Page 33 of The Nanny and the Nerd
She would have sworn she’d felt a slight tremor pass through the robot of a man.
“You poke an awful lot,” he remarked, his chest rising and falling beneath her touch.
Again! Absolutely infuriating!
She didn’t have time for his Penelope Fennimore behavioral observations.
“Rowen, where is your niece?”
A sly expression overtook the android’s face. “She’s at home, of course.”
“Alone?” Penny bit out, poking him again.
He glanced at her finger, which God help her, had made contact with a wall of rock-hard abdominal muscle. This nerd knew his way around a gym.
“No, my house manager is with her.”
“Hey, Penny?” Charlotte called.
“Yes,” she answered, not taking her eyes off Rowen.
“Who are they?” her friend asked.
Penny pushed up onto her tiptoes, looked past the sexy wall of nerd standing in front of her, and noticed two men hanging back a few yards.
Rowen glanced over his shoulder. “They’re…” he began, as his muted demeanor made way for a look of confusion. “We’re not friends, are we?” he asked the men.
“No, dude,” a man who looked vaguely familiar replied. She knew him from somewhere. But with his cap pulled low, shielding much of his face and the dimness of the street, she couldn’t say for sure where she’d seen him before.
“We’re more like participants,” a beefcake of a man with an English accent mused, still not answering the question of who the hell these men were.
Seriously, participants? What was this—a show?
Welp! Back to the direct approach again!
“Who are those men?” Penny demanded, eyeing Rowen
“We’re in a group that meets once in a while. I recently joined,” he answered with such a strange bend to the words that she couldn’t make heads or tails out of the situation.
“A self-help group for spiritual transformation?” Libby questioned because that’s where her mind always went.
The men cringed. Even the one with the ball cap was visibly aghast.
“No, maybe, I don’t know. But they helped me with your things,” Rowen offered. He gestured to the men. “That’s Landon, Erasmus, and Mitch is in the truck.”
She looked at the row of cars parked on the street and spotted the giant tricked-out black truck—a truck she knew well.
“Penn, that’s…” Charlotte whispered as they got a glimpse of the Crystal Cricket chef, Mitchell Elliott, sitting inside the beast of a car.
The chef leaned out the window. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
Thank God the closest lamppost wasn’t working. Lit by the bar’s neon sign, she and Charlotte shook their heads. “No!” they chimed franticly.
Holy hell! The last thing she wanted was to be recognized by the hothead chef. And Char needed to fly under the radar with this guy if she wanted to keep her job.
Penny turned her attention back to Rowen—her new boss—who was in some strange group with her old boss! Thank goodness Mitch didn’t give anyone besides his sous chefs the time of day. Still, that was a crazy coincidence. And when she glanced at Charlotte, her friend looked ready to pop open the manhole cover on the sidewalk and take shelter in the sewer.
“I forgot to give you this,” Rowen said, pulling a card from his pocket and handing it over.
