Anne McAllister - The Playboy And The Nanny

Just as well, Mari thought. She was curious. Not suicidal.

“Put my things here, will you, Thomas?” She went over to the window and looked out. Beyond the main house she could see the beginning of the dunes that dipped toward the Atlantic. Now, in the silence, she could hear the sounds of the waves.

“Miss?”

She turned to see that Thomas had set down her cases and now stood looking at her. He had a slight smile on his face. “I just wanted you to know, miss...he isn’t as bad as he says.”

“He couldn’t be,” Mari agreed drily.

Thomas’s bare hint of a smile turned into a real one. He almost chuckled. “He’ll try, though.”

“It...should be interesting,” Mari agreed. “Tell me, Thomas. Did you know about this? That Mr. Costanides was setting us up, I mean?”

Thomas hesitated a moment, then said, “No, but, I’m not surprised. It’s no secret Mr. Costanides is worried—about Mr. Nikos, about the future of his company. He’s getting older. He’s had one heart attack. He wants time with Mrs. Costanides and the children. So he wants Mr. Nikos to take over. But,” he added, “only if he does it the way Mr. Costanides wants.”

Which was the situation in a nutshell. “And why am I sure that Nikos has his own mind?” she asked wryly.

Thomas smiled again. “Because he’s his father’s son.” Thomas shook his head. “Mr. Costanides doesn’t always handle Mr. Nikos very well.”

“And he thought hiring a nanny would help?”

“I’m not sure he thinks anything will help at this point,” Thomas said bluntly. “But this, at least, he hasn’t tried.”

That would make two of them.

“He won’t hurt you, miss,” Thomas said quickly. “He teases, that’s all. If he gives you trouble, you call me. I’ll come whip him into shape for you.” He grinned. “Mr. Nikos listens to me.”

“But not to his father.” It wasn’t a question.

Thomas shook his head adamantly. “Never. Mr. Costanides never talks to Mr. Nikos, come to that. Just yells. And demands.” He gave a shake of his head, then brightened and looked at her. “You can fix that.”

“Sounds like it’s been broken for a very long time.”

Thomas hesitated, then gave a small nod. “They’re good men, though. Both of them.”

“Then what’s the problem? Why don’t they listen to each other? Why don’t they talk to each other?” She needed a place to start. Some clue as to what dynamic existed between them.

Thomas lifted broad shoulders. “You got to ask Mr. Nikos or Mr. Costanides about that.” His warm brown eyes met hers. He reached out a hand and squeezed hers briefly. “I wish you luck, miss.”

Mari thought she was going to need it.

The knock on the door was quick and staccato. Seven taps, the last two separated from the first ones in brisk, cheerful fashion.

Obviously the old man—pleased with himself and coming to gloat.

“Door’s open,” Nikos growled.

A second later it was, and a seductively stacked blonde in a revealing leopard-spotted dress sashayed in. “Nikos?” she purred, her eyes lighting up at the sight of him.

Oh, hell. He’d forgotten about her!

But a second later he grinned with unholy glee at the thought of what his father must be thinking now—and how gloriously shockable the Mary Poppins clone was going to be!

He pushed himself forward in the chair and held out a hand. “Come here, sweetheart,” he drawled.

Debbie’s Dolly shut the door behind her, then moved toward him, unbuttoning the top two buttons of her very low-cut blouse as she came. “Aw, did you hurt yourself, darlin‘?” she murmured, taking in the yellowing bruises on his face. “Let me kiss it and make it better.” She bent over him, giving him a good glimpse of a pair of her more outstanding assets as she did so.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said a firm female voice from the hallway.

The blonde jerked back.

Mari Lewis stood in the doorway to the living room, a stern look in her eyes. The blonde, eyes like saucers, looked quickly from Mari to him.

Nikos didn’t move, just watched, fascinated, as Mari gave the blonde what looked like an affable smile, and said almost pleasantly, “Or what happened to him could happen to you.”

The blonde looked beyond Nikos’s bruises to his taped ribs and casted leg and gulped. Then her eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“His nanny.”

“What?”

“I’m Nikos’s nanny.” Mari Lewis repeated the words as if they made perfect sense, and she said them with such forcefulness that Nikos found himself admiring her. For a second.

Right before annoyance set in.

He could sense the blonde beginning to retreat. “Don’t mind her,” he said, reaching out a hand and snagging hers, drawing her close. “Ms. Lewis is just a frustrated spinster my father’s wished on me. She won’t bother us.”

“Won’t I?” Mari said, and once again, though her expression was perfectly pleasant, her tone was like steel.

He didn’t think it was a question even though it sounded like it. But he was damned if he was going to let some governess bully him!

“Of course not,” he said. “Because if you leave,” he told the blonde, though he slanted a gaze Mari’s way, “she knows I’ll have to kiss her again instead.”

“Again?” the blonde echoed nervously. She tugged her hand out of his and stepped back, looking from Nikos to Mari, an increasingly worried expression on her face. “I...think maybe you should settle this between yourselves,” she said quickly, edging toward the door.

“Excellent idea,” Mari said, moving toward her.

