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“I’d need to talk to you,” she blurted out. Her gaze darted around. “About the job. In private.”
“Stop by sometime today, before eleven or after two. We’re the house across from the small-machine repair shop. We’ll be home.”
Ivy hopped in place, a big smile on her face.
Grayson said with a hiss, “Yes.” Tova didn’t give us a yes, but she didn’t say no, and that was all my kids heard.
Her tentative smile made it seem like I might see her later and chase her right back out. I didn’t know this woman. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing hiring her to hang with my kids.
My other option was to move back to Buffalo Gully and tell Meg’s parents they should take the kids to Helena two months sooner than expected. They had already enrolled the kids in a private school.
No. I said I’d give myself the summer with them, but I needed a hand. As much as I wished I didn’t, even Meg, before she got sick, had mentioned the option of hiring a nanny to help with the kids before and after school and during the summer. Her parents had pestered her about daycare too.
After seeing the kids with Tova, I couldn’t not do it. They were smiling again. Happier. When she was near them, their behavior reminded me of my siblings when we were younger. Kids being kids.
When I ran Grayson and Ivy through the store and we left to go home and unload our groceries, I was relieved I hadn’t seen the last of Tova yet. And irritated. I’d forgotten the damn sugar.
* * *
Tova
I hung back by the back door of the diner. The lunch rush would start soon, but I had to stop and ask Thelma how crazy impulsive I was being.
She took a fake drag off her unlit Newport. “You want to know if taking up with the first handsome man to cross your path after Charlie-boy is a bad idea?”
I screwed up my face. She made it sound like I was jumping onto the man’s lap and urging him totake me, big boy. “I’m not shacking up with him. I’d be working for him.”
“Tova.” Her tone said everything.
“He asked me to watch his kids, not lap dance for him or his business associates.” It wasn’t like I thought about what it’d be like to loosen a couple buttons on his shirt and soften the granite in his jaw. Idid notthink about what kind of special choreography would drive a man with iron-clad control wild at all.
No. Not at all.
“He hasn’t asked youyet.”
She shook her head.
“Bad idea. No one knows him around here. All I know is that he has two kids and likes his milk.”
“Do you know anyone trustworthy who can nanny for him?” I was strangely protective of the kids. I’d only met them a couple of times, but they’d gone from a sort of lost haze to being exuberant kids when they were around me. My presence was enough to cheer them up, and I didn’t have to put on a performance.
It’d been a long time since I felt like I didn’t have to act a certain way around people depending on what they might think of me or what they wanted from me. It’d been even longer since I’d gotten to hang out with kids.
Thelma pursed her lips and flicked imaginary ashes. “The Wilson girls are teenagers. Heard the older one has a boyfriend she can’t get off of. More likely to spend more time stuck on her phone when he’s not around than watching the kids.”
“How old is the younger sister?”
“Thirteen.”
I didn’t want to offer up this sister I’d never met. “Anyone else?”
She lifted a shoulder. “I think one of his neighbors is Catherine Ives. Her mom has been divorced for a few years, and Catherine is maybe twelve. Old enough to help.”
A single mom lived right next to Cody? How hot was she? Why was my heart rate thumping like I’d done a half hour of barrel jumps? “I like being around Grayson and Ivy.”
“Just the kids?” she asked dryly.
I rolled my eyes. “He’s like talking to a brick.” A handsome brick with hard pecs and wide shoulders that filled out a polo shirt in a way I’d never seen. “He’s like a stern milk daddy.”
