“What do you owe me an apology for?” she asked as she got two wineglasses from the cupboard, trying to contain the urge to run her hands over his torso, across his shoulders and down those muscular upper arms.
Clearly unaware of her wandering thoughts, Logan said, “I don’t think today’s divorce drama and having milk dumped all over you were in the job description.”
“Actually, three-year-olds and spilt milk go hand in hand,” she said.
“Still not pleasant, though. And the divorce drama definitely isn’t part of the nanny’s role,” Logan persisted while he unsealed the wine bottle and positioned the corkscrew.
“It wasn’t exactly drama—”
“It wasn’t exactly fun. But it did get us this very special bottle of wine.”
Was he changing the subject so he didn’t have to talk about his ex-wife and what had gone on this afternoon? Meg wasn’t sure. But she didn’t want to ruin this time they finally had together, so she went with the safer subject.
“What makes it a very special bottle of wine?” she asked when she’d set the glasses on the counter near him.
“A client who owns a winery in Napa Valley gave it to me,” Logan explained. “She bought a lot of furniture from us and gave Chase and me both bottles of a private reserve. We drank Chase’s bottle, but I’d forgotten about this one.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to wait for your partner to share this one, too?”
“Chase won’t care,” Logan said as he popped the cork. “But I’m not a connoisseur—when we drank wine with the client she talked about letting the wine breathe, and there was all that stuff about swirling it and smelling it and rolling it around in your mouth—things I’m completely ignorant of. What about you? Do you have wine-drinking specifications?”
“Just that it goes in a glass,” she joked. “Other than that, I don’t know anything about all those other things, either.”
“Then I guess we just get to drink it,” Logan said, pouring the wine.
He handed one of the glasses to Meg and she led the way to the sofa. She sat in the center while he set the bottle on the coffee table and did the same thing so that they were both at an angle to face each other.
“Ooh, I don’t know anything about wine, but that’s good,” Meg judged once they’d each sipped it.
“I know that price was no object for Carol when it came to buying furniture, so she must have known her business. And we definitely liked the other bottle, too.”
“So if you shared wine with your client—a woman—does that mean it wasn’t only business between you?” Meg asked, hoping it sounded innocent enough when in truth she was fishing. Encountering his ex-wife today had brought all of her curiosity about his past relationships to the forefront. Particularly since his former spouse had been so different than anyone she’d imagined him with.
“Yes, I drank with Carol and no it wasn’t only business,” Logan admitted with a small smile. “At least it wasn’t for Chase. I was married at the time.”
Of course—why else would the wine have been something his ex-wife had ended up with until today? Meg felt a little silly for trying to use that as the opening to get him to satisfy her curiosity.
But then he spared her another attempt by saying, “I’d think you’d be wondering more about Helene than about a client who gave me a bottle of wine.”
So he knew she was curious.
“Your ex-wife did remind me of my grandfather….”
Logan laughed. “That’s true. I hadn’t put that together until just now, but yeah, she’s about as much of a barrel of laughs as he is. Now ask me the question you’re dying to ask?”
She had so many. “Which one is that?”
“What did I ever see in her.”
Meg laughed this time. “I won’t deny wondering about that!”
Logan smiled. “She was different when I met her—”
“When was that?”
“Eight years ago. Chase and I had just gotten started in New York. A big-name interior decorator was using one of our pieces in a designer showcase. We went, Helene happened to be looking at that particular display when we got there. She was telling her friend how much she liked our chair, Chase and I started talking to her and her friend, and one thing led to another.”
“And how was she different then?” Meg asked.
“She was a lot nicer for one. And not her mother. But now—” he shook his head. “Actually a few years after we met I figured out that that whole persona at the beginning was really a rebellion against her parents and the way she’d been raised. But it was a temporary thing and eventually her true nature just had to come out—that was what you saw today, the cookie-cutter image of Helene’s mother, Beatrice.”
“Helene was rebelling against her parents just eight years ago? That’s more a teenage stage.”
“Yeah, but before that she didn’t have much of a chance to be a kid. She’s from old money—big money. She went to boarding schools mainly in Europe, and a small, private college in Switzerland where there were very strict rules and she followed them to the letter for her parents’ approval—she said that herself. She said she was afraid that if she displeased them at all she wouldn’t have been allowed even holidays at home.”
“That’s awful.”
“My in-laws were not my favorite people,” Logan said by way of agreeing. “But when I met Helene she’d just finished her doctoral dissertation, she’d been granted her Ph.D. in philosophy and she was on her own for the first time, living in New York before she began teaching at Yale in the fall. She was ready to celebrate her freedom, to reward herself—that’s what she said when I met her.”
“But you believed that was the real Helene,” Meg supplied.
“Exactly. Plus she saw me as an artist—”
Meg could tell that he didn’t see himself that way. “You don’t think you’re an artist?”
