Page 1 of The Unexpected Nanny
Chapter One
Aiden
Laughter was all I could hear as my little, three-year-old daughter, Joy ran through the aisles of the children’s toy store I’d taken her to for her birthday. With no idea what to buy her, I decided to bring her so she could pick out exactly what she wanted. Not that she needed a damn thing. Her playroom was full of things. But birthdays merit presents, so there we were.
As a single father of a little girl, I often found myself wondering what Joy wanted. I sometimes erred on the side of too girly for her at times. She had a streak of tomboy in her I could already see. She wasn’t a thing like her mother had been.
Joy’s mother, my wife of four years, met with an early death that nearly had me losing my daughter as well. The two had gone on a boat ride with a friend of my wife, Tanya’s. A male friend I knew nothing about. Nor did I know they were going out on his sailboat that day. I found that out when I was visited by a set of police officers at my home where I’d barricaded myself in my study to finish the novel I’d been working on.
It was they who told me they needed me to come with them to the hospital. My wife and daughter had been in a boating accident. It had capsized when a sudden storm came up. All they knew for certain was that the coast guard had been called, the people on the boat were found, and two out of three of them were dead. One was hanging on by a thread after drowning but had been resuscitated by one of the coast guards. The officers apologized to me as they knew nothing more than that.
They found me by finding a small, zippered, plastic bag that was found in my wife’s pocket that had her identification, her cell phone, and a business card with my name and information on it. Also on that card was a picture of me, holding our one-year-old as I had my arm wrapped around my wife, giving the authorities the knowledge they’d gained about who I was to the victims.
To say my heart was in my throat the entire way to the hospital just doesn’t begin to describe how I was handling the news. Numb, mostly was how I felt. Dizzy, sick at my stomach, and praying that by some miracle I would get to the hospital to find them both alive, instead of only one of them.
My prayers went unanswered that day. I was taken to the lowest floor of the hospital first. There I found my wife when they pulled out a stainless-steel tray from a small door on the wall that was full of them. Her wedding ring was still on her finger. The helpful doctor pulled it off and placed it in my hand as he said, “Can you identify the man who was found with them for us? He didn’t have any identification on him. We don’t know who to call about his death.”
I didn’t really want to see another dead person, but I suppose that little thing most of us have inside our brains that tells us to be helpful no matter what our problems might be had me saying, “Sure.”
Leaving my blue-skinned wife with soaked, stringy brown hair where she was, the doctor opened another little door and out came a man I did recognize. “That’s the guy who cuts our grass. Julio. His family lives on the south side of Miami. I think I have his card at home in a drawer in the kitchen. I can call you with it when I get back home, I guess.”
“Could you possibly have someone go find that?” one of the officers asked me. “It’s pretty important to notify the family as soon as possible.”
“I guess there’s no one better to trust than a cop. If I give you the code to get in and tell you where to find the card, can you go take care of that? I mean, my daughter’s here, somewhere. I may not leave here for a while.” I realized then that I was too calm.Way too calm!
When the doctor handed me the plastic bag that had been in my wife’s pocket, and I saw her cell inside of it, I placed my hand on one of the officer’s arms. He looked at it then at me. “You okay?”
“No,” I said then, as it felt as if the floor was moving in waves under my feet. “Not at all.”
I suppose they caught me when I passed out. I had never fainted in my life. And when I woke up to find the three men looking at me, and the doctor shining a light in my eyes, I sobbed. And I continued to keep crying even as they helped me to sit up on the cold floor of the morgue.
Even though I was beyond distraught, I had an idea the cops could find Julio’s phone number on my wife’s cell. “Take out her phone and see if Julio’s name is on her contact list.”
One of the officers did as I’d said and when he looked at the phone, I could see it written all over his face as he said, “Yes, here’s his personal cell and his home phone. And there’s a text here. It’s… Oh, nothing. Anyway, I have the number to his home. Let me make the call. Do you think you should be seen by a doctor, Mr. Cooper?”
“I don’t know what I need. I believe it might help me to see my daughter.” I was picked up and helped to the bathroom where the very nice officers helped me wash my face, and pull myself together a bit. Then they escorted me to the elevator. “You read something in her text messages about her and him, didn’t you?”
“That’s nothing you need to focus on right now, Mr. Cooper. You have a daughter to worry about. Focus only on that. For now, she’s the only thing in this world that matters,” one of the men said to me. And he was right.
It was about two days later before I allowed myself to look at my wife’s phone and her texts. She and Julio had been having sex for about a month it seemed. He too was married, and I didn’t feel it necessary to let that poor young woman know about the affair. Why hurt her?
She was naïve and never asked why my wife and kid were out with her husband on his boat. Either it never occurred to her it wasn’t something people did with the guy who cuts their grass or she was one of those women who hide their head in the sand about their husband’s infidelities. I just wished I could’ve been as naïve as she was.
Instead, I was driven to find out everything I could about what my wife had done. My daughter was recuperating in the hospital, and I found myself going through everything Tanya owned. Her laptop was the motherload of information. Emails had been exchanged by the lovers.
There was even one about divorcing me, taking half of everything I had worked so hard for and running off with him, taking my baby with them. It’s safe to say, if those two hadn’t perished in a tragic accident then I might’ve ended up in prison for murdering them both. So, like they say, some tragedies are meant to happen.
At least my daughter was going to live, and she and I could make our own happy family.Fuck her cheating whore of a mother!
In the two years that passed after Tanya’s death, I made my daughter, Joy, my entire life. I’d written a few books that did really well and gave me a nice nest egg. So, I could take an extended vacation to settle into my life as a single dad to a daughter I adored.
But that nest egg was running low, and it was time for me to get back on the hamster wheel of writing. My work had given us a very nice lifestyle, and I wasn’t about to lose it all because I hadn’t gotten my shit completely together. My libido was zilch, my mind was blank, and my inspiration was nada.
Somehow, I had to make the magic in my head work again. I knew it was a thing I needed to do, but I had no idea how to do it. So, when my little girl started jumping up and down and screaming that she wanted a toy that was up too high for me to reach, I went looking for someone to help me get it down, and I found a surprise that would change our lives.
Chapter Two
Skye
