An Unexpected Father

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Harper,” the young woman being laid siege to said, feeling that using her last name in this case was a little too formal. “My first name is Harper.”

  “Well, Harper, how would you like to feel like the cavalry and ride to our cousin’s rescue?” Ashley wanted to know. Not waiting for an answer, Ashley wiggled into the booth, sitting on Harper’s left side.

  Not waiting for an invitation, Megan immediately sat down on Harper’s other side, immobilizing her in case she had any thoughts about making an escape before they convinced her to take the job their cousin was offering her.

  Looking on, Brady decided that the young nanny probably didn’t stand a chance against these two—at least he hoped she didn’t because he really needed her. He had the good sense not to smile too broadly as he watched his cousins go to work.

  “He’s a really good guy,” Ashley was telling the nanny. “He relocated here all the way from upstate New York because he needed help with his twins—well, they’re not really his twins—” she corrected herself.

  “They are in the eyes of the law,” Megan pointed out. “Brady got legal custody of them when his friends—the twins’ parents—died in that awful motorcycle accident,” she quickly explained to Harper.

  This was the first she was hearing about this. The fact that the man wasn’t the twins’ blood relative but was still taking on the task of raising them raised his stock in her eyes by a hundredfold. Maybe she had been too hasty, turning him down, she thought.

  “But our confirmed bachelor here,” Ashley told her as she gestured toward her cousin, “didn’t have a clue how to get a puppy to listen to him, much less two overenergized four-year-olds. He thought family might help, but we’re all busy trying to make a living, so we haven’t had the time to be of much help with the twins,” Ashley confessed with obvious genuine regret.

  “Which brings us to you,” Megan said. “Nannies are supposed to be able to get kids to jump through hoops and be on their best behavior, right?” she asked Harper, pinning her with a look.

  Harper felt as if she was on the receiving end of a one-two punch. She laughed at the last thing Megan had said to her. The woman was being highly optimistic in her assessment of what a nanny could actually do, she thought.

  “You have obviously either read or seen Mary Poppins one too many times,” Harper told the two sisters.

  Ashley looked genuinely disappointed. “So that’s it?” she asked. “You’re turning the job down without even meeting the kids?”

  Megan jumped in then. “Oh, but you’ve got to meet the boys and give them a chance to steal your heart,” she insisted, then added, “For all our sakes.”

  Okay, Brady thought, seeing his cousins do their act. They were laying it on thick. Too thick. This really wasn’t fair.

  “Ashley, Megan, you’re ganging up on Ms. Radcliffe. Give her a chance to breathe,” he told them. And then he turned what Harper could only describe as his beautiful, heartwarming brown eyes on her. She could feel herself melting. “All I ask is that, in all fairness, you come and meet Tyler and Toby before you decide to turn this job down.”

  Harper looked from one side to the other, taking in the three faces that were literally pleading with her to do the right thing.

  To do the only thing that she was born to do, she reminded herself.

  Ordinarily, she would have immediately jumped at the chance. But she wasn’t and she knew what was stopping her. Justine Wheeler’s husband—or at least the memory of Justine Wheeler’s husband—was what was causing her to second-guess this whole situation and actually shy away from it.

  She was afraid of history repeating itself.

  But this man who had met with her—according to her terms—was in dire need of someone to help him manage the twins he had unexpectedly gotten custody of. She couldn’t allow that awful experience she had gone through with her boss’s husband to keep her from what she had once regarded as her life’s calling.

  She was good at her job, damn it, and she needed to feel that way again. Needed it as much as apparently Brady Fortune appeared to need her.

  Harper could feel herself coming around ever so slowly.

  “Well, I’m still not sure I’m the right person for this job, but I’m not accustomed to being unfair,” she told Brady. “So I will reserve judgment until I meet Toby and Tyler—”

  She got no further. Megan threw her arms round her, hugging Harper hard.

  “You won’t regret this,” Megan promised fiercely.

  “Well, one thing’s for sure,” Brady told Harper. “I know that I won’t regret this.”

  He would have hugged the person he considered to be the potential answer to all his prayers just the way that Megan had, but he had a feeling that doing so might just spook her enough to make her change her mind, so he remained where he was, sitting opposite Harper as well as his cousins in the booth.

  Megan put it into words for all of them. “You’re the answer to a prayer, Harper. Three prayers.”

  “Most likely even more than that if we could take an accurate head count. Everyone in Rambling Rose wants to help Brady with his newly acquired family,” Ashley confessed. “But truthfully, in this situation, you’re probably the only one who knows what she’s doing.”

  Too much flattery had always embarrassed Harper. She was only doing what came naturally to her. “I wouldn’t go that far,” Harper told the three cousins, deflecting words of praise she felt she hadn’t earned yet.

  “I would,” Brady freely admitted. “If you can get them to listen to you, you’ll be doing better than I have in six months,” he told her.

  Harper cleared her throat. “All right then, you want to take me to meet your boys?” she asked, ready to leave the restaurant.

