The Texas Billionaire's Bride / The Texas Bodyguard's Proposal: The Texas Billionaire's Bride. Crystal Green

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СКАЧАТЬ to beat the band, and he lifted his head, his gaze coming to rest on her mouth.

      Then his eyes met hers again, thrashing her with a slam of that awareness she’d been trying so hard to dodge.

      But dodge she did, nodding at him and then leaving before he could, walking past the kitchen and back to her bedroom, where she intended to shut the door nice and tight behind her until tomorrow.

      He’d meant to get to the park for their Father’s Day date.

      He really had.

      But Zane had found some accounting errors while reviewing a monthly report he was catching up on, and by the time he’d finished smoothing out the near damage, he’d looked at his watch to see that it was past three o’clock.

       Three o’damned clock.

      How had that happened?

      He wanted to blame anyone but himself: why hadn’t Melanie Grandy called him when he hadn’t shown up at the park?

      Yet, he figured the nanny had probably given up on him and hadn’t bothered to even pick up the phone, because he had only confirmed that he was the worst dad in existence.

      As his hand fell to his side, he wondered how Livie had taken his absence, but the answer wasn’t hard to come by. She’d had plenty of practice at dealing with disappointment in him before, and he imagined that her opinion hadn’t changed today.

      And there it was—the exact reason he’d excused himself from bringing her up in the first place.

      He called Monty to pick him up. When Monty arrived he didn’t make any comments. Then again, unlike Melanie Grandy, the driver knew it wasn’t his place to do so.

      No, his employee only handed him a box after Zane had settled in the town car’s backseat.

      “What’s this?” he asked Monty.

      The driver pulled the vehicle away from the valet station in the office building’s parking structure. “Ms. Grandy sent it for you. She said she figured you might need it.”

      Steam fogged over him, an equal mix of disliking the position the nanny had put him in and…

      God. He remembered last night, when she’d been standing there in her nightie. Even though the sleepwear had been modest, it had shown more leg than he’d ever seen of her.

      Long, lean leg. And he’d wanted to go to Melanie Grandy, bend down to curl his fingers around her ankle, then start from there on up, skimming over her toned calf, the soft, damp back of her knee, higher…

      But he’d barred himself from doing any of it, mostly because of what he’d stowed in the chest just before he’d heard her moving around while going to the kitchen.

      Danielle’s ashes in an urn.

      He supposed that the approaching anniversary of his first wife’s suicide had urged him to take out her remains. But then again, he often contemplated her—the memories of what he could’ve done. The penance for not being able to stop her…

      In any case, he’d been in a brooding mood, and the nanny had broken it open for a short time before he’d told himself to get out of the room, to resist a situation he just couldn’t handle.

      Now he looked at the box she had sent for him to open, and like that chest, he wished he could just keep it closed.

      But since he had a feeling about what was inside, he took off the lid.

      The R2-D2 tie.

      He tossed the box lid to the seat. Damn that woman. She’d probably found it where he’d placed it on the kitchen counter last night.

      Legs or not, she was making his life hell.

      Zane caught Monty’s gaze in the rearview mirror just before the driver looked away.

      The rest of the ride was like a session in a torture chamber, with the world’s most invisible, cutting, self-inflicted weapons. Zane went back and forth between cursing himself for blowing it with Livie today and thinking that he should just send her back home, until Monty pulled up to his townhouse, with its luxurious, sleek façade that didn’t offer even a hint of the darkness inside.

      They would be waiting in there for him: Livie, with those eyes that slayed Zane every time he saw them. And Melanie Grandy—who had quite a way of killing him softly, too.

       Dammit.

      He took off his Armani tie and put on the R2-D2 one, feeling like an ass, but not just because he was wearing a cartoon character on his chest.

      Then Zane got out of the car, held up a hand to thank Monty and watched his driver pull away in a stream of red taillights.

      He ran a hand through his hair, took a deep breath and entered his home, thinking that he’d never been so cautious about coming into his own doggone place before the nanny had arrived.

      Standing in the foyer, he set down his briefcase, listening for any signs of life. No TV. No clanging around in the kitchen.

      He went back outside to check the stand-alone garage, to see if Melanie’s designated Tall Oaks Volvo was still there where he’d parked it for her, last night before retiring.

      Present and accounted for.

      When he wandered back inside, ready to capitulate and call her cell phone, he heard something floating down from the stairway.

      Laughter.

      The roof terrace, he thought, his veins going taut as he took in the sound. It rang through him, and for a forbidden moment, he allowed it to settle.

       What would it be like to have a house that sounded like this all the time?

      Then reality returned. He had to go up to the roof, and the minute they saw him the laughter would stop.

      Okay, you’re a man, he told himself. Face the consequences.

      He straightened the R2-D2 tie and climbed the stairs, following the laughter—actually drawn to it, as he’d been last night, when it had filled this house.

      When it had even filled something else that he wasn’t sure he could define.

      Arriving at the roof, he found them sitting in lounge chairs that faced the Dallas skyline. The river sparkled in the late afternoon sunshine. They’d turned on the small rock waterfall near the hot tub, and the splash of it mingled with Melanie’s voice as she told Livie some story about a time she’d gone waterskiing.

      “I never drank so much water as I did that day on the lake,” she said at the end of her tale. “I had a stomachache for hours afterward.”

      Livie was giggling and sipping from a straw in a glass that looked to be full of milk. Her gaze was fixed on her nanny, as if she were the most incredible thing to drop from the sky since stardust.

      As Zane watched them, his stomach ached with something СКАЧАТЬ