As much as Brady hated to admit it—because he had once seen himself as being able to master any and every situation he came across—when it came to parenting and disciplining two rambunctious little boys, Brady was totally out of his league.
Even after putting in six grueling months on the job, he still didn’t have the vaguest idea what to do when it came to managing the twins.
He just wasn’t cut out for parenting, Brady thought, resigned. While Harper seemed to be a natural. Somehow, she just instinctively knew what to do, how to get the lively twins to back off. And, more important, how to get them to behave.
Moreover, she could get them to want to behave.
It seemed to Brady that the two hellions who had come roaring into his life on an express train were in competition with one another as to who could be the more well-behaved around Harper. And, he’d noticed, in competition as to who could manage to earn her first smile of the day.
“You don’t drug them, do you?”
Harper looked at Brady, stunned by his question and certain she had to have misheard what he had just said. “Excuse me?”
“I’m joking.” He held up his hands and grinned. “But I am curious. They’re...well, not exactly calm,” he said tactfully, “but less wild around you than they are around me. Why is that?”
She smiled at him. The man certainly needed to be educated in the ways of children and their instincts. “Because they sense they can have their way with you while they’re not that sure how far they can push me. And, I’m happy to say, I get the feeling that they don’t want to do something that might make me leave.”
It was the tail end of another excruciatingly long day. Brady had come home early—and had come very close to regretting it. His intention had been to attempt to bond with the boys, but that just wasn’t happening. After much bargaining—and with Harper coming in to back him up—he had succeeded in getting the twins to bed.
When he had followed her out of the boys’ room and made his way downstairs, he was completely wiped out. “Let’s face it,” Brady told Harper when she had asked him if there was anything wrong, “I’m just not cut out for this.”
“This?” Harper questioned, clearing away the last of the mess that the twins had managed to create as they played today.
“Being a parent,” Brady answered, then specified, “Child-rearing.” He took in a disheartened, shaky breath as he added, “While you, you’re a natural. I’m surprised that you don’t have kids of your own,” he told her.
“It takes the right man for that,” she answered. Their eyes met for a long moment, communicating things neither was free to say out loud yet. But it was still there.
Clearing her throat, she turned her attention to what Brady had said previously. Sitting down on the sofa, she patted the place beside her, silently urging Brady to take a seat.
“That’s a very nice compliment you gave me earlier,” she told him as he sat down beside her. “But not a very realistic one. Nobody starts out knowing what to do when it comes to kids. I’ve been working as a nanny for several years now because I love kids, but I certainly didn’t come on the scene knowing what to do. I had to learn that just the way that everyone else did. Just like you,” she emphasized, deliberately looking into his eyes as she made her point.
“I haven’t learned anything and it’s been over six months,” Brady protested.
He was selling himself short, Harper thought. “Six months of you adjusting to the situation you found yourself thrown into, headfirst,” she declared. “Six months of you adjusting to the needs of two mischievous, overactive, demanding little boys while learning how to put your own needs a distant second.” Didn’t he realize that, she wondered.
“If you ask me, all things considered, I think that you’re doing very well, Brady. Give yourself a break and a little credit here,” she urged him, placing her hand over his.
Then suddenly realizing what she was doing, Harper pulled back her hand. But she didn’t withdraw her seal of approval, which was evident in what she said to him. “If you ask me, Brady, you’re being much too hard on yourself.”
Brady frowned, shaking his head. “I don’t know about that,” he said.
“Well, I do,” she informed him with certainty. “The thing that you have to remember is the most important requirement of being a parent—or a guardian,” she emphasized. “A heart.”
He laughed dryly. “I’m pretty sure my doctor said I had one on my last checkup.”
“I’m serious, wise guy,” Harper chided with a laugh. “If you truly care about them—and trust me, kids have a way of sensing if you do or don’t—then everything else will just fall into place. And, the way I see it, you have enough love for both of us.” Harper’s words played themselves back in her head the moment she said them. She instantly turned crimson. “I mean—”
The woman had just spent several minutes trying to make him feel better about himself as a surrogate parent. He wasn’t about to have her struggling to walk back something she’d had no intention of saying in the first place.
“I know what you mean,” Brady assured her. “And I do appreciate it.”
For a moment, he debated asking the question that had resurfaced in his mind, the one he had asked her days ago. Ordinarily, he would just let it go. But the more he got to know her, the more curious he found himself about the details of her life.
“You know,” he said, approaching the question cautiously, “you never did tell me why you decided to leave your last position.”
As he watched, the confident, outgoing young woman, who was such a natural when it came to handling the two free-spirited boys he had taken into his home, suddenly became introverted and reticent.
After a long beat, Harper finally said, “My last job didn’t end well,” growing more uncomfortable with each word she uttered.
