Page 8 of Temptation at His Door

Three

She’d had five hours of sleep and it was nearly dinnertime when Joa made her way down to the kitchen on the ground floor of Mounton House. She looked around, saw no sign of Ronan Murphy’s boys and nodded, relieved.

“You just missed the boys. They left ten minutes ago,” Keely told Joa as she stepped into the room.

Dropping onto the wide window seat, Joa pulled her feet up and wrapped her arms around her knees. After leaving Murphy International she’d been too tired to fight with Keely about her managing ways and, honestly, a bit side winded by her red-hot attraction to Ronan Murphy.

But she knew she couldn’t let Keely’s bossiness go unchallenged so she tossed Keely a what-the-fudge? glare. “About your suggestion for me to look after Ronan’s kids... What the hell were you thinking, Keely?”

Keely put the kettle on the gas stove and reached for two mugs. “Chamomile or peppermint?” She didn’t look even remotely chastised by Joa’s deep frown.

“Peppermint.”

Keely dumped a bag into a bone china mug. “I know you, you’ll need to do something soon, Ju. You hate being idle. And Ronan needs a nanny. Where’s the problem?”

She loved Keely, she did, but at some point, Keely would have to realize that Joa was no longer a scared, insecure waif from the streets who needed decisions made for her. “And it didn’t cross your mind to ask me whether I wanted another au pair job?”

Keely leaned her butt against the counter and crossed her ankles. “I thought you liked being an au pair.”

She did. She liked the kids, she liked the unstructured environment, being able to go to work in shorts and flip-flops. But there was a big downside to her job and that was her inability to stop loving the family she was living with and, on more than one occasion, the man of the house.

She was done with being on the periphery of someone else’s family.

On her first au pair contract, she’d looked after the five-year-old son of Liam, an Australian gold mining magnate who’d gained custody after a bitter divorce. She’d been Liam’s shoulder to cry on, his best friend and, after five months, she was convinced that their friendship was heading toward something real, something deeper. Then Liam had met Angela, fallen head over heels for her and married her within three months of meeting her.

A year later Joa had gone to work for Johan, a German banker who was recently divorced from Hendrik, and she’d looked after the twin daughters they’d adopted from Vietnam. She knew he was gay, but she couldn’t stop herself from dreaming that she would become a permanent part of his life...

Johan had been smart enough to recognize her crush and gently suggest she move on, telling her that there was no possibility, ever, of them being more than friends. She’d taken a break and traveled for a while, before accepting a job with the Wilson family. Dave was married, she rationalized; she’d never fall in love with a married man.

She hadn’t fallen for Dave; she’d fallen forallof them. Annie became a close friend and quickly became a second sister, and their kids were smart, funny and interesting. Joa had loved working for them—not that it felt like work!—and for the first time in her life, she’d felt like part of a functional family unit.

She’d felt secure and safe. And loved. Now, in hindsight, she knew that her attraction to Liam and Johan had been a rationalization for her need to be part of their family, her desire to be loved and needed. She adored her bosses because they were good men and excellent fathers. They put their children first. Something neither her parents nor her foster parents had ever done for her.

On leaving New Zealand, feeling discarded and tossed aside—her fault, not the Wilsons’—Joa knew she couldn’t repeat her past mistakes. She needed to switch careers, to find a job or a passion that didn’t involve families and kids.

She had two choices: she could come to terms with being single and childless or she could actively look for someone to create a life with, to have children with.

Both scenarios terrified her.

She didn’t want to be alone, but neither did she want to risk rejection.

Devil and the deep blue sea...

“Ronan is a good guy who is going through a difficult time, Joa.” Keely pulled her back to the present.

“The guy is rich and successful. He can afford to hire the best nanny in the city,” Joa argued. Respectfully, his hard time wasn’t her problem.

Keely wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know what it is with him but he always, always seems to hire the wrong people. Since Lizbeth, he’s been a magnet for bad nannies.”

Joa knew there were a lot of weird people out there—she always insisted on a two-week trial period and had left two families when it didn’t work out—and not every nanny was Mary Poppins.

But she still wasn’t the person for the job.

“I don’t want to au pair anymore, Keels. I really want to try something different.”

Keely placed her pointed chin in her hand. “Why? You have a master’s degree in child psychology and you are so good with kids.”

Joa wished she could explain how she insinuated herself into other people’s lives. It wasn’t healthy and it wasn’t...right. And she wasn’t doing that anymore.

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