Marrying the Northbridge Nanny (7 page)

“How was your trip?” she asked as he got behind the wheel, making an effort to keep things superficial.

“I did everything I needed to do, Chase and I had a couple of nights on the town, and now it’s good to be home. I felt guilty about Tia being sick, and about you and Hadley having to take care of her, though. From what she says it doesn’t sound as if she suffered too much—I hope it wasn’t too bad for you.”

“It wasn’t bad at all, it got me up to date on the newest kid movies. Besides, Tia is actually a pretty good patient—she wasn’t whiney or cranky, just quiet and she wanted to snuggle a lot.”

“Which is probably why Hadley is getting the cold now and why you probably will, too.”

“After working with kids—with an office in a hospital—and getting just about everything I came into contact with the first few years, I’ve built up pretty strong immunity when it comes to kid germs. I feel fine.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said as he pulled his car into the garage and stopped the engine.

But it had been such a short trip…

Maybe it seemed that way to Logan, too, because as
they got out of the SUV and left the garage he didn’t merely say good-night and go back to the house. He walked with Meg to the apartment steps, leaned a shoulder against the garage’s corner and went on as if they’d just begun a conversation at a party.

“Chase and I were talking about that, about you working at a hospital and your Ph.D. and everything. I told him what you told me—that you wanted to experience the lighter side of kids to recharge your batteries. Chase wanted to know more details and I had to admit that I didn’t have any to give him.”

So he and his business partner had talked about her. Meg wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. She also wasn’t sure she wanted to be more open with him on this subject even though he was obviously hoping she would be.

But she didn’t like that note of doubt that was in his voice and wondered if his longtime friend had planted seeds of suspicion about why she was being secretive. And she supposed that he had the right to know details about someone he was entrusting his daughter to.

Plus, if she told him what he was fishing for, it would give her a little more time with him.

“It’s complicated,” she admitted as she weighed her decision.

“I kind of thought it was,” Logan said with a smile that welcomed her confidence but didn’t push for it.

It was the smile that got to her.

“I had a bad incident a few months ago,” she said, sitting on the second-to-the-bottom step as she did.

Logan came to sit with her, his back to the garage wall so he was facing her. He propped one foot on the lower
step and braced an arm on that raised knee, giving no indication that he was in any hurry to get home to bed.

“I see kids with a lot of different issues,” Meg continued. “Physical, social, emotional, environmental—you name it, we see it all at Children’s Hospital.”

“Stuff that will break your heart, I’d imagine.”

“Oh yeah,” Meg agreed. “And stuff that’s frustrating and maddening and sometimes dangerous…”

She hadn’t talked too much about this. She’d told her family as little as possible so she didn’t upset them. She’d told her two closest friends in Denver who had helped her when she’d come home after surgery, but again she’d downplayed the event and her own feelings and reactions. Buried it a little, she supposed. And she’d refused any kind of counseling or therapy herself because she thought she could deal with it on her own. And she thought she was. But that still didn’t make it any easier to tell Logan.

“Dangerous?” he repeated to urge her to go on.

“Sure, kids can lose it and even small ones can do damage—to themselves, to anyone around them, to a whole room. I’ve been trained in how to restrain them—and have had to on a few occasions—but for the most part I can usually tell when a kid is about to go off and I can defuse the situation and de-escalate before it gets that far.”

“Usually…”

Logan was such a good listener and attentive enough to pick up on even the smallest things.

“Usually,” Meg repeated the word that had apparently given her away.

“But not always.”

She shrugged. “I’m dealing with disturbed kids. Some of them
really
disturbed.”

And if she was going to be completely honest with him, now was the time, she decided.

“I had a twelve-year-old boy referred by his school psychologist—the parents and the schools had tried everything and sending him to us for evaluation was the last resort. He came in sullen and annoyed with having to be there, but he wasn’t raging at anything. It was obvious from the start that he was manipulative, there were some incidents of cruelty…” Confidentiality wouldn’t allow her to get too far into the pathology. “Let’s just say that he wasn’t a kid I was comfortable turning my back on,” Meg said with a humorless little laugh, trying to make it sound lighter than it was. Lighter than she felt.

