it. I’m sorry. It’s just so overwhelming.” She fumbled in a pocket to pull out a dainty handkerchief and wipe her eyes.
“Talia, if you need them, I can give you references. I promise you, I’m a good guy. I—”
She looked up at Nick, her brows knitted. Why was he talking about references? Then it hit her, and she smiled. “I don’t need references, Nick. I’m crying for joy. Because it’s too miraculous to be possible that I might get to keep Hattie.”
“Oh.” He smiled sheepishly.
“You just thought that up, didn’t you? The whole marriage-of-convenience idea.”
“Yes, but the more I think about it, the more I think it will work.” He stood up, walked to Hattie and picked her up.
“Talia, this is my child. I don’t want to take her from someone she loves and trusts and thrust her into a houseful of strangers, most of us men. She needs a loving mother. I couldn’t bear to have had Artie put into a home of strangers. She’s only fourteen months old and I know she’ll adjust, but if we marry, she will go right along being the happy little child she is and she won’t have a big adjustment to make. I’ll have someone I think I’ll like to love and take care of Hattie and help me raise her. And you’ll be with Hattie and be her legal mother.”
Her thoughts swirled and she looked at Hattie in the crook of his arm, which looked so natural.
Nick sat with her on his lap and Hattie immediately climbed down. Holding to his knee, she reached for a small table and then moved to plop down on the floor in front of a brass box filled with magazines. Hattie pulled one out to toss it behind her and Talia hurried toward her.
“Let her play with the magazines unless she’ll get paper cuts,” Nick said. “She’s not going to hurt anything in that box. Those magazines will be recycled whenever Tina and her cleaning crew get to them.”
“Cleaning crew, a limo, two mansions... Nick, I don’t have that kind of life.” Under normal circumstances she didn’t think it would ever work out between her and someone like Nick. But this was a marriage of convenience. “But I can’t get beyond the realization that now I get to keep Hattie and I’ll become her mother. I can hardly sit still. I feel like dancing around the room. I feel as if I could dance all night and shout for joy.”
He smiled. “I’m glad. I think this will be good for both of us. It lifts a ton of worries off my shoulders.”
She sat down beside him. “The biggest thing is that we don’t know each other at all.”
“We’ll get to know each other and you can adjust to the other stuff. Riding in a limo is not that different from riding in a car,” he added and she shook her head. He sat back, placing one booted foot on his knee. He looked handsome, sexy, strong, and she realized she could easily fall in love with him, but he would never love her in return. They already had lightning streaking between them if they barely touched. How could she marry him, be around him constantly and keep from falling in love? She didn’t think he ever would because all he had talked about since she met him was how much he missed his wife and baby. Was she willing to risk falling in love with him to get to be Hattie’s mother? That was her fantasy, and now it was coming true. Yes, falling in love with Nick was worth the risk.
“Why don’t you tell me about yourself,” he suggested.
“I’ve had a very ordinary life in many ways. I don’t have much family. I’m an only child and my mother died of breast cancer when I was a freshman in college. My father died suddenly from a heart attack when I was fifteen. He had insurance and he’d had a good job in the insurance business, so I was financially okay. I invested most of my inheritance and have done pretty well with it. I went to college on part of it, and I had scholarships for the rest of it.” She stopped and stared at him. “I can’t believe we’re doing this, Nick.”
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