Nanny Needed

by Cara Colter

  Wham.

  Just like that, his belief in shared sleepless nights, angst and craving shattered. She’d only spoken truth as she saw it; not how she felt or what she wanted, but what was. Why the truth made everything she’d awoken in him rise up in hot rebellion, he didn’t know, but he was on his feet, striding toward her without thought, ready to haul her against him and prove she was lying.

  A movement by the window stopped him cold.

  “Then why say anything, if you weren’t going to tell me?” he snapped, not knowing who or what he was most furious about. He’d bricked them inside four walls together, separated by a wall of Perspex neither could batter down.

  One brow lifted as she contemplated his anger and obvious frustration. “So you’ll stop apologising. I have good reasons why there will never be another man in my life. I won’t bother you.” She turned her head away, but not before he saw the flash of want in her eyes. “You don’t need to worry I’ll jump on you. I wouldn’t make a fool of myself.”

  Won’t bother him? She did that just by being here, so close, so lovely, so graceful and so tempting … talking about jumping on him. Everything about her bothered him to insanity point.

  “My bus will be here in a minute.”

  Tim made his announcement through the window beside the taped-off door. Noah cursed his stupidity; Tim must have heard everything they’d said. Why hadn’t he taped the window shut, as well? He could have sworn he had.

  A swift glance showed that Tim had slowly peeled the tape away and opened the window to listen in on them.

  “Re-tape the window, please, Tim,” he said coolly, asserting authority. “And don’t peel it back again. You could put the day-care kids in danger if my work isn’t taped and roped off from Jennifer’s business. If you want to listen to our conversations, come outside and do it honestly.”

  “Yes, Dad.” Tim didn’t so much as look at his father, but his voice was filled with trust as he turned back to Jennifer. It was a trust she’d earned with cooking lessons and games of paintbrush wars, his favourite food—and never looking at Noah as if she wanted him. “The kids are watching Sesame Street, Jen, so can I go?”

  “Of course, Tim. Thanks for your help.”

  Her voice was just as warm as Tim’s. The mutual admiration society had just upped a notch, thanks to Jennifer’s blunt statement that she’d never pursue Tim’s only security. Tim liked Jennifer; Cilla and Rowdy adored her, and she loved them all.

  He was the only one locked out.

  He couldn’t look at her anymore. Life was too hard as it was. He didn’t need the answer, as logical as it was impossible, standing right in front of him, reminding him of everything he couldn’t have. “Don’t bother with the tweezers. I got the splinter myself. Thanks.”

  There was no way she could miss the freezing politeness in his voice.

  She didn’t answer, but the rustling of hot air touching his face told him she was gone.

  “Oh, good grief,” Jacey’s mother Kate muttered the next afternoon, as she stared out the back window. She was the last mother for the day, and she, like the others, married or single, had done the same thing.

  Stared at Noah as if he was manna fallen from heaven …

  In the light of the setting sun he was tearing up old wooden slats and tossing them behind him. He was wearing only cutoff jeans and work boots; his bare, tanned chest and builder’s strong arms were slick with sweat; his legs were muscular and brown. His hair took on the sun’s glow, touched at its ends with golden fire.

  “Jen, you lucky, lucky girl,” Kate muttered, drinking in the sight Jennifer had been studiously avoiding for the past hour. “How on earth do you live next door to that, have him here day and night and not get into the horizontal tango with that gorgeous man?”

  “Shhh,” Jennifer whispered frantically, with a quick glance back to where Tim watched a re-run of something, Jacey on his lap, and Cilla and Rowdy played a game of memory cards.

  Kate grinned, impudent and unashamed. “Come on, girl, are you dead? Lost your hormones? Coz otherwise you can’t tell me you don’t spend hours every day looking, and itching.” She lifted a brow in cheeky suggestion. “Make me coffee and tell me all. I swear if I wasn’t happy with Nick …”

  How many more times would she hear the same thing? It wasn’t as if her rebel body needed the encouragement!