“But you
were
alone with him?”

“That’s part of the job. He couldn’t manipulate me—and believe me, he tried—and he didn’t like that.”

“So he didn’t like you.”

Another good guess.

“I don’t think this particular kid feels anything the way you and I would feel things,” she said, slightly surprised by how ominous it had come out—an indication that she was still shaken.

But she didn’t let Logan know that. Instead she just went on. “Anyway, I was in a session with the kid and he was doing his best to get me to think what he wanted me to think. It wasn’t working, I was calling him on his lies and tall tales and basically the game he was playing that day—I was confronting him, which is a part of what I do at calculated moments…”

Meg hesitated, having the same difficulty she always
did getting this portion out. She shrugged and glanced at the porch light on the rear of the main house rather than at Logan because it somehow seemed less serious to say it that way.

“The kid picked up a pencil and stabbed me with it.”

She didn’t have to be looking at Logan to know the impact that had on him because it was a jolt that yanked his spine a bit straighter.

“He
stabbed
you?”

“In the side. Luckily he didn’t hit any major organs but the pencil went in about three inches and broke off—”

“My God, Meg…”

“I know, he could have killed me. And to tell you the truth, he was so calm about it, so…soothed, almost, by doing it, that I was actually afraid he might go on and do more just for the fun of it. I guess I was lucky that he just laughed and walked out of my office as if he didn’t have a care in the world.”

“I hope that kid isn’t loose on the streets—
ever.
”

“He won’t be for a long time.”

“What about you? What happened to you then?”

“I had to have surgery.”

“And right about then you decided you needed the lighter side of kids for a change—no wonder.”

“Actually, this was months ago. I was back at work in a week.”

“You weren’t.”

“I was. But the whole thing did start me thinking. And evaluating things. And wondering if I was getting burned out—”

“Yeah, I would think that being stabbed might burn you
out just a little,” Logan said, his facetious understatement making her smile and helping to ease some of the tension.

“Actually, I started to wonder if that’s why I
had
been stabbed. If, over time, I’d begun to relate less to the kids, if they weren’t relating to me because maybe I’d gotten too detached, too impersonal—”

“You blamed yourself?” he asked as if he couldn’t believe that.

“I wouldn’t call it
blame.
I just wondered if I was off my game. If maybe I wasn’t building the kind of rapport I needed to with my kids and if maybe that had contributed to the situation. I also started thinking about how long it had been since I’d had contact with kids who
didn’t
have problems, and how much I missed it. I thought I needed a shot of normal. I thought I needed to just get back in touch with…well, the lighter side of kids. Tia is perfect for that.”

Meg glanced at Logan again then and concluded, “That’s why I’m here, being a nanny instead of a psychologist.”

And it actually felt better to have been honest with him. But then there was something about being with him that gave her an all-round sense of well-being, that took away the negative fallout from The Incident. It made her attraction to him that much harder to ignore.

Logan was studying her, though, and rather than letting her last words put an end to this, he proved just how carefully he’d listened to her when they’d talked other times, too. And how much of it he’d retained.

“So when you told me about what it was like growing up under your grandfather’s rules,” he said, “you told
me that part of why you were here this summer was to make sure you don’t fall into his way of doing things—the kind of structure and control you grew up with. Does that tie into this, too?”

Meg’s eyebrows rose all on their own, surprised. “Wow, you remembered that. And put it together with this.” But now that he had, now that she was being honest with him, she might as well let him know that he was right. “Yes, it does tie into this,” she said. “Since the stabbing I’ve been jumpier, more fearful—”

“That seems reasonable.”

