A Nanny in the Family Read online

  “Better watch it, Nicole,” she muttered, letting the shade fall into place and going through to her bedroom. “You’re in trouble enough already, with the deception you’re practicing. Put a halt to this romantic nonsense now, before everything blows up in your face.”

  Every weekend during the summer months, an open-air market was held in Morningside’s Central Park, a huge area encompassing a pier, the beach and a wide grassy expanse shaded by poplars. Everyone, from permanent residents to tourists, flocked to the site and everything, from hand-crafted silver jewelry to Mexican pottery to dust-laden trash posing as antiques, could be found under the striped awnings stretched over the stalls.

  Nicole gravitated toward that market like a flower reaching out to the sun. Pierce had been right to insist she take some time off. She needed to be with people— happy anonymous people with whom she didn’t have always to be on guard.

  The voices, the music, the jostle of bodies, reminded her that there was a world beyond Pierce’s house; that grief eventually faded to make room for the joy of living. It had been so long since she’d laughed or danced or just had fun. For all that she adored being with Tommy, the specter of her deceit followed her everywhere at the house, and underlying it, the tragic reason for her lies. It felt good to forget all that for a little while, to be just another tourist enjoying the afternoon.

  She wandered among the stalls, came across a rack of T-shirt dresses, found one in bright coral that she tried on in a fitting room made of two curtains strung across a wire in the corner of the canvas booth and a mirror suspended from a coat hanger. Pleased with how the dress looked on her, she bought it and another in a deep peacock blue.

  Down the next aisle, she discovered a vinyl bibbed . apron decorated with a Renoir print. Janet would surely love it—and the battery-operated nutmeg grater without which, the salesman assured Nicole, no kitchen was complete.

  The toy displays she avoided. The temptation to lavish gifts on Tommy was simply too great and too risky. Aunts could indulge their nephews; nannies were supposed to know better. Instead, she bought him a striped papier-mâché fish, something inexpensive, colorful and amusing for his room.

  As the sun slipped behind the trees, hunger pangs drove her toward the restaurant at the end of the pier. Unfortunately, other people had the same idea. “It’ll be about ten minutes before I can give you a table,” the hostess informed her, “but you can enjoy a drink in the lounge while you’re waiting, if you like.”

  She didn’t normally frequent bars, and she seldom drank alone, but the carnival atmosphere was contagious. “Why not?” she said, and ordered a wine spritzer.

  The lounge was cool and spacious, with lots of indoor greenery and full-length windows that looked over the water. The cane swivel chairs were deep and comfortable, the music low and soothing.

  After the heat of the market, it was pleasant to relax in the privacy offered by the screen of plants beside her table; to slip off her sandals, stretch out her legs, sip her drink and enjoy the music. She’d treat herself to a good dinner then, after dusk had fallen, she’d sneak back to the house and spend the night in her own bed, in her own room, with Pierce being none the wiser.

  As close to contentment as she’d been since the day she’d arrived in Morningside, she leaned her head against the high back of her chair and let herself be hypnotized by the endless roll of the tide.

  She might have dozed off—heaven knew, she’d hardly slept well the night before—had a new arrival not tripped over her feet.

  “Please excuse me!” a voice exclaimed and then, inexplicably, shrieked softly, “Oh!”

  Bolting upright in her chair, Nicole found herself confronting a woman whose eyes were dark holes of shock in her pale face. Her hand was pressed to her mouth and the bag she’d been carrying lay on the floor, its contents spilling over at her feet.

  The stranger stared at Nicole; Nicole stared at the stranger. And for a second, time tripped over itself as though uncertain whether to run forward or backward. Then the woman recovered, albeit shakily.

  Fingers splayed, her hand dropped to her heart. “Oh!” she said weakly, then again, “Oh! I do apologize! For a moment, I thought you were someone else—a very dear friend of mine...just something in your face as you were sleeping. I’m so sorry to have wakened you.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” Nicole said with a smile. “I was just resting my eyes. And I’m sorry I’m not the person you were expecting to see.”

