Page 72 of The Nanny is Off Limits

Isla gets up and comes over to hug me. “Only crayons in here.” I point to where she was previously lying. “No markers.” I give her a knowing look and she puts a hand over her mouth and giggles.

“Okaaaay!” She nods. “Will you wake me up when you get home?” This is the first time she’s asked me that and I try to ignore the way my heart squeezes in my chest at her request.

“It might be very late.”

She shrugs. “That’s okay.”

“If I don’t, I’ll see you first thing in the morning.”

“Okay.” She wraps her arms around my neck and presses a kiss to my cheek. “Bye, Ellie!”

“Bye, munchkin.”

A few hours later, I’m pulling up to the Italian restaurant that Rowan picked. It’s technically still the city but more on the outskirts; we didn’t want to go somewhere too close to home in case someone recognized us. We know there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with our new relationship, but we don’t want anything to get back to the kids before we talk to them about it, and as we quickly learned from the instance with SJ, it’s that parents talk and so do the kids.

I pull up to the valet, per Rowan’s…advisementbecause he didn’t want me walking around at night by myself after dealing with street parking in the city, and before I can even turn the car off, my door opens. I yelp, having not noticed anyone approaching the vehicle when I see Rowan’s breathtaking smile.

“Sorry, baby, I thought you saw me. I didn’t mean to scare you.” He holds his hand out for me to take.

“Were you outside waiting for me?”

“Of course.” He cups my chin and drags his thumb gently over my bottom lip. “Hi, beautiful.”

I get out of the car and he pulls me into his arms and presses his lips to mine. He slides his tongue against mine once, touching it lightly and then pulling away before either of us can try to deepen it. “Finally. I’ve been thinking about kissing you all day.” He runs a thumb over his own mouth and it amazes me that even his simplest moves are so fucking sexy. “I love when you wear this color. Is it on me?” he asks and I shake my head.

“No, it’s a stain. We’d have to do some heavy kissing for it to transfer to you.”

“Damn. I was hoping to have your mark on me.” He winks before dragging his fingers through my strands gently. “I love this.”

He hands the valet my keys and we make it inside and up a flight of stairs to our table that’s nestled in the corner up against a window that gives us a view of the waterfront. He helps me out of my jacket and the sharp intake of air I hear behind me is just the reaction I was going for. He moves to stand in front of me before taking a step back and dragging his eyes slowly up my frame. “You look beautiful.” He smiles. “Stunning actually.”

“Thank you,” I tell him as I take a seat.“You look really nice too.” He’s wearing an all-black suit and shirt without a tie, and the top two buttons of his shirt are undone. I just want to run my lips over the exposed skin. “Better than nice, actually.” I prop my head up on my hand and eye him up and down.This man can wear the hell out of a suit.

He bites his bottom lip and leans back in his chair. “Stop it, or we won’t make it out of the restaurant.”

After the waiter comes by to bring our water and take our drink order, I broach the subject I’ve been curious about. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything,” he says before taking a sip of his water.

“Can you tell me what happened?” I wince, nervously. “Why did you get divorced? I’m sorry if that’s insensitive.”

“It’s not. It’s natural for you to be curious and I’ve been waiting for you to ask.” He clears his throat. “There really wasn’t one specific thing but a lot of things. We just…fell out of love, I guess? We had kids and I started working like crazy and…I definitely didn’t prioritize her and our marriage; I’ll own that. She stopped wanting to be intimate and then I stopped trying. We started fighting all the time about everything…” he winces, “and then we kind of became complacent?” He looks a little nervous before he continues. “Very much between you and me, we were planning to separate after SJ, but one night, we’d gone to an event for my job, we’d been drinking, and one thing led to another and…then we had Isla. We lasted another two years after she was born and then one day, she told me she was moving out and I…didn’t try to stop her.”

“Did you ever try counseling?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t want to try and neither did she. I hadand haveso much respect for her as their mother, but we didn’t grow together. Not the way a successful marriage should. She wanted more from me and I didn’t have more to give. Looking back, I wonder if I should have tried more or if it would have made a difference. If maybe we had just gone too far down separate paths that we couldn’t come back together.” A look of disappointment crosses his face and I wonder if there’s any part of him that would have been willing to try again if she were still alive.

“Do you think you just didn’t like being married?”

“No, I loved the companionship and having someone to come home to and raise a family with. Sometimes certain marriages just don’t work.”

“I see.” I nod. “Do you see yourself getting married again?”

“I’m not ruling it out,” he says. “I know I’m probably not selling myself on being a great husband…” Someone brings us our drinks, setting his scotch in front of him and my cosmopolitan in front of me before they disappear quickly. “Neither of us were happy.”

“I get it.” I nod. “Well, that’s all I wanted to know.”Hardly. I did have some other questions but I didn’t want to ruin our one night of true privacy by talking about things that could wait.

“Now I have a question.” He leans forward, dragging a finger over my knuckles before he brings my hand to his mouth and kisses it gently. “I know there’s a pretty big age gap here and I have children and…I guess I just want to know where your head is at about all of this.”

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