Winning Over the Brooding Billionaire, page 3
The sizzle was confirmed as his hand closed around hers with pure and breathtaking masculine strength.
Shelby had never experienced a touch that was quite that real or that raw before. As she was yanked unceremoniously to her feet, his easy strength made some awareness—primal—tingle up and down her spine.
For a moment, she was sure he felt it, too, as she saw a flash of startled awareness in his eyes. But then he let go of her hand abruptly and scowled.
Unfortunately, his stern look was extraordinarily sexy, especially because of its contrast to those untamed curls.
“Hannah,” he snapped, looking away from her and to the little girl, who still sat on her pony, “it’s not polite to shoot at the guests.”
“You can’t shoot someone with a doll,” Hannah pointed out. She wagged the doll at him—it was wearing an outfit not unlike her own, minus the hat—and tucked it back in her waistband.
Shelby caught a look on the man’s face. Vulnerable. Unable to counter the inarguable logic of a small child. For a man who looked as if the whole world belonged to him, as if there was no situation he would not bring indomitable confidence to, he seemed to be in over his head.
“Besides, I don’t like her,” Hannah announced.
“You’re shattering my myths about farm friendliness,” Shelby said, smiling at her.
“It’s not a farm,” the child said, not charmed. “It’s a ranch.”
“You’re being very rude,” the man said.
A puffy lip stuck out in an unrepentant pout.
The man presented Shelby with his hand. For the second time.
“Sam Waters,” he said.
This was Sam Waters? It confirmed her initial intuition that he was more than a cowboy. It occurred to Shelby her allergy to internet sleuthing had not stood her well this time.
Had she known he was not old and stodgy, she could have been better prepared.
Though gazing at him, she was not quite sure how you prepared for this.
“Shelby Kane,” she said, taking his hand. She should have been ready this time. But she wasn’t. His grasp was mind-blowingly strong, warm, sexy. And brief.
“This is my daughter, Hannah.”
Hannah glowered at her.
“Say hello to Miss Kane,” Sam said sternly, “and then apologize for assaulting her with your doll and telling her you don’t like her. You don’t even know her.”
“Hello, Miss Kane. I’m sorry I don’t like you.”
Shelby giggled at how Hannah had circumvented the apology, which earned her a dark look from the very sexy daddy.
“I wasn’t expecting you. The agency told me they weren’t going to send anyone else,” he said, taking off his hat and running a hand through glossy hair. Loose curls sprang up under his touch.
That hair! Unfairly gorgeous.
What agency?
“I don’t need a nanny!”
Sam regarded his daughter for a moment, then slammed his hat back onto his head.
They thought Shelby was a nanny!
“Of course you don’t,” Shelby said, earning her a look of reluctant interest from the child and a glance of grave annoyance from the man.
That wasn’t exactly I am not a nanny.
“You’re a city girl, aren’t you?” Sam asked. His voice had a gravelly tone to it that felt as if it was scraping across her skin. And not in an unpleasant way.
Best not to let him know that!
“I prefer to think of myself as a woman,” Shelby said.
Especially around him. She thought about how she had earlier contemplated the phrase boyfriend.
He would never be anyone’s boyfriend.
And she didn’t want to be seen as a girl around him.
Something extraordinarily adult was swirling in the air between them. It was a good thing Shelby was now 100 percent a career woman!
Sam Waters cocked his head at her.
“Woman,” he said, his tone flat. “Noted.”
That was not exactly how she wanted him to notice her. Still, they were getting off on the wrong track.
“I’m from New York,” she said.
He nodded, as if this was not entirely unexpected, and not a good thing, either. He rocked back on his heels and looked into the distance.
“I guess that’s why they’re called International Nanny Services. Though I’m surprised nanny is still a politically acceptable term.”
There was lots of sarcastic emphasis on politically acceptable—clearly a dig at her correcting him about being a girl. Shelby realized that she had to tread very carefully at the moment.
For some reason the lines were blurring. It actually felt as if she had arrived here as a nanny, not looking to him to provide his ranch for a sixty-fifth birthday party. She allowed herself to glance off toward that timber-frame barn.
Though the barn would be absolutely perfect.
“You know, if you’re going to bring your city sensibilities here with you, you can just get back in—” he leveled a look at her vehicle “—that toy car and go back where you came from.”
“It looks like a car a clown drives at the circus,” Hannah chimed in.
“Hence the agency being reluctant to send people,” Shelby said to the pair of them, diplomacy be damned.
He looked at her narrowly. It occurred to her he was not a man accustomed to being challenged.
Given what she wanted from him, couldn’t she, just this once, have held her tongue?
She had to tell him the truth and she had to tell him right now. On the other hand, Sam Waters did not look as if he was going to be amenable to giving over his ranch for a party.
What if he knew her better? What if she knew him better?
