Falling for the Nanny

by Jacqueline Diamond

  “I hate the bitter stuff, too.” Her grandmother smiled. “We should all go out for lunch to a place with a salad bar. Not today, though, and obviously tomorrow’s taken. How about Sunday? I’d like to get to know you better,” she said to Patty.

  “Sure. Thanks.” Patty wasn’t sure who or what to credit for this détente with Darlene, but she was grateful for it. She’d spent too many years blaming the older woman for something that hadn’t been her fault.

  “Now I have a suggestion about—

  “Yes, Rosita?” Darlene glanced at the housekeeper, who stood with a couple of cake-mix boxes in hand.

  “Fiona needs to pick which I bake tomorrow.” To Patty, the woman explained, “Mrs. Denny ask me to buy two flavors.”

  “Wow! Chocolate and lemon!” The little girl ran to examine the packages. “What kind of frosting?”

  “Come and I’ll show you.” The gray-haired woman led her to the open kitchen, far enough away to be nearly out of earshot.

  “Rosita’s a vast improvement over Marla’s other relatives,” Darlene said quietly. “She’s even agreed to come in tomorrow morning to bake and decorate.”

  Good, because when it came to ovens, Patty was still trying to figure out why they bothered with that confusing preheat option. “Great. You mentioned a suggestion?”

  “Kate Franco used to be my hairdresser over at the My Fair Lady Salon. I miss her, now that she’s married to that lawyer and staying home with the baby.” The older woman’s birdlike hands darted from one sack to the other, topping them off with miniature cars. “In fact, her son Brady is coming to the party tomorrow. I’ll bet she’d cut Fiona’s hair at her house, if I asked. How about it?”

  Patty liked Leo’s sister-in-law, and the outing sounded like a good compromise from a safety versus going-out-of-our-minds standpoint. “Super. It has my stamp of approval.”

  Darlene folded her hands in her lap. “Before I call, there’s something else I’d like to say while Fiona’s out of the room.”

  “Uh, sure.” Patty eyed her warily. When people requested a private conversation, that usually meant they had something to unload.

  “I used to be a terrible snob.” Since Darlene made it a simple declaration of fact, Patty didn’t argue. “You may recall that I was a college English instructor, and Howard was an anesthesiologist. We expected our son to be a high-achiever, academically speaking. When he brought you around, well, you didn’t fit into our expectations.”

  Patty didn’t take offense at this obvious truth. “Yeah, I wasn’t exactly a parent’s dream come true.”

  “Some parents ought to take a closer look at their dreams.” The older woman leaned forward and patted Patty’s hand. “Sabrina impressed us. She was glamorous, educated, sophisticated and a complete poison pill. We should have appreciated what a gem you were. A diamond in the rough. Patty, I’m sorry I underestimated you.”

  “That’s okay.” This honest disclosure called for a frank response. “I wasn’t crazy about you, either.”

  Darlene burst out laughing. “You’re priceless!”

  “I like you better now,” Patty admitted.

  “I like you better now, too, and I’m grateful that you’re available to watch over my granddaughter.” She picked up the phone. “On that note, I’ll call Kate.”

  Tony’s wife readily agreed, and a few minutes later, Patty found herself piloting her car, with a buoyant Fiona alongside her, toward the Francos’ bluffside home. While the little girl chattered about how she’d persuaded Rosita to bake cupcakes in both flavors, Patty watched the mirrors and kept an eye out for anyone following them or lurking ahead, ready to box them in. Traffic proved light, no one blocked their path, and they pulled safely into the drive of the Mediterranean-style home.

  What a gorgeous place, Patty reflected as the short, radiant Mrs. Franco greeted them and led them through the house. Sunlight bathed the large rooms and stylish but comfortable furniture. Patty especially liked the curving front staircase and large bay window in the sunroom, but the best part was the covered patio and reflecting pool landscaped with rocks and ferns. An outdoor kitchen made the backyard absolutely perfect.

  Kate indicated a chair she’d prepared with extra cushions, beside a table where she’d placed a plastic hairstyling cape and a set of scissors and hair clippers. “There’s hardly any breeze today, so I thought it would be fun to sit outside. It’s easier to clean up the hair, too,” she said as she transferred her six-month-old daughter from her hip into a playpen.

