Marrying the Northbridge Nanny (3 page)

Logan smoothed the little girl’s hair lovingly and then nodded toward the door to let Meg know they should leave.

In the hallway outside Tia’s room Logan pulled the door closed slightly and whispered, “We’ve been reading that same book and saying those same things every night for at least the last year but no one gets away without it.”

“Bedtime routines are important for kids,” Meg said. “They can almost be like a sleeping pill.”

He nodded as if she wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know, and Meg wanted to kick herself for doing the second thing she’d vowed not to do with him—hide her introversion by saying everything as if it were a pearl of wisdom handed down from the mount of her education and experience.

But it was too late to do anything about it and so she just went with him downstairs.

Hadley was turning off the television in the living room when they got to the entry. Meg had left her luggage there before going up to watch Logan put Tia to bed but now there wasn’t a suitcase in sight.

Before she could ask about it, Hadley said, “I took your things out to the apartment—I thought I’d save you guys that much.”

“Thanks.” This from Logan.

To Meg, Hadley said, “I think you’ll love the apartment. I know I do. Logan put a lot of his own personal touches on it—and in it. He did everything but the plumbing and electrical work himself. He designed the cutest kitchen table, the couch and easy chairs are his, and the bed is one of his signature pieces, too.”

“I can’t wait to see it,” Meg answered honestly, pretending not to notice how uncomfortable his sister’s praise was making Logan.

“No reason to wait,” he said then, as if he were in a hurry to get out of the situation. “Come on, I’ll show it to you.”

“I left the door unlocked,” Hadley called as they headed for the rear of the house.

Still, Meg saw Logan grab a set of keys from one of the countertops as they passed through the dated but clean kitchen space. “These are yours,” he told her, handing them to her. “There’s a key to the apartment, keys to the front and back door of this house, and one that will get you into the barn. The only thing you don’t have a key to is Chase’s place, but I didn’t think you’d ever need that,” he explained.

“I know this place belonged to the Ludwigs before I left Northbridge,” she said as Logan held the back door for her and she stepped into the warm summer evening air. “Did you buy the whole farm?”

“What was left of it to buy,” Logan said, following her out. “Chase—Chase Mackey, I don’t know if you knew or remember him…”

“The name is familiar but that’s about it. He was your age, too, right? I was kind of oblivious to you all.”

“Yeah, Chase is the same age as me. He’s my business partner. And like a brother to me. Anyway, we bought the property that was left after most of it had been sold off in parts. I guess after old man Ludwig died his kids put the farm as a whole on the market. But when there were no buyers they started selling off parcels of land to the surrounding farms. The house, the garage, the barn and the four acres they sit on were harder to move. But they just happened to meet our needs—
personal and business—so Chase and I bought them,” Logan explained as they crossed the backyard.

“I can tell the house has been freshly painted inside and out—”

“It didn’t need much more work than that. But the garage and the barn are a different story,” Logan said with a nod at the garage as they approached it. “The lower level of the garage will still be garage, but we added the apartment—that wasn’t there at all originally. The barn will house our work- and showrooms, plus Chase and I have been putting a loft apartment in the upper half of that for him.”

The garage and the barn were side by side behind the house—the barn directly behind it, the garage off to the left at the end of the driveway that veered around the farmhouse. Not much distance separated any of it and they’d reached the garage where a whitewashed wooden staircase ran up one side to a private entrance to the apartment.

Logan motioned for Meg to go ahead of him. At the landing she opened the door and went in without waiting for him to do the honors. Hadley had left a table lamp on, so Meg’s first glimpse of the place was well lit and as Logan came in after her, she said, “This is beautiful!”

And it was. Every detail from the oak cupboards to the chair rails to the hardwood floors to the one wall that was painted a rustic red shouted class and taste and attention to detail. It was so much more than a thrown-together garage apartment—which was what Meg had been afraid it might be.

“I’m glad you like it,” Logan responded simply,
humbly, but in a way that made Meg think that he genuinely
was
glad he’d pleased her.

But she told herself she was probably reading more into that than actually existed, and began to wander around to look at everything close-up, thankful that she wasn’t going to be living somewhere awful and loving the place so much she wanted to hug him.

Another unwarranted thought. And urge.

No playing with him, no hugging him,
she warned herself.