  “You hardly could be. My friend...” The woman swallowed, bent to retrieve the items from her bag, and glanced again at Nicole. “Well, Arlene died in a car accident. Just over three months ago.”

  Nicole’s smile froze into horror.

  Misunderstanding, the woman rose swiftly to her feet and dropped into the chair next to Nicole’s. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound so ghoulish. I was just taken aback, that’s all, and for a moment, I almost forgot that....” She hunched her shoulders apologetically. “You must think I’m nuts.”

  “No.” Nicole said woodenly. “Not at all. You obviously miss your friend very much.” Your friend, whose name was Arlene and who, for a second, you thought looked just a bit like me!

  She wished with all her heart that she could confide in this woman, that they could console each other. Wished she could have learned more about the sister she’d come so close to finding again.

  The woman sighed and leaned back in the chair. “She was like a sister to me.”

  But she wasn’t your sister; she was mine! “I’m so sorry.”

  The woman slewed her glance sideways to where Nicole perched on the edge of her seat, and smiled. “Do you realize how many times we keep saying that?”

  “What?”

  “That we’re sorry. We must have repeated it about twenty times in the last five minutes.”

  Nicole looked away, out to where the blue-green sea heaved and rolled toward the shore. “Sometimes, they’re the only words that fit.”

  “Yes. And sometimes, there aren’t any words at all.”

  “I know.”

  “May I buy you another drink?” The woman gestured to where the wine spritzer had splashed over the table. “I could use one myself and I’m afraid you’ve lost most of yours.”

  “Thank you, but no.” She had to escape, quickly before her composure shattered. Who would have expected she’d run into a friend of Arlene’s? And worse, if this woman had noticed the resemblance, who else might? “I really must be going.”

  “Well then, thank you for not making me feel like a complete fool. And for what it’s worth, you don’t really look like Arlene at all. She was blond and you...well, you’re dark. I don’t know what it was that made me see a resemblance...” She regarded Nicole searchingly. “Perhaps it’s the mouth. She had a lovely smile, too.”

  The panic rose to choke Nicole again. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said, when the hostess suddenly appeared to tell her her table was ready. “I’m afraid I can’t stay, after all.”

  “Good bye,” Arlene’s friend called after her, as she scooped up her parcels and fled toward the exit. “Perhaps we’ll see each other again sometime.”

  Oh, she hoped not She really hoped not!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SHE wasn’t thinking clearly as she reentered the market. Her only objective was to reach her car, which she’d left at the other end of the park, and race away from the scene of such near disaster.

  A yelp stopped her in her tracks. Just ahead, she saw a puppy cringing under the table to which it was tied by a length of rope. A passing tourist had stepped on one of its front paws which it held up piteously.

  Nicole made two mistakes then.

  The first was merely foolish. She stopped and bent down to console the puppy. It was all legs and tail, and soft, warm fur the color of honey.

  The second—entering into conversation with its stony-hearted owner—was fatal. A man stepped down from the bed of a pickup parked next to the stall. “Y
ou interested, lady? She’s going cheap.”

  It was then that Nicole noticed the sign propped on a chair. FOR SALE 10 WEEK OLD GOLDEN RETRIEVER NO PAPERS.

  The puppy had the saddest eyes she’d ever seen.

  Why didn’t she just shake her head and keep going? Why did she make it impossible to walk away from the pathetic bundle of fur by picking it up and allowing it to burrow into her neck? Why in the name of everything sane and sensible did she say, “She’s adorable. How can you bear to part with her?”

  “’Cause I got enough mouths to feed.” The man jerked his head at the woman trailing behind him with a child slung across one hip and another hanging on her skirt. “Either I sell the mutt or else...” He made a slashing motion across his throat with one grimy finger.

  The dog whimpered and lifted a paw to Nicole, one lost soul reaching out to another.

