Page 87 of Love Notes & Lifelines
“One post on Facebook and Instagram and you’re a runaway train.” Tabby turns the phone to us, and my throat runs dry.
The picture was taken only a few minutes ago. Tabby captured the moment I grabbed ahold of the ring on Stella’s finger. Stella’s staring up at me and from the angle, it truly appears that she loves me. But it’s the expression on my face that has me doing a double-take.
Possessivecomes to mind, but it’s more than that. My face tells a truth I’ve been ignoring for months.
I’m falling in love with my nanny—my fake fiancé—and when I turn to Stella, the same astonishment is reflected in her gaze.
When the hell did I start falling in love with my nanny?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
STELLA
The days have turnedinto weeks, and we’ve settled into a routine. Beck has been abnormally quiet about my trips to Raleigh, especially when I didn’t make it home until the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, but it was part of our deal, and he accepts that. Mostly.
I haven’t told him about my mom and it’s killing me. But opening up about her would lead to questions and eventually, he’d find out what I did.
The guilt is the worst late at night. If I’d known my path to Raleigh was paved in lies and gaslighting, or that it would lead to career suicide and the world being ripped out from under me, I never would have come.
The buzzer goes off on the dryer and I jump. Worrying about things I can’t change is a destructive cycle I’ve never been able to break even after years of therapy.
My head is down as I exit the laundry room with another load, so I don’t see Beck until I bounce off his solid chest.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
I peer down at the laundry in my arms, and he makes a show of checking his wrist that isn’t wearing a watch.
“It’s one in the morning and you have an early day tomorrow.” It’s not my imagination. He’s annoyed by my Saturday trips home. Is it because he’s in the dark, or something else?
I shrug past him. “I didn’t want you to be unprepared with the girls. This is the last load.”
“Why didn’t you ask for help?” he demands, following so closely that his heat engulfs my back.
“Ask for help with what? Laundry? It’s not really a two-person job.”
“It would go a lot faster if we did it together. You should have asked. How often do you stay up doing this shit?”
We still haven’t talked about what happened between us. The first couple of days were really awkward, but since the news of our fake engagement was the talk of the town, it’s been easy to ignore our sexcapades. Now the more time that goes by, the more grateful I’ve become. I don’t want to be what Silas accused me of, and I fear that the hurt Beck could cause would be more than I can handle.
To his credit, Beck has brought it up more than a few times, but we’ve always been interrupted, or I’ve turned nonurgent matters into semi-urgent ones.
Yes, okay, I’m avoiding it. But he was very clear it was one night, and I knew what I was getting. Heck, I initiated it. Just because my feelings and emotions are messy does not mean I have a right to saddle him with them.
He stands with his hands on his hips as I drop the laundry to the sofa and begin to fold. His silence tells me he’s still waiting for an answer.
Shaking out Ruby’s crib sheet, I tuck the corners in on themselves, and he drops to the sofa next to me.
“You do this all the time, don’t you?”
It’s a fight not to roll my eyes. He sounds guilty, but he has no reason to be. This is what he pays me for.
“I do it when it needs to be done,” I say.
“Well, I can help. I was doing laundry myself by the time I was ten.”
This surprises me. I would have guessed he grew up with household help.
He observes me closely. He always does. It’s as though if he learns every line of my face, he can read every thought in my head.