He showed her the bathroom and the closet, then gave her a tour of the kitchen—reminding her that he was hoping that rather than use it too much she would be eating in the house with Tia, Hadley and himself.

“You could have just not put in a kitchen—that would have made eating with you guys a necessity,” she pointed out.

“Not my style.”

There was something sexy in the way he said that that made her wonder what his style was.

But thinking of Logan McKendrick as sexy was another item on Meg’s List Of Don’ts. She instantly added wondering what his style was to that same list.

“So, satisfy some curiosity for me, will you?” he asked then, interrupting her internal struggle to keep her mind on the straight and narrow.

“Sure,” she agreed.

“With all your degrees and a big-deal job in Denver, how is it that you’re signing on to be Tia’s nanny?”

It was a logical question that she’d been expecting. That she had a ready answer for that didn’t reveal too much.

“At Children’s Hospital I see kids with all kinds of problems that are so much bigger than finding
Grilla
in the packing boxes or making sure everyone says good night, moon. I want to help them. I like helping them. But it’s been a pretty steady dose of nothing but that for a while now and I just thought that I needed a little of the lighter side of kids for a change to recharge my battery.”

He was watching her while she recited that. Studying her. And she could see in his handsome face that he wasn’t completely buying it. But it was true. It just wasn’t the whole story and she wasn’t willing to tell him the rest. That would have to satisfy him.

And rather than saying any more, she countered with a question of her own.

“What about you? I don’t know a lot about Mackey and McKendrick Furniture Designs but my sister, Kate, sends me the local newspaper and I did see an article—one of those Northbridge-boys-make-good things. I thought you’d built your business and your whole life in New York and Connecticut, but here you are.”

He shrugged those broad shoulders. “It’s a return to our roots,” he said, giving her the sense that he was holding back, too. Quite a bit, if she were to make a guess.

But he hadn’t pushed her so she didn’t push him.

And as if they’d come to that by some kind of silent agreement, he nodded then, and said, “I’ll leave and let you get started unpacking.”

He headed for the door and Meg went with him, taking in the full and fabulous view of him from behind. His T-shirt outlined every muscle and his jeans molded a rear end that her hands inexplicably itched to cup.

“By the way,” he said when he reached the door and was halfway across the threshold, turning around to look at her again. “If you want to bring Tia up here and spend tomorrow settling in, you can hold off a day or two before you get to her room. She’s not really suffering the loss of Grilla, she’s just peeved that she doesn’t have him, so waiting a little longer isn’t going to make any difference, and you might as well get comfortable before you dig into her stuff.”

“That would be good. And are you really okay if I use visiting you while you work as a reward?”

“Sure. You’ll see when you come out to the barn that the showroom is what you go into first—the workroom is behind it. Just holler to let me know you’re there and I’ll come out so Tia doesn’t get near anything dangerous. But you can come anytime—feel free.”

He made that sound like an invitation to her, not just as permission to bring Tia. But that probably wasn’t what he’d intended. They were just two people with one aim—to care for his daughter—and Meg told herself that she needed to stop reading too much into things. The same way she needed to stop noticing every little detail about him and finding something sexy in them all.

She didn’t understand what was going on with her. It wasn’t something she’d ever done before with anyone else. And if ever there was a wrong time, place, situation or person, this was it!

So she did a mental pulling-in-on-the-reins, again hoping that her reaction to him had something to do with novelty and that when she got to know Logan better she’d be able to take him more in stride.

“I appreciate the open-door policy, but I won’t abuse it. I have a lot of tricks up my sleeves when it comes to getting children to behave and comply—rewarding Tia with a visit to you will only be one of them,” she told him, hearing the formality that had crept into her tone but unable to stop it because it was just something she was accustomed to hiding behind the way Tia had hidden behind Logan tonight.

He must have caught the slight alteration of tone, though, because his eyebrows beetled together slightly. But he didn’t say anything about it.

Instead he merely went on. “Tia isn’t one of those crack-of-dawn kids—she’ll usually sleep until eight or nine, so you can take your time coming over in the morning. Unless you’re an early riser and you need coffee—there will be a pot brewed long before Tia is up and you’re welcome to it.”

Meg imagined going over at sunrise to start her day with him alone, in the quiet of the morning, just the two of them…

Much, much too appealing a thought!

