Cara Colter - At His Service - Nanny Needed - Hired - Nanny Bride / A Mother in a Million / The Nanny Solution

“They looked fine to me,” he said, apparently thinking about it. “More than fine. Great.” She might have been thrilled that he’d noticed in different circumstances.

As it was, the jeans had been a bit of a challenge to get on, and that’s when they’d been dry. What little devil of vanity had made her think her rear end looked good enough in them to put up with a tiny bit of discomfort?

“Look, no matter how reasonable a choice they were when they were dry, they won’t come off now. They won’t fit over my hips. There, am I blushing enough for you?”

His lips twitched.

“Don’t laugh,” she warned him.

“I won’t,” he said, but she could tell he was biting the inside of his cheek. Hard. He didn’t speak for a minute, containing himself. “Let me help,” he finally managed, and then choked. “I sound like a butler.”

“Only one of us here would know what that sounded like,” she warned him, but it was too late.

He was laughing, moving toward her with singleness of purpose written all over him.

“Don’t touch me!” There. Self-preservation finally rising to the occasion. Where had that fine attribute of character been when she had been sobbing her heart out in his seemingly sympathetic ear?

“I can’t help you without touching you.”

“I don’t need your help.” That was a lie obvious to both of them. “You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m trying not to.”

“Try harder.”

“Okay.” He crouched down, and was looking at the area where the soaked jeans were bound up around the wideness of her hips. Oddly enough, the way his eyes rested there, briefly and with heat, before returning to her face did not make her feel like a whale. At all. In fact, his laughter seemed to have died, too.

“Yes, you do,” he said firmly, “need my help.”

“Okay, then.” She was shaking too hard to deny it any longer. She closed her eyes hard against her humiliation. “Just be quick.”

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that in this particular situation,” he muttered.

“We are not in a situation ,” she warned him, “or not one you’ve ever been in before.”

“You’re absolutely right about that,” he said.

His hands settled around the jeans. Her skin was so cold she actually felt scorched from the heat of his hands. She had to resist an impulse to wiggle into that warmth. Instead she made herself stand rigidly still. She opened her eyes just enough to squint at him undetected through the veil of her lashes.

He yanked with considerable strength, enough that she saw that lovely triceps muscle in his arm jump into gorgeous relief. Unfortunately the jeans did not budge, not a single, solitary fraction of an inch.

“Your skin feels like ice-cold marble,” he noted clinically.

Somehow in her imagination, she had imagined him saying softly, Your skin is like silk that’s been heating in the sun, soft and sensual .

When had she imagined such a thing? Practically every damn minute since she had met him, a dialogue of lust and wanting running just below her prim surface.

“Can’t you relax?”

“I doubt it,” she moaned, and then made the confession that made her humiliation complete. “You’re going to have hurry. I think I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Dannie, it would be really inadvisable for you to get us laughing right now. Really.”

“Believe me, I am nowhere close to laughing.” But his lips were twitching again. How had she ever thought he was handsome? He wasn’t. He was like an evil leprechaun.

“Someday you’ll see the humor in this,” he assured her. “You’ll tell your kids about it.”

No, she wouldn’t. Because a story like that would begin with, “Did I ever tell you how I met your dad?”

And he was not going to be the father of her children. Though suddenly she was aware she had a secret self that not only conducted entire conversations just out of range of her conscious mind, but wished things. Impossible things.

Green-eyed babies.

She told herself she had just gotten over another man. This was rebound lust, nothing more. But she was very aware of quite a different truth. There never had been another man, really, just a convenient fantasy, a risk-free way to play at love, a safe way to withdraw from the game while pretending to be engaged in it.

Joshua tugged again. The wet, cold, thick fabric shifted a mean half inch or so.

“Ouch. Who invented denim? What a ridiculous material,” she complained.

“There’s a reason they don’t make swimsuits out of it,” he agreed, and then broke it to her gently. “You’re going to have to lie down on the bed. Hang on. I’ll cut the mattress open.”

He found a knife and cut the strings that were wrapped tightly around the mattress, a defense against mice.

Mice, which had probably been her greatest fear until about thirty seconds ago. Now her greatest fear was herself!

“Maybe you could just cut the jeans off,” she said. She shuffled over to the bed, the jeans just down enough to impair her mobility, no dignified waltz across the cold cabin floor for her. She left great puddling footsteps in her wake.

“I’ll keep that in mind as a last resort, but I might cut you by accident, so we’ll try this first. Lie down.”

Why didn’t her fantasies ever work out? Every woman in the world would die to hear those words from his lips. “Don’t get bossy,” she said, so he’d never guess how great her disappointment was at the way he said that.

“Hey, if you could have followed simple instructions in the first place, you wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

She turned around and flopped down on the mattress, her knees hanging over. “I wasn’t letting you go in that water by yourself.”

“Why not?”

The truth blasted through her. I think I’m falling in love with you. For real, damn it, not some romantic illusion I can take home and satisfy with buying dresses and planning honeymoons I know are never going to happen .

Out loud she said, “The team thing. Okay, pull. Pull hard.”

Real, she scoffed at herself. She was getting more pathetic by the day. You did not fall in love with a man in four days. Unless you were a Hollywood celebrity, which she most definitely was not.

She felt his hands, scorching hot again against the soft flesh of her hips and looked at the frown of concentration marring his handsome features.

It felt real, even if it wasn’t. Of course, people who heard little voices swore that was real, too.

“Hang on,” he said. He took a grip and pulled. The jeans inched down. Finally he was past the horrible hip obstacle, but now his hands rested on the top of her thighs, his thumbs brushing that delicate tissue of pure sensitivity on her inner leg. Thankfully, the skin was nearly frozen, not nearly sensitive enough to make her reach up grab his ears and order him huskily to make her warm.

He tugged again. His hands moved from the thigh area and the jeans reluctantly parted from her frozen, pebbled skin. He yanked them free triumphantly, held them up for her to see, as if he was a hunter holding up a snake he had killed and skinned just for her.

“My skin looks like lard, doesn’t it?” she demanded, watching his face for signs of revulsion. If she had seen any, she would have gotten up and marched straight back into that lake!

He was silent for a long moment. “Alabaster,” he said softly.

“Huh!” Nonetheless, she was mollified for a half second or so until she thought of something else. “I hope I don’t have on the panties that say Tuesday.”

“Uh, no, you don’t.”

Suddenly she saw why he delighted so in making her blush, because when she saw that brick red rise up from his neck and suffuse his cheeks, she felt gleeful.