Interview with a Tycoon

“You don’t know my nephew’s name?” McAllister asked, startled. “It’s Max.”

She glanced back at McAllister. His arms were folded over his chest, and he was regarding her with suspicion identical to the baby’s seconds earlier.

His nephew. The blanks were filling in, but all the same it was unraveling already. Stacy was going to find herself tossed unceremoniously out into a snowbank beside her car and, really, wasn’t that what she deserved?

“Aren’t you his nanny?” McAllister demanded. “That’s who I was expecting.”

“I’m Stacy,” she said, drawing in a deep breath. “Stacy Murphy Walker.” Now would be the perfect time to say who she really was and why she was here.

Tell him the rest of it. But her courage was failing her. So much easier to focus on the baby!

“Uppie? Pwweee?”

And it did feel as if this baby—and maybe Kiernan, too—really needed her. And it felt as if she needed to be in this house that cried for a Christmas tree and a family to encircle it.

She reached into the playpen. The baby wound his chubby arms around her neck, and she hoisted his surprisingly heavy weight. He nestled into her and put his thumb in his mouth, slurping contentedly.

“I’m not exactly your nephew’s regular nanny,” she heard herself saying, “but I’m sure I can help you out. I’m very good with children.”

She told herself it wasn’t precisely a lie, and it must have been a measure of McAllister’s desperation that he seemed willing to accept her words.

He regarded her and apparently decided she was a temp or a substitute for the regular nanny, which would also, conveniently, added to the bad roads, explain the delay in her arrival. After scrutinizing her for a moment, he rolled his broad shoulders, unfolded his arms from across his chest and looked at her with undisguised relief.

“I’m Kiernan McAllister.”

“Yes, I know. Of course! Very nice to meet you.” She managed to get one arm out from under the baby’s rump and extended it, not certain what the protocol would be for the house staff. Did you shake the master’s hand?

He crossed the room to her and took her extended hand without a second’s hesitation, but she still knew extending hers had been a mistake. She had felt his hand already as he helped her from the chaise in his bathroom.

Despite the fact that his hand was not the soft hand of an office worker or of her comrades in writing, but hard and powerful, taking it felt like a homecoming.

And if she thought the mere sight of his lips had posed a danger to her, she could see his touch was even more potent. A homecoming to some secret part of herself, because something about his hand in hers sizzled and made her aware of herself as smaller than him.

And feminine. Physically weaker. Vulnerable in some way that was not at all distressing, though it should have been to a woman newly declared to total independence and a hard-nosed career as a freelancer.

She yanked her hand out of his and felt desperate not to give him the smallest hint of her reaction to him. “And just to clarify, is your nephew Ivan or Max?”

“Max. I just like to call him Ivan.”

Stacy looked askance at him.

“As in Ivan the Terrible,” he muttered.

She could feel disapproval scrunch her forehead—a defense against the electric attraction she felt toward him—and something like amusement crossed McAllister’s features as he regarded her, as if he was not even a little fooled.

Annoyingly, the light of amusement in his eyes made him look, impossibly, even more attractive than before!

“But his name is really Max.” He cocked his head. “I guess that works, too, if you think about it. He’s Max everything. Max noisy. Max sleepless. Max filthy, at the moment. He’s just over a year. A horrible age, if there ever was one.”

“He’s adorable,” she declared.

“No. He’s not in the least.”

“Well, he is right now. Except, he might need changing—

“Never mind! If he needs that, you have arrived in the nick of time. And while you look after it I will do the manly thing, and go look after your car. You can change his nappy and then be on your way.”

Well, there was no need to tell him the truth if she was leaving that quickly!

He made the declaration of assigning them duties with such abject relief that Stacy tried to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

It didn’t work. It was probably, at least in part, a delayed reaction to her accident, but a little snort of laughter escaped past her clamped lips. And then another one.

McAllister glared, and more laughter slipped out of her. It seemed to her it was the first time since the disintegration of her relationship that she had had anything to laugh about.

The baby chortled, too, and it made her laugh harder.

“Sorry,” she said, trying to bite it back. “Really. Sorry.”