“Let’s just see how it goes,” she said noncommittally, hating how more of that aloofness had echoed in her voice.

“Sure. Whatever,” Logan said, those furrows in his brow deepening.

Then he said good-night and left, and once again Meg wanted to kick herself.

One minute she’d been friendly, the next she’d been evasive, the next she’d talked like a textbook—if he was worried that he’d hired some kind of nut job he had good reason.

She was just so all over the place when it came to him.

But tomorrow was another day, she consoled herself. It was her first day of work, when her complete focus would be on Tia.

That would probably help, she told herself.

No, not
probably
, that would
have
to help.

Because she’d come here to get herself back on track.

Not to hook up with a hot hunk.

“O
h-oh, look-ut Harry did….”

At the sound of Tia’s voice, Meg stopped putting clothes in a dresser drawer and glanced around to find that the puppy had gone into the apartment’s bathroom, grabbed the end of the toilet paper and unrolled it all the way out into the living room.

“Harry, not again!” Meg complained because it was the third time the puppy had done that.

Despite the repeat performance, Tia thought it was hilarious. And as much of a nuisance as the mess was, the fact that it delighted the three-year-old made it worth it to Meg. That kind of simple joy was part of why she was there—it was actually part of what she was hoping to find in this job that was her self-prescribed therapy.

Tia knew the drill by then—she grabbed Harry to
keep him from running wild and unrolling even more of the paper while Meg tore off what he’d slobbered on, threw it away, and re-rolled the rest. By the time she’d done that and come out of the bathroom—again leaving the door open to accommodate Tia’s instant dashes there when she decided at the last minute that she needed to use the facilities—a giggling Tia was sitting on the floor with Max licking her face.

Meg could have left the puppies at the house while she and Tia were at the garage apartment unpacking. But where Tia went, the puppies wanted to go, too, and Meg hadn’t had the heart to separate them. Still, it had made settling in a slow process and by late Monday afternoon—after spending the entire day trying to empty her suitcases and the boxes she’d taken from the trunk of her car—she was still only about half finished.

“Are we done yet?” Tia asked when Max and Harry began to wrestle with each other and ignore her.

“Just a little while longer and then it will be time to go back to the house to get ready for dinner. I have a present for you, though, since you’ve been so good today and let me get some of my work done.”

“A present?” Tia repeated.

She sounded wide-eyed but Meg couldn’t actually see the little girl’s eyes because they were covered with a pair of old sunglasses Meg had let her have. They completed the dress-up ensemble that included one of Meg’s scarves and two of her belts wrapped around Tia’s T-shirt and shorts, and a pair of Meg’s thong panties worn like a backpack with Tia’s shoulders through the leg openings. Meg had no idea what Tia thought the
panties were, but since the three-year-old had devised her own use for them and not asked about their real purpose, Meg had not offered the information.

“What kind of present?” Tia asked coyly.

This particular present was one of Meg’s favorite tools and she was surprised that Tia had been distracted and entertained with other things for so long that it had taken until now for Meg to need to bring it out. Ordinarily, with the kids she worked with, she needed to use the tools at her disposal immediately.

She was also thrilled that it hadn’t taken more than today for Tia to become comfortable with her—she was accustomed to kids who were so disabled, fearful, phobic, angry, upset or just plain leery of strangers that it took far longer to win them over.

“It’s kind of a big present,” Meg answered her charge’s question in a tone intended to intrigue.

“How big?” Tia inquired, going for the bait.

“Pretty big,” Meg said as she went to the bed. She’d hidden the gift under it when she’d taken it out of her trunk last night after having brought her car around to park it nearer to the apartment—something Hadley had come across the yard to suggest after Logan had left, making Meg wonder why he hadn’t come back himself.

Not that it mattered…

“It’s too big a present to wrap,” she warned Tia as she got down on her knees and pulled out the mini trampoline.

“What is it?” Tia asked when she saw it.

Meg positioned it next to the bed so the mattress could act as a sort of guardrail. “It’s called a trampoline.”

“What d’ya do with it?”

Meg stepped onto it and demonstrated. “You jump on it.”

This time Tia’s awe was more apparent because her mouth opened wide.

