Bad Nanny (The Bad Nanny Trilogy #1)

by C. M. Stunich

  I said I'd look at her, not … fuck her.

  Christ.

  What the hell am I doing?

  Brooke's arms circle my neck, trapping our mouths together as she arches her breasts into my chest, encourages me to press her into the mattress with my weight. In the back of my mind, I know we really shouldn't be doing this or anything with the realm of this.

  But I can't stop.

  Naw, maybe I don't stop?

  When she drops her hands to my jeans and tears the button open, I let her, let her stick her hand in there and touch me, sliding her palm down my shaft with a gasp tearing from her throat.

  “We should probably wait,” I grind out because, shit, I guess I'm fucking crazy as hell. Must be nuts to say no to a girl as pretty as this—especially with her hand pumping furiously on my cock. It's amateur as fuck, but also kind of sexy.

  My mouth drops to her collarbone, licking up along that graceful neck of hers, teeth nibbling the sensitive skin of her throat as she moans and digs the nails of her right hand into my bicep. Her left is still working me with a frantic, wild rhythm, begging me for something that I'm not sure she even really wants.

  “No.”

  I reach down and take her wrist, pulling her hand out of my pants.

  When I sit up and scoot to the edge of the bed, she shoots up and presses her back into the headboard, breath coming harsh and quick, her breasts rising and falling with the motion. I glance back at her, but I can only look for a second.

  It's too much. It's all just too much.

  “I looked at you,” I tell her as I stand up and button my pants, grabbing my shirt and slipping it over my head. “I looked at you, Brooke.” My hand curls around the handle of the sleeping baby's seat, and I move out of the room and down the stairs to find the kids still enraptured in their show.

  “You sure look stupid right now,” Kinzie says as I pause and glance into a small mirror at the bottom of the stairs. My hair is mussy and my pupils are huge, like I'm high or something. Nothing I can do about that, I guess. “Can we eat now? It's late and I'm hungry.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I'll get right on that, your majesty.” I move into the kitchen and find that the fridge has been stocked with plenty of food. Well, hell. Somebody's thinking way ahead of me, that's for sure. I start to pull stuff out when I hear the front door slam and pause, heading back into the living room and looking out the window just in time to see Brooke's car pull out of the driveway.

  I wonder if I'll regret letting her leave like that.

  I have no idea what came over me upstairs with Zayden. Like, literally none. I feel like I went crazy there for a minute, like I was sure that anybody would be better than the customers at the club. But … then after I left, I just felt cheap and weird, and I didn't know what to do.

  So I pulled over on the side of the road and I just sat there in my ugly panties and my top with the buttons all screwed up, and I put my face in my hands and cried. For an hour. An hour that made me late to my new job.

  When I got there, my new boss screamed at me and then fired me right on the spot.

  So apparently I was freaking out for nothing. I'm not going to be a stripper.

  But what I am going to be is homeless and hungry and praying that my nieces don't get dragged into foster care, or maybe that when my parents come home, they'll be able to take them—even though my dad has early onset Alzheimer's.

  Because it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to handle this.

  I stay out for most of the night, as long as I would've worked, just sitting in the parking lot with the cheap, cheesy glow of the club's lights bathing my car in neon pink and blue. I don't do anything but sit there and watch men go into the club, laughing and joking and hanging on one another. When they come out, they look like they're even more drunk than they were before.

  After a while, I admit defeat and head home, unlocking the door and letting myself into the living room to find Zay asleep on my sister's couch. The baby's with him, sleeping quietly on his chest, her tiny body wrapped in strong, tattooed arms.

  I suck in a deep breath and wrap my own arms around myself. I don't see any of the other kids, but I guess that they're parceled out upstairs. Without saying anything, I slip my heels off and move inside, plopping down on the small couch and turning on my side.

  The cushions smell like dog piss. In fact, as I'm thinking that, I see Dodger run up to the coffee table and lift his leg.

