The Billionaire And The Nanny (Book Two)

by Paige North

It was what it was, and yes, it could’ve been beautiful, but life isn’t about what could’ve been. It’s about what you make it while you’re here. What it is while you’re living it, and for six weeks, I haven’t been living. That’s not me—time for that to change.

  Because the weather’s warming, I finally get to wear one of my cute dresses I haven’t worn since summer in NYC last year. It’s pretty but not too flirty, solid yellow but not too bright for a teaching interview. As I check how I look in my bedroom mirror, I see that the yellow matches the pillow that Zayden bought me, and for a second, I think about changing. When all my items arrived in a big box shortly after moving back home, I nearly threw everything away that reminded me about Zayden, but then I remembered something…

  I’m in control of my life. No guy gets to decide what I keep and what I toss.

  And so I kept it all but displayed only a few things—the lights, the blanket, and the yellow pillow.

  My hair came out great, thanks to the weather outside, so I grab my portfolio and purse and head for the front door. Mom sees me and smiles. “Well, look at you. Now, that’s the Bailey I know and love.” She comes up to me, examines me as a mother should from head to toe, then kisses my cheek. “Good luck on the interview, honey. I know you’re going to be off the chain.”

  “Mom, no one says that anymore.”

  “Rock it? You’re going to rock the interview?”

  “Mom, just stop, please.”

  “Oh, fine, you’re going to do great. That work?”

  “Perfect.”

  Just as I’m about to head outside, though, I catch a flash of shiny, stretchy black. The kind of black you see everywhere in NYC but is oddly out of place here in Perrysburg. My mom sees it too, and we both fly to the window to peer through the blinds. It’s a car. A limo. And it stops in front of my house.

  “Who in the rotten hell?” Mom says next to me.

  “Oh, no…”

  My heart begins to beat like spring after a long, dead winter. I know who in the rotten hell, and I don’t want to be caught standing here staring out the window at him. Can’t give him the satisfaction. Assuming it’s him, of course. My dad walks out of the garage and stands on the sidewalk. Mrs. Miller across the street comes out in her muumuu, covering her squinty eyes with her hand.

  “Is that who I think it is?” Mom moves away from one window and goes to another to see better. That’s how long the limo is.

  “I hope not,” I mutter, a nasty storm brewing inside my stomach.

  Suddenly, the side door of the limo opens, and out steps Zayden Hawthorn himself sporting one of his more casual looks—jeans, a black long-sleeved shirt, and a hipster-style blue scarf. It’s definitely him—the angles of his face, his strong nose, those eyes…and he’s holding pink roses. Shit.

  Shit, shit, crap, fuck.

  Fuckity-fuck.

  I spin, my back to the window. “It’s him. What do I do?”

  “Want me to get your father’s shotgun?” Mom murmurs, narrowing the blinds.

  “Not funny.”

  “I didn’t mean it to be. That’s the man who put you under for a good two months. I’ve got no problem letting him know he’s an asswipe.” She heads for the door on a mission.

  I appreciate her ferocity but I can handle this. I have to handle this before my dad does. “He’s also the man who employed me for five. Don’t say anything to him, please. I’ll deal with it,” I tell her, pushing myself into the space she’s occupying and opening the door partway.

  Dad’s already talking to Zayden. To my surprise, they’re shaking hands and Zayden’s giving him a big, buttery greeting, though my dad’s not completely buying it. Zayden spots me standing in the doorway, and all time seems to pause like it did when I lived with him. It’s the first time our eyes meet after so much time apart, and my brain splits in half. Part of me wants to run into his arms, but the other half knows better.

  “What are you doing here?” I demand, holding the door for balance.

  “I came to see you, Bailey.” He holds out the flowers. “These are for you.”

  What am I supposed to think? Does this mean he wants to make up, apologize, or what? Resist, Bailey. Don’t fall down the rabbit hole again…

  “I don’t want to see you, Zayden. Go home.” I resist the offering, as behind me, my mother advises me not to take the flowers. “Stop,” I murmur over my shoulder.

