Page 60 of Marrying the Nanny

So she could walk in on him? Her filthy, betraying mind conjured his gleaming shoulders and bare chest. She would bet his abs crunched for days.

Stop.

Trying to hide her flustered, randy thoughts, she rose and kissed Storm’s hand.

“What do you think, Storm? As long as he signs a blood oath to rinse his whiskers and put the seat down, right?” She side-stepped and spoke over her shoulder as she headed toward the bathroom and her own bedroom beyond. “I’m going to try my parents. It’s been a while and it’s their anniversary soon.”

She hurried away.

*

Three days later, Reid was tired. It had nothing to do with his kid sister, either. Now that Storm was eating solids twice a day, she was sleeping close to eight hours, usually waking around four or five in the morning for a bottle before falling back asleep until seven or eight. Reid should have been getting eight hours as well.

Instead, he’d been tossing and turning in that rickety little bed, knocking his ankles against the footboard, thinking of the nice big queen-size mattress a short distance away.

Thinking of the woman in it. Thinking about how her hair might feel tickling across his stomach and thighs. How her laugh made him want to kiss her. How he smelled her every time he went into their shared bathroom where she had tidily moved her things to the one sink and left the other one for him. Every damned time he walked in there, he saw bubbles sliding down her creamy skin.

He wasn’t the lust-driven type. Or rather, he made a habit of channeling sexual frustration into work rather than dogging after women. He’d lived the fallout of his father’s dick-driven lifestyle and balked at intense emotions in general. When he dated, he went for women who enjoyed their independence, usually career-focused types like himself who wanted to keep their relationships light and low maintenance.

Emma wasn’t like that. She’d walked away from the rat race and had a sensitive heart. She was in a vulnerable, tenuous place and she was his employee.

He was attracted to her anyway. Maybe, if he was honest, he liked her because she was grounded and earnest and soft. It felt damned good to have a woman act like a friend and open up even as she saw through to the protector and doer.

That insight of hers had been uncomfortable, but it was true. He wanted to protect his baby sister. He wanted to do what was right by her. He wasn’t the caregiver idealist that Emma was, though. He had made a point of walling off his emotions to get through the life he’d lived so far. He didn’t know how to become accessible in the way Storm needed.

Emma could help him, though. She already did.

That made maintaining his friendship with her vital. Making advances would throw off their healthy dynamic. That’s why he’d insisted on the rule.

This schism of being drawn to her and wanting to protect her from his horndog instincts was driving him crazy. It was starting to make him look for solutions outside the box that were so far out there, he was fighting a proper acknowledgment of them.

But what if he could solve the problem of Storm’s future with minimal impact on her bond with Emma? What if he could keep Emma in Canada and step up with confidence in taking responsibility for his baby sister?

What would his brothers say?

Did he care?

It was so odd to be back here with them. Not as hellish as Reid had feared, either. Logan had always loved the marina, even if he groused about everything else, especially the weather. Trystan didn’t care how many fish he had to clean, so long as he was outside. Reid preferred solid land under his feet and putting his back into creating order from chaos. They’d fallen into an old dynamic that wasn’t perfect, but it got the work done.

It would get them to the point where they could sell this place. That common goal united them.

He knew Glenda hoped they would form some kind of bond while they were here. She had tried to engineer it when they were kids. It wasn’t just Reid’s aversion to emotional ties that had got in the way back then. His brothers didn’t exactly reach out. If any of them had wanted a closer relationship over the years, they would already have one. The bottom line was, they had nothing in common except a screwup of a father and a baby sis—

“—talk to the owner. Is he in there?”

Reid snapped out of his brooding and back to awareness of being at work.

He had tuned out the voice speaking with growing demand, but it carried clearly through the door Reid should have closed properly when he had fetched his cup of coffee from the break room down the hall.

As Reid listened, he realized there were a lot of things about being back in Raven’s Cove that he had been convinced he hated, but it turned out most were minor annoyances—the isolation and the cost of living, for instance. He didn’t love that everyone knew what time he went to bed simply by looking up the hill and watching the light go out, but the people who lived here were decent. The resort had a good relationship with the Heiltsuk people, and the rest were kind, if unconventional. He’d forgotten how beautiful the whole area was, too. The challenge of restructuring the resort was proving to be satisfying, especially because he didn’t have Wilf micromanaging and overriding him at every turn. He was in charge.

The one thing, however, that he had always truly loathed about living here was that voice out there. That whine-ass, entitled, “Been down the eastern seaboard, through the Panama Canal, and up the Baja Peninsula. The rudeness I encountered today has ruined my entire trip.”

Really? One remark was all it took to ruin months of travel? Fucking boaster.

Not a boater or a yachtsman or a sailor or a fisherman. Not a captain or a deckhand or a traveler or that pesky but financially necessary animal—a tourist.

No, he was what Wilf Fraser had tagged a boaster among other things. One of those seamen who transformed into semen the way a grasshopper became a locust. The kind who had seen and done it all and loved to go on about how smart and well traveled he was, and how he had bullied a salesgirl into crying or made the car dealership lose money. The kind who always got what he wanted because the customer was always right.

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