She was kidding herself. Somehow this wasn’t even about the party anymore. Shelby didn’t just want to see inside that house, it felt as if she needed that. To set foot in a place where stockings had hung on the same mantel for a hundred years or more, where people had sat on those porch rockers, maybe holding hands...
Sam sighed. “Can I assume you don’t ride?”
“You can. I don’t actually like horses.”
She was treated to identical aghast expressions from the father and daughter duo. She looked at the pony.
“Toy horses excepted, of course.”
She watched a reluctant smile twitch at Sam’s lips.
“I don’t need a nanny,” Hannah said again. “Buckie is fine! I love him. He takes care of me.”
“The pony?” Shelby asked. A pony was looking after the child?
“No, that’s Rascal,” Sam said. “Buckie is the ranch cook.”
“Buckie?”
“Nicknames tend to go hand in hand with ranch work. He does childcare in a pinch, but it’s not ideal. We’re pretty much a society of men out here. She needs a woman.”
“I don’t!” Hannah cried. “You can’t be my mommy. My mommy died.”
For a moment, the angry mask slipped, and all Shelby saw in the little girl was immense and bottomless pain.
“My mommy died, too,” she said quietly.
The connection between them was brief and intense. Suddenly she knew this little girl needed her.
It was shocking to realize that in her twenty-eight years on the planet, she had never, ever felt that before.
Needed.
She wondered, briefly, why she had such an aversion to having children when, really, who needed you more than them?
She felt a sudden, totally unwanted tickle down her spine. She could suddenly remember herself, at about the age of this child, needing with a terrible desperation.
It wasn’t quite a memory. The realization was followed by that familiar feeling of blankness that she always had about her early childhood.
She shook it off, and watched as Hannah whirled the fat pony around and took off down the arena, stirring up clouds of dust behind her.
Shelby glanced at Sam’s face as his daughter rode away.
Maybe because some secret of her own had threatened to surface, she saw his with stunning clarity. He was a man who obviously had complete control of an empire. When she had searched for his contact info, she had found out his business portfolio and holdings were immense. They easily rivaled her father’s.
But all his billions and all his power had not been able to save his daughter from sorrow.
As a daddy on his own, it seemed possible he was in way over his head.
Maybe, for once in her life, Shelby could put the needs of others ahead of her own. Such a noble sentiment made going along with a little white lie—committing the sin of omission—okay, didn’t it?
No, it did not.
She drew in a breath. The woman she had been eighteen months ago would have gone along with the mistaken-identity thing, played it out for a bit.
But she couldn’t. It wouldn’t further her cause in the end, anyway.
Or maybe it was something about him, about Sam Waters, that made anything short of 100 percent integrity seem as if it was not acceptable.
“Look, I’m not—”
A sound stopped her midsentence. A man was thundering directly toward them on a horse. She could not be certain he was in complete control. Was the horse running away? Stampeding? Were they about to be crushed?
Shelby thought about jumping over the nearby fence to avoid a collision, but she felt oddly protected by Sam, who made no evasive move as the horse came closer, standing his ground, calm and strong.
Just when it seemed as if the horse was going to crash right into them—she slid behind Sam, though he did not even flinch—the horse slammed to a halt, practically sitting down on his back legs the stop was so abrupt.
“Boss,” the lean cowboy on the horse said. “There’s been an accident at the round pen. I think we might need to chopper Jim out of here.”
Sam’s stillness was gone. He was already running.
He turned back. “Have you got this?”
Shelby nodded. Of course she had it. What other option was there?
* * *
Sam called Hannah from the hospital to make sure she was okay and to tell her good night.
He thought his daughter would be beside herself at his sudden departure and being handed over to the brand-new nanny, but her first question was for Jimmy. It was a small thing, but her ability to be concerned about others gave him hope that, in the sea of single-parenting confusion, maybe he was managing to get the odd thing right.
“Is he okay?” Hannah asked with touching and genuine concern.
“Yes, he’s fine. He broke his arm.”
“Does he have a cast?” she asked, not when will you be home, not I hate the new nanny.
“Yes, he does.”
“Can I draw on it?”
The mystery of his daughter: How did she know people drew on casts? She had probably seen it on television.
Did he let her watch too much TV? So convenient, sometimes...
Would the woman who’d appeared in their lives so unexpectedly know things like that?
“How’s, uh, Miss Kane?”
“She said I can call her Shelby. I like her.”
“You do?” He tried to strip his genuine astonishment from his voice.
“Yes. She’s nice.”
“She is?”
“She’s not really a nanny. She’s just going to be my friend.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CLEVER, SAM THOUGHT, for Shelby Kane to recognize his daughter’s aversion to nannies and skirt around it.
He allowed himself to feel marginally hopeful that this time it was going to work out, even while he experienced a shiver of discomfort.
Miss Kane, in their very brief acquaintance, had made him feel something.