“A craftsman, maybe,” he allowed, “but I’m not a beret-wearing, putting-on-airs artiste, no. Or a Bohemian. But to Helene I think that’s what I seemed like—especially compared to the cultured snobs she was used to. And by being with me, she thought that’s what she was being, too.”
“Bohemian?”
“And that’s what her parents frowned on—although I don’t think they saw me as any kind of artist, they just saw me as the hick from the sticks who wasn’t good enough for their daughter.”
Meg arched her eyebrows as he continued. “I was starting to have some success that seemed like it would make up for not having a college degree, she was proud of her accomplishments but she wasn’t full of herself—it seemed like an okay mix at first. And it was easy to be attracted to Helene. In fact, Chase and I were both interested in her that day at the showcase, but she chose me.”
He paused, frowned, drank his wine, stretched an arm along the back of the sofa. Then, as if he was reluctant to admit it, he said, “And maybe I liked feeling that I could hold my own with a brainiac.”
“But things changed?” Meg said, interpreting his ominous tone and the vertical lines between his eyebrows.
“We dated for a full year—even after she went to Connecticut to work, we still spent weekends together and any other time I could get there or she could get to me. By the end of that year we decided to get married. Her parents were on their yacht in Monte Carlo and not due back for three months, but she said she didn’t want to wait, that she didn’t need their permission, so we eloped—”
“And you relocated to Connecticut.”
“Not instantly, but yeah, eventually I was spending more and more time there than in New York to be with her. And at first things were good. Helene said it was nice to come home to someone who didn’t have his head in the academic clouds the way everyone else she hung around with did. She said it was a relief that when she was with me she didn’t have to be on her toes, proving how smart she was, that I re-energized her so she could plunge back into the never-ending competition for tenure, always vy
ing to be the smartest person in the room.”
Meg made a face. “I hate those situations.”
“So did Helene until her second year—when I guess she’d started to have some times when she was the smartest person in the room. And liked it. Anyway, early on she preferred keeping work and our relationship separate because she said I was her escape, so I didn’t have to have much to do with the other professors. But then somewhere along the way—”
“That stopped being the case.”
“She wanted to move up the academic ladder so she was on all kinds of committees, getting involved, and the more time she spent in that whole world of academics, the more she liked it. Then there were the outside-of-work get-togethers and staff parties and dinners that she didn’t want to miss—things she wanted me to go to, too.”
He finished his wine and set his glass on the coffee table. When he sat back again he said, “That wasn’t a crowd for me. Forget talking movies or weather or sports—it was all Nietzsche and Kierkegaard all the time. And Helene was right in there with the best of them, getting snootier and snootier by the day, it seemed.”
“And turning into her parents after all?”
“Yep,” he confirmed fatalistically. “By about three years into the marriage Helene was basking in that environment and being embarrassed by what a fish out of water I was with her friends and associates. One particular night she got steaming mad at me for slipping out of an after-dinner discussion to find a television so I could get the score on a football game. I said I’d had it with seeing so much of her friends. She said maybe she liked being with them because they didn’t bore her the way I did—”
“Ouch!” Meg said in response to the harshness of those angry words, understanding more of why he was so sensitive about his lack of higher education.
“Yeah, that was about where we started entertaining the idea of splitting up. But then Helene found out she was pregnant—birth control malfunction.”
“That couldn’t have made things easier.”
Logan shook his head again. “Nope. Helene didn’t want to have the baby. She’d never liked kids and she wanted to focus on her career. But I talked her into going through with the pregnancy, into trying to make things work because of it—dumb idea.”
“But since the baby was already on the way…”
“Right. And I know I thought that a baby might help, that some kind of maternal instincts might kick in and bring out the best in Helene. As you could see today, I was dead wrong.”
“So she gave up you and Tia.” It wasn’t something Meg could fathom and that was reflected in her voice.
“Basically. There certainly wasn’t any kind of custody battle. Helene fought for other things, but when it came to Tia, she didn’t even make a show of wanting her. Work and the life Helene had built within the Yale community were more important to her and she didn’t want the distraction of a child.”
“And you did want Tia—”
“I did,” he admitted unashamedly. “I do. I also didn’t want her in the kind of situation I was in as a kid—inflicted with a bad stepparent. The only way I could make sure that didn’t happen was if she was with me.”
He said that with conviction, and his protectiveness, dedication and devotion to his child just made Meg like him all the more. “How old was Tia when her mother left?” she asked.
“Two months. And yeah, it was rough for a while. Chase came to Connecticut to help through the worst of it but we were two guys dealing with an infant—poor Tia spent a couple of weeks in diapers that were too small for her before it occurred to either one of us that she’d outgrown them and needed a bigger size—”
“Plus it wasn’t only about Tia—your marriage had ended,” Meg prompted, wondering about him. And any residual emotions he might have when it came to his ex.