  After she’d eventually ushered Kate and Jacey out of the house, Jennifer sighed. Why couldn’t she find the words to shut the mouths of the curious and determined? It was bad enough that every child’s mother had asked the same thing, and her mother, alerted by Uncle Joe, was calling from Italy for updates; her quilting friends Veronica and Jessie had also met him when Tim took off last week, and Noah had come over looking for his son. Wearing only a singlet top and denim shorts, his body gleaming with sweat from making her cubby house …

  Not one person in town believed they weren’t lovers. Not one person didn’t fill her imagination daily with visions she couldn’t lock out of her head.

  Not with him there, looking like that …

  Like Kate, like Annie and Olga and every other woman with a beating heart and hormones, Jennifer was mesmerised. Through the elusive, shifting colours of her old stained window, he seemed godlike, a glowing being of strength and power … and a rich male beauty that left her breathless and hurting.

  Trying to behave, she’d done no more than steal glances as the kids played and she stitched her latest quilt she was making; yet every peek made her feel like a sneak thief in her own home. But she was helpless to stop herself from doing it, over and over.

  Quilting was a form of creation she could take anywhere, one she’d learned at the Children’s Hospital during Cody’s stays. It kept her hands busy and her mind calm and centred, especially when she was tired or feeling negative.

  Unless there happened to be exquisite, golden-brown temptation working just outside her window, bending down over lumber, wearing only hugging jeans …

  She had to stop it, now!

  Sticking the needle into the quilt, she folded it up and put it out of the reach of little hands. “Let’s play a game of hide-and-seek before dark,” she announced to the kids.

  “Yeah!” Rowdy and Cilla bolted from the game of Memory they were playing, straight out the back door to the yard.

  She looked at Tim, still watching some rerun of funny videos, with a smile she made deliberately impish. She couldn’t show him that she’d suggested the game for his sake alone. Desperately hoping that, by playing the game so often, she could desensitise the issue of his disappearances whenever life overwhelmed him. “If you stay there I’m going to find you pretty fast, Tim—and Rowdy will crow about it all night.”

  With a chuckle, Tim ran for the back door.

  After a slow, loud count to twenty, she walked out the back door after them, calling, “I’m coming to get you,” in a way that never failed to make Rowdy giggle.

  She always made sure Tim or Cilla won. Rowdy didn’t seem to mind; he liked finishing the search with her, and once he’d said, “Timmy likes to win,” for which she was awed. That a three-year-old had such self-esteem, and such insight into his insecure brother’s needs, was a testament to Noah’s rearing of his kids. That Tim and Cilla were healing so quickly—and they were—could only be laid at Noah’s door, as well. All her training told her it should take far longer to have gained the kids’ trust, and for them to let her in.

  It amazed her that Noah didn’t realise what a magnificent father he was.

  “I’m coming to get you,” she cried again, and heard the giggle from around the front of the house. Smiling, she called it over and over, hearing the laughter smothered by a hand, but still constant. Running around the old cubby at the side, she dashed into Rowdy’s favourite hidey-haunt: behind the gardenia bushes at the front corner of the house. She dived on him, tickling his tummy. “Got you, bud!”

  Rowdy shrieked with laughter, not in the least put out at being foun
d first. “Let’s get ‘em, Jenny,” he whispered very loudly, slipping his hand into hers.

  Resisting the urge to kiss the little hand, she circled the yard at a little-kid running pace, crying out, “We’re coming to get you!”

  As they approached where Noah was tearing down her verandah, he turned his head: the golden-rose rays of sunset fell on his face as he smiled at them.

  Jennifer lost her breath—and caught her toe. She tripped over a root and stumbled. Acting with lightning instinct, she twisted Rowdy so he came down on top of her as she fell to the spongy grass.

  Seeming unhurt, he cackled with laughter. “We playing Ring Around the Rosie?”

  “No,” she laughed back, “Jenny’s just playing dropsies.”

  “I thought I was the dropsy one around here.”