But she could see that Brady was waiting for more information. She forced herself to say something, while still keeping it as vague as possible. Because although she liked him and was coming to think of Brady as a fair man, ultimately she didn’t know how he would react to the reason she had been fired. After all, it was just her word against her former employer’s. What if he didn’t believe her? At the very least, that would bother her. At its worst, it might cause Brady to fire her. She decided not to go into it.
Since it happened, she had done her best not to think about the circumstances at all. But it wasn’t easy. “Let’s just say that the situation became...complicated,” she finally told him.
“Complicated?” Brady questioned.
“Complicated,” she repeated, saying the word with such finality that he knew the subject was closed until further notice.
Possibly permanently.
In any event, Brady knew when to back away and not push the situation.
Switching directions, Brady didn’t entirely drop the subject, just decided to approach it from another angle.
“I think the reason you’re so good at what you do is because you become emotionally involved with your charges and their families.” He sighed. That wasn’t anything that he could have been able to deal with. “It comes naturally to you,” he said. “Me, not so much,” he admitted. “As a matter of fact, I can’t say that I’m really any good at something like that.”
Something like that.
Was he telling her that he wasn’t one to get emotionally involved—or worse, was he warning her off? She didn’t know, but in any case, she wasn’t about to buy any trouble. It might do her good to keep a distance between herself and this sexy, good-looking man.
A man she had already kissed and would have gone on kissing—or more—had Tyler not had a bad dream and come downstairs looking for her and interrupted them.
The fact that Brady had also kissed her back—and maybe had even been the one to initiate the kiss—wasn’t really that important. W
hat was important was that they had kissed and that kiss could have very well blossomed into something a great deal more if not for Tyler’s untimely entrance.
She was going to have to keep her guard up against that sort of thing ever repeating itself.
That would bring a whole new meaning to the word complicated, she thought.
It was definitely time to retreat, she thought. Gathering herself together, Harper suddenly rose to her feet. “Let me get you dinner,” she told him with forced cheerfulness.
Brady caught hold of her hand to stop her. Abruptly realizing what he was doing, he released her hand. When she looked at him quizzically, he told her, “I didn’t hire you to serve me meals, Harper. I hired you to be Toby and Tyler’s nanny.”
“I know that,” she answered crisply. “But it doesn’t hurt to go the extra mile and make an extra serving when cooking for the boys and myself. Unless you don’t like my cooking,” she suddenly realized. Was that why he was saying no? Because he didn’t like what she made?
“Anything I don’t have to cook myself tastes great,” he told her, then assured her with feeling, “But so far, everything you’ve made has been really exceptionally delicious.”
Harper grinned. “Nice save,” she congratulated Brady.
“Not bad for a man who’s half asleep,” Brady conceded with a tired smile.
Harper laughed warmly at his comment, her revived sense of humor bringing her old self back to the foreground. With a wink, she told Brady, “Not even bad for a man who’s wide awake. Come, follow me,” she urged, leading the way.
Brady’s stomach grumbled as he followed Harper to the kitchen. The grumbling reminded him that he had completely lost track of the last time that he had actually eaten today.
Harper was more than happy to turn her attention toward doing something productive instead of wrestling with her growing feelings and digging up situations that made her feel very uncomfortable. Her last job was in the past and she fully intended to keep it there rather than to draw it out and expose it to the light of day.
Heaven knew it wasn’t because she had ever harbored even the slightest feelings for her last employer’s husband. On the contrary, by the time she had been given her walking papers, Edward Wheeler had made her skin crawl with his very presence. The idea of anything happening between them was enough to make her physically ill. The man had turned out to be a notorious player and it galled Harper that his wife actually believed that she would do anything so reprehensible as to have a romantic affair with the father of the children she was being paid to watch over and take care of.
That would have been a terrible breach of trust on her part and she just wasn’t that type of person. It hurt her that the woman would even think that was possible.
Water under the bridge, Harper silently insisted.
No, the subject was better left closed and under wraps, Harper thought. If she said anything about it to Brady, gave him any sort of details, then at some point, she was certain the subject would resurface again and haunt her.
That was the last thing she wanted, Harper thought. She had a new job, back doing what she loved, and she wasn’t about to risk that because of something that never happened.
Harper roused herself, bringing her mind back to the present. Placing a serving of pork chops, mashed potatoes and green beans in front of Brady, she told him, “If there’s nothing else, I think I’ll be going home now. The boys were particularly active today and to be honest, my batteries are drained and need recharging,” she confessed.
“You didn’t even have to do this,” Brady reminded her. “All I need from you is to take care of the boys. That was what we had agreed on at the outset,” he reminded her. “I could have found something to eat.”
“And mess up the kitchen while you were doing it?” she asked. She had seen Brady when he was searching for something. The man was definitely not neat. He was more like a tornado that had been let loose. “No, this way’s better,” Harper assured him. “Less to clean up in the long run.”