He didn’t like it when he realized what that feeling was. Some awareness of her as a woman had shivered along his spine, even before he had taken her hand. Since the death of his wife, he knew all about the painfulness of firsts: birthdays celebrated without her, Christmas. You could sort of brace yourself for the swamp of feelings if the event was on a calendar.
But this first had taken him entirely by surprise, like a hit up the side of the head: finding a woman attractive.
For a man who had lost way too much to love, Sam recognized that shiver he had felt for what it was: a warning.
It was flashing brightly in his brain like a neon sign: Danger. Stay back.
He’d traveled the treacherous path of love and loss a few too many times now. Only a fool would embark on that journey again.
It was dark by the time he landed the helicopter back at the ranch and helped a drowsy Jimmy to the bunkhouse.
“Take it easy for a few days,” he told the hand.
“I hate leaving you shorthanded at this time of year.”
“You know ranches,” Sam said, even though he hated being shorthanded, too. The ranch was the least of his many business obligations, but it always seemed to be jostling for more time than he had to give it.
Still, he had every hope the new nanny might make his schedule a little more manageable.
“Sorry, boss.”
There was injured pride in that statement. No cowboy wanted a hospital visit after getting tossed from a green colt.
“Hey, stuff happens.” Only Sam didn’t say stuff. He said a word he couldn’t say when he was wearing his daddy hat and that he was pretty sure the nanny would not approve of.
He walked back through the darkness to the house. He stopped before he arrived. Someone was sitting on the front porch in one of the rocking chairs, wrapped in a blanket against the chill of the mountain spring evening.
It was the new nanny.
He felt a shiver of doubt. Should he call her Shelby? Or Miss Kane? He was annoyed at the uncertainty. He made decisions where millions of dollars were on the line with less thought than this.
He knew, from that jolting awareness of her, that the uncertainty ran deeper than what to call her, so he hesitated in the darkness awhile longer, studying her.
Sam remembered how her hand had felt in his when he had lifted her off the ground. Some dangerous current had passed between them, and he had seen awareness of it pass through her eyes, too.
But that was probably a natural reaction. He had not touched a woman since Beth had died. Such impulses could be controlled.
It was the other thing that seemed more dangerous. Sam remembered how she had looked at him a little too intently, as if she saw something he did not want her to see.
As if his every uncomfortable uncertainty was on full display. Especially when it came to raising his little girl on his own.
Every day, he tried to find balance between his business and his parenting obligations.
Business was easier, cut-and-dried.
Parenting, not so much. He walked in the unfamiliar land of not having answers. How much television was too much? Was it okay to let Hannah play the occasional game on his phone? What was he supposed to do with all that hair? Should she be picking her own outfits?
And bigger questions. The ranch was as close to happy as either of them had gotten since Beth had died. But was it okay to raise her here? Didn’t she need more? More friends her own age, more things to prepare her for school?
School. Next year. He had to make decisions. He was good at decisions. Usually.
Now they nagged him. Did Hannah need more women? Even though Hannah had reacted violently to the suggestion, didn’t she need some of that softness around her, that feminine energy that was in pretty short supply at the ranch?
Feminine energy. Shelby Kane had that in spades, even with her slender figure hidden in the folds of a blanket.
She was way too pretty for this job. Sam didn’t like that he had noticed, especially her eyes. He might have initially said her eyes were brown, but that wasn’t true. Up close, he had seen they were so shot through with flecks of gold and green that he wasn’t quite sure what color they were.
Her hair was loose and thick. Earlier in the day, the spring sun shining on it reminded him of honey in a jar. And her mouth...
He wished the agency would have sent a nanny like that one on television. The one who looked like a refrigerator in a pantsuit.
Shelby represented a complication of the variety he didn’t need. When he’d helped her up off the ground, he’d felt that complication jolt through him.
Still, Hannah had actually said she liked her.
Had they connected because Shelby—he had decided to call her that, instead of Miss Kane—knew what it was to be a little girl drowning in sorrow?
That gave him a hope that maybe they could make this work.
Because when he’d first seen her, out of the corner of his eye, when she had walked up to the arena, he’d seen her get that heel stuck in the ground. The footwear choice alone signaled she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was getting into.
When he’d observed her up close, he had recognized the name inside those shoes. Once, he’d been a part of that world.
Like generations before him, Sam had been born and raised on this ranch. But unlike those who came before him, and to his family’s distress, he’d wanted a bigger world.
In university he’d been pulled toward technology, a field as far removed from the gritty realities of cows and land and weather and hard, physically demanding work as a man could get.
And yet, he was well aware, it was the combination of the worlds that had allowed Sam his rocket ride to success. His upbringing had given him drive and toughness, a relentless work ethic, an ability to think on his feet and handle challenges. He’d chased success and found it beyond his wildest dreams.
For a blink in time, he’d been the man with success and money and power beyond imagining.