  Great.

  I can't wait to start cleaning this place up for the inevitable move. Can't stay in a house if you can't pay the rent.

  I stare across the moonlit room at Zay with the baby on his chest and try not to smile. I don't want to smile, not after the shitty day I've had. But I can't help it. What is it about tattooed guys and babies that make girls crazy? Is it that juxtaposition of hard and soft? I have no clue. Clearly, I'm no good at psychoanalyzing myself or else I would've known I was incapable of making a sacrifice for my family.

  I'm such a selfish bitch.

  I close my eyes and breathe deep, almost falling asleep before I hear a rustle from across the living room. It's Zayden, laying the baby gently in the folding crib he brought over. She fusses, but he coos at her, singing some soft song under his breath. I think it's … Africa by Toto? What the hell? But anyway, it's cute as hell when she settles with a little smack of her lips and falls back asleep.

  “How was work?” he asks, voice guarded against the weird virgin-stripper girl that tried to jump his bones this afternoon. No wonder he thinks I'm nuts. I feel nuts right now. And I can't believe I did what I did earlier.

  “I got fired,” I whisper, lips brushing against the gross pilling gray fabric of the couch. Zay makes a sound under his breath and comes over to sit next to me, crossing his legs as he settles on the floor between the couch and the coffee table.

  “Before or after?” he asks, his voice weird and tinny.

  “Before,” I admit and there's a long pause before he sighs.

  “I mean, that's kind of good, right?”

  “If you like cold houses with no food and cars with no gas. If you like kissing your master's degree good-bye because you can't find a job that'll work around those hours. If you like having to move your sister's kids into a new city, a new town, just so you can have some hope of actually landing some work with a bachelor's in statistics.”

  Zay smiles a little, his silver lip piercings catching the wan moonlight.

  “When you put it like that,” he starts, but then he just shakes his head a little, reaching up to run his fingers through the thick hair on the left side of his head. I can still feel a tingle in my fingertips from when I touched it. “Do you know what I think?” he asks and I shake my head, cheek rubbing against the dog pee cushion.

  Zay reaches out and pokes me in the center of my forehead with a tattooed finger.

  “I think you got off lucky. Don't do something if it's going to break you like that. You've got a right to your own body, you know?”

  “What else am I supposed to do?” I ask, trying not to cry again. The last thing this poor guy needs is to see me cry. Haven't I done that enough already? I mean, seriously. We really don't know each other at all. Honestly, if I was being straight with myself, I should wonder how I ever thought to leave him with the kids. Or how I'm totally cool with laying in a dark living room next to him.

  He could be crazy. He could be a murderer. He could be … all sorts of things.

  I should kick him out of my sister's house.

  “I have no clue,” he says with a loose, exaggerated shrug, lifting up his palms for emphasis. “I've always been pretty shitty when it comes to adulting.”

  “Adulting?”

  “Yup. Adulting. The act of being a boring, tightwad with no personality and nothing to do but bitch.”

  “That's adulting?” I ask with a raised brow. “I thought adulting was when you, you know, paid bills and took care of the kids and did what you had to do to survive?”
>
  “Naw. Stop being so practical, Smarty-pants. Seriously. For somebody with a degree in math, you sure seem a little dumb.”

  I smile, but it's a crooked, loose smile. It fades as soon as I see the dog pissing on the bricks of the fireplace. I should've left that fucking rat at the shelter.

  “I'm sorry about your money,” I whisper, realizing that we've never actually agreed on a price. The thought gives me chills. “I'll get it to you as soon as I can.”

  Zay sits there for a long while looking at me.

  “Look, like I said, I don't exactly need the money right now, okay?” There's another long pause as he leans back against the coffee table. “All I'm doing for the next week and a half is watching these monsters.” Zayden jerks his head toward the stairs. “I mean, what are two more?”

