Page 44 of Beau Pair
Gordon
“This is weird, right?” I ask.
Beau straps Elsie in the backseat and looks at me through the rearview mirror.
“What is?” he asks.
“This,” I say. “You, me. Elsie. You being my daughter’s babysitter. My student.”
“It’s very weird,” he says, and the sinking sensation at the pit of my stomach returns. “But weird is good. Weird is fun.”
Beau shuts the backdoor and joins me in the front.
“But… I’m paying you to be in my house and look after Elsie. This is stupid. And awkward. I’ve… I’ve taken advantage of you,” I insist.
I’m not having second thoughts, but with Elsie back in the house and with both of us going back to our “routine”—if we can call it that considering we’d only been doing the babysitting thing for no more than two weeks—it just feels surreal.
Yep, definitely not second thoughts. Being with Beau is the kind of medicine one doesn’t know they need until they have it. But now that Elsie is here, part of my brain is back where it’s supposed to be. My head.
“You aren’t taking advantage of me,” Beau says, and puts his seatbelt on.
“But how? I’m paying you. It’s like I’m paying you for… and you couldn’t say no because then you’d have no job or house.” My breath quickens and everything is starting to go blurry.
What if he reports me to the university? Then my career as a professor is definitely over. And I’d still need a fucking nanny to look after Elsie. This is a whole mess. Why does my dick still dictate my decisions after forty-seven years? Haven’t I learned anything by now?
“Would you kick me out if I refused you?” he asks, and rests his hand on my thigh.
“No!” I snap my head to look at him and reassure him.
“And that is one of the many reasons I like the hell out of you,” he says. “You didn’t take advantage. You even caught me… you know. I wasn’t doing it because I have a kink for sniffing underwear. It’s because you make me crazy… excited, and I was trying to have a piece of you without…mucking up my job. But you like me too, right?”
He looks so cute, how he pauses before he says anything inappropriate and casts a glance at the backseat. Or how big his smile is when he says he likes me. Even the concern in his eyes when he asks me if I like him back.
“I-I do. A lot,” I admit, and I feel like a fucking teenager admitting my crush to someone for the first time.
Beau beams, and he leans over but then stops before he gets to my lips.
“Do you… not want me to do that in front of her?” he asks.
Ideally, I wanted this, him and me, to be a secret for as long as it lasts—because it’s not going to last, is it? Let’s be realistic. Ideally, he wouldn’t be my au pair and wouldn’t live with me, so it’d be less crazy when all of this ends. But since we are already in this weird situation and Dolly knows about us, then what the hell?
I answer him by closing the distance between us and giving a quick, chaste kiss.
“It’s fine,” I tell him.
At best, Elsie learns that Beau is part of the family—for now, anyway—and that Daddy likes him.
At worst, she sees me happy for a little while.
Until Beau moves on to his next conquest.
“See? The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t rain comets. The sun didn’t explode,” he says, looking out of the windshield.
“It’s still early,” I tell him with a smirk, and he gives me a gentle slap on the cheek.
“This will only be weird if we make it. So, let’s not,” he says, squeezing my thigh and making the parts between my legs tighten.
“You’re right. We’re both adults,” I agree, and turn the car engine on. “Which reminds me, I’m gonna ask one of my colleagues to take over your assessment. I hope… you don’t mind if I tell him it’s because you’re my au pair? I don’t want to air my dirty laundry at the university just yet.”