“Le’me do it!” Tia demanded, jumping up and down on the floor in an excited mimicry of Meg’s demonstration on the trampoline. And again Meg appreciated the fact that it was so easy to interest Tia, to excite her, and that she was so willing to plunge right into even new things.

Meg stepped off the trampoline and before she could offer any assistance, Tia had climbed onto it.

“First let’s get some of this stuff off of you—you could trip on the ends of the belts and the scarf, and the sunglasses will go flying,” she explained.

“But not my pitty cape,” Tia said, patting one of the thong’s straps at her shoulder.

“Not your pretty cape,” Meg agreed. “You can keep that on as long as we’re up here but it will have to stay in the apartment when we leave.” Because there was no way she was taking Tia to dinner wearing her flowered thong…

While Meg divested Tia of the rest of her playthings, the little girl could hardly contain herself. When she’d finished, Meg said, “Now hold my hands and take little jumps at first, until you get the feel of it.”

Tia didn’t hesitate to do as she’d been told—anything to finally get to do what she was wiggling around in eager anticipation of. But the exact moment her tiny hands were securely in Meg’s, Tia jumped. Tentatively at first, giggling, then jumping more.

“I yike it!” she proclaimed, venturing a higher jump, wobbling slightly on the landing but not enough to fall.

Then she got braver still and began to jump repeatedly. Up and down, up and down—she was clearly a quick learner, and after a few minutes of that said, “Le’me do it myself.”

By then Meg thought Tia knew what she was doing and since the trampoline was barely a foot off the floor with nothing nearby that the little girl could fall into and hurt herself, Meg allowed her to let go of her hands.

“Now go back,” Tia ordered, her three-year-old independence making her insist that Meg not continue to hover.

But Meg only went as far as to sit on the bed. She still wanted to keep an eye on the little girl until she was sure Tia could manage the trampoline without incident, but she was also enjoying watching how much pleasure it was bringing the happy-go-lucky Tia. That was more important to her than unpacking.

This was exactly why she’d taken the nanny job—to have contact again with an untroubled, carefree kid. A kid who experienced unfettered joy over things like the dog unraveling toilet paper, who had no compunctions about innocently wearing a thong as a makeshift cape, who got a thrill out of jumping on a tiny trampoline.

Things like that were what had made Meg enjoy working with kids in the first place. Prior to taking on the job of dealing with the serious aspects of ill, disabled or abused children, being with kids had just been fun. It had been a way for her to get out of the shell of her shy, reserved nature and behave more freely herself.

And that had been important to her. Especially since
she worried that her shy, reserved nature made her a little too much like her grandfather, the stuffy former town reverend.

Not that she was in any way as judgmental or staunch or strident or daunting as the Reverend was. But she did tend toward being a bit on the controlled side, and she’d discovered early on that working with kids helped counteract that. And right now she needed that more than she ever had.

In fact, if she didn’t find a way to accomplish it, she wasn’t sure that she could go on doing her job as a psychologist anymore.

Intellectually, she knew what she was going through—it was a reaction to a traumatic event. But she was concerned that if she didn’t do something to work through it in a hurry, her inhibited, reticent, shy nature might take over and she might not ever lose the jitters or the skittishness she’d developed. The jitters and the skittishness that made her jump at even the smallest unexpected sound or every time one of her kids came near her without warning. She was worried this fearfulness might make her as suspicious and untrusting as her grandfather was, that she would end up distant and off-putting and untouchable.

Why did the image of Logan McKendrick pop into her mind when she thought about how much she didn’t want to be untouchable?

It wasn’t as if she was there to be touched by the man who was her boss. Or by any other man, for that matter.

She had things to sort out. Things that had put her at a critical juncture in her life, in her career. There was
no way she needed the additional complication of romance with anyone, let alone someone who was employing her to take care of his daughter.

And his daughter was another component of that. Tia could potentially be hurt by something like her nanny having a fling with her father. It was one thing for the McKendricks to include Meg and
treat
her like family, but it was another thing to play house and give Tia a false sense of a family that didn’t really exist.

And yet the thought that she wouldn’t want Logan to see her as untouchable lingered the same way his image and the strong sense of him had stayed with her since he’d left last night…

Maybe that lingering image and sense of him came from the fact that there was so much of him in this apartment. A sort of essence of him left in his handiwork and in the personal touches that almost seemed like a brand on the place. He’d built it, for crying out loud. And not only had he furnished it, he’d furnished it with pieces he’d designed, pieces he’d created himself.

