Page 16 of The Nanny and the Nerd
Rowen waved him off. “Keep the change,” he said over his shoulder as he fell in step a few yards behind the woman Ms. Malone must have sent. The nanny. His nanny. No, Phoebe’s nanny!
His thoughts spiraled. He couldn’t believe it. He’d pictured some prim and proper possibly British lady around his mother’s age—a lot like Teddy’s nanny. But that was not the person striding a few paces ahead of him. This woman was like the sexy, disheveled version of every gamers’ wet dream.
He should call out to her and introduce himself. But he couldn’t—not yet. He wasn’t a nosy person. In most cases, he couldn’t care less what people did to get their rocks off. But this was not most cases. And she was not just some woman. He kicked up his pace and followed close enough to listen in on her conversation.
He was doing…research. Yes, that’s it! Monitoring her call wasn’t creepy. It was a fact-finding exercise.
He could feel his pulse thrumming. Okay, it was totally creepy—like the type of creepy that inspired horror movies, but his reservations melted away the moment she spoke.
“I don’t know, Charlotte! He could be a giant weirdo,” she said, then mumbled something as he strained to listen. “I know, I know. I don’t have anything else to pay the bills, and the money is good. And it would give me time to write,” she continued, then stopped dead in her tracks. Like an idiot, he bent down and pretended to tie his shoelaces. It wasn’t the stealthiest of moves. And the fact that his shoes had no laces complicated the matter. But the nanny remained too engrossed in her conversation to notice him.
She stared up at the sky. “No, I haven’t told my mother. I can only imagine what she’d say. Don’t forget, I’m the Fennimore lost cause,” she added with a forced laugh before she continued toward the Gale Gaming building.
Yep, this was definitely his nanny!
He finished tying his invisible laces and was back in hot pursuit. The click of her boots against the sidewalk and the swish of her hips in the skirt were damn near hypnotic.
She stopped in front of the entrance, and he observed her reflection in the glass doors. She pressed her lips into a hard line as she nodded her head. She was nervous and most likely going through some kind of inner dialogue pep talk. He knew that look all too well.
She blew out a slow breath. “I’m here, Char. If I don’t call you back, assume I’ve been kidnapped and alert the FBI.”
He reared back. Was she kidding?
Kidnapping? The FBI? She must really need this job to risk life and limb.
She closed the phone and slipped it into her tote, then looked up and met his gaze in the reflection. The breath caught in his throat as she turned, and a lock of her blond hair swept across her face. For a beat, they stood there, staring at each other as if they needed to lock this moment into memory. At least, that’s what he was doing. She had brown eyes. No, not brown. They were sable. He used the color in AI-77—specifically for Princess Amelia’s eyes. Brown, with a touch of auburn, it was as if he were face-to-face with the enchanted princess in the flesh. And then she smiled at him—a smile so warm and so engaging it took everything in him not to close the distance between them and tuck the errant strands behind her ear.
“Hi! Hello! Do you work here?” She glanced down at the clusterfuck of papers in her hands. “Here at…Gale Gaming?” She said the words slowly, glancing at a random scrap of paper with the name of his company scrawled in purple ink. But it wasn’t the planner from hell that threw him for a loop. She sounded as if she’d never heard of him or Gale Gaming. And more than that, she didn’t recognize him. Maybe that wasn’t so strange. It wasn’t like she could search the web on that phone of hers. Jesus! Did the woman even have an email account?
“Um…hello…sir?” she said gently, doing that lip-nibble thing that already had him half-cocked.
Dammit! Pull yourself together, Gale!
“Yeah, I work here,” he answered coolly.
“Really?” She cocked her head to the side and gave him the once-over.
“Is something wrong? Do I not look like I should work here?” he asked, enjoying this bit of anonymity.
She narrowed her gaze. “You’re so big and muscly.”
“Muscly?” he repeated with a crinkle to his brow.
“Yes, muscly! It means made of muscle. In your case, quite a bit of muscle,” she replied as her cheeks grew pink. She cleared her throat. “I figured people who worked at video game companies were kind of—”
“Kind of what?” he pressed, opening the door for her and gesturing for her to go inside. Thanks to Chantel’s departure, the first floor was empty—a good thing because he wasn’t ready to pop the bubble and reveal his identity yet.
She took in the life-sized model of one of the aliens from his last video game release, then tapped the creature’s tentacle. “Kind of nerdy. You know, lanky with big glasses. The type of person who wears a hoodie with Ms. Pacman on it,” she mused.
He frowned. “Ms. Pacman?”
She huffed an irritated breath. “I can’t think of another video game off the top of my head.”
Rowen’s jaw dropped. Holy shit! What planet had she been living on? She didn’t look more than twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. She’d been born in the digital age!
“You only know of one video game?” he asked, regaining control.
She tapped the alien nervously, and for the first time, he envied the cardboard figure. “No, of course, I can think of another.”