  I sit up suddenly and glance away, hair falling over my face. I sweep it back over my shoulder with a quick motion.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask as I glance his way and try to take him in. He's still a Tattooed God, but … he looks a little human right now. “You'll be our nanny for free?”

  “Why not? You can spend all day pounding the pavement, looking for another job or something.”

  “Why would you do that?” I ask as I stare in his beautiful, pierced face. When he smiles, it's almost magical.

  “Because … why the hell not?”

  No more pretty girls.

  Seriously. No more pretty girls ever.

  Brooke takes her kids to school the next morning, and I manage to wrangle my monsters into their appropriate pens, but after that … I get back to my brother's place and flop down on the bed. The enormity of what I promised in the quiet dark last night is seriously pinching my nipples.

  I just agreed to be a … a fucking nanny? I mean, who the fuck has a fucking nanny in this day and age? I mean, might as well have a larder and a chambermaid, too, huh?

  So now, I get a mere four hours of alone time a day before I have to start picking up kids like pinballs, bouncing from one school to another in this weird awkward stretch of time between one and three. Why do they all have different times?! Why can't all the damn kids go to school at the same damn time? Maybe that's what nannies are for because I don't know how any normal human motherfucker gets around to all these places without Hermione's time-turner from Harry Potter.

  The baby starts to fuss a few moments later and the pot dealer neighbor starts his wall banging.

  I lay there for all of two minutes before I throw myself out of bed and jam the monitor in my pocket, taking the stairs three at a time before I jump down to the main floor and explode out the back door.

  I have just about fucking had it with this son of a bitch.

  I head into the backyard, climb up onto the small cement area where Mercedes grows an organic fucking garden, and gaze over the fence. There's a big ass rottie back here, and the dog growls at me, but what's he gonna do from there?

  I reach down and grab the wooden handle of Mercedes' clippers. They have about a four foot reach, and she says she uses them to cut blackberry clusters off the thorny vines that peek above her fence.

  I use them to reach into the neighbor's yard and snip his weed plants off at their bases. It takes me about two minutes, and then it's done.

  “Eat shit, you cocksucker.”

  I drop back into the yard and head inside. Twenty minutes later when that son of a bitch finds his prized crop, there ain't none of it left.

  His scream is enough to lull me into a soft, melodic sleep.

  Six kids. One car. Nightmare from hell.

  Kinzie and Bella are screaming and fighting over one of those dead dolls with the weird eyes and the freaky body proportions while the twins kick and yell and argue over possession of my phone. I have a blinding headache, and I kind of want to … die right now. My cat's stuffed in a kennel in the front seat, and the horrifyingly putrid little chihuahuas are trapped in the back, yipping and growling and fighting with each other. Suddenly, there are like, three of them. I thought there were only two? Did they multiply? I can't remember how many goddamn chihuahuas I'm supposed to have.

  I drive the whole kit and fucking caboodle over to Brooke's house and pull into the driveway, my heart constricting at the empty swath of pavement where her ugly ass Subaru was sitting this morning.

  I'm really on my own here. Really, seriously, truly alone with six children and four dogs and a hairless cat named Hubert.

  My life is so over.

  “Alright, guys, let's do this shit with military precision, shall we?” Nobody's listening to me, so I just start unloading demons from the seats and making sure they get in the front door. Once I think I've got everyone, I start counting and realize I've lost that hideous hairless gray dog thing. You'd think Hubert's hairlessness would endear me to that rat, but all it does is make me realize how much I despise little dogs.

  Seriously.

  Get a cat. Get a large dog.

  What's with this in-between shit?

  A quick search of the vehicle and I find the creature eating a dirty diaper under one of the seats.

  Don't cringe away from that. Reread it. I had to live it, okay? And it's fucking gross.

  As I'm dragging the rat-thing in by its harness, I find my phone on the cement outside the front door. When I pick it up, I see the screen is cracked.

  My mouth twitches.

