29. Olivia
29
OLIVIA
A n unexpected benefit of Declan’s mom coming for dinner was that she invited Catie to spend the next day with her. She also kept the conversation afloat, while Declan brooded into his whiskey, and I radiated false cheer and ate too much ice cream.
Honestly, bless Marie.
The next morning, I decided to do the responsible thing and use my unexpected free time to start sending in my resume for upcoming nannying jobs on the Sunny Days Childcare site. After Declan told them I’d passed my trial period with flying colors and he wanted to keep me on through the end of his contract, Sunny Days HR had green lit me to begin applying for future jobs again.
I’d put off actually logging on and looking for other jobs partly because I’d been busy, and partly because I didn’t want to think about my time with Catie and Declan coming to an end. But yesterday had reminded me that I couldn’t afford to be too sentimental. As much as I might feel like I was part of the family for the time being, at the end of the day, this was a job, and I was just passing through their lives. Staying wasn’t an option, not after all that had happened, so I needed to start figuring out where I was going to go next.
I made myself a cup of tea. Then I returned to my bedroom, where I pulled on Declan’s sweatshirt to ward off the early morning chill, then popped open my laptop.
I scrolled through the job openings. There was a Chicago family whose nanny requirements screamed “high maintenance.” A scatterbrained Hollywood actress who lived on a Montana ranch in between films, and needed a nanny for her new stepchildren. That sounded promising, until I checked the ages, and realized the stepchildren were seventeen and eighteen.
No thank you , I thought. I’d nannied younger teens before, but at that age, they’d resent the insult to their independence. And they’d be right.
I kept scrolling. There was a fairly normal sounding family that would be vacationing in Faribault-Northfield for a few weeks in late August and wanted a nanny so the parents could enjoy a little alone time while they were there. Normally, I avoided jobs that short, but the idea of getting to stay close to home for a few weeks enjoying a low-stakes job sounded like just what the doctor ordered.
I polished up my profile and started to type up an in introductory message to the couple.
A knock sounded on the door.
I jumped, nearly spilling my tea.
It was Declan. It had to be. My stomach twisted.
“Come in,” I called.
He did, slouching against the doorframe. His dark T-shirt pulled tight across his chest. I knew from experience that those shirts were incredibly soft, almost as pleasing to the touch as the skin beneath it. A small, weak part of me wanted to go to him and bury my face in his chest.
How messed up was it that he was the one who’d hurt me, and he was also the only person I wanted to go to for comfort?
Maybe that’s not messed up , an old voice whispered. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.
The voice sounded a lot like my mom’s, I realized.
I brushed off the thought, unsettled.
Declan cracked a crooked smile. “Glad to see you’re not taking a break from stealing my clothes.”
I flushed. “Do you want it back?”
The wicked spark in his eyes dimmed. “Keep it,” he said gruffly. “You can take it back to the States for all I care.”
I swallowed. “Did you want something?”
“Right.” He straightened. “Are you still up for going to Prague with me? Catie still wants to go, but if you’d rather not, since we’re… If you’d rather not go, I’ll explain to her that my plans changed.”
I blinked. I’d forgotten the trip to Prague was tomorrow. “She’ll be disappointed,” I said.
“She’ll get over it. I’ll take her somewhere better after you leave.” He studied my face. “I don’t mind being the bad guy, if you need to be here.”
If you need to be away from me . That was what he wasn’t saying.
Frustrated tenderness welled up in me. Declan was being so him . Willing to rearrange his plans and bear the brunt of Catie’s disappointment if that was what I needed.
Damn the man.
“What about you?” I asked. “Would it be easier to focus on your work if I wasn’t there?”
He laughed, not unkindly. “ A ghrá , I’ve never had trouble focusing on business, and I never will. I’m not built like that.”
I felt a rush of sadness at his words. Maybe that was our problem. He could always put me out of his mind when he needed to, and I never seemed to be able to put him out of mine.
“I’ll go,” I decided. “I don’t want to disappoint Catie. When’s the next time I’ll get to go to Prague?”
Declan picked up a knickknack off my bedside table and began inspecting the grumpy frog statue with an air of studied casualness. “You could stay in Europe for a bit after your job here ends. Buy a Euro Rail pass, do the backpacking thing.”
Something in my chest tightened. It was the closest Declan had come to asking me to stay in Ireland after my work with him ended. And I had a feeling it was the closest he was going to get.