  The idea—outrageous and presumptuous though it was—took shape and refused to go ignored. Pierce had suggested getting a dog for Tommy; here was a dog in desperate need of a home. That Nicole also needed something of her own to love, something that didn’t belong primarily to someone else, was a minor consideration.

  I can’t do this, she thought. I don’t have the right.

  “I’ll take her,” she said, closing her mind to the probable repercussions of such a decision. At the very worst, she’d have to ship the poor little scrap home to her parents. At best, she now had good reason to return to the house that night.

  It was a pretty paltry best. All the way back she rehearsed what she’d say. I saved its life, Pierce, seemed a reasonable beginning. But when she pulled her car into the third garage, she saw that although Louise’s dark red Taurus was parked under the trees, Pierce’s black Mercury Marquis was missing, which must mean they’d left Janet to baby-sit and gone out somewhere for dinner. Which was fine with Nicole; it bought her extra time to think up a more persuasive argument.

  Grateful for the reprieve, she hurried to the kitchen.

  “He took Tommy and Miss Trent out for the afternoon,” Janet informed her, relieving her of her smaller packages. “Gracious me, Nicole, what’ve you got in there?”

  “I guess you could call it an impulse buy.” Nicole lifted the puppy out of the cardboard box in which she’d shipped her home and waited apprehensively for Janet’s reaction.

  Janet, who was, above all else, a thoroughly down-to-earth woman, clasped her hands and declared, “It’s a dog and scarcely old enough to do without its mother’s milk. Put it out on the back lawn quick, before it wets on my clean floor, and I’ll fix it something for supper.”

  “Do you think Pierce will let me keep her?” Nicole asked a little later, as they watched the puppy snuffle her way through a bowl of warm cereal.

  “You mean, the Commander doesn’t—? Don’t tell me...!” For once at a loss, Janet look scandalized.

  Nicole nodded miserably, the consequences of her actions at last coming home to roost. “I did this without his permission.”

  “Gracious me, Nicole!” Janet exclaimed again. “How could you?”

  “I had no choice. The man who sold her to me was going to have the poor thing put down if he didn’t find a buyer.”

  “Talk about one being born every minute!” Janet rolled her eyes scornfully. “You realize he likely has ten more where this one came from? Probably steals them, if truth be known. And that he’ll be there again next weekend, playing the same old tune?”

  “No,” Nicole said faintly. “I didn’t realize that. And if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon not dwell on the fact, or I might find myself running a kennel before much longer.”

  Just then, a beam of light swept over the darkened shrubbery outside the kitchen windows. “Right now, you’ve bigger problems,” Janet predicted, eyeing the puppy which had curled into a warm ball and gone to sleep at Nicole’s feet. “The Commander just drove up and if I were you, I’d wait until tomorrow to spring this little surprise on him. It’s my guess that after an afternoon with Tommy and Miss Louise, he’ll not be in the best of moods.”

  “You’re right.” Nicole picked up the puppy, popped her back into her box, and thrust the whole works into Janet’s arms. “Help me out, Janet. Just for tonight, keep her here in the kitchen. She can’t get into much trouble confined to this box.”

  “Let us hope not,” Janet sniffed. “What’s its name, by the way?”

  Nicole shrugged helplessly and touched a finger to the soft pale fur. “Honey, maybe? Or Peaches? I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it much.”

  “You haven’t been thinking at all today, if you ask me,” Janet said darkly. “Stick the thing under the table out of sight and pray the Commander doesn’t decide to come in here for a late night snack or we’re both for the high jump.”

  Pierce carried Tom up to the nursery, peeled off his filthy clothes, and dunked him in a warm bath. Heaven knew the boy needed it. He was covered in ketchup, ice cream and a lot of other unmentionable stuff.

  By the time he was clean again, he was practically asleep on his feet and Pierce needed a bath himself. It seemed a fitting way to erase the memories of what had turned out to be a generally disastrous day.

  Tom had never really recovered from Nicole’s leaving, and it hadn’t done a whole lot for Pierce’s ego that the kid found him such a poor substitute for the nanny.

