Page 57 of Falling for the Nanny

Cat pulled her hands back off the table before I could reach them. “Just tell me whether we have a deal or not,” she said.

I took a deep breath and left mine, palms down on the table, halfway between us. “No. We don’t have a deal.”

Cat’s eyes widened. She had been so sure that I would agree, but I couldn’t figure out why the hell she thought I’d sign off on never touching her or really talking to her again. Unless she was convinced that what I had told McMann in the bar was the truth.

She didn’t mean anything.

She was just convenient.

Part of me thought that she must have known, on some level, that I was bullshitting, but now I realized that she didn’t. She believed it.

That gave me a place to start.

“Cat, what you overheard in the bar…” I shook my head, sick with disgust. “I shouldn’t have said it. Not a single word was true. I just wanted McMann to go the fuck away.”

She made a noise I couldn’t decipher, but the look on her face wasn’t promising.

I pushed on. “The last twenty-four hours have been hell. All I’ve thought about since that moment is finding you. I need to tell you how sorry I am that you heard it. If I could do it all again…”

“You’d have said it more quietly?” Cat asked, cold steel in her voice.

“I wouldn’t have said it at all!”

She tilted her head, her golden-brown hair sliding off one shoulder, her blue eyes skeptical. “And what would you have said?”

I took a deep breath and pressed my fingertips into the cool surface of the glossy wood between us. Here it was. The moment when I signed my name to the contract that would seal my fate, one way or another.

“It’s not what I would have said to McMann,” I said quietly. “It’s what I should have said to you, but I didn’t because I was a coward.”

Her head was still tilted, but something in her expression shifted, froze. I had the sense that she was holding her breath, waiting.

I reached across the table for her hand, and this time, she didn’t pull away. It was limp in mine, but it was there.

“I should have told you that I love you, Cat. Because I do.”

CHAPTER 33

CAT

I heard the words, but instead of sinking down into my heart and healing the wounds that his other words had opened, they settled on the surface. A cool compress against a burning forehead, but not a cure. I wanted so badly to believe them, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The scar tissue was too thick.

David could read the skepticism on my face. He squeezed my hand tighter, leaning forward imploringly. “I mean it, Cat. I don’t know when it started but I knew it when we went to Busch Gardens, and I should have told you then, but I was a coward.”

“You keep saying that.” My voice sounded strange to my own ears, not like mine. Cool, remote, almost disinterested. “What were you so afraid of?”

He lifted his wide shoulders. “My past with Chloe. How a relationship with you would look to outsiders. How it could affect Lily. Any of those things. All of them. But most of all, you.”

“Me? Why?” It was the most surprising thing he could have said to me. The other things, I could have guessed, but it defied logic that David could have been scared of me. He was the intimidating one with the wealth and the power and the fact he had to know he was irresistible to women.

“Because if I admitted I was in love with you, and you left me like Chloe did, it would…” David’s jaw tightened as he looked for the right word. “...hurt. And maybe I’ve spent my whole life in relationships that didn’t have that ability.”

“To hurt you?” I clarified.

He nodded tersely.

I thought of Alyssa and Parker and the motley collection of reasons tying them together, none of which was love.

“Even Chloe?”

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