Just then Tia jumped too near the springs and lost her balance for a split second before she regained it and went on the way she had been.

It seemed to Meg that that was what she was going through herself—she’d lost her balance and now she was back in Northbridge, working with Tia, to regain her own equilibrium.

And regardless of how terrific-looking Logan was, how sexy, how appealing he could be when he was holding his daughter on his lap or reading to her or gently kissing her good-night and tucking her in, appre
ciating him as a good dad was as far as anything was going to go with him.

Because nothing could be more unbalancing than a relationship with a man and that was the last thing she needed right now.

“I’ll walk out with you.”

“Okay,” Meg agreed much too easily when Logan made that suggestion late Monday evening.

After the family dinner, giving Tia her bath while Logan answered a business call, and sitting in again on the reading of
Goodnight Moon
before putting Tia to bed, it had amounted to almost a fourteen-hour workday for Meg. She should have been ready for some time to herself.

Instead, having Logan come with her out the back door gave her a whole new surge of energy.

“So how was your first full day on the job? Are you ready to run for the hills yet?” he asked as they strolled across the yard.

“Not yet,” she answered with a laugh that didn’t give away how much she’d liked every minute she’d spent alone with Tia, and then every minute on top of that that had included him.

“I wanted to talk to you about tomorrow,” he said then. “After Tia’s nap Hadley and Tia and I are supposed to go meet Theresa Grayson—I don’t know if you know what’s going on with that…”

Since her sister, Kate, was marrying Ry Grayson—Theresa’s grandson—on Friday night and Meg was the maid of honor, she actually did know what Logan was alluding to.

And she didn’t see any reason to play dumb, so she said, “I do know about Theresa Grayson. I know that fifty-plus years ago when she was seventeen, her parents were killed and she was taken in by Hector Tyson and his wife. That Hector—who is Northbridge’s cocurmudgeon along with my grandfather—seduced her and got her pregnant and then arranged for the baby to be secretly adopted. I know that Theresa has a lot of mental and emotional problems and came back here desperate to reconnect with the daughter she’d given up, that her grandkids have been working diligently to do that for her—”

“And that they found out that Theresa’s child was actually Hadley’s and my mother,” Logan interjected.

“Which makes Theresa Grayson your grandmother,” Meg concluded.

“And tomorrow is the first time we come face-to-face.”

They’d reached the steps that ran alongside the garage up to the apartment, but Logan didn’t seem inclined to go the rest of the way because he leaned his T-shirted back against the garage’s outer wall, hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets and raised a booted foot to the bottom step.

It was a lovely summer’s night and Meg didn’t mind standing outside talking to him so she stopped there, too, facing him and resting her own back against the stair rail.

But even if it had been twenty degrees below zero she wouldn’t have been in any hurry to say good-night.

“Are you nervous about meeting Theresa?” she asked, part of her attention on what they were talking about and another part of it looking at the play of light and shadow on the sharply drawn lines of his features.

“It’s a strange position to be in, but no, I’m not nervous about it. Except maybe when it comes to Tia,” he said. “Hadley and I have been warned that things with Theresa could go in a lot of different directions—she could refuse to see us at the last minute or cry all the way through it or be disoriented or just quiet. We don’t know what to expect.”

“Kate introduced me to her and I know Theresa’s diagnosis. Multiple diagnoses, actually. Yes, she has a lot of problems, but you won’t find a raving crazy woman—if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’d say that if she can get up the courage to actually meet you and Hadley, the worst you’ll see is tears because she’s very emotional. But she also may just be happy to meet you and not appear any different than anyone else.”

“I’m actually less worried about her than I am about Tia,” Logan confided.

His pale eyes were iridescent in the light cast from the four lamps that were hung at the same angle that the stairs ran along the garage wall. And even in the dimness Meg thought those eyes exuded a warmth she could almost feel. Except that she told herself she was probably only imagining that…

“Tia could love Theresa or hate her on sight,” he was saying when Meg forced her focus back to that. “And she could behave or misbehave accordingly. I don’t want her to set off someone who—from what I’ve heard—is pretty easily upset. I’d like it if you could just come with us so if Tia acts up, you can take her outside.”