  Fiona climbed onto the cushions. “Where’s Brady?”

  “In kindergarten until noon. He’ll be sorry he missed seeing you, Fiona. He can hardly wait till your party. What fun, to bring his favorite stuffed animals!” Kate covered her in the cape and fastened the Velcro at the back.

  “Should be quite a kick. ’Scuse me a minute. Doing my guard duty.” Patty had heard Darlene on the phone, explaining about Sabrina and the precautions they were taking. Besides, while it might be easy to pretend to strangers that Patty was a nanny, Kate knew all about her background.

  So, while her hostess set to work on Fiona’s hair, she paced around the yard. Just like at the condo development, the bluff made the place hard to access from behind. At either side, bushes and ferns obscured the fences. Peering through them, she took in the well-kept yards of the neighbors. No one stirring at the moment.

  Patty returned to find Kate brushing out the little girl’s hair. “A short bob would be easy to maintain,” the hairdresser advised.

  “I want to look like Patty.” Fiona indicated Patty’s chin-length cut.

  “Her hair’s straight. Yours has more curl, so they wouldn’t look the same,” Kate pointed out. “I’ve got another idea. Why don’t I give you both short haircuts?”

  Patty thought this over for about ten seconds. She never changed her hairstyle because she had no idea what to change it to, but here she had an expert volunteering. “Whatever you think will look good. I don’t mind if it’s prettier on Fiona than on me.”

  “Okay with you?” Kate asked Fiona.

  “Yeah!”

  As Kate gently sliced away Fiona’s long hair, Patty couldn’t help contrasting this luxurious home with the small, cozy cottage where Kate had previously lived. Patty and Leo had visited it once to write up a report about a troubled teenage girl Kate had been helping.

  “A person could sure get used to a place like this,” Patty said. “I mean, maybe not me personally, but it’s fun to visit.”

  “I still feel a little like an imposter. Tony and I have been married only for three months, you know.” Kate murmured a few complimentary words to Fiona before picking up the subject again. “After my first husband died, Brady and I got by on a very tight budget. When I agreed to be a surrogate mom, and Esther brought me here to help her plan the nursery, it was like visiting an alien dimension.”

  Patty had heard the story from Leo, complete with sarcastic commentary about his brother’s self-centered first wife. Ambitious and hard-driven, Esther had responded to her infertility by hiring another woman to bear their child—actually, Tony and Kate’s, since Esther had suffered ovarian failure. All very well, except that partway through the pregnancy, Esther had decided to accept a prestigious job offer in Washington, D.C., abandoning her husband and their baby-to-be for the glamorous social life of a single woman on the rise.

  “Leo admired you for refusing to live with Tony while he was still going through the divorce,” Patty recalled.

  “What kind of example would that have set for Brady if I’d moved in with a married man?” Kate moved around the chair, snipping carefully. “When Tony offered to be my birthing partner, I never imagined we’d fall in love. But sometimes wonderful things happen.”

  “Yeah, occasionally.” Patty wasn’t optimistic about her own chances in the romance department, but no sense burdening Kate with that. “So did you always plan to be a mom?”

  “Always.”

  “Guess a p
erson has to be born with that,” she mused.

  “You’d be a good mother, Patty.” Kate kept her gaze on the little girl, checking the length of her newly cut bangs.

  “I doubt it.”

  “You don’t like kids?” Fiona asked in dismay.

  Patty had forgotten the child was drinking in every word. “I like you. But I’m not good at mommy stuff. Never even played with dolls, unless you count action figures.”

  “You thought of the teddy-bear clinic!” her charge retorted.

  “Your grandmother and Rosita are organizing it, not me,” Patty pointed out.

  “You’re a good nanny.” The girl seemed determined to win this argument.

  “I’m your bodyguard. I’m here to protect you.”

  The little girl’s mouth trembled. “That’s all?”

  Wasn’t that enough? Patty supposed not. “Hey, you’re more than a job to me. You’re my friend.” An unfamiliar impulse seized her, to give Fiona a reassuring hug. Not practical, though, what with the scissors whipping about.

