Page 15 of Falling for the Nanny

CAT

If I didn’t die of embarrassment, I was going to kill Alyssa. She had been the one to save his number in my phone, along with the long list of other phone numbers Mrs. Barnes gave me. Lily’s school, her classes, her closest friends’ parents, her pediatrician, her dentist. She’d shown it to me and laughed, and I had said, “Oh my God, Alyssa, change that right now. What if he or Lily see it?”

Clearly, she hadn’t changed it though because when I pulled my phone out of my pocket, my worst nightmare came true. There, emblazoned across my screen, were the words David HotDad King with the picture of him that Alyssa found on his company website. And the real thing was sitting in front of me, looking more and more pissed every second I delayed.

Unable to do anything else, I finally dropped my phone in his waiting hand and lifted my eyes to the ceiling, refusing to look at him.

There was a long, horrible silence.

“I see I was mistaken,” David said finally, his voice completely and utterly emotionless. “You do have my number saved.”

“My best friend did it as a joke,” I said to the ceiling. “Because that’s what they call you at the restaurant. When you came in every Friday, it was like, ‘Hot dad at table 42.’”

God, it was sounding worse the more I explained. I needed to just get out of here, kill Alyssa, get a good night’s sleep, and forget this ever happened. I finally risked looking at him again, hoping to see a twitch of a smile. Bland amusement. Anything. But his face was as unreadable as granite.

“It was a joke,” I stressed again and grabbed my phone back.

“I know.” David didn’t sound mad, but he shifted forward in his chair, his gaze intense. “But you are aware that Lily can read, aren’t you? How would you explain that joke to her, if she saw it?”

“She won’t see it,” I muttered, unlocking my phone and changing it right there. I fixed it and held the screen up for him to see.

In the brief moment that he moved his gaze from my face to the screen, I felt as though a weight was lifted off my chest. Just the force of his eyes on mine had made it hard to breathe. Now I felt oxygen hitting my brain again, and I could see how this situation looked through his eyes.

Here I was about to move into his house, drive his car, be solely responsible for the welfare and wellbeing of his daughter–and I’d been immature enough to have him saved as HotDad in my phone. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “That was unprofessional, and you might not believe this, but incredibly out of character.”

David’s gaze moved back to mine, and it instantly became more difficult to breathe again. He seemed to be looking for something, and I held eye contact, hoping he’d find it. Finally, he nodded imperceptibly and sat back. “I believe it,” he said. “I’ve seen you at work, remember? And your references from Little Tykes were impeccable. I wouldn’t have let Mrs. Barnes–I wouldn’t have hired you if I had any doubts.”

I didn’t miss his slip though. It confirmed what I had suspected–that Mrs. Barnes had chosen me and somehow convinced him to give me a chance. He hadn’t wanted to. There was no way I was mistaken about our first meeting. I opened my mouth to reassure him that I was going to take such good care of Lily that he didn’t need to ever worry about another slip, but before I could, David spoke again.

“I think it goes without saying, Cat, but you’re my employee. And there are lines I don’t cross. Ever. Especially when they would impact my daughter.”

I waited for the tidal wave of embarrassment to crash down on my head. I’d been here all of an hour, and already my boss felt like he had to explain to me that he could never be my boyfriend. But the wave never came, and it was because of the way he said it. There was no condescension or admonishment in his voice.

Maybe I was crazy, but I thought I’d heard a hint of regret.

I looked into his dark green eyes and nodded to show that I understood. I considered lying and telling him I had a boyfriend, but something stopped me. I didn’t want to lie to him. I didn’t want him to think that there was someone else.

I wanted him to regret that he couldn’t cross those lines.

* * *

My first week of work as Lily’s nanny was nerve wracking for a few reasons. The first thing was that I had trouble sleeping. I was used to sleeping through the symphony of life in a crowded suburb. The ever-present rumble of cars in the distance. The occasional shriek of tires, the revving roar of midnight drag racing. The sound of girls coming in late after a night out, muffled voices and shrill laughter.

Here, in this little slice of Great Falls paradise, there was only the soft chatter of the forest and the occasional bark of a dog in the distance to lull me to sleep. And it didn’t work. The first night, I tossed and turned, replaying over and over again in my head the look on David’s face as he saw his nickname in my phone. The way his eyes had risen forebodingly to mine.

He should have intimidated me.

He did intimidate me. But more than that, he intrigued me. I’d tried to get a hint from Mrs. Barnes about his dating life by asking whether there were any other regulars in the household.

“Never,” she had said.

I couldn’t believe it though. With eyes like that, he wouldn’t need a dollar to his name to bring women running. And with money like his, he could have been an ogre and they still would have come. The combination of his ruthless good looks and wealth was too potent for him to be sleeping alone. I decided he must just be very good at hiding it from Mrs. Barnes, which made sense because he’d be hiding it from Lily, too.

I fell asleep wondering what kind of women David slipped in and out of the house.

I woke up to Lily’s jam-packed schedule.

Lily attended a private school that I knew cost forty grand a year because I’d looked it up online. If I hadn’t known for sure, I still could have guessed. The school sat on a small campus about ten minutes from the house, and it didn’t look anything like the public school I’d attended in Reston. It looked like it had been plucked out of the English countryside with its ivy-covered brick walls, but on the inside, it was thoroughly modern, equipped with the kind of tech you usually saw in a Marvel movie. Cozy classrooms, some with fireplaces, held between six and eight kids. The students all wore uniforms, and the parents who dropped them off were all dressed to the nines even though it was only eight am. I was glad I’d done a run-through with Mrs. Barnes last week so I knew not to show up in anything less than a nice shirt and a full face of makeup.

---