  “I just want to talk to you,” he continues, unfazed by my flat rejection of his offer.

  “We have nothing to say to one another.”

  “Someone there?” Zayden tries to get a good look behind me. “I just want to talk to you.”

  I open the door, so he can see how well he disturbed the ant farm. Not only are my mom, dad, and Mrs. Miller out of the house looking on, but now so is half the neighborhood. “You better make this good,” I tell Zayden. “You have most of the town for an audience.”

  Zayden takes a look around at all the faces watching him. “Small town,” he mutters. Taking a few steps all the way up to the stoop, he wisely stops when he sees that I have no intention of taking his flowers nor hugging him. “Bailey, look. I wasn’t ready before…”

  Behind Zayden, my dad smiles smugly, breathes on his fingernails and buffs them off on his shirt, like he knew this would happen. Yes, Dad, you told me this is how it would go down.

  “Ready for what?” I’m going to just pretend I don’t understand a single thing he’s saying. He’s going to have to do all the work. I hold strong, even though I’m trembling with fear and anxiety.

  “Ready for anything. For you, for Olivia, ready for the way I was feeling.”

  I tremble even harder now. Something worse than fear and anxiety begins to take over…hope? It’s so easy to build ideas up in your mind, though. So hard to take them down, and I cannot spend another year of my life undoing the damage Zayden does. I push out the door and past him, ignoring the scent of his skin as I do. “I can’t listen now. I have an interview to get to.”

  “Bailey, please. Just listen to what I have to say. I promise it will be worth your time.”

  “My time,” I reply, “has to go to people who will make a difference in my life. People who know they want me, like the principal currently waiting for me at her school. Let me go, Zayden.”

  “Bailey, I love you.”

  His words stop me at my car, my hand curled under the handle. I pause there, processing the words. For months and months, I dreamed about him saying those words to me. I imagined him as a changed man, ready to accept the new emotions he was feeling with me, with Olivia. I wanted it to happen so badly and now it has, only perhaps too late.

  They say putting thoughts out into the universe comes back to you.

  Olivia.

  “What about the baby?”

  “I love her, too. I wasn’t ready to deal with the loss, and I knew the day would come when I would lose her. So I put up walls to protect my heart. After the hurt I’d been through in my life, it was the only thing I knew how to do, the only thing I could do.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’s with her mother.”

  My hope begins to deflate. I don’t know that I could ever be with Zayden if he doesn’t accept Olivia back into his life. “You don’t see her?”

  “Not yet. But I’m going to. Bailey, I hired a lawyer. I’m going to fight for custody. I have a pretty good chance, like you said. I know, I should’ve listened to you from the beginning.”

  I smirk and back myself up against the car, arms crossed. “Full custody?”

  “Well, yes, but the most I’ll probably get is fifty-fifty. Honestly, I’d be happy with anything, but the important thing is that I want to be in her life, I want to be an active father. Bailey, you must understand how it all came out of the blue for me.”

  “You came out of the blue for me too, Zayden. Yet you didn’t see me freaking out, turning hot and cold on people, and being an asshole.”

  “You’re s
tronger than me,” he says, and for a whole minute, I get to see a very weak side of Zayden, as he admits that he’s not the big man everyone thinks he is. Not when it comes to feelings, anyway.

  “That’s not true,” I mutter softly.

  “I lost my baby brother when I was eight, Bailey. My brother Callum.” His throat seems to constrict as if he’s choking on the words. “After he died, I lost everyone else that mattered, one by one. I never talk about it, but that’s the reason I was scared.”

  “Scared to lose again,” I echo. Finally, I understand something about him. It all makes sense. He pushed away love, pushed away family, because he was afraid of losing again. I was right when I guessed he was harboring pain.

  “Losing is hard.” My mother stands in the doorway, loosening her death grip on the door frame. Both Zayden and I turn to look at her. “I know first hand.”

  “Yes, ma’am, it is,” Zayden tells her.

