Daycare Mom to Wife

by Jennie Adams

Came on a breath and she turned her head. Light spilled from the lounge room inside. She’d walked out through the sliding doors to join Dan on the porch. The light illuminated just enough for Jess to see the strong planes of Dan’s face and to want to trace each one of them with her fingertips.

  Her worries blurred as she stared into his eyes. Her sensible reasons for resisting the way he made her feel faded too.

  ‘It didn’t exhaust me. But what about you, Dan? I don’t think you managed much rest for yourself today.’ In fact, Jess thought Dan might have overdone it a bit today, because he’d looked quite used up when they left the beach, and again after playing in the yard with Rob for a while tonight.

  He’d looked upset, too, when Rob mentioned building sandcastles with…Rebecca, Dan’s late wife. She’d been a beautiful brunette with soft brown eyes and a smile that Dan must see in his daughters every day. Jess had pored over the framed photos with the younger children back at the Fraziers’ house.

  And the talk with Luke couldn’t have been easy for Dan, either.

  ‘A good sleep tonight will sort me out.’ Dan shifted slightly, slowed the movement of the swing seat down to the gentlest motion. As he did so his thigh shifted against Jess’s. She had a skirt on with a T-shirt top. Dan was wearing another of his polo shirts and denim shorts. Yet even through the layers of skirt and shorts, Jess’s skin warmed, sensitised to that brush of his body against her.

  ‘What do you have planned for the kids tomorrow—?’

  ‘I hope the children don’t wake at dawn to morrow—’

  Jess drew a tight breath.

  Dan stopped.

  Their eyes met and held, and Dan made a sound that was half yielding, half resistant, and Jess’s breath stopped in her throat.

  ‘Jess.’ Dan spoke her name with all the suppressed desire that Jess felt.

  She should say no, should get up, walk away, think about her position here and all those reasons, but Jess didn’t. She couldn’t do it because she did desire Dan. She was attracted to him and in the back of her mind she had asked herself a hundred times—

  When Dan lowered his head, she lifted her lips and met him. His foot came to rest on the floor and the tiny motion of the swing seat stopped.

  Dan’s lips closed over Jess’s and his arms came around her. Her arms rose to his chest and one locked about the back of his neck. Jess had dreamed about Dan’s neck. The strong column of it; how the muscles would feel beneath her hand. She hadn’t known that he would feel so warm. That she would feel such tensile strength in him, or that his kiss would feel like this. She told herself it was safe. The children were asleep. She and Dan could do this and it wasn’t hurting anything.

  Dan’s firm lips softened, and brought her the taste of wine that was also in her mouth. Jess’s wineglass was long gone, somewhere on the floor. She didn’t even remember finishing the drink or putting it down. She wanted to blame the abandonment of her thoughts on that wine but she couldn’t.

  The bubbles floating inside her were not from the small amount of alcohol. These were Dan-inspired bubbles and Jess didn’t want them to ever stop. All her careful thoughts and self-protection frayed away, unravelled as Dan’s lips consumed hers, took her mouth with desire and a need that matched her need.

  Jess melted into him. That was what Dan felt as he kissed her, as their lips meshed together and he experienced all the sensations of holding her, kissing her, feeling her body soften against his and her arm creep about his neck so she could hold him closer, draw more from their kiss.

  His heart pounded. Every sense and sensation was focused on the woman in his arms, the taste of her soft lips. Dan had asked himself how Jess could truly be attracted to him, what she could see in a man his age. There was Luke, being difficult, and Dan’s own confused feelings.

  And there was this—him kissing her and her kissing him in a way that not only assuaged curiosity and awareness but invoked tenderness, the kind of tenderness he would have given and exchanged only with Rebecca…

  What was he doing?

  What kind of risk was he taking when he had nothing inside him to give, nothing that hadn’t already been given, handed over to the woman he had loved with all his heart? What was he doing seeking this with Jess when his eldest son was inside, angry and upset because he thought Dan was crossing a line with an employee that he shouldn’t cross?