  He’d decided taking the boy out for the afternoon would make up for things, and when Louise had shown up unexpectedly, that inviting her along on the jaunt might help. If anything, it had made matters worse.

  “That child is spoiled,” she had declared when, at Tom’s admittedly whiny insistence, they’d stopped for cold drinks within fifteen minutes of leaving the house. “And it’s mostly thanks to that nanny you hired, Pierce.”

  “I thought you approved of her,” Pierce had said.

  Louise had removed herself a safe distance from Tom’s efforts to squirt orange soda out of his straw. “That was before I realized what a mess she’d make of the job.”

  “I think she’s doing rather well. Tom seems to be adjusting to the change.”

  He spoke mildly enough—no reason to take his frustration out on Louise, after all—but she must have realized he was operating on rather a short fuse because when she spoke again, a more conciliatory note softened her voice. “Sweets, I’m not criticizing you. I know you’re doing your best and for that I love you.”

  I love you. The silence following those three words twanged with expectant tension—what was known as a pregnant pause, he supposed, and one he knew he was expected to end, just as he knew what it was he was expected to end it with. Trouble was, he couldn’t quite bring himself to echo the sentiment.

  Instead, he’d mopped up the mess Tom had made and suggested they drive down the coast to Cleves where there was an amusement park. Louise had stared out of the car window the entire time, the angle of her head and tilt of her shoulder proclaiming her disappointment in him.

  In a way, he hadn’t blamed her. They’d been dating for five months and without it ever becoming an item of discussion, their pairing had taken on a definition of permanence. In time, he supposed they’d get married, have children—or, more accurately, have more children, since, for all intents and purposes, Tom was now his son. But Jim and Arlene’s dying had put everything on hold for a while. He’d assumed Louise understood that.

  Perhaps he’d assumed too much on more than one front. Hiring Nicole, for example, had seemed like a good idea, a way to ease Tom into this new, unsettling phase of his life. Why, just when things were finally getting squared away, had she become a complication he didn’t need?

  That business last night, when he’d kissed her.... Hell, just thinking about it had him breaking out in a sweat!

  The amusement park had gone over pretty well, at least from Tom’s point of view. He rode the carousel, the children’s Ferris wheel and the bumper cars, squealing happily throughout.

  Louise hadn’t said much—i
t wasn’t the best place for conversation—but she’d been a good sport, waiting around in her high heels and putting up with all the noise. In fact, the only time she’d really opened her mouth had been when Tom had begged to go on the roller coaster.

  “You’re crazy to give in to him on that, Pierce,” she’d said. “He’ll get sick, being thrown around like that.”

  Pierce hadn’t listened. He’d been too glad that Tom wasn’t howling or scowling or both. “He’ll be fine, he’s got sailing in his blood,” he’d bragged, certain that nothing an amusement park offered could equal the motion of a ship under heavy seas. “In fact, why don’t you come on with us?”

  But she’d dug her high heels in at that and flatly refused. “He’s not going to throw up on me!”

  Tom had been a trouper, shrieking with terrified delight and clinging to his uncle in a way that more than made up for his earlier rejection. A guy could get used to this parenting thing, Pierce had decided.

  By the time they left the park and headed home though, the sun was setting and Tom was fading just about as fast, whining about being hungry and thirsty and hot, so they’d stopped for dinner at a fast-food joint on the beach midway between Morningside and Cleves.

  He and Tom had gone for the whole works—burgers, fries and chocolate milk shakes—but Louise had wanted only a salad. That had been when he’d realized she’d been pretty quiet for a long time, which wasn’t like her.

  “Hey,” he’d said, wondering if she’d had too much sun. “Is everything okay?”

  She’d sort of sighed, and her face had a pinched look to it. “I don’t know,” she’d said. “You tell me.”

  He’d stared at her, baffled, then been distracted by Tom who’d slopped enough ketchup on his food to keep an army supplied for a month.

  “I mean,” she’d gone on, sounding decidedly peeved, “are you even aware that I’m here?”