I gestured to my laptop. “I’ll probably have to get back. Most of the nannying jobs I’m applying to would start fairly soon after this one ends.”
Declan’s hand tightened on the ceramic frog. “You’re already looking for other jobs?”
“Declan,” I said, helpless. Why did he have to make everything so much harder than it had ever been before? Why did he have to make me wish I was the kind of person who stayed?
But I wasn’t. I was a fairy-godmother/nanny. I blew in to people’s lives, carried them through a rough patch, and then flew on to the next job when they didn’t need me anymore.
Declan sat the frog down with more force than was necessary. “So you’re not going to do the sponsorship, then. Become a professional blogger.”
I inhaled sharply. This was the first time since yesterday’s fight that he’d referenced something we’d talked about as @1000words and @DBCoder.
Something uncomfortable occurred to me. “Did you get me that sponsorship offer after you found out who I was?”
He clenched his jaw. “So what if I did? You’re better than half the professional bloggers on that site.”
His high regard warmed me as much as his high-handedness made me want to bang my head against my desk. “Declan, I don’t want to get professional opportunities because I’m sleeping with you.”
“You’re not sleeping with me now,” he pointed out dryly.
I made an inarticulate groan that sounded something like ARGH and buried my head in my hands. “Why are you so impossible?”
And he was impossible. Everything about him—about us—was impossible.
“Hey.” Declan’s voice gentled. He drew closer and knelt in front of where I sat. His hands were big and warm as he coaxed mine from my face, so that he could meet my eyes. “It wasn’t like what you’re thinking. When any of the Snug employees see a high-quality blog that could be a good fit for sponsored content, we send it over to the team that handles corporate partnerships and advertising. That’s all I did. And your blog was so great, they found a potential sponsor in less than a week.”
Oh. That wasn’t so bad.
Then I ran that timeline through my head and narrowed my eyes at Declan. “If it didn’t have anything to do with us sleeping together, why didn’t you recommend my blog to your sponsorship team before you knew who I really was?”
He looked down at our joined hands, his curled protectively around mine. “Is it horrible to admit I’m a selfish bastard who didn’t feel like sharing you with the world?”
Something warm bloomed in my stomach.
It took everything in me not to lean forward and kiss his mouth so I could taste the flawed, perfect words coming out of them.
Abruptly he dropped my hands and stood. He turned on his heel and headed to the door. When he looked back over his shoulder, any trace of greedy tenderness was gone, hidden behind an impassive mask.
“We leave from Dublin at half past ten tomorrow. So make sure you and Catie are completely packed tonight. We’ll leave early in the morning.”
And then he was gone.
I stared after him, wrestling with my emotions.
Then I turned back to my laptop and resumed planning for a future without Declan in it.
I probably would have appreciated the glamor of a private plane more if I wasn’t half-asleep and unsure of where I stood with Declan. Ever since he’d walked out of my room yesterday, he’d maintained an air of cool, stoic distance. He was his normal warm self with Catie, but with me, he was back to being the curt, powerful man he’d been when we first met.
Normally, I would have dealt with his cooling temper by dialing up the sunshine wattage of my own personality, but I’d woken up at the crack of dawn to coax a grumpy six-year-old out of bed and sunshine just didn’t feel like it was in my repertoire today.
We all buckled in as the flight attendant ran through the safety information and the lavish in-flight menu with equal amounts of detail.
Declan barely listened, already scrolling through work emails on his phone.
“Can I have two chocolate cookies, Uncle Declan?” Catie asked.
“You can have whatever you wa— I mean, that’s a lot of sugar,” he corrected himself, finally looking up from his phone. He glanced first at Catie, then at me.
“How about one cookie?” I suggested. “But we have to wait until the plane takes off.”
Catie wrinkled her nose at that, but was quickly distracted when the plane took off down the runway, gaining speed. The force pressed us back into our seats, and Catie grinned wildly.
“I love this part,” she said. When the plane left the ground, and the friction of the runway evaporated, she spread her arms wide, palms down, like she was the plane. “We’re flying ,” she said, awestruck.
Declan and I shared a smile, delighted by this kid who temporarily linked us. His smile was wide and unencumbered, and I felt something inside me relax in response.
I’d missed that smile.
“This one isn’t the same plane as the one we took before, when we flew to your house,” Catie asked, looking around confused. “That one had red seats. And different cookies. There were no chocolate ones.”
