A Nanny in the Family Read online

  Your guests, Louise, he thought irritably. He couldn’t put a name to half the faces swarming around his property.

  She slipped a hand beneath his arm and gazed up at him soulfully. “Aren’t you having a good time, sweets? You seem a bit out of sorts.”

  He curbed the temptation to tell her bluntly that he couldn’t wait for the evening to end. She’d worked hard to make it a success, to show him how much of herself she was prepared to invest in a relationship with him.

  A week ago he’d probably have viewed her efforts with more tolerance if not more enthusiasm, but a lot had happened in the last week. His growing fascination with Nicole had culminated in his making love to her and that had changed everything. But now was not the time to tell Louise that what he’d suspected for some time had crystallized into certainty: he saw no future for them as a couple.

  “Pierce? What are you thinking?”

  “That you’re right,” he said, hating having to dissemble. “We really should be mingling.”

  “You’re sure there’s nothing else troubling you?”

  Her voice rang sharp with anxiety, as if she sensed trouble on the horizon. It was enough to convince him there was something to that women’s intuition business, after all. “Nothing I care to go into now,” he said, unwilling to tell her a direct lie. “We’ll talk some other time.” “Is it the nanny, Pierce?”

  He realized immediately that in trying to evade the issue, he’d made a serious tactical error. Although she managed to sound sympathetic rather than alarmed, the way she dug her nails into his arm betrayed an uneasy suspicion. “Why would you jump to that assumption, Louise?”

  “Because I can’t help noticing how ineffectual she is. Take this evening, for example. Where was she when you needed her? Schmoozing with the guests and leaving you to take over the job she’s being paid to do.” She stopped long enough to sneeze and dab again at her nose.

  “Are you coming down with a cold?” he asked, with rather more optimism than was polite. “If you are, don’t feel you have to stay here to run things.”

  “I don’t have a cold, Pierce,” she said reproachfully. “The dog’s making me sneeze. I’ve mentioned a number of times that I’m allergic to it.”

  When he made no comment to that, she swayed against him and tucked her arm more securely in his. “But to get back to what we were talking about, sweets, someone needs to spell out to Miss Bennett exactly where her duties lie, and it might come more easily from another woman. Would you like me to talk to her?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I have no problem speaking plainly when the occasion calls for it.”

  “As you like.” She sniffed delicately. “The offer stands, though, if ever you decide to take me up on it. I’m in this for the long haul, Pierce, you know that.”

  He was afraid he did. Severing the ties with Louise wasn’t going to be easy or pretty. Peace-keeping in the Persian Gulf had been a breeze beside such bulldog tenacity.

  By the time Peaches was securely leashed, it was almost seven. “Just enough time to make the rounds and say good night to everyone, then bedtime for you,” Nicole told Tommy, immensely relieved that she’d soon have a valid excuse to leave the party. “Remember your manners, darling.”

  He managed so beautifully for the first few minutes, submitting with good grace to the occasional hug from the women or handshake from the men, that Nicole just about burst with pride. Inevitably, though, they came to where Louise sat with a group of friends, and it was then that things fell apart in spectacular fashion.

  Approaching, Tommy stared at Louise in mute fascination. Aware of her audience, Louise put on her best mother-in-waiting act. “Hello, dear,” she said, sounding somewhat congested. “Have you come to say good night to Auntie Louise?”

  Tommy said nothing and simply continued to observe her closely. With mounting dismay, Nicole saw what it was that had captured his attention. A small piece of Kleenex tissue had lodged itself at the corner of one of Louise’s nostrils which were quite red, as if she’d been blowing her nose repeatedly and which made the scrap of white all the more noticeable.

  She began to twitch under Tommy’s scrutiny. “It’s rude to stare, Thomas,” she said, smiling fixedly. “Hasn’t your nanny taught you that?”

  Tommy’s gaze remained glued to her face, his eyes wide and serious. Finally, he spoke. “You’ve got something hanging out of your nose,” he said wonderingly.