  “Why don’t you want to be a mommy?” the girl persisted.

  “For starters, I don’t cook, except for spaghetti and omelets.” Patty wished Fiona would stop looking so crushed. “Whenever I try to do girlie stuff, I screw it up. Once I read in a magazine that giving your hair a vinegar rinse made it shine. I didn’t realize you had to wash it out, and went around all day smelling like a salad.”

  A chuckle broke the tension. “Did anybody try to eat you?”

  “Luckily, no.”

  Kate gave the bangs one last snip and held up a mirror. The little girl turned this way and that to study the new style. “It’s so short.”

  “It’s adorable, you little pixie,” Patty said. “I can’t wait to get mine.”

  Fiona’s smile could have lit up the universe. When Patty lifted her off the chair, the girl clung to her for a moment before alighting on the ground.

  Holding her felt wonderful.

  How unfair that the child had a lousy mother, and now she’d lost Tatum, too, Patty reflected as she removed the cushions and sat down. Alec was a great dad, but Fi needed a mommy-type person, too. Someone to love her. Someone to help her grow up and learn to dance and put on makeup and knock boys down if they got rough, and shoot clay pigeons when they left.

  In the playpen, baby Tara waved a rattle and declared, “Ba ba ba.”

  Fiona plopped down on the ground, nose to nose with the infant. “I like babies. Is it okay if I want to be a mommy someday?”

  “Absolutely.” It’s not as if you have to reshape yourself in my image, Patty thought. But how touching that the little girl valued her opinion.

  Kate set to combing Patty’s hair, and kept up a running stream of commentary to Fiona about the infant’s development. As she listened, Patty sneaked glances at the two young ones. How would it feel to have tykes like these who depended on her, loved her, belonged to her? Plus a husband who kept the bed warm and shared the events of the day with her. A guy like Alec.

  She’d enjoyed bustling around him at breakfast, inhaling his aftershave lotion, noting the sophisticated weave of his jacket. Touchable. Sexy. Too bad they belonged in different worlds. Except so had Kate and Tony, until they’d fallen in love.

  Now stop that. Patty had better not be turning into one of those weak women Grandpa had deplored. Moping around, fantasizing, being ruled by emotions instead of good judgment and common sense.

  “What do you think?”

  Kate’s question roused Patty from her reflections. To her amazement, she discovered that she’d daydreamed right through her haircut.

  The hand mirror revealed a couple of startling facts. For one thing, she had a forehead, visible now that her thick bangs had been trimmed to wisps. For another, she had ears. Kind of cool to see them standing there proudly, not peeking shyly through the hair. She might even hang earrings off them once in a while. “Great job.”

  “We’re twins.” Fi watched her hopefully.

  Patty removed the protective cape and did what she’d been longing to do: she grabbed the little girl, whirled her around and blew raspberries against her neck, making funny noises and raising delighted giggles. “We sure are! You’re such a sweetheart.” Now, where had that endearment come from? “Thank you, Kate.”

  “My pleasure.” Their hostess lifted her baby from the pen. “I’ll clean later. Right now I’ve got to collect Brady and take him to the hospital.”

  “Brady’s sick?” Fiona asked worriedly.

  “Oh, no, we’re going to visit my sister Mary Beth. She just had a baby. It’s her third child but first girl. We’re all thrilled.”

  “Congrats.” Patty wished her brother or sister would get married and produce a kid. The whole family was a real no-show in that regard. So far, anyway. “Oh, hey, Fi, aren’t you going to take your braid home with you? Hang it on the wall or something?”

  “Yeah!”

  Patty rummaged in her purse and found a plastic bag. She always carried a few for evidence or anything else useful she might stumble across.

  “And you said you aren’t domestic.” Kate escorted them through the house again. “I completely forgot about giving her the braid.”

  “That isn’t domestic. It just struck me as a good idea.” She held up a hand to stop their hostess from exiting first. No matter how safe the neighborhood appeared, Patty didn’t believe in taking chances.

  She moved to the front window to survey the street. All appeared quiet, but Patty went out first. Nothing moved, and after a quick check around, she gave the all clear.