  “More than anything in the world,” Brady told her. As she began to rise, he caught hold of her wrist, anchoring her in place. “But they’re in preschool right now and the last thing I want to do is disrupt their day.” He smiled at the phrase he had inadvertently used. “They’re perfectly capable of doing that all by themselves. But, like I said, they’re in school right now. That gives us at least a couple of hours before I wind up bringing you before the firing squad.”

  “You’re really not selling this, cousin,” Ashley told him with a laugh.

  Brady looked as if he knew he had made a mistake and wasn’t sure just how to backtrack from it. His shrug was innocent. “I guess I was just being honest.”

  Harper found herself coming to his rescue. “Honesty is a very admirable quality.” There was approval in her voice that she didn’t have to feign.

  “I will be as honest as you can bear as long as you promise to give the twins a chance,” Brady told her in all sincerity.

  She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. He’d sold her. “Fair enough.”

  Ashley looked at her sister, relieved. “Well, our work here is done,” she declared, beaming as she rose from the booth. Megan slid out from the other side. “Thank you,” she repeated, looking at Harper. “Well, enjoy your lunch, you two—and oh, by the way,” she added, squeezing Harper’s hand, “Lunch is on me. Order anything you like. The sky’s the limit,” Ashley emphasized.

  Taken aback, Harper said, “That’s very generous of you.”

  “I just want to make you feel welcome here at our restaurant. You’ll find that it’s a very warm place,” Ashley told her with a wink.

  “Well, you certainly have made me feel welcomed,” Harper told her. “Or guilty if I decide to turn the job down,” she added, viewing the situation from the flip side.

  Sitting back in the booth as his cousins took their leave, Brady observed, “You know, that’s very astute of you.”

  He watched in fascination as an almost beatific smile slipped over her lips.

  “I deal with children,” Harper reminded him. “And children, bless ’em,
can be positively the most manipulative little creatures on the face of the earth.”

  Tickled, Brady laughed, finding himself appreciating her view on the situation. “Something tells me you are most definitely the right woman for the job,” he told her.

  She wanted to stop him right now. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Harper warned. “We’ll take this one step at a time.”

  “Right,” Brady agreed. He proceeded cautiously. He didn’t want to blow this now that it was finally happening. “Step one is ordering lunch,” he reminded her. “And my cousin did say the sky’s the limit.”

  “That was very generous of her,” Harper told him as she scanned the menu she had just picked up.

  “Well, we try to take care of each other in Rambling Rose,” he told her.

  “Apparently,” she murmured, attempting to make a selection between the choices she had narrowed down to. “It must be nice to have such a big family.”

  “I never really thought about it,” he admitted to Harper. “I mean, I didn’t grow up with my Texas relatives, but I had five siblings—including a twin brother. So it was just something that was always a part of my life, but now that you mention it, I guess it is nice. Although,” he told her, “there were times I really did want to be alone—and that’s when life seemed to be the most crowded.”

  Spoken like a real bachelor, Harper thought. A bachelor, she was willing to bet, who wasn’t through planting his wild oats. And, if she took this job being nanny to his newly acquired twins, that would leave him free to go on planting to his heart’s content, she thought.

  The next moment she told herself that wasn’t her concern one way or the other. What was her concern, if she decided to take this job, was whether she and the boys meshed. Could she be a plus in their lives or would this turn out to be just a way for her to earn a salary?

  If it turned out to be the latter, then she wouldn’t take the job, Harper decided. Even though she needed it, it had never been about the money for her. Instead, it was what she could bring to the table and add to the lives of the children she took care of.

  That was what was important to her.

  “So, what will it be?” Brady asked, his voice breaking into her thoughts.

  Rousing herself, Harper realized that she hadn’t really heard him. “Excuse me?”

  Brady held up the menu, drawing her attention to it. “Lunch,” he prompted, tapping the dark green cover. “What did you finally decide to have?”

  Her mind wasn’t on food. At the moment, she was too preoccupied thinking about meeting the twins. But she didn’t want to keep him waiting while she made up her mind about something as trivial as lunch.

  “I can’t make up my mind,” Harper told him, not going into why she couldn’t. “Why don’t you choose for me?” she suggested.

  Though she looked delicate, Harper Radcliffe didn’t strike him as someone who abdicated her choices, even when it came to something as simple as ordering lunch.

  “Are you sure?” he asked her. When she looked at him quizzically, he explained, “One of us could be a vegan, or have a food allergy, which means that the other person shouldn’t be the one making the choices for lunch.”

  That was a really odd thing to say, Harper thought. “Well, I’m not a vegan,” she told him. “As a matter of fact, I happen to really like eating meat.”

  “No kidding?” he asked, his face lighting up. One of the last few women he had gone out with—pretwins—had been a devout vegan. “So do I. I’m very partial to steak.” Brady grinned. “Guess what, Ms. Radcliffe? I think that I just found something that we have in common.”

  Harper laughed. “I’m sure there are probably other things.”

  “I look forward to finding them out,” he told her in all sincerity.

  Uh-oh, Harper thought. There were red lights flickering inside her head.