  I’ve been holding it together this whole time, but now I might cry. If my mother can soften up at Zayden, empathize with his emotions, then I suppose I can, too. I let out a huge sigh and roll my eyes to the sky. Don’t lose it, Bailey. “I really need to go, Zayden,” I say, imagining the school principal staring at her clock, taking points off my resumé because I’m late. “Can we talk when I get back?”

  “Bailey,” he pushes on, “I didn’t realize the completeness I had when I had it. I’ve spent my life making sure I don’t amass anything important enough to lose.”

  Tears threaten to rise into my eyes, but I bat them back. “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who doesn’t want to lose again, Zayden. I’ve…” Ugh, should I admit to him? “I have not had a good two months. You…you hurt me.”

  The tears spill and ugh, I hate myself for showing weakness.

  Suddenly, I feel his hand slip into mine, as he lays the bouquet of roses on the roof of my car and lays the other hand over mine. His warm, beautiful hands. God, how I missed them. I hate him for bringing them all the way from New York City. I feel myself getting sucked in the longer he stands here.

  “I never meant to hurt you. I was trying to protect you whenever I’d ask you to stay away. In my own fucked up way, I was trying to give you a good life when I disconnected myself. I didn’t think I was worth loving, Bailey. That’s the thing. And I didn’t want you dealing with this fuck-up here.” He points at his face.

  “Of course you’re worth loving,” I tell him, touching his cheek.

  I’m losing this battle. But I feel what he’s saying and know he means it, considering he came out all this way. Of course, traveling is easy enough for a transportation mogul, since he can afford it. But I don’t think it’s just for show.

  “So, when two amazing things came into my life, I freaked out,” he says flatly. “I mean, that’s basically it. I freaked out, Bailey. Please forgive me.”

  I can forgive him, even though he was an ass. Especially since he’s spot-on about freaking out. I saw that he was scared when I was living with him, but I was hoping my love would be enough for him to change. I felt defeated when I saw it wasn’t. His rejection really did a number on my confidence.

  But it wasn’t me. It was never about me.

  He had hurdles to jump over first.

  “I’m sorry your little brother died,” I say, looking down at our hands together. They do look nice. Does this mean I’m willing to take him back? Is that what he’s asking of me?

  “It’s okay, thanks. It was a long time ago. I could’ve dealt with it had it ended there, but then my mom checked out. She couldn’t handle the pain. And then my dad drank himself to death.”

  I gasp. “Oh, my God. How horrible, Zayden.”

  He nods softly. “My family fell apart in the most insidious of ways. I should’ve told you before, but I’d pushed it all out of my mind. Everything was nicely tucked away out of my memory before you guys came.”

  And there it is. I get it now. Fully and completely. “Of course I forgive you, especially after what you’ve been through. I only wish you would’ve told me all this.”

  “I put up walls around my heart. But those walls are shattered now, because guess what?”

  “What?” Somehow I feel like whatever he’s about to say will mark the end of this loneliness, this depression.

  “I don’t have a heart anymore. You shot down those walls and took off with it the night you left me, Bailey. And you were right to. But I’m here to bring them both back—yours and mine.”

  Zayden

  Her eyes.

  In them, I see all the atoms and molecules that make up her soul. I see them crashing into each other, out of control, and hating me. But I also see how she’s spinning and dancing, relieved that I came back for her. I’m a smart guy. It may take me a while to figure shit out sometimes, but eventually, I do figure it out.

  And I’m not making this mistake ever again. I’m going to assure her of this.

  “Zayden,” she takes my face in her hands, looks me in the eye, then holds me close, “I hear what you’re saying, and I appreciate it, but…I have to go. The interview…”

  “Don’t go to it,” I tell her.

  “What?”

  “Don’t go to the interview. Call and tell her something came up.”

  “Zayden, I don’t have that kind of luxury. I have to work for a living.”

  “You don’t have to go. In fact…” It’s now or never, buddy. Just do it. I reach into my pocket and pull out the box that’s been burning a hole in my pants since I left the airport. “You don’t have to work ever again, Bailey.”

