Meg could have left the puppies at the house while she and Tia were at the garage apartment unpacking. But where Tia went, the puppies wanted to go, too, and Meg hadn’t had the heart to separate them. Still, it had made settling in a slow process and by late Monday afternoon—after spending the entire day trying to empty her suitcases and the boxes she’d taken from the trunk of her car—she was still only about half finished.
“Are we done yet?” Tia asked when Max and Harry began to wrestle with each other and ignore her.
“Just a little while longer and then it will be time to go back to the house to get ready for dinner. I have a present for you, though, since you’ve been so good today and let me get some of my work done.”
“A present?” Tia repeated.
She sounded wide-eyed but Meg couldn’t actually see the little girl’s eyes because they were covered with a pair of old sunglasses Meg had let her have. They completed the dress-up ensemble that included one of Meg’s scarves and two of her belts wrapped around Tia’s T-shirt and shorts, and a pair of Meg’s thong panties worn like a backpack with Tia’s shoulders through the leg openings. Meg had no idea what Tia thought the panties were, but since the three-year-old had devised her own use for them and not asked about their real purpose, Meg had not offered the information.
“What kind of present?” Tia asked coyly.
This particular present was one of Meg’s favorite tools and she was surprised that Tia had been distracted and entertained with other things for so long that it had taken until now for Meg to need to bring it out. Ordinarily, with the kids she worked with, she needed to use the tools at her disposal immediately.
She was also thrilled that it hadn’t taken more than today for Tia to become comfortable with her—she was accustomed to kids who were so disabled, fearful, phobic, angry, upset or just plain leery of strangers that it took far longer to win them over.
“It’s kind of a big present,” Meg answered her charge’s question in a tone intended to intrigue.
“How big?” Tia inquired, going for the bait.
“Pretty big,” Meg said as she went to the bed. She’d hidden the gift under it when she’d taken it out of her trunk last night after having brought her car around to park it nearer to the apartment—something Hadley had come across the yard to suggest after Logan had left, making Meg wonder why he hadn’t come back himself.
Not that it mattered…
“It’s too big a present to wrap,” she warned Tia as she got down on her knees and pulled out the mini trampoline.
“What is it?” Tia asked when she saw it.
Meg positioned it next to the bed so the mattress could act as a sort of guardrail. “It’s called a trampoline.”
“What d’ya do with it?”
Meg stepped onto it and demonstrated. “You jump on it.”
This time Tia’s awe was more apparent because her mouth opened wide.
“Le’me do it!” Tia demanded, jumping up and down on the floor in an excited mimicry of Meg’s demonstration on the trampoline. And again Meg appreciated the fact that it was so easy to interest Tia, to excite her, and that she was so willing to plunge right into even new things.
Meg stepped off the trampoline and before she could offer any assistance, Tia had climbed onto it.
“First let’s get some of this stuff off of you—you could trip on the ends of the belts and the scarf, and the sunglasses will go flying,” she explained.
“But not my pitty cape,” Tia said, patting one of the thong’s straps at her shoulder.
“Not your pretty cape,” Meg agreed. “You can keep that on as long as we’re up here but it will have to stay in the apartment when we leave.” Because there was no way she was taking Tia to dinner wearing her flowered thong…
While Meg divested Tia of the rest of her playthings, the little girl could hardly contain herself. When she’d finished, Meg said, “Now hold my hands and take little jumps at first, until you get the feel of it.”
Tia didn’t hesitate to do as she’d been told—anything to finally get to do what she was wiggling around in eager anticipation of. But the exact moment her tiny hands were securely in Meg’s, Tia jumped. Tentatively at first, giggling, then jumping more.
“I yike it!” she proclaimed, venturing a higher jump, wobbling slightly on the landing but not enough to fall.
Then she got braver still and began to jump repeatedly. Up and down, up and down—she was clearly a quick learner, and after a few minutes of that said, “Le’me do it myself.”
By then Meg thought Tia knew what she was doing and since the trampoline was barely a foot off the floor with nothing nearby that the little girl could fall into and hurt herself, Meg allowed her to let go of her hands.
“Now go back,” Tia ordered, her three-year-old independence making her insist that Meg not continue to hover.
But Meg only went as far as to sit on the bed. She still wanted to keep an eye on the little girl until she was sure Tia could manage the trampoline without incident, but she was also enjoying watching how much pleasure it was bringing the happy-go-lucky Tia. That was more important to her than unpacking.
This was exactly why she’d taken the nanny job—to have contact again with an untroubled, carefree kid. A kid who experienced unfettered joy over things like the dog unraveling toilet paper, who had no compunctions about innocently wearing a thong as a makeshift cape, who got a thrill out of jumping on a tiny trampoline.
Things like that were what had made Meg enjoy working with kids in the first place. Prior to taking on the job of dealing with the serious aspects of ill, disabled or abused children, being with kids had just been fun. It had been a way for her to get out of the shell of her shy, reserved nature and behave more freely herself.
And that had been important to her. Especially since she worried that her shy, reserved nature made her a little too much like her grandfather, the stuffy former town reverend.