“Terrible idea,” Nikos disagreed. Didn’t Debbie’s Dollies have any backbone? “Come back here.”

“Keep right on going,” Mari suggested, herding the blonde ahead like a sheepdog nipping at the heels of a ewe. “Thomas, would you show Miss... Miss.. ?”

“Truffles,” the blonde supplied nervously.

“Would you show Miss...Truffles the way out, please?” Mari said quite pleasantly, though Nikos was sure he could hear a hint of a smile when she said the ridiculous name. He gritted his teeth. Surely even a blonde with very little brain could have thought of a better moniker than that!

“And give her something for coming all this way,” Mari added.

“You stay right here,” Nikos commanded. But the blonde wasn’t listening to him. She fumbled to open the door. Mari opened it for her.

“He doesn’t need to give me anything. We have his credit card number,” the blonde said nervously.

“You’re not charging me! You didn’t do any—”

“We’re supposed to charge whether or not they—” Truffles-the-blonde apologized to Mari. She wasn’t even looking at him! “For the, um, er...house-call, y‘know?” she said a little desperately.

“Of course.” Mari nodded sagely. “Makes perfect sense.”

“The hell it does!” Nikos shoved himself up, trying to get out of the chair. “You can’t give my money away like that!”

She turned and gave him a blithe smile. “I didn’t. You did.”

“Come along, miss,” Thomas said smoothly, taking the blonde by the arm. He gave Nikos a hard level look over his shoulder and a slow despairing shake of his head as he steered the woman down the path. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Nikos wasn’t sure if Thomas meant the blonde or him, but judging from the look on the old gardener’s face he had a pretty good idea.

The door shut. The silence was deafening.

Used to prevailing in arguments about bedtime, homework and when to allow a friend to sleep over, Mari found it a little difficult to pretend that she commonly vanquished women of the evening—as Aunt Bett called them—in the course of her work.

It’s not much different than a sleepover, she told herself firmly, then rolled her eyes.

Surreptitiously she wiped damp palms on the sides of her navy skirt and drew several steadying breaths before she shut the door after Thomas and ‘Miss—she still smiled as she thought the name—Truffles, and turned to face the ire of Nikos Costanides head on.

Big mistake.

The sizzle she’d felt from his kiss seemed to arc right across the room and hit her between the eyes. He was slumped back into his chair again, glaring at her, looking for all the world like a sulky child who’d just had his treat taken away, and she could feel her palms dampen and her mouth dry out. There was some deep primitive response going on inside her, too, that she didn’t really want to focus on.

‘Hormones, dear,’ her Aunt Bett would have said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And doubtless Uncle Arthur would have winked at her.

Well, now was not the time for hormones!

No matter how curious she was, she couldn’t simply jump a man she didn’t know. A man she probably didn’t even want to know!

What, she wondered, were you supposed to do if these suddenly wide-awake and raring-to-go hormones aimed you at entirely the wrong man?

Go slow, she cautioned herself. Learn as much as you can about the phenomenon. Then, once she understood it better, she could transfer the feeling to someone more suitable than Nikos Costanides.

Right now the thought of what he and Miss Truffles would be doing if she hadn’t arrived set a blush on Mari’s cheeks. Was that why he’d been so eager? she wondered with sudden dismay. Had he been primed for any woman, and simply let it all out for her?

Now there was food for thought.

She slanted a glance at him again, wondering just what sort of man he was. Surely he didn’t routinely hire “women of the evening” and parade them past his father and family!

If he did, it was no wonder his father was out of patience with him.

“You don’t look like you’d have to hire that sort of thing,” she said now.

Nikos blinked. Then, “I don’t,” he said flatly.

“Then why—?”

He plucked irritably at the fabric on the arm of the chair. “Think about it,” he growled at last.

Mari tried. She thought about everything that had happened since she’d knocked on the door, expecting Stavros Costanides and his four-year-old son and getting a virile man clad only in a bath towel instead. A virile man in a bath towel who’d said, “About time,” and then hauled her into his arms and kissed her!

She hurried past that part of the memory before it could affect her equilibrium again. But as soon as she did, she had to back up and go over it again, because somehow she suspected it was the key.

Obviously he’d mistaken her for Miss Truffles. But why was he waiting to kiss Miss Truffles? It wasn’t as if he knew the woman, for heaven’s sake!

Mari was sure he’d never seen her before in his life. Anyway, even in Mari’s non-existent experience, a man didn’t lie in wait to kiss a woman he hired by the hour.

Unless, perhaps, he was doing it for effect.

Effect. On whom?

She remembered the gathering at the poolside. There had been a lot of women, a few children. And his father.

She remembered seeing him there, starting to go over to talk to him, but then him shaking his head and waving her on. Waiting. Watching.

For Nikos to open the door. To meet his nanny. To blow sky-high?

Perhaps. Or maybe to be amenable then to another “discussion” with his father. Yes, she was willing to believe that was what Stavros had been doing.

And Nikos?

She suspected that, for all their differences, he was his father’s son.

“What were you trying to prove?” she asked.

“I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I was trying to get him to damned well throw me out!”