  “Can I have ice cream for lunch?” Fiona asked as they said goodbye and went to the car.

  “Not until you’ve eaten something healthy. How about a pickle-and-egg sandwich?”

  “Ooh, yuck!”

  Patty agreed. “I just made that up to be silly. How about a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich?” She’d seen the makings in the fridge.

  “Hurray! Those are scrummy.”

  Patty wasn’t sure how to fix a BLT, but she could find instructions on the internet. This domesticity business wasn’t so hard, after all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  On Saturday morning, Alec helped his mother and Rosita festoon the clubhouse with hospital-themed decorations, including an eye chart and tables with signs such as Admissions, Diagnosis and Blood Pressure. Patty and Fiona sat on chairs blowing up balloons, a number of which escaped and scooted through the air with raucous noises that sent his daughter into fits of giggles.

  He’d been startled to see the pair sporting look-alike haircuts last night when he’d arrived home for dinner. He couldn’t stop peering from one to the other, admiring how much more freely Fiona moved her head without the restraining braid, and how artfully the style framed Patty’s face, emphasizing her large gray eyes and sensual mouth.

  Despite the similar cuts, there wasn’t much physical resemblance between his fierce, brown-haired daughter and the confident blonde woman. But they seemed closer, making little jokes and teasing each other. Obviously, they’d had fun that day.

  Most importantly, Fiona was safe. And that was what he and Patty both needed to focus on, today in particular. Although they still didn’t know exactly when Sabrina would arrive, they couldn’t legally stop her from paying a visit, supervised by Alec, of course. As for snatching their daughter, she hadn’t repeated the threat, which hadn’t been specific enough for the police to take action.

  No matter how powerfully old embers sizzled, he should never have distracted Patty from her mission by bringing up the past, Alec reflected as he set his wrapped gifts on a table. Fiona’s well-being was the only thing that mattered.

  Mike Aaron arrived at 10:00 a.m., an hour before the party’s scheduled start, and closed off the clubhouse’s side door. “From now on, I monitor everyone who enters.” The sandy-haired giant wielded his clipboard as if prepared to deflect bullets with it. “Any word from the ex?”

  “Nada.” Alec gav
e a start as his phone played the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

  “Might be her now.”

  “No, it’s my boss.” Wondering why Owen Tartikoff would be calling on a Saturday, Alec moved to a quiet corner.

  “Alec. You at the lab?” As usual, the world-renowned fertility specialist skipped ordinary courtesies.

  “Not this morning.” Whatever question Owen had, Alec hoped answering it wouldn’t require a trip to the office.

  “Got a request from a former colleague, Dr. Laura Giovanni. She’s a fertility specialist in Buenos Aires who’s presenting a paper at the ISERF meeting next fall.” That would be the annual conference of the International Society of Embryology and Reproductive Fertility, to be held in L.A. in October. Owen was scheduled to be the keynote speaker. “A member of her clinic’s board of directors is visiting your area today and wants to see the facilities. I said you’d be happy to show him around.”

  Alec didn’t know which to address first, an uneasy feeling about this director or the fact that he wasn’t available to play tour guide. He decided on the latter. “Any chance he’s staying over the weekend? I’m tied up today on personal business.”

  “The man owns a biotech company. Laura says he may be interested in sponsoring research. What exactly is important enough for you to blow him off?” Owen spoke with the all-too-familiar sardonic tone that he splashed like acid over nurses and residents.

  But Alec was neither of those. “It’s my daughter’s birthday party.” He didn’t bother to say how much this meant to Fiona, since that wouldn’t help his case. Owen’s interest in children dwindled to zero once they passed the embryo stage. “What’s this fellow’s name, anyway?”

  Paper rustled in the background. “Edward something.”

  “Eduardo Patron?”

  “You’ve heard of him?” A rare note of surprise colored the question. Owen wasn’t used to being caught off guard.

  “Mr. Patron is expected to attend the birthday party, since he’s engaged to my ex-wife.” Alec enjoyed being one step ahead of his boss for a change. “Did he request the tour with me specifically?”