  Luke had thrown that at Dan along with a lot of deeper accusations about Dan not honouring his mother, and Dan…hadn’t been able to argue because Luke was right about Jess’s position as an employee, and in the end, though Dan didn’t want his son trying to dictate to him about his personal life, Luke’s accusations about the rest of it only matched Dan’s own thoughts too.

  Dan’s hands came up to Jess’s shoulders. He eased his lips from hers and set distance between them. Dan on this side of the swing seat. Jess on that side. And he prayed to whatever god might be listening that he hadn’t just hurt her and that he hadn’t just hurt himself. This wasn’t right.

  It couldn’t be.

  Regret washed through him. For doing something that was wrong and disloyal. He couldn’t remember how it had felt to kiss Rebecca. The memory wouldn’t come, was pushed down beneath the sensation of kissing his children’s daycare mum. Dan had always been able to remember.

  Yet this kiss had felt special, exceptional, but was he talking himself into these thoughts because he craved closeness? Because Jess was attractive and working in proximity with him and so it was almost easy to let himself—?

  ‘It’s the holiday setting.’ A trace of panic laced Jess’s tone. She blinked as though to try to dispel the lingering effects of what they had just shared. ‘The sea and how late it is and sitting out here. It didn’t mean anything. We just didn’t think—’

  But they had thought, hadn’t they? Dan had known that Jess would join him out here and he’d waited and in some part of him he’d known he would kiss her, even despite the upheaval with his son and all the reasons it would have been smarter not to do it.

  Jess had done her final round inside the house and checked on her daughter and she’d known, too. Dan felt certain that she had. But could she be more truly invested in this than he was?

  Jess was young, a single mother and working for him. Why put her in a position where she might feel vulnerable, whether she’d been prepared to step into that place with him for a moment or not?

  She was obviously having second thoughts about it now.

  Just as he was. ‘I had no right to do that, Jess, and yet a part of me wanted it to happen.’ He hated to admit it but he couldn’t make it sound as though Jess had been the one to try to make it happen. They’d both drifted towards this and in the quiet of the night with all the children tucked away… ‘That was even more wrong because I know I can’t—’

  ‘I know.’ Jess hushed him with the low words. ‘I know, Dan.’ She got up from the seat. Her face was tight, filled with tense emotion. Uncertainty and resolve at war with each other. Shadows. Unease. And still the impact of his kisses was there for him to see upon her swollen lips and in the blurred confusion in her soft grey eyes.

  Desire whispered again, and Dan frowned it down.

  ‘It’s late.’ The need to get away filled her words. ‘And I think the children probably will be up early in the morning. I need to be up too, to be on duty the moment they wake and to do my best to start trying to win Luke’s trust again after—after him opening up about his feelings today.’

  She didn’t say more and Dan pushed down his own mixed feelings on that topic for examination later.

  Jess simply went on. ‘So I’ll say goodnight now and hope that you sleep well and get really good rest. I worry about you getting too tired sometimes.’

  She went inside. Dan picked up the wineglasses, and dumped them in the kitchen, and made sure all the doors were locked. He would do as Jess suggested and sleep, and when he woke tomorrow he’d remember what it had been like to kiss Rebecca.

  T
here would be no Dan and Jess, because Dan and Jess didn’t exist. Not in any way other than employer and employee. He might be tempted, he might need to draw some lines in the sand with his son so Luke respected Dan’s right to have needs, but none of that changed the fact that his relationship with his much younger childcare provider needed to remain firmly fixed in business.

  Dan took himself off to bed.

  Jess leaned against the closed door of the room she was sharing with Ella. She’d shut herself in there and listened as Dan went about the house checking that everything was locked up and secure. Checking that his children, and, by association because they were here, Jess and Ella, were safe before he went to bed.

  Dan had kissed her. Jess’s insides were still shaking from the impact of that kiss. She didn’t want to think about it, was afraid if she did she might discover thoughts and reactions and emotions inside herself she couldn’t let herself find.

