Page 19 of Nanny for My Billionaire

“Hey Missy. Fuck you too,” Adam says, and the two of us start laughing so hard, I’m not sure she’s not going to cry.

“It’s the tension, Missy. I’m glad you are coming back in. I guess I just needed a few minutes and a dose of Gena to snap me back into reality.”

We each take two of her suitcases back out of the car and step inside with them. I guide Missy right past Gena, who looks insulted that I don’t stop right in the middle of what we are doing to accommodate her demands, but instead guide my so-called fiancée to the stairs. Missy wordlessly follows my lead and simply mounts the steps.

I am not surprised when Gena tries to follow, but Sara stops her.

“Let them put down the luggage first,” she tells her. “I think Miss is just a little upset at the moment, considering she didn’t think she’d ever meet you. Even you must understand that this whole thing is pretty weird for her.”

“I don’t care what some upstart little teenager thinks of me being here,” she practically shouts. “I mean, is that girl evenlegal?”

“That’s so rude!” Sara’s voice follows us up the stairs. “She’s just one of the lucky ones who doesn’t show her age!”

“What a bitch,” says Melissa as she sets her cases on my bed. “Why did you ever marry her in the first place?”

I snicker and whisper near her ear, “What can I say? I’m a sucker for really good blow jobs.”

“Asshole,” she mutters as she turns away from me and heads toward the door.

“That’s me,” I agree, as I follow her.

We return to the bottom of the stairs and I wrap an arm around Melissa’s waist, drawing her against my hip as we face Gena down.

Sara wordlessly gestures toward the playroom, where the boys have been left for at least fifteen minutes on their own, and scurries off before I can say anything to stop her. It’s probably just as well, or who knows what outlandish story she might come up with next?

“Okay, so this is Melissa, my fiancée,” I say to Gena. “I hope you’ve remembered enough manners to recall that you’re in someone else’s home, and you’re not in charge here. I’m not going to just stand here and let you abuse the woman I love.”

“Adam, honey, I’m not going to pick on your little girl,” she scoffs. “Hello, Melissa, I’m Gena Barlow, the mother of those two boys you’ve got designs on keeping. And I’m here to tell both of you that it’s not going to happen. I’m doing a movie right here in Boston, so for the foreseeable future I’m going to be nearby, watching you two. I hoped that we might have been able to come to some sort of a compromise, but I can see now that I underestimated your desperation, Adam. It’s clear to me that there’s going to be a need for mediation, because there’s no way I’m going to just let you keep my sons and raise them with this—child!”

“Lady, you need to go back under whatever rock you crawled out from and piss off,” Melissa tells her, as she balls up her fist. I’m not sure if she will actually hit Gena, but I stop her by tugging her into my arms. The last thing we need is for Gena to tell the judge that Melissa punched her. I don’t think having a partner would sway any judge if they thought that partner was violent.

“Come on, Miss, calm down,” I tell her. “We don’t need any trouble.”

“Nuts to that,” says Sara, who has overheard us and stormed back into the room. “Gena, you need to leave right now. The last thing you need is to be escorted out of my brother’s home by the cops, right? Because if you hope to get any time at all with those kids after the way you dropped them off, you’re gonna be fighting an uphill battle.”

She straightens her shoulders and glares at us. “Fine, I’ll go. For now. But don’t even think about trying to pull a fast one. Those kids are just as much mine as they are yours, Adam, and don’t you forget it.”

Chapter twelve

Melissa

Ican’tbelievewhathappened over the last hour, but at least I was able to return to my own suite of rooms once Gena had left the house. She had started demanding to see her kids first, but Adam wasn’t about to allow it. She left those kids behind seven months ago with no intention of ever seeing them again. There was no way he was going to allow her to breeze right back in.

As for this whole idea of pretending to be engaged, it seems to have really grown some wings. It wasn’t something we’d be able to do from two different houses, for starters. Then too, there was also the fact that right now there was no other nanny around willing to replace me. So, we quickly decided that I would have to stay put.

More importantly, we knew that to make it believable for anyone else, Ethan and Evan will also have to be told that their father and I are engaged. Once they go to school it won’t be too hard for Gena to get somebody to ask them about that, and we can’t afford to have any loose ends.

There’s no way I’m going to give up on my dream of starting a database business, though. Sure, I still have a bit of a nest egg waiting, but once the boys are in school, I’ll have several hours a day to kill, and working on my future sounds like the perfect way to fill that gap. Whether Rudolpho’s remains a client or not. When I brought it up, Adam told me to leave things as they are for now, but I got the feeling he didn’t know how all that would pan out over time.

The one thing we haven’t addressed is how we actually feel about each other. Because, at least from my perspective, I don’t think we should begin to touch that issue until we’ve had a chance to regroup. We both did things to hurt each other, but somehow that hasn’t stopped us from agreeing to play yet another game, except this time the stakes are a lot higher.

I just wish I knew if I’m playing for keeps, or if he’s going to kick me to the curb as soon as he has what he wants. And the truth is, I wouldn’t blame him if he did. There’s a big difference between complaining that you want a woman who wants to stay home instead of pursuing a career, and blatantly pretending to be somebody else just because—well, just because it sounded good at the time? I still have no real clue.

But I do know that Adam needs me, and I want to help. I mean, to be fair my endgame probably involves still being here with him and these kids once all the legalities are taken care of. So now I have a new mission, and that is to convince Adam that my little impersonation stunt was nothing but a lark, just to see how long it would take him to notice, even if that’s not totally true. I’m pretty sure that in large part I did it just because I’d missed him while I was gone, and if he didn’t realize who I was maybe we could get past that stupid argument without ever having to talk it out.

In a way, it sort of worked. I’m still here, and we’d agreed to forget all about it, right? And so far, he hasn’t shot down my business idea. Probably because he stands to benefit from it, of course, since otherwise he’d be stuck doing all that paperwork himself. He could hire someone, but I’m already here and still, maybe the best way to his heart might just be exactly what Sara suggested: make myself indispensable.

Sara has been hanging out with the boys all afternoon, but it’s about time for us to figure out dinner and introduce the engagement to them. And also, to somehow explain to them that I’m no longer Miss Anna, that they should probably just start to call me Miss, which is what I had the kids at my last job do since Miss Melissa or Miss Miss both sound stupid.

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