Page 34 of Give & Take

I force myself to ignore his body, instead clearing my throat. I have to do this now, before I chicken out completely.

Or come to my senses.

“Okay, so,” I say, proud of how steady my voice is. I meet his eyes, ignoring their caramel warmth, and instead focusing on him, as a person.

A person who deserves better than I’ve given him, despite him making my hormones set up a whole amusement park inside of me since he’s been here.

“So I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” I force myself to take a breath. “But, I wanted to…apologize.”

He blinks. “What?”

“To you.”

He lets out a little laugh.

I frown. “Why are you laughing?”

“I don’t know.” He runs a hand through his hair. It’s so sexy I feel a flash of anger as I force myself to keep my eyes trained on his face.

“I guess I thought for sure I was getting fired,” he says.

Now it’s my turn to be surprised. “What? Why?” I frown. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened, Sunshine. Well, Nova stepped on a barnacle out there this morning. Nothing a little seawater couldn’t help though.”

I look over at my kids. Chris and the girls are laughing at something on Chris’s phone.

Raphael shifts, and the tips of his long fingers brush against my bare knee; a scratch of roughness that sets off an almost painful sparking inside of me. I keep my hands primly on my thighs, but since his eyes are on the patio, mine drop down. I can’t help notice how as he moves again, his knee—the one between my legs—disappears under my skirt.

I throb there. Like actually throb. Inappropriately. I drag my eyes away, sliding back as far as I can in my chair.

Raphael doesn’t seem to notice any of this. His eyes return to mine once more. “You were saying?”

I rub my thumb over the back of my hand in a hard, repeating gesture, so I can focus on saying what I’ve been working on since this morning.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry because…I underestimated you.”

Raphael raises his brows. “You don’t say?”

He’s teasing, but there’s something real there. It flashes behind his eyes.

He’s used to this. Being underestimated. It bothers him.

It bothersmethat I’m thinking about him with more depth. I promised myself this morning that the only way this would work was if I acknowledge that I find him attractive, but compartmentalize that. Keep it wrapped up separately from this being a business interaction. Learn nothing more about him and let him live his life as my nanny, and then on his own. Separate from us. From me.

I seem to have completely forgotten all of that, woven together as we are on these chairs.

I force myself to continue. “I assumed the worst about you. I wasn’t going to consider hiring you. But you did…really well on your interview, even if you tricked me into it.”

He opens his mouth but I lift a hand. “It was as much Nova as you.”

I press my hands together again. “Before you even started, your references came back…well, I’ve never heard someone be gushed over quite so much. One of them begged me to send you back to California so you could work for them again, albeit in a teaching position.”

Raphael frowns, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. “I like to do a good job at whatever I’m doing.”

“I can tell.” I think about how all week, I’ve comehome to a clean kitchen. Little things like restocked toilet paper and shoes neatly in the shoe rack instead of scattered across the foyer. Yesterday, he’d mowed the lawn. None of those things were in his contract. I’d wondered at the time if he was just trying to make himself look good, but I think that’s just the way he is.

“You do things no one will ever know about,” I say, forgetting myself.

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