Not that she was in any way as judgmental or staunch or strident or daunting as the Reverend was. But she did tend toward being a bit on the controlled side, and she’d discovered early on that working with kids helped counteract that. And right now she needed that more than she ever had.
In fact, if she didn’t find a way to accomplish it, she wasn’t sure that she could go on doing her job as a psychologist anymore.
Intellectually, she knew what she was going through—it was a reaction to a traumatic event. But she was concerned that if she didn’t do something to work through it in a hurry, her inhibited, reticent, shy nature might take over and she might not ever lose the jitters or the skittishness she’d developed. The jitters and the skittishness that made her jump at even the smallest unexpected sound or every time one of her kids came near her without warning. She was worried this fearfulness might make her as suspicious and untrusting as her grandfather was, that she would end up distant and off-putting and untouchable.
Why did the image of Logan McKendrick pop into her mind when she thought about how much she didn’t want to be untouchable?
It wasn’t as if she was there to be touched by the man who was her boss. Or by any other man, for that matter.
She had things to sort out. Things that had put her at a critical juncture in her life, in her career. There was no way she needed the additional complication of romance with anyone, let alone someone who was employing her to take care of his daughter.
And his daughter was another component of that. Tia could potentially be hurt by something like her nanny having a fling with her father. It was one thing for the McKendricks to include Meg and treat her like family, but it was another thing to play house and give Tia a false sense of a family that didn’t really exist.
And yet the thought that she wouldn’t want Logan to see her as untouchable lingered the same way his image and the strong sense of him had stayed with her since he’d left last night…
Maybe that lingering image and sense of him came from the fact that there was
so much of him in this apartment. A sort of essence of him left in his handiwork and in the personal touches that almost seemed like a brand on the place. He’d built it, for crying out loud. And not only had he furnished it, he’d furnished it with pieces he’d designed, pieces he’d created himself.
Just then Tia jumped too near the springs and lost her balance for a split second before she regained it and went on the way she had been.
It seemed to Meg that that was what she was going through herself—she’d lost her balance and now she was back in Northbridge, working with Tia, to regain her own equilibrium.
And regardless of how terrific-looking Logan was, how sexy, how appealing he could be when he was holding his daughter on his lap or reading to her or gently kissing her good-night and tucking her in, appreciating him as a good dad was as far as anything was going to go with him.
Because nothing could be more unbalancing than a relationship with a man and that was the last thing she needed right now.
“I’ll walk out with you.”
“Okay,” Meg agreed much too easily when Logan made that suggestion late Monday evening.
After the family dinner, giving Tia her bath while Logan answered a business call, and sitting in again on the reading of Goodnight Moon before putting Tia to bed, it had amounted to almost a fourteen-hour workday for Meg. She should have been ready for some time to herself.
Instead, having Logan come with her out the back door gave her a whole new surge of energy.
“So how was your first full day on the job? Are you ready to run for the hills yet?” he asked as they strolled across the yard.
“Not yet,” she answered with a laugh that didn’t give away how much she’d liked every minute she’d spent alone with Tia, and then every minute on top of that that had included him.
“I wanted to talk to you about tomorrow,” he said then. “After Tia’s nap Hadley and Tia and I are supposed to go meet Theresa Grayson—I don’t know if you know what’s going on with that…”
Since her sister, Kate, was marrying Ry Grayson—Theresa’s grandson—on Friday night and Meg was the maid of honor, she actually did know what Logan was alluding to.
And she didn’t see any reason to play dumb, so she said, “I do know about Theresa Grayson. I know that fifty-plus years ago when she was seventeen, her parents were killed and she was taken in by Hector Tyson and his wife. That Hector—who is Northbridge’s cocurmudgeon along with my grandfather—seduced her and got her pregnant and then arranged for the baby to be secretly adopted. I know that Theresa has a lot of mental and emotional problems and came back here desperate to reconnect with the daughter she’d given up, that her grandkids have been working diligently to do that for her—”
“And that they found out that Theresa’s child was actually Hadley’s and my mother,” Logan interjected.
“Which makes Theresa Grayson your grandmother,” Meg concluded.
“And tomorrow is the first time we come face-to-face.”
They’d reached the steps that ran alongside the garage up to the apartment, but Logan didn’t seem inclined to go the rest of the way because he leaned his T-shirted back against the garage’s outer wall, hooked his thumbs into his jeans pockets and raised a booted foot to the bottom step.
It was a lovely summer’s night and Meg didn’t mind standing outside talking to him so she stopped there, too, facing him and resting her own back against the stair rail.
But even if it had been twenty degrees below zero she wouldn’t have been in any hurry to say good-night.
“Are you nervous about meeting Theresa?” she asked, part of her attention on what they were talking about and another part of it looking at the play of light and shadow on the sharply drawn lines of his features.
“It’s a strange position to be in, but no, I’m not nervous about it. Except maybe when it comes to Tia,” he said. “Hadley and I have been warned that things with Theresa could go in a lot of different directions—she could refuse to see us at the last minute or cry all the way through it or be disoriented or just quiet. We don’t know what to expect.”