  It was such a classic line that Nicole couldn’t help herself. A snort of laughter rose up in her throat and although she did her best to smother it, she didn’t quite succeed. Others who’d heard seemed similarly afflicted. At length, the woman sitting beside Louise leaned over and whispered in her ear.

  Scarlet with outrage and embarrassment, Louise brushed furiously at her nose. “Get that benighted creature away from me!” she snapped, any pretense at being Mother Earth quickly erased by the malevolent glare she shot at Peaches. “It’s no wonder I’m so stuffed up that I can hardly breathe!”

  Turning aside to hide another unforgivable smirk, Nicole met Pierce’s amused gaze. “I’m afraid we’ve disgraced ourselves,” she said.

  “I’m afraid you have,” he murmured, laughter rippling in his voice. “It really isn’t polite to snigger at someone else’s expense, Nicole. I’m shocked! Take that little rascal away before he voices a few more home truths.”

  “It’s no laughing matter, Pierce. Miss Trent isn’t going to forgive any of us for this.”

  “I can’t say I blame her,” he replied, but his smile and the way his gaze roamed over her took away any sting in his words. “Put the little devils to bed, both of them, then come back down here and let’s try to effect some damage control.”

  “I’d prefer not to do that. This isn’t my party, Pierce, and I feel out of place. Furthermore, I don’t think Louise is going to accept an apology even if I felt disposed to offer one.”

  “In that case,” he said, stroking the flat of his hand over her bare shoulder and urging her out of earshot of the others, “wait until everyone’s gone, then come down. There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about and I don’t think I can put it off any longer.” Then, as added inducement in case she argued the point, “It has to do with Tommy’s future and I’d like your feedback on what I’m proposing to do.”

  A quiver of alarm shot through her. “You’re not thinking of sending him away to school or anything like that, are you?”

  “No,” he said, his hand still lingering. “I have something quite different in mind and it does involve you. So I’ll expect to see you later, when we’ve got the house to ourselves again?”

  “All right,” she said, apprehension a leaden lump in the pit of her stomach. His decidedly furtive air made her very nervous.

  All the time that she was bathing Tommy and putting him to bed, her mind worried at the mystery. In fact, she was so totally wrapped up in it that she quite forgot she had another meeting planned for that evening and was startled to find Alice Holt standing beside the writing desk when she returned to her sitting room.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in,” Alice said. “It made more sense than my hanging around in the hall where, if anyone had seen me, I might have had to explain myself.”

  “I don’t mind,” Nicole said, but she did. She minded very much that, if she’d been so inclined, Alice could have snooped through the contents of the desk drawer and found the evidence she needed to expose Nicole as a fraud. She minded enough to add sharply, “Have you found what you were looking for?”

  Alice had the grace to blush slightly. “No,” she said, “though I admit I was tempted. But I decided you deserved the chance to state your case first.”

  “Thank you for that much.” Nicole sighed and dropped onto the love seat next to the window. “You’ve figured out who I really am, haven’t you?”

  “I think you’re an impostor and my common sense tells me I should expose you as such. For reasons I fai
l to understand, you’re cashing in on a slight physical resemblance to my late and very dear friend in order to get close either to her son or to Pierce Warner. The unsettling thing is, that slight physical resemblance to Arlene predisposes me to like you and that is the only excuse I can offer for not confronting you in public.”

  Alice sat down at the desk and very deliberately crossed one knee over the other, as though to signal her determination not to be hornswoggled a minute longer. “My conscience, however, is beginning to trouble me sorely, so I’d like it very much if you’d explain the reasons behind this elaborate charade you’ve as good as admitted you’re playing.”

  “I’m Arlene’s sister.”

  Alice laughed. “That’s preposterous! Arlene didn’t have a sister. She was an only child. Her mother couldn’t have any more children after she was born and I know that for a fact.”

  “Her ‘mother’ couldn’t have children, period. Arlene was adopted when she was eighteen months old but she found that out only a few months before she died. Our birth mother gave us up because she felt unable to provide us with the sort of life she thought we deserved after our father deserted us.”