“If it stays within reason. But I started to find myself needing absolute control over situations—if my playgroups got a little wild or noisy I started to get panicky. An accidentally dropped toy was sending me jumping as high as if somebody shot off a gun. I was way too stressed-out dealing with volatile parents and rather than being diplomatic I’d hear myself being more dictatorial. I was finding myself holding back when I knew I should have been doing some therapeutic provocation or confrontation…”

She hesitated but by then she thought that she’d already gone this far, she might as well go the whole way.

“I started to worry that if I didn’t nip this in the bud I might turn more into my grandfather than I want to be—all uptight and rigid all the time.” Not that some things didn’t
need
to be controlled—like what being with Logan stirred in her.

Meg shook her head. “I haven’t told anyone this last part. I’m not sure why I’m telling you—you’re probably going to think I’m crazy.”

“I’d think you were crazy if you
didn’t
come away from being stabbed feeling on edge and needing to get back some sense of control. But it seems to me that deciding to get away for a while and regroup—which is really what this nannying thing is, isn’t it—”

“It is,” she agreed, grateful that he was taking that view of it, that he was understanding while not blowing it out of proportion.

“Well, it seems to me that getting away, relaxing, regrouping before it’s too late and you end up like the Reverend, is a smart thing to do. It seems
therapeutic,
” he finished, making a joke by using her terminology.

It made Meg grin and marvel at how much better she felt suddenly. “So you’re okay with my using your daughter as my self-prescribed therapy to loosen up?”

“Sure. I think you’re more
worried
about being wound too tight than actually wound too tight. I haven’t seen anything about the way you are with Tia to think that you’re acting like your grandfather around her. In fact, I heard some stories about root beer floats after her bath and letting her fall asleep in front of the television while I was gone—that doesn’t sound like anything the Reverend would approve of.”

Meg laughed. “The Reverend definitely wouldn’t have approved. But kids need a little flexibility when they’re sick.”

“I just hope the fact that you could
be
flexible didn’t convince you that you’re cured and make you want to go back to your other work.”

“You want me to stay a basket case?”

“I just want you to stay.”

Oh…

He was still looking at her in the dim glow of the lights that trailed up the side of the garage to the apartment door and Meg’s eyes met his, basking in the warmth in them, unable not to feel as if all was right with the world again now that he was home.

Then, without any warning at all and for no reason Meg could figure out, he leaned forward, over that arm still braced on his knee, and kissed her.

It was the same way he’d kissed her on the Wednesday night before he’d left—soft, barely there. But just when Meg was afraid he was going to end it again in a hurry—like he had that other kiss—he deepened it instead.

He pressed his lips more firmly to hers and they parted in a way that prompted hers to part, too. And there was movement—a sensual, soothing, mesmerizing movement—to go with it.

The entire week he’d been gone she’d thought about that other kiss, she’d wondered what it would be like for him to kiss her again. She’d wanted him to so badly she’d even dreamed that he had. And now he was. And even if it was still a relatively tame kiss, it was so much better than that other one, so much better than she’d even imagined…

Then just when she was really getting into it, he ended it to breathe a sort of sigh, sort of chuckle, and say, “So much for promises of no kissing.”

Meg knew she should probably have registered an admonishment against breaking promises. Against the kissing. But the truth was she just wished he’d break the promise again and kiss her some more.

But she couldn’t say
that.
So all she said was, “I’m glad you’re back.”

That made him smile a crooked and pleased smile. “Me, too.”

Then he swooped in for another kiss—that one exactly like the one the week before—and got to his feet.

“You have a big day tomorrow getting ready for your sister’s wedding,” he said. “Hadley told me she’s taking over with Tia so you can do everything you need to do for it.”

“I have to start helping Kate with last-minute things at seven tomorrow morning,” Meg explained.

“That means we won’t see you until the wedding tomorrow night?”

Since her sister Kate’s groom was Ry Grayson, Logan, Hadley and Tia had been invited to the wedding of their newest family member.