How To Wife Your Nanny A Billionaire Single Dad Romantic Comedy- Melinda Minx Page 0,12

legs. “And what else are you wearing under there?”

She turned around so fast a few strands of her hair whipped against me. I didn’t need to see her face to know exactly what it looked like after asking her that.

She also didn’t remove the earring. After thirty seconds or so, she even reached up and touched it, as if thinking about how it got there. About how I touched her to put it there. Was she thinking about how it had felt when I touched her? Was she smiling? Or maybe forcing herself not to smile?

Just as she was about to pay for her coffee, I slapped the money down onto the counter to pay for it. She glared at me, shoved it aside like it was infected with something, and paid for the coffee herself.

I ordered myself a coffee as she sat down with her drink and pulled out a pen.

I sat down across from her, but she didn’t look up. She was just signing the books and trying very hard to pretend that I wasn’t sitting with her. She didn’t just write her name into each book, she wrote a little message to Naomi, and even drew a quick little Gobblegurt doodle too. That was sweet, Naomi was going to love this.

“See how worn those are?” I asked her. “We’ve read them each hundreds of times.”

“Mhm,” she mumbled, still not looking up at me.

“The Mean Gobblegurt Who Didn’t Want to Say Sorry,” I said, pointing to the book she’d just opened. “My personal favorite.”

“Why?” she asked. “Because you never want to say sorry? And because you’re mean? So you relate to the mean Gobblegurt?”

“I was like him. I did relate to him,” I said. “But then I read your book a few hundred times. The message didn’t quite set into me for the first 200 or so reads, but I think it was the 234th time we read the book when it all clicked for me. When I realized I should say sorry, because I was a terrible person.”

“I’m pretty sure toddlers figure it out faster than that.”

“I’m saying sorry, Lacey Larsen.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Does that mean you accept my apology?”

“Didn’t you read the book 234 times?” she asked.

“Huh?”

She flipped to the back and pointed to the last page. “The lesson. The moral of the story.”

I read through it again, not that I didn’t have all the words in my head already. “Oh, right. It’s important to say you’re sorry, but no one owes you forgiveness.”

I bit my lip and looked at her. She was still angry, but she kept looking up at me. Those glasses couldn’t hide her nice, thick eyelashes, or her red cheeks. I loved the way the freckles on her nose looked when her face got red. She wanted to say something, but she wasn’t going to.

“The important thing is that I said I’m sorry.” I stood up. “I’ll leave you alone, Miss Lacey Larsen.”

“Are you going to start calling me that now too?”

“It’s easier if Naomi and I call you the same thing.”

“You can give the books to her,” she said, sliding them toward me.

“She’ll be more excited if you give them to her. She’s going to flip out when she sees those drawings. That’s the closest we’ve come to a new Gobblegurt book in five years.”

“She’s only been alive for four years.”

“So it’s the closest she’s come in her entire life.”

“I’ll give them to her,” Lacey said.

Then I caught it. It was a smile. She hid it just as fast as it happened, like when one of those Black Friday websites accidentally posts a deal early and it’s gone by the time you refresh the page, but I swear to God I saw her smile. At me.

I was too busy staring wide-eyed and trying to keep my jaw off the floor, and by the time I managed to smile back at her, she was already frowning again while suddenly becoming very interested in the inside of her mostly empty coffee cup.

I went back to the Kids’ Corner and played with Naomi for a while. She taught me her trick to cheat at the fishing game, and we cheated a bunch of fish out of the pond together.

“You know the real trick with fishing?” I asked her.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t go fishing, because it’s boring. You’ll pay more on a fishing license, a boat, supplies, and time spent going fishing than you ever would just buying fresh fish from someone who was foolish enough to go