  For a moment Alice simply stared, apparently struck speechless. Finally, she swallowed and said, “And you can prove that, can you?”

  Nicole gestured at the desk. “It’s all there, in a brown envelope at the bottom of the drawer. See for yourself.”

  “No.” Alice shook her head, as though to sort into some sort of order the questions burning to be asked. “I’d rather have you explain. Why, for instance, didn’t Arlene confide in me if, as you claim, she’d known for months before her death that she had a sister?”

  “We’d decided to keep it quiet until we’d had a chance to get to know each other again. I only found out myself last August, then spent most of the winter trying to trace her. Her adoptive parents, when I tracked them down, refused to help me locate her. They said they’d washed their hands of her when she married and wanted nothing further to do with her.”

  “I can believe that,” Alice said. “The Goodmans are very possessive. That was one of the reasons Arlene and Jim decided to make their home out here, away from their stifling influence.”

  “Well, I was just as determined not to be put off, and my parents—my adoptive parents, that is—were wonderful. They helped me and encouraged me every step of the way. I finally found Arlene in February.”

  “But you chose not to visit until after she died?” Alice looked skeptical. “That has a fishy ring to it. What kept you away until then?”

  “My work, the weather in the Midwest. Late winter isn’t the best time to drive across the prairies. But we wrote to each other and talked often on the phone. We’d planned our reunion for early June. We’d thought we’d spend a few days alone, just the four of us...”

  Unexpectedly, the grief that recently had begun to subside rose up to choke Nicole again, and with it came the anger. “I was already on my way here when the accident happened. I was due to arrive on the first Thursday in June and she was killed the preceding Saturday. It was a vicious, cruel twist of fate that, after losing one another for all those years, we missed each other again by such a close margin, and I will never forgive God for taking her away like that.”

  Unable to sit still a moment longer with the rage she’d thought she’d dealt with again tearing at her, she leapt to her feet, snapped on the desk lamp, and wrenched open the bottom drawer. “Go ahead. Read what’s in the damned envelope if you don’t believe me.”

  Alice subjected her to a long, thoughtful stare before slowly withdrawing the envelope from its hiding place beneath a copy of the local telephone directory, then coming to sit next to Nicole on the love seat.

  Struggling to compose herself, Nicole turned away and stared out at the scene in the garden below. The sun had dipped below the horizon and left only a pink stain on the ocean to mark its path. The remaining light had that peculiar pre-dark quality to it that threw the flowers into a subdued neon brilliance at the same time that it emphasized the dusky shadows.

  The string quartet had finished performing and a few couples were dancing on the patio to the strains of the piano coming from the open windows of the living room. Fully recovered from her earlier humiliation, Louise Trent presided over a small contingent of well-heeled cronies, seemingly engaged in extolling the virtues of her real estate perspicacity if her expansive gestures toward the house itself were any indication.

  Pierce stood some distance away, deep in discussion with three other men, one of whom Nicole knew was a colleague. But most people were lined up at a cloth-covered buffet table where a chef in a tall white hat was serving lobster thermidor.

  To all intents and purposes, the evening was as highly successful and picture perfect as Nicole’s life had been the day she’d set out to drive from Madison, Wisconsin, to Morningside, Oregon. How quickly it all could change, though. By an out of control truck crossing the centre line of a twisting coastal road, or simply by a word, the fabric of so many lives could be ripped apart and never put back together again.

  Behind her, Nicole heard the rustle of papers and a quiet sigh. “My dear,” Alice Holt said, her voice hushed with shock, “I’m so very sorry. What a truly dreadful time you must have had since you got here. But what I can’t comprehend is why you haven’t confided in Pierce. He would understand.”

  “If he would,” Nicole said, “I had no way of knowing it, the day I arrived on his doorstep. He’d just been awarded guardianship of a child who was more closely related by blood to me than to him. How do you know he wouldn’t have seen me as a threat to his custodial rights? I would have, had the situation been reversed. And I’d have moved heaven and earth to stop an outsider from trying to take Tommy away from me.”

