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.
“Wednesday?” she asked, shocked at herself.
“I am trying to be a gentleman!”
Of course he was. And it didn’t come naturally to him, either. One little push, and he wouldn’t be a gentleman at all.
But did she know how to handle that?
“Here’s a blanket,” he said, sternly, handing it to her.
She glanced down before she took the blanket from him. Plain white, the perfect underwear for the nanny to have her encounter with the billionaire playboy! Of course the encounter was tragic, rather than romantic. She really didn’t have what it took to start a fire that she didn’t know how to put out!
She wrapped the blanket around herself, lurched off the bed, nearly tripped in the folds.
He reached out to steady her. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “Don’t be embarrassed.”
She looked at where his hand rested on her arm. There was that potential for fire again. She pulled her arm away. “I have to go to the bathroom. Now can I be embarrassed?”
“Yeah, okay. Everybody on the planet has to go to the bathroom about four times a day, but if you want to be embarrassed about it be my guest.” And then he grinned at her in a way that made embarrassment ease instead of grow worse, because when he grinned like that she saw the person he really was.
Not a billionaire playboy riding the helm of a very successful company. Not the owner of a grand apartment, and the pilot of his own airplane.
The kid in the picture on the beach, long ago.
And in her wildest fantasies, she could see herself sitting around a campfire, wrapped in a blanket like this one, her children shoulder to shoulder with her, saying,
“Tell us again how you met Daddy.”
She bolted out of the cabin, then took her time trying to regain her composure. Finally she went back in.
He had pulled the couch in front of the fire and patted the place beside him. “Nice and warm.”
Cottage. Fire. Gorgeous man.
In anyone else’s life this would be a good equation! She squeezed herself into the far corner of the couch, as far away from him as she could get.
He passed her half a chocolate bar.
She swore quietly. Cottage. Fire. Gorgeous man. Chocolate.
“Nannys aren’t allowed to swear,” he reprimanded her lightly.
“Under duress!”
“What kind of duress?” he asked innocently.
She closed her eyes. Don’t tell him, idiot. Naturally her mouth started moving before it received the strict instructions from her brain to shut up. “You’ll probably think this is hilarious, but I’m finding you very attractive.”
At least it wasn’t a declaration of love.
“It’s probably a symptom of getting too cold,” she added in a rush. “Lack of oxygen to the brain. Or something.”
“It’s probably the way I look in a blanket,” he said, deadpan.
“I suppose there is that,” she agreed reluctantly, and then with a certain desperation, “Is there any more chocolate?”
“I find you attractive, too, Dannie.”
She blew out a disbelieving snort.
He leaned across the distance between them and touched her hair. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to do this.” His hands stroked her hair, his fingers a comb going through the tangles gently pulling them free. He moved closer to her, buried his face in her hair, inhaled.
She