croissants. Several child-size boxes of cereal, including Huggi Bears were available. There were choices of milk, chocolate milk or juice, the coffee smelled absolutely heavenly.
What would it be like to live like this? To just snap your fingers and have a feast including Huggi Bears delivered instantly?
It would make a person spoiled rotten, she thought. Emphasis on the rotten.
Or make them feel as if they had died and gone to heaven, she thought as she took a sip of the coffee. It was even richer and more satisfying than it had smelled.
It renewed her commitment to taking the children home. Before she was spoiled for real life. Before she started wanting and expecting luxuries she was never going to have.
“Let’s take it out on the terrace,” he suggested. He took the baby from her with more ease than she would have expected after just one day. When she joined him outside, he was spooning yogurt into Jake who was cooperatively opening his mouth like a baby bird waiting for a worm.
Susie had chosen one of the tiny boxes of Huggi Bears. It was the annoying kind that claimed it could be used as a bowl, but never quite worked properly. Still, Susie insisted she had to have it out of the box, and by the time Dannie had it opened along all the dotted lines and had poured the milk, she was cursing Joshua’s charm and good looks, which made her feel as clumsy as if she were trying to open the box with elephants’ feet instead of hands!
She made herself focus on the view, which was spectacular in the early morning light. The sea breeze was fresh and scented. She wondered what Hawaii smelled like.
She ordered herself just to enjoy this place and this moment, but it proved to be impossible. She needed to know what happened next. It was just her nature.
“So, may I ask what arrangements you’ve made for the children and me?” The thought of traveling again so soon exhausted her. The thought of staying here with him was terrifying.
It gave new meaning to being caught between a rock and a hard place.
“Well,” he said, and smiled widely, “I have a surprise for you.”
Danielle was one of those people who did not care much for surprises. It was part of being the kind of person who liked to know what was going to happen next.
“I’m flying out to look at a property for a few days. It’s called the Moose Lake Lodge. Susie mentioned camping, so I thought she’d love it. All of us. A vacation in the British Columbia wilderness.”
“We’re going camping?” Susie breathed. “I love camping!”
“You don’t know the first thing about camping,” Dannie said.
“I do so!”
She was staring at Joshua with a growing feeling of anger. So this was why he’d been so charming this morning! Smelled like Hawaii, indeed. Her hair made him think of Hawaii. Sure it did!
“Are you telling me or consulting me?” she asked dangerously.
He pondered that for a moment. “I’d really like for you to come.”
It was an evasive answer. It meant he hadn’t booked them tickets home.
“The real question is why would you want to drag two children and a nanny along on a business trip?”
“It’s not strictly business.”
She raised an eyebrow and waited.
“You know as well as I do Melanie will kill me if I send the kids home after I promised her I’d give them a holiday.”
It still wasn’t the whole truth. She could feel it.
“Say yes,” Susie said, slipping her hand into Dannie’s and blinking at her with her most adorable expression. “Please say yes. Camping.”
Everything in her screamed no.
Except for the part of her that screamed yes.
The part of her that begged her to, just once, say yes to the unexpected. Just once to not know what the day held. To not have a clue. To just once embrace a surprise instead of rejecting it.
To leave the safe haven of her predictable, controlled world.
What had her controlled world given her so far? Despite her best efforts, she had ended up with her heart broken, anyway.
“What do you mean, you’re flying?” she asked, looking for a way to ease into accepting, not wanting to say an out-and-out yes as if the promise of an adventure was more than poor, boring her could refuse.
Not wanting to appear like a staid nanny who’d been offered a rare chance to be spontaneous.
“I have a pilot’s license,” he said. “I fly my own plane.”
There was that feeling in her stomach again, of a roller coaster chugging up the steep incline. “Is that safe?” she demanded.
“More safe than getting in your car every day,” he said. “Did you know that you have more chance of dying in your own bathroom than you do of dying on an airplane?”
Who could argue with something like that? Who could ever look at their own bathroom in the same way after hearing something like that?
That was the problem with a man like Joshua Cole. He could turn everything around: make what had always seemed safe appear to be the most dangerous thing of all.
For wasn’t the most dangerous thing of all to have died without ever having lived? Wasn’t the most dangerous thing to move through life as if on automatic pilot, not challenged, not thrilled, not engaged?
Engaged. She hated that word with its multitude of meanings. She thought she had been engaged. For the first time she did not touch her locket when she thought about it.
She took a deep breath, squeezed Susie’s hand. “All right,” she said. “When would you like us to be ready?”
Dannie had never flown in a small plane before. Up until getting on the plane, her stomach had been in knots about it. But watching Joshua conduct extremely precise preflight checks on the aircraft calmed her. The man radiated confidence, ease, certainty of his own abilities.
The feeling of calm increased as she settled the children, Jake in his car seat, and then she took the passenger seat right beside Joshua.
She loved the look on his face as he got ready to fly, intensely focused and relaxed at the very same time. He had the air of a man a person could trust with their life, which of course was exactly what she was doing.
The level of trust surprised her. At this time yesterday, getting off an airplane after having read about him, she had been prepared to dislike him. When he hadn’t arrived at the airport, she had upgraded to intense dislike.
But after seeing him in his own environment, and now in charge of this plane, she realized the mix-up at the airport probably had been Melanie’s. Joshua gave the impression of a man who took everything he did seriously and did everything he did
