Mother in Training

He didn’t need to flatter her, Zooey thought. The man had her at “hello.”

“Okay, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to need some information,” she told him, mentally rolling up her sleeves. “Like where you work, where you live, how to reach you in case of an emergency, where and when to meet you so that you can take your children home….”

She was thorough; he liked that. She was asking all the right questions, questions he would have given her the answers to even if they’d been unspoken. “I knew I wasn’t wrong about you.”

“The day is young,” she deadpanned. Then, because she’d never been able to keep a straight face for long, she grinned. “Just give me a few minutes to clear it with my boss.”

Jack was aware of every second ticking by as he automatically glanced at his watch.

“I’ll make it fast,” she promised, already backing away from the table.

“I like her, Daddy,” Emily told him in a stage whisper that would have carried to the last row in Carnegie Hall.

“Lucky for us, she feels the same way,” he told his daughter.

Zooey returned to their table faster than he’d anticipated. Jack rose to his feet, scanning her face. Looking for an unspoken apology. To his relief, there was none.

“All set,” she announced.

He glanced toward the counter. The man behind it was scowling and sending him what could only be referred to as a dark look. “Your boss is all right with this?”

“He’s fine with this,” she replied. Jack noticed she was carrying her jacket and that she was now slipping it on. “He doesn’t care what I do.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. And then it hit him. “He fired you.”

Zooey shrugged dismissively. She wasn’t going to miss the itchy uniform. “Something like that.”

Jack hadn’t meant for this to happen. “Look, I’m sorry. Let me talk to him.”

But Zooey shook her head. “You’re running late, and besides, I was thinking of leaving soon, anyway. This is just a little sooner than I’d originally planned,” she admitted. And then she smiled down at the two eager faces turned to her. The children had been following every word, trying to understand what was going on. “You two ready to have fun?”

Chapter Two

The last word Jack Lever would use to describe himself was impulsive.

It just wasn’t his nature.

He was thorough, deliberate and didactic. Born to be a lawyer, he always found himself examining a thing from all sides before taking any action on it.

It was one of the traits, he knew, that used to drive his wife, Patricia, crazy. She’d complain about his “stodgy” nature, saying she wanted them to be spontaneous. But he had always demurred, saying that he’d seen too many unforeseen consequences of random, impetuous actions to ever fall prey to that himself.

It was, he thought, just one of the many stalemates they’d found themselves facing. Stalemates that had brought them to the brink of divorce just before she was killed.

However, he thought as he slipped case notes into his briefcase, this was an emergency. Emergencies called for drastic measures. Tomorrow was going to be here before he knew it. Tomorrow with no nanny, with Emily needing to be dressed and taken to school, and Jackie still a perpetual challenge to one and all.

Walking out into the hall, Jack made his way to the elevator and pushed the down button. He needed a sitter, a nanny. A person with extreme patience and endless fortitude.

The express elevator arrived and he got on, stepping to the rear.

Desperate though he was, it seemed that fate—the same fate that had sent him three ultimately unsatisfactory nannies, one worse than the other—had decided to finally toss him a bone.

Or, in this case, a supernanny.

So when he stepped out of the fifteen-story building where the firm of Wasserman, Kendall, Lake & Lever was housed, and saw Zooey sitting on the stone rim of the fountain before the building, one child on either side of her and none looking damaged or even the worse for wear, Jack decided to go with his instincts. And for once in his life, do something impulsive.

The moment she saw Jack exiting the building, Zooey rose to her feet.

“Daddy’s here,” she told the children. A fresh burst of energy sent Jackie and Emily running madly toward their father.

Jackie reached him first, wrapping his small arms around his father’s leg as high as they would reach. “Hi, Daddy!” he crowed. For a little boy, he was capable of a great deal of volume.

“Hi, Daddy.” Emily’s greeting was quieter, but enthusiastic nonetheless.

He’d dropped his briefcase to the ground half a beat before Jackie and Emily surrounded him. “Hi, yourselves,” he said, wrapping an arm around each child.

Jack did like being a father. He just had no idea how to exercise small-person control.

Finding himself in a large conference room with a collection of the state’s greater legal minds, or in a tiny briefing area with a known hardened criminal, Jack knew how to handle himself. Knew how to maintain control so that the situation never threatened to get away from him.

But when it came to dealing with the under-fifteen set, especially with small beings who barely came up to his belt buckle, he was at a complete loss as to what to do.

Not so Zooey, he thought. Being with the children seemed to be right up her alley. As a matter of fact, she appeared to be as fresh as she always was when he walked into the coffee shop each morning.

He had no idea how she did it. His children had worn out three nannies in the last eighteen months, and seemed destined to wear out more.

Unless his instincts were right.

Slipping his arms free, he nodded at the short duo. “Did they give you any trouble?” he asked, almost afraid of the answer.

Zooey looked at him, wide-eyed. “Trouble? No!” she replied with feeling.

The way her green eyes sparkled as she voiced the denial told Jack that today had not been a boring one by any means.

Though he didn’t spend all that much time with them, he knew his kids, knew what they were capable of once they were up and running.

“Should I be writing out a check to anyone for damages they or their property sustained?”

She grinned. “You really do sound like a lawyer. No, no checks. No damages. Emily and Jackie were both very good.”

He stared at her. The trip to the parking structure that faced his office building and presently contained his car was temporarily aborted. “You sure you’re talking about my kids?”

She laughed, and it was a deep, full-volume one. “I am sure,” she assured him. “We went to the park, then saw that new movie, Ponies on Parade, had a quick, late lunch and here we are.”

Ponies on Parade. He vaguely remembered promising Emily to take her to that one. He guessed he was off the hook now. And damn grateful for it. He looked at Zooey with awe and respect. “You make it sound easy.”

“It was, for the most part.”

Zooey thought it best to leave out the part that while she was taking Emily to the ladies’ room, with Jackie in tow, the latter had gotten loose and scooted out from under the stall door. He’d managed, in the time it had taken her to leave Emily and go after him, to stuff up a toilet with an entire roll of toilet paper he’d tossed in and flushed.