How To Wife Your Nanny A Billionaire Single Dad Romantic Comedy- Melinda Minx Page 0,24

to the nines. Noah had on his suit and tie, of course. I realized I’d never seen him wearing anything else. Most of the other men were dressed up just as much, though I saw a few wearing just polo shirts with slacks and dress shoes.

The women were all wearing dresses. Not just dresses, but dresses. The kind you’d wear to the Oscars. These were custom-made dresses, designed by the most famous fashion designers in the business.

I felt a lot of eyes on me. In the middle of all the marble and mahogany and Miuccia Prada, there was Miss Lacey Larsen. Wearing booty shorts from Target and a tank top from one of those little tourist shops on the boardwalk that sell $5 pairs of sunglasses. My hair was a sweaty mess, and I was wearing glasses from Walmart. If the cruise ship was a human body, then everyone else looked like part of the ship’s native biology, whereas I must have looked like some kind of viral or bacterial infection. The rich people staring me down were like the ship’s antibodies, recognizing that I did not belong inside of this ecosystem.

Even Naomi was wearing a nice little pink dress. Her hair was neatly combed, and she looked like she belonged here as she held her father’s hand.

I laughed nervously as everyone stared at me and turned their noses up at me. “Well. This looks nice.”

Noah got us the keys to “our cabin.”

When I heard there was only one cabin, I got very nervous. So what if Natalie was right. What if there really was a lot of “between the lines” stuff going on here. What if he never outright said I had to sleep with him, but suddenly I was stuck on a ship with him, and he’d gotten us a room with only a bed for Naomi, and then another bed for us together?”

My fears fell away when Noah opened the door to our “room.”

“Rooms” was a much better word. Though that didn’t really cover it either. The giant space that we occupied was at least ten times the size of my apartment on Staten Island. At least. It occupied four floors, and more rooms than I could count without checking behind all the doors.

Two of the floors looked like they were for Naomi. There was a main space, and a type of loft as the second floor. These floors were covered in bright colors like orange and blue and yellow, and there was even a freaking slide that she could slide down to go from the loft to the bottom floor. Her bed was shaped like a big cartoon whale, and she even had her own private bathroom up there on the loft. On the bottom floor she had a bunch of kid-sized couches. A ball pit. A trampoline. She had an entire corner loaded with games and toys. She even had a kid-sized air hockey table.

“This is so insane,” I whispered.

I looked over to Noah to see if he would react to this at all, but he was leaning against the wall, steadying himself with one hand. His eyes looked like they were focused on something very far away, and then his mouth slammed shut, and his cheeks puffed out.

“Are you okay?”

His eyes snapped back into the room, and he looked up at me. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Take care of Naomi, not me,” he snapped.

I scowled at him, but he straightened himself back up and watched Naomi as she jumped onto the slide and slid down.

“Whee!” She flew out of the slide and landed in the ball pit. “This is like a big playground! I get to sleep in here! I’m never going to sleep! I’m going to stay up and play all night!”

She jumped back into the ball pit, then threw a bunch of balls out. Some landed on one of the couches, and a few others landed on the air hockey table.

“Perfect,” Noah muttered. “Sweetheart, I’m going to show Lacey to her room. You good to play here?”

“Wheeeee!” she said, going back down the slide.

I followed Noah up a staircase, and soon we were in a much more elegant and refined part of our rooms than the brightly-colored playground area.

“There’s a full-sized piano in here,” I said, gawking at the thing.

Noah shrugged. “I bet you almost no one ever plays it. It’s just there because it’s so heavy, large, and impractical.”

I pressed a button above the keys, and it started playing classical music