Substitute Bride (Beaufort Brides #2)

Chapter 1

Rose Beaufort tried to smother a yawn as she poured out crispy rice cereal into two bright pink bowls.

She hadn’t gotten very much sleep last night because six-year-old Jill had woken up twice with nightmares, and Rose had been awakened by her cries and had gone into her room to comfort the girl.

But she’d been the Harwood girls’ nanny for more than two years now, and she could go through the breakfast routine without conscious thought.

She topped the cereal off with milk, scattered sliced strawberries on top, and then brought the bowls over to the girls, who were both sitting at the countertop bar on the large kitchen island.

“My strawberries aren’t good,” five-year-old Julie said, frowning down at her cereal.

Rose quickly checked the fruit in question. “Sure they are. They’re just darker red than some of the others we’ve gotten. They haven’t gone bad yet.”

“I don’t like mushy strawberries.” Julie was a particularly verbal child, especially for her age, but she was also a perfectionist and was always very unhappy when things in her life weren’t just so.

Rose knew how to deal with the girl by now.

She used to take Julie’s complaints seriously, which only nurtured them into real temper fits.

Now she knew better, and she always just shrugged them off.

She reached over and popped one of the strawberries from the bowl into her mouth.

“Mm,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Not mushy at all. I’ll eat them if you don’t want them. ”

Julie frowned down again at her bowl and then soberly scooped out a bite, one small strawberry slice perched atop the cereal. She put the spoonful in her mouth and chewed for several seconds. Then she gave a little nod. “It’s okay.”

Rose hid a chuckle by turning around to face the single-serve coffeepot where her coffee cup had been sitting forgotten for a couple of minutes.

She gave it a dash of cream and took a sip, closing her eyes for a moment and trying to wake up.

She had a long day today since the girls had dance practice after school and then a birthday party at a skating rink this evening.

When she turned back around, she saw that Jill had only stirred her cereal in her bowl.

Jill was a year and a half older than her sister and had the same long red-brown hair and hazel eyes.

But Jill was much quieter and more introspective than Julie, and Rose sometimes worried that she brooded too much.

“Are your strawberries not good, Jill?” Rose asked casually.

“They’re okay.” Jill stared down at her bowl as she finally took a bite.

“Are you tired this morning?” Rose reached over to tilt up the girl’s chin so she could see her. It was a fair, pretty face with a small nose and a sprinkling of freckles. There were slight shadows under her eyes, but her lips weren’t pale and she didn’t look sick.

“No. Just thinking.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

Julie looked over at her sister as she chewed, a trickle of milk streaming down her chin. “Are you thinking about Mya’s party tonight?”

Jill shook her head.

“Are you thinking about your dreams last night?” Rose asked, suspecting this was the case. For the past few weeks, the girl had woken up periodically with nightmares, which was a little worrying.

Jill shrugged and looked down, proving that Rose’s suspicions were right.

“What did you dream?” Julie asked, her eyes wide and round.

“Nothing.”

“Well, you dreamed about something,” Rose murmured, wiping down the stray rice crisps from the counter. “You don’t have to tell us what it was if you don’t want, but it’s not nice to lie to us and say it was nothing.”

“Oh.” This seemed to hit home with Jill. Her little forehead wrinkled.

Julie put down her spoon and leaned her head on her sister’s shoulder. “You can tell me and Rosie.”

It was a very sweet gesture, and it touched Rose’s heart. It also appeared to have an impact on Jill. She gave a big sigh and stared down at her cereal bowl unblinkingly. “It was no big deal. It wasn’t scary.”

“Then there’s no reason not to tell us,” Rose said, leaning on the counter so she was closer to the little girl. “Sometimes dreams are hard to talk about if they’re scary, but it usually makes you feel better if you do.”

“It wasn’t scary,” Jill repeated. “It was about a an evil stepmother—like from the movie. She was mean to us.”

Rose’s breath hitched in her throat at the implications. “What did she do?”

“She yelled at us and made us work all the time, and she threw Topsy out on the street.”

Topsy was the girls’ little white cockapoo, much beloved and long-suffering as she was constantly dressed up in outfits for pictures and playing house.

“That was mean,” Julie said with a gasp, fisting her hand around her spoon again and continuing to eat. “Poor Topsy.”

“Was the stepmother the one from the movie?” Rose asked lightly, carefully watching Jill’s face.

