Page 24 of The Nanny and the Heartthrob

His foster parents had been invited to lead a sculpting seminar abroad at a university in northern Italy.

They’d offered to turn it down and continue to care for Aria, but he couldn’t let them do that.

It had been their dream to return to Italy to teach. Their fiftieth wedding anniversary fell during this time, and he’d insisted they celebrate the joyous occasion at his home in the region. He loved them. He wanted this for them. Still, when they’d shared the news a few months ago, this seismic shift felt lightyears away.

Now, only a little over a week remained before they departed.

It was time for him to step up and accept his role as Aria’s legal guardian. He knew this, but it scared him to death.

If it was safe to assume he wasn’t the marrying type, he sure as hell wasn’t the parenting type either.

He needed help.

But this was where it got complicated when it came to the nanny situation.

Harper’s three best friends, Penny, Charlotte, and Libby, had been matched with the three men in his nanny match men’s group.

And how’d that go?

They were engaged.

All of them.

Every nanny match had turned into a nannylovematch.

So much for maintaining a platonic boss-nanny relationship. It was hearts and roses with these three couples. And with Harper’s three friends matched with his three friends, he didn’t have to be a genius to deduce that he and Harper were the next match.

That couldn’t happen. Love was not on the horizon for him. It couldn’t be.

He didn’t despise love. He was happy his friends had found it. He genuinely liked them, and he’d even connected with their kids. But none of that required him to give away much about himself.

So far, he’d existed on the periphery—a supportive onlooker in his friends’ nanny match endeavors.

And that was close to love as he could get.

They knew him as Landon Paige, the pop star fussing over his number of fans or flipping his collar and sporting a cap to go unnoticed in a crowd. It was easy to play that version of himself. He’d been doing it for years.

As much as he cared about these people, he couldn’t let them see the flawed man behind the glitz and glam.

And that was the trouble with Harper Presley.

The minute he’d seen her, he’d known that if anyone could see through his facade, it was her. He’d figured he could ignore her. But that was damned near impossible. There were a shit ton of reasons for them to see each other. Their friends’ lives required a crapload of relationship interventions, which meant spending time with Harper at writing competitions, school carnivals, food truck stops, birthday parties, and even volunteer drives with the astronauts on the International Space Station as special guests.

Yes, the shit with these people was freaking bananas.

But it was the good kind of bananas—for the other guys. The men had found love and true companionship.

Still, that couldn’t be his path. He would provide for Aria. He could do that. He had homes across the globe and more money than he knew what to do with. And Aria was wealthy in her own right. Once she was twenty-one, her parents’ wealth and royalties would become hers. But even with his niece, his blood relative, he had to maintain his distance.

In the long run, it would be better for the child.

Five people had known the real Landon Paige. A little over two years ago, that number dropped to three. And that was the way it had to stay.

There was too much on the line—and he had a clock of his own ticking away.

He’d made a deal with his label.

These past six months were supposed to be a last-ditch effort to reinvent himself and pull together the music that he, Trey, and Leighton had promised each other they’d write. If he could do it, in a little over sixty days, there was a chance they could get him a spot at the Red Rocks Unplugged—the game changer of a musical event that could alter the trajectory of his career and show the music world he was more than a pop prince. It was the perfect venue to springboard in a new artistic direction.

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