Page 82 of The Nanny and the Nerd
Was it him, or had this conversation taken on a pseudo-sexual tone?
It had to be him. There was no way Madelyn would want to know if he and Penelope were screwing each other’s brains out, spending their evenings tangled together only to do it again and again and again and again and—
“Rowen,” Penelope whispered, then pointed to the cell in his hand.
“I’m completely satisfied. Ten stars. Would highly recommend,” he blurted, going for casual but sounding more like he should be committed.
“Excellent, I’ll let you return to your work,” Madelyn purred before the line went silent.
He and Penelope watched as the screen faded to black. Thank Christ they’d gotten through the call. It only lasted a few minutes, but each second had felt like he’d exerted the energy one would require for lifting a tractor trailer. God help him! He could use a chocolate chip cookie right about now. He sighed as Penelope sank into one of the chairs at the worktable, and he plopped down next to her.
“Madelyn is intense, but I think she means well,” Penelope offered. Her cheeks still held a blush, and it took everything in him not to run his fingertips down her jawline.
“When my mother talked me into working with her, she said that Madelyn had helped a lot of single dads and guardians in Denver.”
Penelope relaxed into the chair with a faraway look in her eyes. “I certainly wouldn’t be here without her. Never in a million years did I think I’d be someone’s nanny. It’s funny how one chance meeting can change everything.”
That was true. He drank her in, unable to remember what life was like before her.
He should tell her that. He should let her know he’d be lost without her. He should say that when he watched her on the gate camera, all he wanted to do was leave everything behind and go home…to her and Phoebe.
“We should get to work,” he answered instead because he was a chickenshit, and because two competing forces were still playing tug-of-war with his emotions. The first sat only inches away from him. The second lived inside of him, in the darkest corners of his mind.
“Right.” She tapped the touchpad on her laptop, and they looked on as a slew of emails populated.
He scoffed. His developers sure as hell didn’t email him this much.
“What?” she asked as the neckline of her loose top pulled to one side, revealing a hint of her shoulder.
He looked away from her milky, oh-so-damned-kissable skin. “You seem to have gotten yourself a fan club at Gale Gaming,” he offered as an image flashed before him of the moment he stepped out of his office and saw her standing at the storyboard with a shit ton of sticky notes peppering the screen. He wasn’t able to control his reaction as irritation laced with pure elation had surged through his body.
“Boomer, Goose, Man Bun, and Just Randy are great. I might have freaked them out a bit at first, but they were receptive to my ideas.” She scanned the email. “Unfortunately, I don’t think they understand how little gaming knowledge I have. I don’t know what most of these terms mean. What’s an open world, and why is it so important?” she asked, reading the email, then turning toward him as those damned wisps of hair fell forward.
He balled his hands in his lap. “It allows the players to freely explore every part of the world we build.”
She smiled and tucked the golden locks behind her ear. “We?”
“We, at Gale Gaming—everyone at Gale Gaming,” he clarified. He wasn’t awetype of boss. His ideas. His gaming platform. His vision. His glory. But perhaps that’s where he’d gone wrong? He had been shedding employees left and right to Bones Gaming. Could he be the reason?
She nibbled her lip nervously as she opened another email. “Okay, here’s something else completely foreign to me. How does this motion capture work? When your guys first saw me, they thought I was there for Princess Amelia’s motion capture. Actually, they thought I was Princess Amelia. They seemed pretty sleep-deprived and a little out of it.”
“We were pretty beat at that point until…” He paused.
“Until?” she pressed.
Until you sauntered up the stairs and gave everyone the direction and the enthusiasm to move forward.
No, he couldn’t say that.
“Motion capture is when we hire actors to recreate the movements of the characters in the game. We do this to make the gaming experience as lifelike and realistic as possible,” he relayed robotically.
Okay, he could do this. He could talk shop. He could teach her a thing or two about gaming. That would keep him from thinking about bending her over the couch and taking her hard and fast from behind. He glanced across the room at the adjoining bath and the massive steam shower, and thoughts of gaming drained from his brain.
Had she asked him how to turn on a computer, he wouldn’t have been able to tell her! His addled, Penelope-infused brain didn’t want to focus on anything but her and that shower.
She opened another email. “I don’t understand this either.”
Computers, computers, computers!Focus on the damned computer screen!