Unable to resist, he cut a piece of pork chop and slipped it into his mouth. For a second, the expression on his face looked like that of a man who had unexpectedly found his way into heaven. “This is really good,” he told her with feeling.
Pleased, Harper smiled with satisfaction. “Toby and Tyler thought so, too.”
Moved, he couldn’t let this pass without telling her how valuable she had become to his life in such a short amount of time. “I am so glad you’re here, Harper.”
That caught her off guard. He didn’t mean that the way it sounded, she warned herself. He was just talking about her cooking and how she managed the boys.
Not wanting him to think she was rude, Harper told him, “I’m glad to be here, too,” as she began to make her way out of the kitchen.
“No, you don’t understand,” Brady said. “Until you got here, dinner used to consist of hot dogs, hamburgers and the occasional pizza.” He knew there was no excuse for that, but sometimes easy was better than nothing at all. “Until you came into their lives, Toby and Tyler didn’t realize that vegetables could actually be a tasty part of an evening meal.”
He had such an adorable expression on his face, Harper couldn’t help laughing. “Then I’m glad I came along,” she told him. “I guess that would explain why the twins thought soda pop was one of the essential food groups,” she teased.
“Like I said,” Brady told her after taking another healthy-sized bite of the seasoned pork chop, “I make a terrible parent.”
She was not about to stand for him putting himself down. “The most important part of being a parent is wanting to be there—and you were. You are,” Harper emphasized, her eyes meeting his. “Now, if there’s nothing else,” she told him, “I’ll be leaving.”
There was something else. He wanted to ask her just to stay at the table and keep him company. Nothing more than that.
But at the same time, he knew that was being selfish. Harper had certainly earned her rest and the least he could do was let her go home and get to bed.
The word bed instantly conjured up images in his mind that had absolutely no business being there. Images of Harper sprawled across his king-size bed, her arms stretched out to him as he lowered himself over her.
All the more reason to send her on her way, he thought. Heaven knew that if he had her stay, that would tempt him to want to progress to something more than just conversation, and if he went that route, he risked having her leave.
Permanently.
He had already risked losing her with that juvenile stunt he had pulled that day while she had been picking up toys and he had gone to help her—and wound up doing something completely out of character, Brady upbraided himself. If it hadn’t been for Tyler and his nightmare, who knew what might have happened?
He couldn’t allow that to happen a second time no matter how attractive he found Harper, Brady thought. Without knowing it, that little boy had managed to rescue the situation—and him. Because, if Harper hadn’t miraculously come into his life, who knew where he and the boys would be right now? Or, for that matter, if he could even manage to juggle work and this situation he had somehow found himself in.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you,” Brady apologized. “Go home, get some well-deserved rest so that you can put your track shoes on in the morning and keep up with those little whirling dervishes.”
His words created an image in her head and Harper couldn’t help but laugh.
“That is a very colorful way to describe them,” Harper told him with approval.
“Really? I thought I was actually understating the situation. Heaven knew that until you came along, I felt like someone trapped inside of a never-ending cartoon program.”
Harper smiled as she made it to the front door and opened it. “Glad I could change that for you,” she told Brady.
; Brady watched as she walked out of the house.
“Yeah,” he murmured under his breath to her back. “Me, too.”
Chapter Thirteen
Things were progressing well at the Hotel Fortune and even his home life had seemed to fall into some sort of a heartening routine, Brady thought. While he couldn’t exactly say that things had become peaceful, at least they were no longer in a state of constant turmoil.
If there was a fly in the ointment, it was that the search for the person who was behind that balcony collapse had not been fruitful. The investigation was ongoing and while some of the suspects had been cleared, there were still a lot of people who needed to be investigated.
Brady found that really frustrating and disturbing.
In an effort to keep moving forward and remain productive, Brady forced himself to focus on the positive things and not obsess over the negative.
Easier said than done, he thought late one evening after Harper had gone home and he was in bed. He found his thoughts turning toward her and that really didn’t help him, either. During the day, when his time was filled to the brim with hotel concerns, it was easy not to think about Harper. And even when he came home and the twins were still bouncing around, all he could concentrate on was how much his life had changed.
But once they had been put to bed, Harper left and the house grew quiet, it was really hard for him not to think about her and how she had brought such incredible order and peace of mind into his life.
And by the same token—even after she went home for the night—how she also managed to fire up his imagination and stir his longing.
Really stir his longing.
No woman had ever been front and center in his life. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy their company whenever he could, but he had never been singularly focused on any of these women.
However, it seemed that lately, totally unbidden, Harper kept popping up in his thoughts as well as occasionally in his dreams. He kept telling himself he shouldn’t—couldn’t—allow any of these mental meanderings to bear fruit. And yet, no matter what he did, he couldn’t seem to eliminate the really powerful longing he felt for her.
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