The door opens and I blink, and all the breath leaves my body in an instant as my heart thumps and my legs turn to jelly because standing in front of me is the most handsome man that I have ever seen.
He’s more than six feet tall, built like a lumberjack, with a grizzly dark beard that’s mottled with splashes of silver and bed hair that’d make a boyband jealous. His steel-blue eyes somehow cut right through my chest and straight to my heart, and the dangerous look on his face as he runs me up and down makes my panties tremble. I force out half a smile, and then I bite down on my lower lip, my tummy filling with something that I don’t even have a name for.
I whimper, literally whimper, and then I say, ‘Hgng.’
Fuck.
I’m in so much trouble.
*
I’m a man of few words, but this girl, standing on my doorstep with her pale hands neatly folded together, her flame-red hair tucked back into a white Alice band, her beige cardigan that’s hiding curves that I can’t handle… has reduced me to none.
She’s so goddamn beautiful I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut, and the way she’s chewing her lip right now is doing things to me that I can’t legally describe.
Fuck.
I breathe out as subtly as I can, and then pound my reset button, hard. Whatever the hell just happened needs to be buried, deep.
‘You must be Miss Miller,’ I say, with more gravel than I intended. ‘You’re late.’
She doesn’t respond, she just blinks and for a moment she looks flustered, and just as I’m about to start questioning why it is thatshe thinks turning up an hour behind schedule is acceptable, I feel tiny hands wrap around my leg and I look down.
‘Are you my new nanny?’ asks my youngest daughter suspiciously, peering out from between my calves, and when I look back up I find a smile so bright I have to look away.
‘Hey,’ says the firecracker, her light mid-western accent as sweet as a summer breeze as she drops to one knee. ‘You must be Harper.’
‘That’s me,’ my tiniest little terrorist says brightly, and I can’t help but grin as the two of them wave at one another.
‘And how old are you?’ she says.
‘I’m four,’ says Harper, holding up three fingers.
‘Four?’ says the girl holding up the right number, her eyes so wide I feel myself leaning toward them. ‘No way. Can you guess how old I am?’
Harper tilts her head, purses her lips, and squints. ‘A hundred, and six,’ she says confidently.
Red gasps as I cringe. ‘How did you know?’ she says, her laughter making my heart thump.
Get a fucking grip Blake, she’s too damn young. You’ve got at least twenty years on her, and she’s your kids’ new goddamn nanny.
‘My last nanny was a million-billion years old,’ says Harper.
‘Was she?’ the girl giggles, flicking her gaze up to me and winking, sending my heart a ticker.
‘Harper,’ I say, barely keeping it together. ‘That’s enough now.’
‘Mr Ledger?’ says Mackenzie, popping back up with the kind of elasticity only youth can muster. She extends her hand and takes a step closer, making me feel things that I don’t think are allowed. ‘My name’s Mackenzie Miller. I’m so sorry I’m late.’
I look at her long outstretched fingers covered in beautiful freckles, and I find myself hesitant to take them, wary that touching her might set me off again, but I can’t refuse, I’m too damned polite, and I regret it the moment my skin meets hers.
This has to be a mistake.
The agency must have sent the wrong girl. Our last nanny was in her late forties and so conservative that Harper thought she was a Victorian ghost when she first turned up, and honestly, she had a point. This girl looks like she just walked off the set of the kind of movie the boys had on loop back in Kandahar - the kind of movie I’d want to watch alone.
Goddamn.
I can barely keep my eyes off her. I was all riled up to ream her out for being over an hour late, but she’s taken the wind right out of my sails.