  His voice was close. He was close … too close. She turned her head, with the vestiges of laughter still in her eyes, to see him smiling down at them. “No.” The word came out half-strangled. “I—why do you think I work with kids? I thought I’d put the family’s genetic clumsiness to a good use. It entertains the kids no end.”

  Grinning, he put out his hands to them. “This feels like déjà vu.” He lifted her to her feet. “But there are no pots to take off you this time.”

  And no shirt, either.

  On her feet, Jennifer found herself in direct eye contact with his naked, brown chest; her hands, released from his, were a bare inch from touching him. He smelled like earth and grass and wood, and hardworking, raw, sensual male. His bare skin gleamed with honest sweat.

  Heart racing, breathless, she didn’t dare look up at him. She’d only make a fool of herself if she did … but she couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop it. Within moments her gaze lifted to his.

  Deep, hot, strangely vulnerable as he took in the desire she couldn’t hide … and tender. Will against wanting, need against reason … the aching current arced between them, impossible and beautiful—and her hands, with a will of their own, lifted that inch—

  “We go finding Timmy and Cilla now?”

  The hopeful question roused her from the lovely stupor. She shook her head to clear it, and her hands fell. She couldn’t breathe, or speak with any semblance of normality. It was all she could do to smile down at Rowdy and nod.

  Noah stepped back without a word, but a tiny smile hovered around his mouth.

  On legs that felt like jelly, she took Rowdy’s hand again, and headed toward the other side of the house.

  And Noah, as off-kilter and damned scared as he knew Jennifer had been, turned back to the verandah, thanking heaven Tim hadn’t seen that moment, for once. Thanking heaven for Rowdy’s intervention, or he’d have taken her into his arms then and there …

  He’d have to work himself into insensibility the next few hours. It was the only way he’d get any sleep tonight.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TIM came into the house without his usual passive-aggressive behaviour that disrupted the family—and Noah knew what he was going to say before he said it. “Dad, you got one of those big letters again.”

  The kids always left him alone to read them. They knew better than to get him going on “big letter” days—they just didn’t know what the letters were or why they got to him.

  He carried the letter into the kitchen, got a beer out and sat at the table. He knew he’d need it. Phone calls were positive news, a lead or a sighting of Belinda; a letter was always bad.

  Dear Mr Brannigan,

  It is with regret that I inform you we found the woman in question, and there is no possible way she could be your wife. Her name is Sandra Langtry, and she lives in a bush cabin in Broadwater National Park with her family. She has lived an alternative lifestyle for eighteen years and has given birth to four children in the past twelve years …

  The words blurred in front of his eyes.

  It was over. The only good sighting in the past eighteen months, and it led to nothing.

  He downed the beer in seconds, but it did nothing; no amount of alcohol could douse the pain, the feeling that a CHAPTER of his life should be closed, but the jagged shards of his life remained in the doorway, leaving it open. The cold winds of uncertainty and abandonment, the feeling of being stuck down a dark well he couldn’t climb out of, filled him again.

  Unless he did something about it; he had to take charge.

  Closing off the door to the kitchen, he picked up the phone to make the call he’d been putting off for more than a year.

  A week later

  She had to stop looking. It was bordering on perversion, the way she kept finding reasons to sit here near this window, or looking every time he passed.

  Which was way too often.

  Dear God, the man was beautiful … like a statue of David come to warm, touchable flesh …

  Would this mid-autumn heatwave never end? It’d been nine days now; nine days of endless heat, where Noah pulled his shirt off to work in the early evenings.

  If only he’d keep his shirt on, she wouldn’t be so—so lost in the sight of him all the time. Lost in the sight of warm golden-brown skin, muscle rippling beneath; lost in the smiles he gave her when he caught her looking. She was beyond counting the amount of stubbed toes or bruises on her legs from walking into things, or tripping over when she stared at him, but she knew she had fifty-two needle pricks in her index finger …

  Ouch. Make that fifty-three.

