Page 33 of Falling for the Nanny

“What are you thinking?” he asked, sensing my churning emotions.

I was thinking a lot of things. Wondering. Fearing. Hoping. But I pushed them all away and reached out to touch his lips. “I was thinking that it’s not even midnight.”

David’s eyes darkened. “And I did say we had all night. I think the rule was that we go slower this time.”

“You did,” I agreed. I pushed closer to him, rising up on one elbow to kiss him from above. “And you know how good we are at following the rules.”

His arms came up around me, and I sank into him.

Maybe we didn’t have a future, but at least we had all night.

CHAPTER 20

DAVID

We’d done it. We’d crossed a line we couldn’t come back from. But with Cat’s warm body pressed against mine, I couldn’t bring myself to regret it. Not yet anyway.

The clock on the nightstand glowed the time in pale blue numerals. I watched them tick by as she slept and tried to figure out what the hell we were going to do next. What new rules could we put in place? What consequences would matter enough to stop us? We’d had every reason not to find ourselves in this position in the first place, and none of them had mattered enough.

The trouble was–there was no clear way forward. I couldn’t fire her because I wanted to sleep with her. She would hate me, and Lily would never understand. But I couldn’t date a woman on my payroll. Even if she wasn’t an employee of my company, and I didn’t have an HR department to tell me so, it was intrinsically wrong.

The only smart choice was to end it now before it got more complicated.

I stayed awake all night. I was no stranger to operating on little to no sleep. When I was building my company, all nighters had been par for the course. When Lily was born, I was the one who walked the halls with her at night, soothing her back to sleep. It had been a while since I’d seen the sun come up, but it was still a familiar sight. The windows lightning behind the curtains. The warble of bird song as watery gray light filled the room.

Cat shifted beside me, and I knew the moment she opened her eyes because she went very still beside me. I turned to look at her and found her smiling.

“You stayed,” she whispered.

“I told you I would.”

There was a tense undercurrent to my voice that made the smile slide from her face. She pushed up on one elbow and looked down at me. “And you’ve spent all night thinking about what a bad idea it was,” she guessed.

“Not all night.”

She blew out her breath in a disappointed sigh. “David, it’s done. I know it’s complicated, but we’re both consenting adults. Can’t we just…enjoy it?”

I couldn’t help laughing grimly at that. “Cat, if you don’t think I enjoyed it, you’re still delirious.”

She smiled again, encouraged by my laughter. “Then can’t you stop running the numbers on all the ways this could be a mistake and just have fun?” She sat up, too, light dawning in her eyes. “Let’s make new rules.”

I raised my eyebrows skeptically. “You mean because the first set worked out so well?”

“You created the loophole,” Cat reminded me, nodding her chin toward the discarded twist of black fabric on the floor. “We won’t do that this time. And these will be rules we can actually follow because they’ll allow…” she bit her lip and trailed her finger down my leg. The light scrape of her nail on my skin activated every nerve in my body. “Benefits,” she finished.

Her touch knocked out that part of my brain that might have warned this wouldn’t work out either, and I was glad. I didn’t want to think about that anymore. I captured her hand. “Benefits?”

Cat looked up at me from beneath her eyelashes. “Rule one, we never let Lily find out.”

“That’s a given.” I skimmed my hand over her cheek and into her hair.

“Rule two, we both agree on what this is.” She let her eyes wander from my face down to my bare chest.

“And what is that, exactly?”

Cat shrugged. “Just pure animal attraction. That’s all.”

I wasn’t sure that was all, but I was willing to go along with it. I pressed her back down against the pillows. Her hair fanned out across them, silkier than the pillowcases. “What’s rule number three?”

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