  He’d pushed her away, had regretted the kiss probably before it was even over. Jess had seen in Dan’s eyes the conviction that she would be too much trouble to be worth it. Some of that would be about Luke’s attitude, about her working for him…

  People found ways, though, when things mattered enough, didn’t they?

  You don’t want Dan to find a way, Jess.

  Jess didn’t have what she would need to invest emotionally. She had her life to live and she needed to rely on herself, be the best mother possible to Ella and the best daycare mum she could be, but with the exception of the love she gave to her daughter, Jess needed to do those things while keeping the deepest parts of herself locked away where they would stay safe and not suffer any further blows of rejection.

  What could Dan Frazier do but reject Jess? He’d done it just now, hadn’t he?

  Jess pushed away from the door and went to the single bed beside her daughter’s cot. Jess’s clothes were there in a zipper bag. She got out her pyjamas, put them on, crawled under the sheet and prayed for sleep and for tomorrow to have erased every memory of Dan’s mouth over hers, his arms snug about her, and most of all to have erased the feeling of security and rightness that Jess had felt in his embrace.

  There was no such security to be found. Dan didn’t have it to give.

  ‘Eating outside at a picnic table is fun. I’m glad we thought of it.’ Daisy didn’t hesitate to take credit for the idea of eating their breakfast out of doors, though in fact it had been Dan’s suggestion because he’d wanted to allow Jess to sleep in a little if she could.

  It was not because he didn’t feel ready to face her after that kiss. Dan glanced in Luke’s direction. Was it because of the uneasy state of matters between him and his son? It was, in part. It was also because Dan hadn’t been able to get the kiss out of his mind.

  ‘Do we have any more orange juice, Dad?’ Rob asked the question after lifting the two-litre bottle on the table and discovering it was empty.

  ‘You keep going on your breakfast, Rob. I’ll get more juice from the fridge.’ Dan left the children. It was bad that, because of Luke, he almost felt relieved to walk away. He was going to have to try to sort things out better than this, but what should he say? Butt out of my personal life? It’s none of your business? It wasn’t that simple.

  Dan stepped into the kitchen, and heard a sound from the room Jess and Ella were sharing. The door had been closed when he got up this morning but he noted now that it was halfway open.

  Had Annapolly taken a peek in there? She was a horror for helping herself to doors that weren’t locked. Dan hesitated for a moment and then decided to go shut it. It was six in the morning. Let Jess sleep in while she could. Ella, too.

  Let a little more time pass before Dan had to confront what happened last night? The awareness was mostly due to proximity, wasn’t it? And to his senses waking up after a four-year slumber in a way Dan hadn’t realised was going to sneak up on him?

  He stepped quietly to the door of the room and reached to pull it closed.

  He paused as he took in the sight inside. A baby in a cot, covers kicked off lying on her tummy with her nappy-padded bum in the air. A smile twitched at the corners of Dan’s mouth despite himself.

  Then his gaze shifted to the bed beside that cot and his smile faded because there was Jess in a set of very short floral baby-doll pyjamas with frilly bits all over and a lot of bare skin. She, too, had kicked off her covers and was sound asleep on her tummy.

  And yes, Dan was still attracted and it had only taken that glimpse of her to make it clear. But there was more than that. There was tightness in Dan’s chest because…he wanted to step into the room, climb into the bed, pull the sheet up over both of them and cuddle up with her. He wanted that, and it wasn’t only about physical awareness. It was about a kind of closeness that Dan feared might mean he didn’t only want her, but some part of him thought that he needed her?

  ‘Du!’ A wriggle of sound came from the cot.

  By the time Dan looked, Ella was on her back, grinning up at him.

  ‘Do you want to get up, Ella?’ Dan whispered and shifted to the side of the cot. The little one wriggled, rolled and pulled herself up to her feet using the cot’s railings for support.

  Dan picked her up, grabbed a disposable nappy and the bits and pieces he’d need to sort her out, and took her into the girls’ room. Two minutes later he had a dry cooing baby in his arms. He got Rob’s juice from the fridge and took Ella outside to join the others.

