A Prince of a Guy (Red Hot Royals #1)(12)

She held Melissa, who wriggled and wriggled until she was set free.

“Uncle Sean!” Beaming from ear to ear, Melissa threw herself at him, flung herself in the air, leaving him no choice but to catch her before she hurt herself. “I missed you!”

Suffering her exuberant and very wet kiss, he glanced at Carly. He had a million things to do, but his nanny had a look he distinctly recognized.

High-level stress.

“Come home with us now,” Melissa demanded, cupping his face in her little hands, forcing him to stop looking at Carly and to look directly at her. “I want you to be with us.”

“I can’t. I have work.” Work was good. Work was great. Work was what he wanted.

Carly smiled apologetically. The neat woman from her interview yesterday was gone. Her hair looked ravaged. Her clothes were wrinkled. And she seemed to be wearing a good part of Melissa’s lunch. But most curious, was her barely subdued sense of…panic?

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m sorry.” Carly looked embarrassed. “We had a long day and—”

“We burned the toast,” Melissa announced, helping herself to the jar of chocolate kisses on his desk.

“Breakfast,” Carly murmured. “Didn’t come out too good.”

“Neither did lunch,” Melissa added.

“We didn’t burn it, at least.” Carly gave a tight smile. “The cake collapsed, that’s all.”

“Yep. Calaps,” Melissa told him, pleased to be in the know. “But don’t worry, we had clean-up time. And then we made play dough from itch.”

“Scratch,” Carly corrected.

“Scratch. It stuck to the pot. Set off the fire alarm.” Melissa sent Sean a chocolately smile. “Mrs. T called the fire department, and two big trucks came! So then we drove here.” She grinned and spread chocolate on some of his papers. “Carly said we could.”

“Quite the day,” Sean murmured to Carly, who bit her lower lip and pressed her thick-rimmed glasses to her face.

“Yes,” she agreed. “It’s been a long one.”

He might have commented further but caught sight of Melissa climbing on his desk. “Try to keep those chocolate fingers off the plans, okay?”

“Okay!” But she had to lean over them to grab more of the kisses, which meant at least two more handprints.

Sean gritted his teeth and rolled the plans up.

“I hope you don’t mind us showing up,” Carly said as Nikki came into the room to offer drinks. “But…”

But she was exhausted, that was clear. Sean took pity, because he knew better than anyone the kind of exhaustion Melissa could provoke. He’d been living it for days before Carly had showed up to save his life.

But he did have to wonder at his supposedly experienced nanny. She had a résumé and references he had checked out, yet she wasn’t acting so experienced.

Still there were those huge blue eyes of hers, magnified by those glasses. “It’s okay,” he heard himself saying. “I don’t mind visitors.”

Nikki stopped short of opening a soda and gaped at him. “Since when?”

“I could use a break,” he said raising his eyebrows in such a way as to tell his nosy assistant he was trying to spare Carly’s feelings.

“You hate breaks,” Nikki said.

At Sean’s glare, she rolled her eyes and vanished.

“Sean? You sure?” asked Carly.

No, he wasn’t sure at all, but she looked so…desperate. And that little doubt came back, just a little niggle of it, but it was enough to disturb him.

Who was she, really?

Very uneasy that maybe she hadn’t been completely honest with him, he took a big mental step back. His ex hadn’t been honest, and that had nearly destroyed him. Now he had Melissa to think about, though what else could he do? He had very carefully and thoroughly checked Carly’s references.

It had to be his attraction to her that bothered him.

“Uh-oh,” Melissa said suddenly from the corner. She’d punched too many buttons on the fax machine, and paper started spitting out of it.

While he and Carly went closer, Melissa backed away. She fed Sean’s discarded sandwich to the computer through its disk drive.

It started to smoke.

The fire alarm went off.

“Not again!” cried Melissa, covering her ears.

“Dammit!” Sean roared brilliantly.

Nikki came racing in, took one look at the disaster zone and brought her hands to her mouth to cover her shocked laugh.

“I can fix it,” Carly assured them, fanning air in front of the smoke detector until it stopped. Then she bent to the disk drive, which was making a funny noise.

Melissa’s bottom lip continued to quiver. Then she opened her mouth and let out a sharp, earsplitting wail.

Sean struggled with his temper, overcome with the urge to strangle his sister for putting him in this position in the first place. Melissa belonged with her mother, not with him.

And then there was his nanny, who at this very moment was bent over his computer, glasses slipping down her nose, her huge sweater nearly falling off her creamy shoulders as she worked on his computer.

What kind of a nanny knew how to fix computer hardware? And why was he fighting a very male, very base urge to lean close and suck on that shoulder?