Page 8 of Marrying the Nanny

“Don’t look at me.” Logan recoiled. “After that performance?” He thumbed to where the wardrobe change had happened. “Hell no.”

They both looked to Trystan.

“Hard no,” Trystan said firmly.

“Where’s your mother?” Reid asked, earning Trystan’s flat stare.

“You think I’d ask her to take his kid? No. She’s in Bella Coola anyway, married to Roy Harkin.”

“The trawler? I thought he had a wife and kids.”

“His wife passed a few years ago. He and Mom got together last year.”

“Huh. Good for them.” Reid looked to Logan.

“I won’t tell Mom you didn’t think of her first, when you went looking for someone to take on more of Dad’s ‘issues.’”

“I was at her wedding. I know she’s also remarried and looking after her new husband’s ‘issues.’” Had that really been the last time he’d seen these two? Glenda’s wedding four years ago?

“What else you got?” Logan didn’t stoop to saying it, but it was almost worse that he didn’t suggest, I guess that leaves your mom.

Reid looked blindly to the abstract painting above Logan’s left shoulder, gut tensed as though bracing for a kick. His fault, he supposed. He shouldn’t have brought up mothers, but he’d been thinking maybe if Pauline was willing to supervise Emma… Hell, he didn’t know what he’d been thinking beyond the fact that he was still shouldering responsibility for the mess his father had made of his first marriage. Surely he could delegate cleanup to someone else for a change?

“Does she know?” Logan asked, voice pitched with a low reluctance to pry.

Reid was long past resenting that Logan’s birth and Glenda’s affair with Wilf had ended his mother’s marriage. He was even past the envy that had once consumed him that Logan had a stable, loving mom while his own was a source of frustration and helplessness. Logan’s tone grated, though. It felt like pity. He wanted to mutter, We’re fine, but they were never fine.

“She heard about it on the news like everyone else,” Reid said with dismay.

Trystan swore under his breath. “I tried, man.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Trystan’s great-uncle had heard about the downed plane via the marine radio channels. He had transmitted the news to Pauline, who had sent Trystan’s rescue crew in with a helicopter to pull him out midshoot from Alaska.

At least he’d been in North America. It could have been Bora Bora the way that man got around.

Trystan had texted Logan and Reid even as the authorities were getting hold of them, but the small plane sitting on the water off the northern tip of Vancouver Island had made all the national news channels. The logo on the wing had been easily discernible to anyone who had ever lived in Raven’s Cove.

Reid hadn’t been given the chance to break it to his mother gently, not that making that call would have been any easier than receiving her hysterical one.

He shrugged off his impotent anger, not wanting to get into his mother’s reaction. She was bipolar and resisted medication. Her reaction to her ex-husband’s death was all over the map. Reid had arrived early this morning and sat with her for a few hours, listening while she processed because there was literally nothing else he could do for her.

For a man who lived to get results, that sort of spinning in emotional ruts was complete torture, but there was a chicken and egg aspect to it. He probably lived for getting results because he’d spent his childhood spinning in ruts.

He rubbed his brow, neither angry over his mother’s illness nor ashamed of the firm boundaries he’d established when it came to how he responded to her. He only asked, “Either of you married?”

Emma’s “Wow” came out a lot louder than his brothers’ simultaneous “No.”

Reid narrowed his eyes on her, finding her both mousy and superior. He wasn’t sure how to take that, which bothered him so he fell back on sarcasm.

“Careful. You’ll wake the baby.”

“First of all, sexist. Your plan is to hand off your little sister to whichever uterus one of you happens to be related to? I see now why none of you is showing a milligram of interest in her. You don’t even know if your own brothers are married.”

She was judging again. It was starting to get under his skin. He’d given up yearnings to be normal years ago. Longings like that were madness when his reality was so harsh and impossible to change. Rather than bemoan his estrangement from his family, he owned it.

“I didn’t know my father was getting married until he died on his way to the wedding.” Reid ignored the clench in his chest as he spoke the words aloud. Did it bother him that his father had died before they could talk things out? He was trying hard to convince himself it didn’t. What could Wilf have said that would ever make Reid okay with the choices he’d made? With the way he had treated his mom? Nothing.

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