“Kate introduced me to her and I know Theresa’s diagnosis. Multiple diagnoses, actually. Yes, she has a lot of problems, but you won’t find a raving crazy woman—if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’d say that if she can get up the courage to actually meet you and Hadley, the worst you’ll see is tears because she’s very emotional. But she also may just be happy to meet you and not appear any different than anyone else.”
“I’m actually less worried about her than I am about Tia,” Logan confided.
His pale eyes were iridescent in the light cast from the four lamps that were hung at the same angle that the stairs ran along the garage wall. And even in the dimness Meg thought those eyes exuded a warmth she could almost feel. Except that she told herself she was probably only imagining that…
“Tia could love Theresa or hate her on sight,” he was saying when Meg forced her focus back to that. “And she could behave or misbehave accordingly. I don’t want her to set off someone who—from what I’ve heard—is pretty easily upset. I’d like it if you could just come with us so if Tia acts up, you can take her outside.”
“Sure, absolutely,” she said, agreeing enthusiastically—and resisting the urge to spout technical terminology. “Certainly Tia doesn’t need a psychologist there, you just need someone who can remove her if she puts up a fuss like any three-year-old might around new people in a strange situation.”
“Exactly,” Logan confirmed.
“You said this is the first time you’ll be meeting Theresa, but what about her other grandchildren? That would make Wyatt, Marti and Ry your new cousins—have you met them yet?”
“Yeah, the triplets,” he answered. “They all came out last week to fill us in on things,” Logan continued. “It was a pretty big shock to Hadley and me to find out that we’re related. That our mom had been adopted.”
“You had no idea?” Meg asked.
“Not a clue. Neither did our mother, apparently. We’ve talked to our other grandmother—Mom’s adopted mother—”
“My sister, Kate, told me it was Anne and Shamus Wimmer who adopted the baby.”
“Right. Gramps passed away a few years ago, but Gran is still alive and lives in Florida. When we first found out about this whole thing we called her. It took some persuading but she finally told us the truth. They never let anyone know they’d adopted. Apparently Gran even pretended to be pregnant at the same time Theresa was and then made a birth announcement as if she’d had the baby. And they never told a single soul anything different, including the rest of their families and my mother.”
“Who passed away, too, if I’m remembering right.”
“When Hadley was almost three and I was five. She was pregnant with what would have been our baby brother and there were complications. They both died,” Logan confirmed. “But Mom died never knowing anything about being adopted.”
“Or suspecting anything?”
“I’m sure she didn’t. To my grandparents, she was a gift—they doted on her and adored her. Which is more than I can say for Hadley and I being raised by a stepmother. But then I guess adopted kids are more wanted than stepkids.”
“That was what you and Hadley ended up as—stepkids…” Meg said to prompt him to go on. Because not only did she want to have her facts straight, but since he’d added that, it was obviously on his mind and she thought he might want to talk about it.
She must have been right because he didn’t hesitate to go on.
“My father remarried six months later—Hadley was two and a half, I had just turned five. He said kids needed a mother and he couldn’t take care of us on his own. And almost nine months to the day after that wedding the second batch of McKendricks started to arrive—the real family, according to my stepmother,” Logan said with an edge of bitterness to his tone. “She never let anyone forget that Hadley and I weren’t her kids, and she didn’t hide her res
entment that she’d been stuck raising another woman’s children.”
“That’s awful,” Meg said simply.
After a moment, Logan collected himself, smiling a half smile and said, “What were we talking about that got us onto this?”
But looking at the curve of his mouth when it formed that smile stalled Meg’s memory and made her think something else.
It made her think about kissing him.
The thoughts were out of the blue, uninvited and unwelcome, but there they were anyway—she was wondering what it might be like for him to kiss her. Wondering and wanting him to—just a little…
Meg forced herself to veer away from that, to actually answer his question. “I believe we were talking about me going with you guys tomorrow when you meet Theresa so I can wrangle Tia if need be,” she finally said, relieved that she’d been able to pull it together enough to make the recollection.
“Ah, that’s right. So, you don’t mind?”
“I’m happy to,” she assured.
“Can I ask you one more thing?”
“Sure.”
“Tia said she wore a cape of yours today and she wants one of her own…”
The thong panties.
Meg hadn’t heard Tia say that but just knowing what the little girl was referring to made her cheeks heat. She hoped it wasn’t visible in the porch light. She also had no idea how she was going to explain the cape without abject embarrassment.
Lie. That was all she could think to do.
“It was just a towel I tied around her shoulders. I’m sure she’ll forget all about it by tomorrow.” At least Meg hoped to high heaven that she did…
She hoped, too, that the faint frown that tugged at Logan’s brows again didn’t mean that Tia had described her cape in enough detail for him to know it couldn’t have been merely a towel.
But rather than give him the opportunity to question her more about it, she took the first two steps toward her apartment to indicate that it was time for this to end.
Logan apparently got the hint because he said, “I should let you get going.” He pushed off the garage wall to stand up straight.
Marrying the Northbridge Nanny Page 4