  “Who did it?” I ask as the rat-thing attaches itself to my leg and starts to death shake my pants, growling and snarling and … is it hissing at me? No, that's Hubert. Who's out of his kennel. Shit. I shake the dog off and try to ease forward toward my cat. “Come on, Hub. Don't do this to me, man.” The cat takes off up the stairs, the chihuahuas on his ass like white on rice.

  Great.

  “Best day of my goddamn life,” I grumble as I hunt down the herd of wild dogs and corral them in an upstairs bathroom. I feel bad for the things, but what am I supposed to do with them? They're not my dogs, and these aren't my kids. The only thing here that's mine is the damn cat, and he wasn't even mine to begin with.

  Vegas, Vegas, Vegas, I think as I tromp back down the stairs and into the kitchen to make snacks or whatever. It takes me a while to come up with something, and I start slapping together PB&Js for the whole lot of them. That's what our parents fed us. My brother and I had stupid peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch at least five times a week. All kids like 'em, right?

  “I have a gluten allergy,” Kinzie barks as I toss the plate of sandwiches on the coffee table and let the kids go at it like animals.

  “You have a … what?” I ask as I shove bread and jelly and peanuts into my mouth.

  “A gluten allergy, stupid.” I narrow my eyes at Kinzie and then point with the whole of my sandwich.

  “Okay, that's it. Last warning, kid. Next time, it's a time-out.” She scoffs at me, but I'm not playing around here. Seriously. My niece has slapped and kicked and punched and spit at me. I'm finished with the attitude.

  “I don't like time-outs,” she says, picking up one of the sandwiches and tossing it onto the floor for the gray rat-dog thing. I watch as it gobbles it up and then set my own food down on the table.

  “Well, you've just earned yourself one. Get up. Let's go. You're going to sit in this downstairs bathroom for …” I brainstorm time periods and decide that since she's seven, we'll go with that. “Seven minutes. Get in here and I'll start timing you.”

  Kinzie makes about … zero moves to get up and listen to my directions. In fact, she looks right at me, hauls back her head … and spits.

  The projectile lands harmlessly on the floor between us, but I've had just about enough of that shit. I move around the couch, lean down and haul my niece over my shoulder while she screams and flails and kicks. I'm not hurting her, but she acts like I'm in the process of beating her to a bloody pulp, wailing and punching and … fuck, did she just bite me?

  I sit Kinzie down on the closed lid of the toilet with its fuzzy pink cover and k
neel down in front of her.

  “I'm done with the attitude, okay? I've been nothing but nice to you. Until you have a change in attitude, you're sitting here until I say otherwise, got it?” Kinzie kicks and yells, but I'm not here to argue. I get up and leave the room only to have her burst out of it fifteen seconds later. With an eye roll, I follow her up the stairs and into the master bedroom where Brooke and I almost fucked yesterday. Part of me wishes I'd just gone through with it, let myself see what that soft, curvy body of hers would feel like wrapped around mine. The other parts knows I made the right decision.

  Last night, Brooke Overland was angry and desperate and hurting.

  Today, she … well, it was hard to say exactly what she was, but it wasn't all that much better.

  Clearly, the girl has issues. I'm not saying she's not hot and that I wouldn't mind spending the rest of my time here tangled up in her sheets, but … it ain't gonna happen.

  Brooke is too fragile, too sensitive; she's clearly got issues up the wazoo.

  Kinzie dives underneath the bed and I follow after her, carefully wrapping an arm around her waist as she screams at me, and dragging her out from under the bed.

  This time, when I put her back on that fuzzy toilet seat cover, she sits there for a good two minute before she makes another run for it.

  This is gonna be a seriously long goddamn day.

  When Brooke gets back to her sister's place later that night, her long brunette hair is tangled and her lips are pulled down into a permanent frown. The makeup she put on so carefully this morning is gone, replaced with black smudges around the eyes, purple circles underneath them, and a dab of red along the side of her chin that I think used to be her lipstick.