  “What do you mean?” Her eyes flit to the box then my face again with a panicked look.

  Dropping to one knee, there in front of her parents and all these weird neighbors checking us out, I take her hand and look up at her pretty brown eyes. My brown-eyed girl. “Bailey…”

  “Zayden? What are you doing?”

  I open the box, showing her the five-carat diamond solitaire surrounded by tiny diamonds and emeralds. “What I mean is…you don’t ever have to work ever again, unless you want to. If you still want to open that home décor store, we can do that, but don’t work because you have to—work because you want to. I got you covered, sweetheart. Don’t go to the interview. Stay here with me.”

  Her other hand dabs at her lips. She can barely breathe. “Zayden…why are you doing this?”

  What am I doing? My hands shake totally uncharacteristically, and I almost don’t recognize my voice. Who knew I’d ever be down on one knee like this? That’s what a good woman does, I guess. “Because I’m asking my favorite person in the world if she’ll do me the honor of marrying me.”

  She doesn’t answer right away. Her fingers tremble, and tears glaze her eyes. I hear her mother gasp, “Oh!”

  “Bailey?” I say. “That’s you, baby. My favorite person in the world is you.”

  She lets out a raspy laugh. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this…” She rambles. “Are you sure?”

  I admit, I have to laugh at that. I shake my head at this crazy, amazing, beautiful woman. My knee down on this broken asphalt driveway is killing me, but it doesn’t matter. I’d go through it a thousand times more for her. “Positive. You brought love into my life again. You showed me what having a family could feel like, and yeah, I was scared at first, but life’s too short to live in fear, Bailey. I gotta have you. Please marry me.”

  “Say yes!” someone shouts from down the street.

  Everyone around us breaks into laughter, a good sign. I’ve been worried how her family was going to take this, but then Dad says, “The man’s waiting for an answer, Bale.”

  I glance over my shoulder at him with a look of gratitude.

  Bailey lets out a breath through rounded lips, looks up at the sky as if her final answer were there, then looks down at me again. For a second, I think she’s going to turn me down. She’d be smart to, but God, I hope she doesn’t. Then, slowly, she nods. “Yes.�
��

  Holy fuck, that was close. A rush of air escapes my lungs. Taking out the ring, I slide it onto her pretty finger, and it fits perfectly. She’s mine. This woman is mine. Finally, I stand and take her face into my hands. “Thank you. You won’t ever be sorry you said that.” I kiss her and take in what it feels like to be the luckiest bastard in the world.

  All around us and down the street, Mom, Dad, and others cheer. My driver got the whole thing on video. I’ll have to give him a nice tip for doing that, since it totally flew my mind. She said yes. Bailey Rainville is now my fiancée. I knew she loved me, but I was worried the whole way over that she’d be too pissed at me to ever forgive me.

  But she did, surprising me yet again.

  Because that’s the kind of woman Bailey is.

  A funny thing about small towns—there are no hotels, and I don’t feel right staying at the Rainville’s home, per Bailey’s mom’s invitation, knowing fully well that I plan on banging the shit out of my woman after months of not seeing her.

  So we take off and stop at a bed and breakfast in a cute nearby antique town. On the way, Bailey calls the school to tell them she won’t be coming in, but thank you for the opportunity, and I hear the principal tell her, “Oh, that’s a shame. You were quite the candidate. Good luck with everything.”

  She hangs up and looks at me. “That’s that,” she sighs, looking back at her ring to admire it. I would’ve put a 40-carat diamond on her finger if it would’ve made sense, but somehow, I think she loves this one just fine.

  “You’re mine now,” I tell her, giving her side eye.

  She bites her lip, looking so coy and pretty in that yellow dress, it sends shivers through my body. I’ve waited for her this whole time. No one else even comes close. “You’re going to have to talk to me, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’re going to have to fight for Olivia. Whether you win or lose is different, but you have to fight for her.”

  “Already in the works, babe,” I say. “If I could take her back full-time, I would. Together with you, I know we can do it.”