  “Is that what you wanted, to take Tommy away from him? Is that what this is all about, Nicole?”

  “No,” Nicole said miserably. “I simply wanted to be near him, to love him and comfort him and help him through this terrible time. But I was afraid that if I revealed my true identity, Pierce wouldn’t see me in that light.”

  “You did him a great disservice in assuming that.”

  “Perhaps, but I was in shock. It was all I could do keep myself together.” Nicole looked up and found Alice’s gaze on her, full of sympathy. “Tommy was my lifeline at a time when I badly needed one, and it didn’t seem such a dreadful thing to offer to stand in as his nanny. Who was I hurting?”

  “Yourself,” Alice said. “And eventually, Pierce. I’ve known him a long time, Nicole. He won’t take it well when he learns you’ve deceived him like this. He places great stock in honesty and trust.”

  Nicole blinked at the tears blinding her. “I don’t need to hear this right now, Alice. Things are complicated enough.”

  “They can only get worse, my dear.” She gestured at Nicole’s head. “As I mentioned the first time we met, the hair threw me at first—you’re so dark and Arlene was a natural blond. That distracts a person initially, but the closer I look, the more I see similarities. The shape of your mouth, your smile—they’re what give you away to an observant eye, and I’m amazed I’m the only one to have noticed.”

  “You think Pierce might?”

  “He might not. Until his accident, he was overseas a lot of the time and didn’t see that much of Arlene or get to know her all that well. But someone else will, in time. Especially after tonight when so many people who did know her saw you for the first time.”

  She gripped both of Nicole’s hands. “Take my advice, and tell Pierce before someone else does. Please, Nicole.”

  “I want to, but—”

  The rustle of taffeta at the door alerted both women to another presence seconds before Louise’s voice floated silkily across the room. “So sorry to interrupt, but I wondered if I might borrow an emery board.” She held up one elegant hand and waggled the forefinger. “I broke a nail and it’s driving me mad.”

  “I’m surprised you don�
�t carry one with you,” Alice said, reaching into her own bag. “Here, use mine. Keep it, in fact. I have another, should I need it.”

  Aware of the incriminating evidence spread out between them, Nicole took advantage of Alice’s actions to stuff the envelope and its contents under the love seat’s cushions. Louise raised her eyebrows and gave a faint smile. “Dear me,” she cooed, “did I interrupt something terribly private?”

  “Not at all,” Alice said smoothly. “We were merely looking at old family pictures.”

  She waited until the door had closed firmly in the wake of Louise’s departure before resuming her seat. Her eyes were worried as she regarded Nicole. “You know what will happen if that woman finds out what’s been going on and gets to Pierce before you do? She’s itching for an excuse to discredit you in his eyes.”

  Nicole went cold. “You think she suspects?”

  “Not who you really are, no, but only because she’s too wrapped up in her own looks to pay particular notice to anyone else’s and she was never close to Arlene. They shared nothing in common. But Louise is no fool and she’s figured out that something’s going on between you and Pierce. I don’t pretend to know what it is and I’m not asking for any details. That’s between you and him. But it’s obvious to me that there’s...”

  “What?” Nicole asked, stunned at the insight of this unexpected ally.

  Alice lifted her shoulders expressively. “Well, for want of a better word, let’s say there’s an attraction. If I’ve noticed, you can be certain Louise has, and I don’t think I have to tell you that she’ll make a very bad enemy, Nicole. Don’t expect her to show any mercy, if she gets hold of this information before Pierce does.”

  “But nothing’s going on between me and Pierce,” Nicole said. Nor was it. They’d both agreed on that.

  Alice leaned back against the love seat cushions and rolled her eyes. “Of course it is! He tracks your every move and you—” She laughed softly and reached forward to embrace Nicole in a hug. “Your feelings are written all over your face as plain as day. You’re in love with him and you’ve not done nearly as good a job of hiding that as you have of covering up who you really are.”