Jill’s eyes shot up quickly and then back down. “Y-yeah.”

Rose knew that wasn’t true. The girl just didn’t want to say who the evil stepmother in her dream had been—which meant it was almost certainly Genevieve Brown.

Genevieve was their father’s fiancée and one of the snottiest women Rose had ever met.

She knew the girls didn’t like their future stepmother.

They tried to do as their father told them and get to know her, but the woman made very few efforts as far as Rose could tell.

She acted overly sweet whenever James was present, but Rose wasn’t deceived.

Genevieve didn’t seem to care for the girls at all.

Rose hadn’t realized Jill was so worried about it though.

This dream—as childish as it was—was troubling.

“Well,” Rose said, pitching her tone to be encouraging, “the important thing to remember is that dreams aren’t real. We would never let anything happen to Topsy, would we?”

“No!” Julie exclaimed.

“No,” Jill agreed, less enthusiastically.

“And your daddy wouldn’t let anyone be mean to you,” Rose continued with a smile. “So you know what we do with bad dreams?”

“We file them away in the back of the drawer and tell them to stay there!” Julie was grinning now, making the motions of putting a paper in a file and then sticking it into a file cabinet.

James, the girls’ father, worked from home a lot, so they were very familiar with office supplies.

Jill’s expression was clearing, so Rose caught her eye and gave her a significant look. “What do we do?”

With a long exhale, Jill gave a little smile. “We file it away in the back of the drawer.”

“And tell it to stay there!” Julie added.

“Did someone have a bad dream to file away?” The male voice came from the side entrance of the kitchen, surprising Rose so much she gave a little jerk.

She turned to see James Harwood, her employer of two years, walking into the kitchen in a dark gray suit and blue tie.

He wasn’t a traditionally handsome man—with a too-high forehead and a too-square jaw—but Rose thought he was attractive anyway.

He had brown hair and broad shoulders and hazel eyes like the girls.

He was in his midthirties and already a rising executive in an international corporation.

His wife had died two and a half years ago quite suddenly from a random brain aneurysm. Rose had started working for him as the nanny of his girls a few months later.

She instinctively glanced down at herself to make sure she was presentable. She wore a baggy T-shirt and a pair of yoga pants, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail—none of which was very flattering.

It didn’t matter of course.

The first year she’d worked for the Harwoods, she’d gotten up an hour early every day so she could be showered and fully dressed before breakfast, but she’d given up on that eventually as she started to feel more a part of the family.

No one cared what she looked like at breakfast, and it seemed better use of her time to shower and dress after she’d taken the girls to school.

It wasn’t like she was any sort of a beauty queen, even when she was dressed up. She had long brown hair and normal brown eyes, and she was just a little too curvy, always needing to lose about ten pounds. She was here to take care of the girls—not wow anyone with her appearance.

“Jill had a bad dream,” Julie informed her father as he made a beeline for the coffeepot. “But she already filed it away.”

James turned his gaze on his oldest daughter as coffee streamed into his mug. “Is that right, Jill?”

“Yes. It’s all over now.”

“Good.” He stepped over and brushed the girl’s hair back from her face so he could better see her expression. “Did it wake you up last night?”

“Yes, but Rosie came in and took care of me.”

James glanced over at Rose, a question in his eyes.

She gave him a little smile. “She was brave and went right back to sleep.”

Jill seemed pleased with this praise and squirmed on her stool.

James turned back to her. “You know you can wake me up anytime you want to if you get scared at night.”

“I know,” Jill said soberly. “But Rosie took care of me.”

Rose couldn’t read James’s expression as his eyes moved a few times between her and his daughter, but whatever mental conclusions he had drawn seemed to satisfy him. He turned back to grab his coffee and took a long sip. “So what’s happening today?” he asked.

He tended to be rather absentminded, and he could never keep a schedule in his mind. His assistant kept him on track at work, and Rose kept him on track at home.

“The girls have dance practice this afternoon. Then they have a birthday party at a roller-skating rink this evening. You said you had a work dinner tonight, so you probably won’t see them until bedtime.”

“Oh. Right.” He’d obviously forgotten about his work function. “Whose birthday is it?”

“Mya’s!” Julie informed him, grinning brightly. “She’s going to have pink strawberry cupcakes!”

“Sounds good. I wouldn’t mind having one of those.”

“They’re not for you!”