Mary Wilson - Regarding The Tycoon's Toddler...

A stranger, but very definitely a woman and different from any nanny he’d ever seen in his life. He didn’t dare move, afraid that the response that was deep inside him would build. Then she shifted, her face tipped up to his, and the amber eyes were veiled by improbably long lashes. Freckles stood out against skin pale from shock.

“Oh, God,” she gasped. “What happened?”

He thought for a moment she was shocked at what he was feeling—the basic emotion of a man with a woman in his arms—but he rejected that. “An unexpected stop,” he managed to say, then took a breath. “And we aren’t moving.”

Her eyes darted to the floor indicator, and at the same time she let go of him. She moved back, and felt coolness there instead of the heat. A disturbing sense of loss came with it. “Stuck?” she breathed.

“As in, stuck between floors,” he said, waiting for panic or fear or both to show up in her expression.

He didn’t expect her to turn and start to smooth his suit coat where she’d crunched the material, a contact he’d barely felt.

“I am so sorry for doing that,” she said. “This suit must have cost you a—” She bit her lip and drew her hands back. “It’s okay, I think,” she murmured. “We’re stuck?”

He turned and pressed each floor button one after the other, but nothing happened. “Stuck,” he said, and turned back to her. She was watching him, her expression unreadable. “And don’t even say it. The elevators were not shut down to save money.”

Her cheeks flamed at his jab. “I didn’t say that.”

“You were thinking it, weren’t you?”

“Okay, it crossed my mind. I admit it, but I didn’t say it.” She crouched in front of him to retrieve her purse, which had landed on top of his dropped briefcase. “What now?”

He turned to the panel and reached for the emergency phone. “We’ll get help,” he said, lifting the receiver to his ear.

Zane pushed the button under the phone, and in two rings someone was on the line.

“Yes?”

“The executive elevator stopped, hard, and it’s stuck between floors.”

“Oh, man, I’m sorry.” The guy sounded like some teenager. “That’s a bummer.”

“Just get it going.”

“Yeah, sure, as soon as we can.”

Zane hung up, then turned to Lindsey, who was standing facing him now with her purse in hand. “They’re starting to work on it, and it won’t be long.” He couldn’t stand her just standing there looking at him as if everything was just fine. It was annoying the hell out of him to be stuck like this. “This doesn’t bother you at all?”

She blinked at the question, then shrugged. “Well, of course it does. I don’t want to plunge down seven or eight floors, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t think we’re going to plunge anywhere,” he said.

“Then, we wait. And if we’re waiting, we can talk some more. No wasted time.”

It sounded like something he would have said, if this had happened during rushed business negotiations. And when he thought about it, he had to admit that this was exactly that. He could have this nanny thing sewn up before they got to the parking garage.

“You’ve missed your calling.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“You should have hired on to help with the cuts around here.”

“I think they’re doing just fine in the cutting department without me,” she said a bit tightly.

“You do say what you mean, don’t you.”

Her lashes lowered slightly, shadowing her expression just a bit. “A bad habit.”

“I was giving you a compliment, believe it or not.”

“I’m sure you meant it as a compliment.”

He wasn’t gaining any ground here at all, and worse than that, he had the feeling he wasn’t even controlling this interview. He backed against the closed doors and crossed his arms. “Okay, forget the compliments. We can talk business. We aren’t going anywhere just yet, as you pointed out.”

“Not unless we crawl out the escape hatch.”

He looked up at the panel in the ceiling. “I think we’ll save that for a last option.” He glanced back at her, sensing a heat in the car. Probably the air-conditioning not working right. “So, you’ve got a degree, and you’re working toward your master’s?”

“Slowly but surely. But you know, where kids are concerned, degrees are just so much confetti.”

“If academic qualifications don’t matter, what does?”

“Being there, just being there and caring.”

“And you care.” It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact. Her caring was very evident even in the short time he’d been around her. He wasn’t used to passion where it concerned work. Anger, intensity, drive. But not real passion. “Do you put that on your resume?”

She looked around, then unexpectedly moved back and sat on the floor, her back against the far wall, her legs crossed Indian-style. She laid her purse by her and looked up at him. “No, I don’t put that on my resume. It’s a given in this business. Why would anyone work with kids if they didn’t care about them?”

“I don’t know,” he said, watching that passion he’d glimpsed building in her again. And it was fascinating.

“Well, I do know, and I wouldn’t have anyone working for me that didn’t care. Amy Blake doesn’t have any degrees, but she’s all heart when it comes to kids. Her own child is so lucky, even without a father. She’s totally rearranged her life to be with her little girl.” She spoke in a rush. “She loves her own child, and she loves the other kids that she helps care for.”

“She works for you?” That didn’t make sense. Unless the agency had gotten so fed up with their failure to find a nanny for him that the boss had come for the final interview.

“She’s the coordinator and the heart behind the center.”

“The center?”

He heard her take a breath, then she pressed her hands palm down on her knees. “Okay, Mr. Terrel, since we’re stuck here and you’ve asked me to talk, I’m going out on a limb with you. I know that you and Mr. Holden are partners or associates or whatever you want to call it, and you must trust each other completely. You have equal input. You’re both in charge, from what I hear, and even though he’s the one who’s been doing the work on this, I think you can help me. Either by agreeing to what I need, or by talking to him about it and getting his agreement.”

She thought he was Matthew? “I don’t know what you think, but—”

“Oh, I’m sorry if I misunderstood the arrangement. I thought you were co-C.E.O.’s or something like that. I thought you could probably take care of this. Or if you can’t, maybe you could convince Mr. Holden that Just For Kids needs the funding badly. We need more programs, more people to help, so the child-worker ratio comes down. It’s imperative that we have more supplies for the younger children.”

He couldn’t have cut in if he’d wanted to: she was talking quickly, and her hands were moving to emphasize her points. So he just watched, listened and took in the fact that he’d found L. Atherton in a stalled elevator.

“And a van,” she went on. “A better van, for the after-school pickups. That would be great—nothing fancy, but one that keeps running and won’t break down. And the oven in the kitchen, well, it just either burns or doesn’t cook.”

She assumed that he was Matthew, and he’d assumed that she was there as a nanny candidate. They’d both been wrong, dead wrong. “Just For Kids?”

“Mr. Lewis understood that it was the backbone of the company, that an employee who knew his or her child was safe and cared for and within arm’s reach was an employee who could give more to the company than a worried parent.” She spread her hands palms up. “He knew that having the center right here was a win-win situation. And sending back my requests for funding marked “Denied” just isn’t right.”