  The children fussed over Ella. She was a beautiful baby. Dan had forgotten what it was like to have such a little one. Ella was wide awake but still a bit cuddly. She laid her head in the crook of his neck and watched his rowdy family from the safety of his arms. And Dan…wished that all of life could be so simple. Just provide a pair of arms and that would be enough.

  Luke had the seat to Dan’s right. Ella reached out her arms to him and gurgled.

  ‘I think she wants you to hold her, Luke.’ Dan caught his son’s eye just as Ella wiggled even more, waving her arms for Luke to take her.

  ‘I don’t know why she likes me so much.’ Luke half grumbled the words, but he took Ella and his expression was soft as he sat her on his knees.

  Dan looked at his eldest, who was so close to being a man now, and wondered where the years had gone, and hoped that he and Luke wouldn’t remain at loggerheads. He didn’t want that. Deep down, Dan didn’t think Luke wanted that, either.

  And Dan thought about Jess asleep in bed inside and how he’d felt when he saw her there. Maybe what he felt was lonely, and Jess was around and he’d kissed her so of course he’d want to kiss her again…

  Dan poured himself some cereal, added a generous portion of milk, and started a conversation with the children about what they’d be doing today before they got in the van to go back home.

  Probably when Jess woke, Dan would look at her and wonder what all his fuss had been about anyway.

  ‘You let me sleep in.’ Jess spoke the words in a shocked tone as she joined Dan at the outdoor breakfast table. She’d woken to the sound of Ella crowing somewhere outside and had realised Dan must have got her daughter up and left Jess to sleep.

  Jess had never started a day without taking care of Ella. And the thought of Dan coming into the room, seeing her sleeping…

  What if she’d been flat on her back snoring? She’d woken on her side, curled up in a ball, but Jess knew she wriggled around before she actually woke up. Ella did the same thing.

  ‘You’re dressed.’ Dan spoke the words with an edge of relief. A second later his ears turned red at the tips. He glanced at his children, then turned back to Jess and all but shoved a box of breakfast cereal her way as she took a seat at the table. ‘You were asleep. I went to shut the door. I think Annapolly was the culprit though I couldn’t say for sure. Ella was awake but I couldn’t see the sense in waking you.’

  With these statements made, Dan poured a glass of juice for himself and drank half of it in one gulp.

  There hadn’t been tim
e from waking to joining everyone at the table for Jess to think about anything other than the shock of waking without her daughter in the room, and knowing she should be on duty and Dan had left her to sleep. She’d thrown on the first clothes she found and rushed outside. She hadn’t even combed her hair, and now Jess became aware of so many things all at once.

  Her less-than-properly-groomed state. Dan looking fresh and attractive and far more capable of satisfying her than any bowl of cereal.

  Luke holding her daughter, and Ella patting his face with complete contentment. Jess had a theory about that. Children and animals—they knew a kind heart when they found one. That gave Jess hope that she would be able to get things in a better place with Luke over time.

  If you stop showing any interest in his father!

  Jess had realised that kissing Dan had been a mistake. All she’d done was expose herself to Dan backing away afterwards. But this morning Jess was having trouble accepting that assessment. What was wrong with her? Did she want to line up to be rejected when she couldn’t stack up to what Dan had already had in his life? When Dan wasn’t prepared to stand up for her? Not really? If he cared enough he would address the issue with his son and make it clear to Luke that he had the right to pursue a relationship.

  Hadn’t she had enough second-rate treatment from Ella’s father?

  Jess didn’t want to be negative. She had Ella. She had a job and she would have a home. Jess just needed to sort that out properly with Lang Fielder one day very soon. She didn’t need anything more.

  Jess pushed out every thought aside from her work, this work right now. And she worked. She made sure the children had the best time possible when they all went back to the beach. She gave two hundred per cent to trying to win Luke over. She assisted Dan at every turn and she did it without responding to him as a man, at all.

  This was the way it needed to be. Jess and Dan, working as a team to give his children the best short holiday experience possible, and for Jess to give the best care for them, overall.