already, are you?”
“Of course not,” she whispered. “I have tomorrow night off. I have a volleyball game.”
He frowned, running his hand through his hair. “I don’t know if this is a good idea. Maybe I should call a sitter.”
“It requires guts and tenacity. I thought you Barones cornered the market when it came to guts and tenacity.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “What do I do with her?”
Gail’s heart swelled with a combination of admiration and compassion. Nicholas Barone was an incredibly powerful man, but he was willing to go to the mat for the daughter he hadn’t even known existed just weeks ago. “Read to her. Pay attention to her. Women are the same at any age. They love attention. They love to be chased. They love to laugh,” she said, and noticed he was standing so close to her she could see the five-o’clock shadow on his jaw. She felt suddenly light-headed.
“Women are the same at any age,” he echoed, his curious gaze winding around her like a silken thread. “So what does Gail want? To be chased and to laugh?”
She had to be imagining the intensity in his gaze, because he sure as heck could not be looking at her the way a man looks at a woman he finds desirable. Dropping her gaze to clear her head, she stared at her feet and his. He wore Italian leather shoes. She wore pink bunny slippers. She backed away. “Gail wants a cup of herbal tea. I’ll let you get back to your secret quality time with your daughter. Don’t worry about tomorrow night. I’ll leave her favorite books out for you, and if that doesn’t work, you can always make up a story.”
He gave her a blank look. “Make up a story about what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure you’re creative,” she said, and the naughty thought sliced through her mind that he was probably very creative in bed. Before her mouth decided to share that thought, she took another step backward. “Good night, Nicholas.”
He nodded. “Gail,” he said as she turned.
She stopped. “Yes?”
“Great slippers.”
Her cheeks heated at the sexy amusement in his voice. His voice was so sexy he could probably read the Wall Street Journal and a woman would beg him to bed her. Gail bit back a moan. She definitely needed to make sure she didn’t run into Nicholas late at night again. A woman needed all her faculties and fortitude to fight off that man’s impact.
The following night Gail played volleyball with her co-ed team. She’d been so immersed in her new nanny position that she had a tough time concentrating at first. Her longtime buddy and teammate, Jonathan, had teased her out of her fog. After the game and a quick shower at the gym, she joined her comrades for a celebratory round of beer at a local bar. Her mind kept wandering to Molly and Nicholas. Visions of Molly, red-faced and crying, and Nicholas, discouraged and exasperated, plagued her, so she left early.
When she entered through the heavy wooden front door, she listened for sounds of screaming. Instead, she heard Nicholas’s low baritone coming from the kitchen. Quietly walking down the hallway, she noticed his words were punctuated by pleasant gurgling noises from Molly. Pleasant? Gail silently mouthed the word wow and stood outside the kitchen.
“You like Baronessa strawberry gelato,” Nicholas said. “You have excellent taste. Would you like to hear how Baronessa Gelati was started?”
Molly gave an unintelligible babble, but once again, it was pleasant sounding.
“I knew you’d be interested. Your great-grandfather Marco came to America from Italy and he fell in love with a girl named Angelica who made ice-cream desserts. The two of them eloped on Valentine’s Day and they later opened a gelateria, which is an Italian ice-cream store. Can you say gelateria?”
Another unintelligible babble followed, and Gail smiled, charmed by Nicholas’s ridiculous question.
“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m sure my father will make sure you speak some Italian. But back to the story. Marco named the gelateria Baronessa because their last name—our last name—means baron in English. As his wife, she was the baronessa. The gelateria became very popular with locals and tourists. It was a huge success. Years passed, and my father, Carlo, who earned his MBA from Harvard, took the business national, and Baronessa Gelati can now be found in the gourmet section of grocery stores all over the world.” He paused. “Baronessa strawberry gelato can also be found all over you, little one. It looks like you’re going to need another bath, and something tells me that won’t be nearly as popular as strawberry gelato.”
Gail poked her head through the doorway. “Looks like you two have been having a party.”
Nicholas heard Molly shriek with joy and felt a rush of relief at the sight of Gail. Molly had been fretful for a good part of the evening. Serving her gelato had been an act of inspiration and desperation.
Gail smiled, and he felt an odd trickle of warmth in his gut. “I’m impressed,” she said. “It would have taken me a while to come up with ice cream.”
“But you probably would have managed to keep it neater,” he said, nodding his head at the pink mess that was Molly.
“No,” Gail said, grabbing a couple of paper towels and moving toward Molly’s high chair. “I just would have tried to get her cleaned up before you saw her so you would think I’d managed to feed her without her getting it all over herself.”
“So the just-fed clean one-year-old is a myth?” he asked.
Gail nodded. “If you think this is bad, you should see SpaghettiOs.”
“You mean canned spaghetti?” he asked in horror.
Gail winced and chuckled. “Oops. Have I just deeply offended your Italian sensibilities? Sorry, but round noodles are great toddler food.” She wiped off Molly’s face and the baby began to protest. Gail put the paper towel in front of Molly’s face and whipped it away. “Peekaboo,” she said, and Molly smiled, reaching for the towel.
Nicholas envied Gail’s ease with his daughter. Although he had hired Gail for the sole purpose of caring for Molly, he still wished he didn’t feel so damned incompetent with his own daughter. As Gail lifted Molly from her high chair, he noticed ice cream on the front of the child’s pajamas. “Be careful,” he said. “She’ll get ice cream on you.”
Gail looked down and shrugged. “No problem. I’m not prissy.”
That she wasn’t. Nicholas was not accustomed to un-prissy women. He followed Gail up the steps, his gaze caught by the sway of her cute rear end in jeans. Remembering the sight of her bare bottom, he imagined her athletic frame naked. He suspected she would appear more toned than muscle-bound. Those thighs would wrap around a man—
He bit back an oath. This was his daughter’s nanny, for Pete’s sake. And she wasn’t even his type. She was different from the perfectly coiffed women he dated. Her hair was wild. She couldn’t completely tame it even when she pulled it back. A forbidden, instinctive image of Gail naked, with her red hair flying free, her face full of ecstasy, stole into his mind.
He frowned and bit back another oath. Maybe it had been too long since he’d taken a woman to bed. Although he’d continued to attend public events with beautiful women,