  “Tell you what, why don’t we use this time to get to know a little about each other?” Brady suggested. “Over lunch,” he elaborated, then added, “So I can get to know just what sort of a person I’m handing the care of my best friend’s kids over to.”

  “That’s why you want to get to know me better?” she asked, still not certain.

  “It’ll do for starters,” he replied, his eyes meeting hers.

  Harper felt something warm shimmying up and down her spine. Was that a sign of things to come? Or had her bad experience with Edward Wheeler managed to color the way she saw even the most harmless of comments? She didn’t know. But for now, she decided to give Brady the benefit of the doubt.

  She lowered her eyes to look at the menu. “I think I’m ready to order now,” she told him.

  He smiled and nodded. He’d figured she would be better off making her own choice.

  Chapter Seven

  As he drove home from the restaurant, Brady kept raising his eyes to look in the rearview mirror every few seconds.

  He was relieved to see that Harper was still there, still following him in her unimpressive, fifteen-year-old four-door car just as she had told him she would.

  Even so, Brady half expected to see the car make a U-turn and head back to wherever it was that Harper was currently living.

  But mercifully, the woman he had wound up pinning all of his hopes on in the last couple of hours was still there. Still following him.

  He was happy that she was actually willing to keep her word and meet with his kids.

  Brady suddenly gripped the steering wheel harder as he realized the import of the thought that had just gone through his head.

  His kids.

  When exactly had that happened? Brady asked himself, clearly stunned.

  When had he started thinking of Toby and Tyler as “his” kids instead of Gord’s kids? Or even “the” kids? He had no answer for that, only that the term had somehow snuck up on him.

  To give Harper’s meeting with the twins a better chance of going well, he’d decided it should take place on his own home territory. Brady had asked his brother Kane to pick up the boys at the preschool when he went there to pick up his fiancée’s daughter. Since Kane already had a set of his own keys to the house, Brady had asked Kane to bring the boys home and stay with them until he himself could get there with Harper.

  He knew that his brother had to sympathize with what he was going through to some degree. Kane was soon to become an instant father himself when he married Layla, who came with a precious little girl in the bargain.

  Nothing seemed to daunt Kane, Brady thought, checking in the mirror again to make sure that Harper’s car was still behind him.

  It was.

  But then, Brady thought, both of his older brothers probably thought the same thing about him. That nothing daunted him.

  He had certainly thought that about himself until six months ago. These days it was just a struggle to try to take everything in stride and not let things like cuts and scrapes, and broken glasses and plates, get to him. Lord knew it wasn’t easy. Trying to get the twins to actually pay attention and listen to him when he told them to do something had shown Brady a whole new side of himself. A side that had turned out to be a great deal more flappable than he would have ever thought possible.

  But after today, with any luck, things should be a lot calmer, he promised himself. All he had to do was convince a perfectly sane, rational woman that she’d actually enjoy living in a circus-like atmosphere where three-foot clowns ran the show.

  No big deal, right?

  As he drew closer to the new house he had recently purchased, again with the boys in mind, he saw Kane’s car parked in his driveway. His brother had managed to get here ahead of him, he thought, even though he had been closer to it than Kane was.

  Part of Brady had hoped to bring this nanny into his house before all hell had a chance of breaking loose.

  Brady wondered if this was the kind
of situation where the term trial by fire had initially originated.

  Instead of parking his car in the garage which was overloaded with boxes, both his and the boys’, Brady decided it was simpler to just choose a spot in the driveway. He parked over to one side, making sure he left plenty of room for Harper’s vehicle. It wasn’t that her car was big, but it gave the impression that it was close to being on its last legs, which meant that it could very well die soon. When it did, it would need a lot of room to allow other vehicles to come and go easily.

  After getting out of his car, he turned his attention toward helping guide Harper into a space away from both his car and Kane’s.

  It went a great deal better than he would have predicted.

  Until his would-be nanny got out of her car. She didn’t exactly look happy, he thought.

  “Was all that gesturing you were doing your way of telling me that you don’t think I’m capable of parking my car without damaging yours, or damaging whoever belongs to that one?” she asked, nodding toward Kane’s truck.

  He hadn’t meant to insult her, Brady thought. He supposed there was such a thing as overthinking a situation.

  Brady launched into damage control. “No, I guess I was just afraid that you were going to change your mind and tear out of here at the first sign of a problem.”

  “What kind of a problem?” she wanted to know, not following him. “Parking a car?” she asked, saying the first thing that came to her mind. “I’ve been driving since I was sixteen,” Harper told him. “And the reason this car looks as if it’s been driven in a demolition derby for the last ten years is because I bought it—very used—from a friend of mine after my car caught fire because of a defective fuel pump. Andrew was always hard on his cars,” she said, mentioning the vehicle’s previous owner by name.

  Harper regarded the vehicle parked away from the other two vehicles. She had to admit that hers looked very much like a pariah. “It was all I could afford.”

  “You don’t have to explain anything to me,” Brady told her.

  “I beg to differ. The look on your face says I do,” Harper contradicted.