That surprised a laugh out of me. She was right. Did the man actually have two private planes? And if he did, why had he been flying coach when we met?
“It’s not my personal plane, it’s the company’s,” Declan explained. “And some other executives were already using it when your mom called and asked me to come pick you up. So I flew coach to get to you and your mom as quickly as possible, and then I rented a different one for us all to go home. I’m sorry if their cookies weren’t up to snuff.”
“If you waited until the company people were done, we could have used this plane,” Catie said thoughtfully. “It’s important to take turns, Uncle Declan.”
“I didn’t want to wait,” Declan said. I thought of that first day I’d met him on the plane. I’d written him off as a hot antisocial grump. But now I realized he must have been jet-lagged and wrecked with worry over Sinead. He’d just found out his sister was struggling with alcoholism, and I’d been whining to him about losing a job .
No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk to me.
“Besides,” Declan shot me a wink, startling me out of my thoughts. “You get better nanny recommendations flying coach.”
I laughed. Maybe this trip wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we’d moved past the most painful parts of being “on a break” and could shift into something more comfortable. Something like friendship.
Maybe.
O nce we arrived at the hotel, we split up for the day. Catie took a nap, and Declan met up with a British billionaire he knew named Grayson Frost. Apparently, the man lived in New York and was focused on expanding his business into the tech world. I couldn’t quite tell from the way Declan talked about him whether the man was a friend or a rival.
Maybe, in Declan’s world, it was the same thing.
After Catie woke up from her nap, she decided she wanted to go for a swim in the hotel’s ritzy pool. I pointed out that Declan had a pool at home, and there was a whole city outside to explore. She pointed out that this pool had a waterfall and super fluffy bathrobes for when we were done swimming.
I couldn’t argue with that logic, so we exhausted ourselves swimming. Then we went up to our hotel suite—three bedrooms, a sitting room, a business suite, and a gorgeous balcony—and ordered room service on Declan’s credit card.
When Declan finally got back to the hotel after his night out with Grayson, Catie and I were eating strudel and watching a Czech movie, making up our own dialogue since we had no idea what the characters were saying.
Declan leaned on the wall and watched us with a fond look in his eyes. But when he caught me watching him, he straightened and retreated to the business suite. He didn’t come out again until it was time for him to read Catie her bedtime story.
I stacked our dirty dishes on a tray and listened to Declan’s soft baritone drifting out from the other room as he read to Catie. I enjoyed that sound more than I wanted to admit.
When he finished reading the book, I scurried out into the hallway to drop off the tray so housekeeping could pick it up. The door swung closed behind me.
I huffed, realizing I’d been locked out.
I knocked on the door softly, careful not to wake Catie. She normally drifted off toward the end of Declan’s last book of the night.
When no one came to the door I knocked a little harder.
This was going to be so embarrassing if I had to go down to the check-in desk and ask for help. At least I was pretty sure how to say stupid American in Czech. The phrase had come up several times in the movie Catie and I were watching.
I was about to give up, when Declan opened the door. “What are you doing out there?” he asked, a smile lurking in the corner of his lips.
“I got locked out,” I explained. “My keycard is inside.”
“You should keep it in your pocket,” Declan said, stepping back to let me into our rooms.
I gestured to my camisole and pajama shorts. “What pockets?”
His eyes darkened as he took in my relative lack of clothing.
A delicious thread of anticipation stretched between us.
Stop , I told myself firmly. There’s nothing to anticipate.
I tried to step away from Declan and bashed into an overstuffed armchair. Declan caught my hips to keep me from tumbling backward.
“Thank you,” I said. The words came out breathier than I intended.
His hands spread on my hips. “I’m done with work for the night. We could have a glass of wine on the balcony. Or play the X-rated version of that movie game you were playing with Catie.”
Everything in me wanted to say yes. Which was why I knew I had to say no.
That thread of anticipation tangled into something complicated and agonizing.
I stepped out of his grasp, careful to avoid inconveniently placed furniture. “That does sound fun. But I think it’s probably best if we avoid old habits, right?”
Declan didn’t answer me. He just looked at me, his eyes dark and hungry.
Why did he have to look at me? I felt my resolve beginning to crumble.
“We both have full days tomorrow,” I babbled. “I’m going to turn in for the night.”
I grabbed for the closest doorknob I found, grateful when it did indeed turn out to be my room. I shut the door behind me and leaned on it. I closed my eyes and blew out a long sigh.
This taking a break stuff wasn’t for wimps.