  Right. Stop it immediately. Lower gaze and look at your quilt before it’s completely unsaleable. Yes, you can do that.

  Her gaze lifted again within two minutes. Obviously self-control was not the forte she’d thought it was.

  So Plan B: get out of the line of fire.

  “I’m going out to the rocking chair,” she announced to the kids. Yes, that was safe—the rocking chair was on the untouched side of the verandah, on the other side of the house from Noah. Take the kids, even better. A refuge against temptation. “Want to put on the hose and cool down on the Slip and Slide before I make dinner?”

  During summer she took the kids to the beach, while it was patrolled, but the lifesavers packed up in late March, and she wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to risk taking the children there alone. So they’d played on the wet mat every afternoon during the late-April heatwave, cooling down in the burning hour before sundown. Tim especially liked it when all the kids were there, and he was the big one who watched over them and made sure they were all safe.

  “Yeah, Slip and Slide!” Rowdy would have run straight out if she hadn’t stopped him, putting on his sunscreen shirt and hat. It might be late afternoon, but in heat like this his fair skin would burn.

  When the kids were dressed and sunscreen applied, she let them bolt to the back door, and out. She followed, carrying her quilting basket. “Tim, don’t forget to wet the whole slide first,” she called, knowing Tim would, but he liked to hear again that he was the senior one, and he had the responsibility.

  Tim was already hosing it down, his tongue sticking out with concentration. “No, Rowdy, you could hurt yourself,” he said, waving his little brother back. “It’ll be ready in a minute.”

  “Okay, Timmy—hurry.” Rowdy stepped back and hopped from one foot to the other in impatient obedience.

  As she patched in a small piece of curved rag to the main quilt, Jennifer smiled, watching the brothers. Tim was becoming a child of his family again; the past few weeks, he’d stopped running away, and seemed to begin accepting life here.

  It had surprised her at first, given the depth of his anger and rebellion against Noah at the start; but if it worked, if his father thought the change was positive, who was she to question it?

  If she saw something in Tim’s eyes, in the way he spoke, and how he’d become a big brother again instead of verbally attacking Cilla and Rowdy that made her wonder, she could think of no reason for it. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened to bring about the change that she could think of.

  “Maybe it’s school?”
<
br />   “What is?”

  “Ouch!” She removed the needle, and rubbed at her jabbed finger. “Fifty-four,” she muttered, glaring up at Noah—

  Would he never put his shirt back on?

  “Fifty-four what?” He looked down at her abused finger. “Sorry.” He frowned, taking in the amount of pinprick jabs there. “Are you diabetic?”

  “No.” Embarrassed, she shrugged. “Just clumsy.”

  “And you chose quilting as your hobby? Did you see it as a challenge?” He chuckled and sat on the rocker next to her. “Why don’t you get a thimble?”

  “I’ve had a dozen—I keep losing them.” She grinned back. “Quilting was an exercise in patience more than anything at first—a way to pass the hours. Before I knew it, I loved it. I’ve met a lot of my closest friends up here in the quilting circle.”

  “It looks very peaceful. Like you,” he said quietly. Then he gulped down the tall glass of iced water he’d brought out with him.

  The past week or more, he’d been making more of an effort to speak to her, to begin the friendship they’d spoken of the first night. They talked of their childhood, schooling, what made them choose their career paths. They talked of family still living, his brother, her sisters and brother and cousins. She told him about her parents travelling the world in their early retirement, as his parents were travelling around Australia in a campervan. They were currently in Western Australia, discovering the wildest northwest Outback.

  It was so good to have an adult to speak to about something other than their children, but if there was two things she was certain of, it was that she couldn’t be Noah’s friend … and she was far from peaceful. Not when something as simple as watching him drink made her heart thunder and her breath seize in her lungs … watching the movement of his throat and small trickles of sweat run down the golden-brown skin …

  Fifty-five.

  She was quite proud of the fact that she didn’t say “ouch” aloud this time.