“Sure, there was fallout from that, too. I had my bleak days. And nights. Divorce is tough.” He grinned a half grin. “And you’re thinking you have to make me feel better about it all. But it’s okay, you don’t. The whole thing was over three years ago—I weathered it and made it out the other end just fine.”
Something about the way he said that made her believe that he had weathered it, that it was over for him. Which she was inordinately glad to know.
“And since then?” Meg asked, not all of her curiosity appeased. “Have you dated or been involved with anyone else? Or have you been too swamped with being a single dad?”
The half grin reappeared, complete with the devilishness again. “My best friend and partner is one of the biggest players you’ll ever meet. He’s made it his goal to hook me up every chance he gets. But there hasn’t been anything serious—my first priority is Tia.”
A gust of wind and rain hit the side of the apartment hard enough to rattle the windows just then.
“Geez, what’s going on out there?” Logan said, getting up from the sofa and going to the door to open it and look out.
Meg followed behind, standing beside him at the threshold to watch the show of thunder and lightning through the sheet of rain that was pouring down.
But looking in the direction of the lightning show brought Logan into Meg’s peripheral vision and that was all it took for her gaze to be drawn to him instead.
He wasn’t aware that she was studying him rather than the storm and so Meg gave herself a moment to enjoy that view of his perfect profile.
She didn’t know how it was possible to go so quickly from talking about such a solemn subject to being turned on by the simple sight of him, but that’s what happened.
“I should probably make a run for it,” Logan said.
That idea set off a sort of panic in Meg. It had been a long, stressful day. The evening had brought a tense conversation. And now it was as if the rain was washing all of that away, and she just wanted to curl up in his arms…
“Don’t do that,” she heard herself say in answer to his suggestion that he make a run for it. Then, to conceal what was really on her mind, she added, “You’ll get soaked.”
“I’m not a sugar cube—I won’t melt,” he said.
But he didn’t move to go. He turned his back to the door frame and looked at her as if he knew she had other motives. “Unless you just don’t want me to go…”
She just didn’t want him to go—that was the bottom line. But what if he did stay?
Things between them last night had been headed for lovemaking when she’d had second thoughts that had stopped it. But if he stayed now, she knew she was putting them back on that road and she’d better be sure about what she was doing.
As she looked up into Logan’s piercing blue eyes she reminded herself of the reasons why she hadn’t thought this would be smart last night.
No, tonight they weren’t out in an open, public place the way they had been at the river’s edge. But there was still their work arrangement. There was still the upheaval of his ended marriage and move cross-country. There was still her own influx situation. There was still Tia and the inadvisability of Tia’s dad and her nanny being anything more than employer and employee.
There was no denying it—each and every one of those things still existed and was still a reason not to take this to the bedroom.
And yet…
They were doing so well keeping what was between them private and separate from the working portion of their relationship that Meg didn’t think even Hadley had any suspicions. Certainly it wasn’t affecting Tia and whatever happened now didn’t need to affect Tia either, did it?
And as for the rest? Transition and upheaval and flux might all be precarious times to make major decisions, but a simple night of giving in to something that had been simmering between them right from the start? That wasn’t a life-altering major decision, that was an indulgence.
Of course Meg had been raised to limit and moderate her indulgences.
But this once?
It didn’t seem wrong. In fact, it almost seemed like what she should do. What could be mo
re of an aid to relaxing than making love…
She couldn’t help smiling at her own rationalizations and the reach they were taking.
“What are you grinning at?” Logan asked.
Meg shook her head, refusing to tell him, but instead confessing, “I don’t want you to go.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, peered down at her and smiled the most wonderfully wicked smile she’d ever seen. “No?” he challenged. “I thought this was where we were going to end up last night and then you got cold feet.”
She was barefoot and she glanced down at them. “Not so cold tonight,” she answered quietly.
He stood there watching her intently for a long moment before he reached an arm across the distance that separated them and clasped one hand around the back of her neck. “That isn’t why I came here tonight, you know,” he said then, his voice lower, more gravely. “I only came because I wanted to be with you.”
“So…another glass of wine and more talking is all you’re up for?” Meg goaded audaciously in return.
He laughed. “It’s good wine but…” He pulled her toward him. “It seems like you might have something better in mind.”
“I might,” she answered, surprised by her own boldness and the inclination to step outside the box a little when he was standing there in front of her, so masculine, so handsome, so imposing, so sexy in that white T-shirt that left just enough to the imagination.
“Did you have this in mind?” he asked as he leaned forward to kiss her. It was the briefest meeting of parted lips, mingled breath, and not much more.
“I might have had that in mind,” she conceded when he ended it.
“Did you have this in mind?” he asked as he nibbled her earlobe, the sharp edge of her jawline and then the side of her neck.
“Hmm, possibly…”
“And this?” A string of kisses linked together along her collarbone and down her arm.
Marrying the Northbridge Nanny Page 14