan said with a blithe smile when Reid handed in the last bag.

“Nice try.” Trystan arrived with Emma beside him. “I happen to possess a pilot’s license so I’m in the cockpit. Stow this, would you?” He offered the car seat to Reid. A blanket was tented over it, but the wind picked up the corner, revealing the still-sleeping baby inside it.

“You’re going to fly us?” Emma asked with alarm.

“Copilot.” Trystan nodded at the pilot heading toward them. “That’s John. The owner and pilot.”

Reid offered a hand to help her from the bobbing dock into the bobbing plane. Her pretty backside danced at eye level a moment before she nudged the car seat farther along the bench, then turned to peer at him, forcing Reid to lift his gaze.

“There aren’t enough seats,” she said.

“Because you filled the back with diapers. You’ll have to hold her.”

“In my lap? Isn’t this like a car? Shouldn’t she be buckled in?”

“It’s fine.” The pilot opened the cockpit door so Trystan could squeeze over to the copilot seat.

Emma unbuckled the baby and let Reid set the carrier with the rest of the cargo. She wriggled closer to the window as he settled beside her.

She smelled like fresh air and damp wool and something sweet and soft that had to be baby powder.

“I’m not usually a nervous flyer,” she said sheepishly. “But the whole way here, I kept thinking about them, playing horrible scenarios in my head, wondering how to swim to the surface with an infant if the plane went down. They don’t have the sense to hold their breath.”

A dozen pithy comments came to his tongue. Who borrowed that kind of trouble when there were real problems to solve? But he couldn’t mock her for genuinely caring about a helpless baby.

He eyed the kid, waiting for recognition to strike. Did he really imagine he would see his father’s lined, rugged features in such a tiny, feminine face? Who in their right mind named a kid “Storm” anyway?

It struck him how small she was. He’d never looked at a baby, really looked, but she was like a scale model, all the details perfectly re-created in miniature. Lashes, eyebrows, a mouth that seemed pouted in concentration, as if all her effort was going into sleeping as hard as she could.

He’d never studied noses before, but as Logan returned from taking back the luggage cart and pushed in beside him, Reid compared the nose their father had given them, with its straight bridge and narrow nostrils, to the button on Storm’s face.

“What?” Logan demanded.

“Nothing,” he muttered, self-conscious at searching for commonalities and experiencing such a strange satisfaction in finding them.

“Buckle up.” The pilot closed them in and secured the door, then cast off and climbed into the cockpit.

Emma wrapped her arms more securely around the baby. She was liable to chew her bottom lip right off before they were in the air.

“Hey.” He nudged her elbow as the plane taxied from the wharf. “We’ll be fine.”

“Have you heard what might have caused it?” Emma asked apprehensively.

The authorities were still fishing for pieces of the plane. Reid was trying not to think about it but told her as much as he knew. “Possibly a medical event.”

“Tiffany was telling him to see a doctor. What about the black box thingy?”

“Small private planes aren’t required to have a cockpit voice recorder, but there was an abrupt radio transmission, maybe Tiffany trying to call for help.”

“That’s sad.” She made a worried noise and cuddled Storm closer.

The plane turned and the noise rose to a loud buzz, but the baby slept through it. As the plane picked up speed and the wings tilted to pick up first one float, then the other off the water, Emma was pressed into him. He could feel her tension.

“It’s fine,” he said, tempted to put his arm around her, which was an out-of-character impulse. He wasn’t the cuddling type. And really, when had anything involving his father and Raven’s Cove ever turned out “fine”?

Chapter Four

---