Page 90 of The Nanny and the Nerd
Neither broke the connection.
He disintegrated into her pools of warm sable, lost in a woman who turned his life inside out and upside down in the best, most unexpectedly beautiful way. Gasping for air, the slap of skin on skin quieted as they floated back to their bodies. And still, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. And it wasn’t just him. Penelope held his gaze, her eyes growing heavy as she stroked his cheek. And remembering her words, he did something he couldn’t recall doing before. He soaked it in—the warmth of her body, the gentle rise and fall of her chest, the brush of her blond hair against his skin. The totality of being present. Without a word spoken, he lowered himself and pressed his lips to hers, devouring her softness, reveling in her beauty. She hummed a satisfied sound as he gathered her into his arms and tried to find a word for this moment—something to encapsulate the pure bliss that coursed through his veins.
“Rowen?” she said on a sleepy sigh, drawing soft circles across his chest with her fingertips.
“Yeah?”
She pulled the blanket over them and nuzzled into him. “I’ve never been this happy.”
And that was it. So simple, yet succinctly sublime.
Happiness.
That was the word he was searching for. In his life, he’d experienced contentment, but this was an emotion like nothing else. More than that, it wasn’t about him. It was her—all her. Holding Penelope in his arms and watching her shatter into a million pieces, writhing in orgasmic abandon, was like a state of being he never wanted to lose.
“I want to keep making you happy,” he whispered, twisting a lock of her golden hair between his fingers.
She granted him another sweet, drowsy smile before closing her eyes. He traced his fingertips down her jawline as her breathing grew even, and she succumbed to sleep. But he didn’t want to close his eyes—didn’t want to chance that this was just another dream and he’d wake up alone in his office.
“I never dreamed I could be with someone like you,” he whispered to his real-life Princess Amelia. But as he uttered the words, a chill danced down his spine. She might be everything to him. The question was, could he be the man she deserved?
Eighteen
Penny
“What are you doing, Penelope?”purred the hottest nerd on the planet.
Penny smiled at the sound of Rowen’s sleepy morning voice. A voice that, after the last four weeks, still sent a scintillating tingle down her spine. She observed her laptop, her tablet, and her smartphone fanned out on her side of the king-sized canopy bed. To say that she’d embraced technology over the last month would be one hell of an understatement. On the tech front, she’d come to learn a few things about herself. First, she wasn’t as computer illiterate as she’d thought. It bears noting that it certainly didn’t hurt that she lived under the same roof as a man who literally changed the face of technology with his brilliant mind, inventive games, and lifesaving apps. But somewhere between swimming in a sea of sticky notes and cc’ing the Gale Development Team on new tweaks and minor edits multiple times a day, she’d found her footing.
“The PR team forwarded an email. Some online gaming magazine wanted to do a profile on me. They heard about my work on AI-77 and reached out. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not one bit. It’s good press, and you deserve the recognition,” he answered, all gravelly tone and boyish grin.
She glanced at her laptop. “They asked how I made the jump from writing women’s fiction to gaming. I wrote them back and said a chance encounter led me down a path I’d never considered. And that, while I have much to learn on the technical side, the creative side of gaming offers a rich tapestry of opportunities to build characters and inventive worlds that draw in players just like a favorite movie or cherished novel.”
“You sound pretty fancy?” he teased.
“There’s more,” she teased right back.
He cocked his head to the side.
“I had a few ideas I wanted to get down,” she continued, clicking send on an email to the audio engineers before closing her laptop. “I also thought of three new challenges we could add to increase the game longevity. Our beta players loved the alternate realm we rolled out last week. It tested through the roof with a ninety-seven percent satisfaction rating. And then I thought about skins and how, at each level, we could offer a modification to the character’s appearance. I was reading about how this is done everywhere from games for kids to fast-paced first-person shooters.”
“Listen to you,” he replied, propping up onto an elbow as he slid his hand down her thigh.
She pinned him with her gaze. “What about me?”
“You must be the sexiest gaming narrative developer on the planet,” he answered, slipping on his glasses, then gifting her with a wolfish grin.
And heaven help her! Nerd glasses plus mussed man hair had become her kryptonite. And yes, she now knew about superheroes and their weaknesses thanks to the steady stream of chatter from the development team at Gale Gaming.
“Oh, I don’t know! Boomer is pretty sexy. Are you sure that I’m the sexiest?” she pressed, imagining the jovial mountain-of-a-Teddy-bear man.
Rowen paused. “Now that you mention it. You’re right. Boomer can rock a hoodie like nobody’s business.”
“So, so hot in a hoodie,” she added with a sage nod.
“Especially when he eats a plate of nachos, then drips a little salsa on his sleeve.”
