6. Cj

CJ

It was meant to be. Whether Kevin Wadsworth knew it or not, the universe had spoken, and we were destined to be together forever. Now I had to convince him to hire me as Lexi’s manny, or to, at the very least, give me his phone number for more grown-up things before he booted me out the door.

“Let’s go into the playroom,” Kevin said, sounding somewhere between hysterical and defeated.

“Yes!” Lexi screamed. She turned the wheels of her truck and crawled down the hallway. “Come on, CJ. It’s tis way.”

Geez. This kid was adorable. She had the same black curly hair as her father’s, except much longer and tumbling around her shoulders, and her daddy’s big green eyes. She so resembled him that I fell half-in-love with her on sight. Not that I loved the nervous man, but he’d be an ideal candidate. He hadn’t faded from my mind at all since our interlude, and unlike the other night when my dumb ass let him go without a way to contact him in the future, I didn’t plan to squander this Heaven-sent opportunity.

Crawling along behind her, I looked over my shoulder up at Kevin. “You coming, Dad?”

His cheeks flushed a rosy red. “You can stand up, you know?”

Scowling playfully, I said, “But I’m playing with Lexi.” Then I rolled my eyes and followed her into what she called her playroom. It was actually originally designed to be a formal living room, but this one was overrun with bins of blocks, a dollhouse that was probably as tall as Lexi, a blue old-fashioned play kitchen, a cloth chair swing hanging from the ceiling, train cars, and then all the trucks a child could hope for. It was all neatly lined up or on shelves, so things definitely had a place, but the room still resembled a toy store.

“Here, CJ.” The child pushed a truck toward me. “You can pay with tis one.”

I complied, making the same vrooming sounds as her. The vehicle she’d given me had a white cab, and the back had racks that I knew from my own childhood were supposed to hold toy cars. I didn’t see those or anything to use as roads.

“Do you want to build a town with roads running through it that we can drive on?”

Lexi sat back on her calves. “What you mean?”

Sitting down cross-legged, I patted the floor next to me. “Come sit here so we can visualize together.”

She scrunched her tiny nose up in confusion, and it was so cute I wanted to pull my cell phone out of my pocket and snap a picture. “Vitwatlize? What’s dat?”

“Visualize,” I said, slowly. Her eyes locked on my mouth, and her lips moved as she watched me say it. Oh, this one was smart. We were going to have a blast. “You coming?” I patted the ground again.

Deserting her truck, she scrambled over and sat next to me, leaving a foot of space between us. Smart girl. She might have liked me and the fact I’d play with her, but she didn’t know me yet, either. I had experience with earning children’s—and their parents’ trust—though, so I wasn’t worried about that.

Earning the faith of every member of the family I worked for was one of the first and most crucial parts of my job. This didn’t work right if the kids were scared or hated me or if the parents weren’t able to breathe easy knowing that the most precious people to them were safe and protected.

“So the first thing we have to decide is what’s in our town,” I said seriously.

“How do you know tat?” she asked.

“Well, we have to look for what we have to work with.” I pointed to a Little People building sitting up on a shelf. “What’s that?”

She jumped up and ran, poking it and pushing it back farther on its shelf. “Tat’s a gas station.”

“Oh wow.” I crawled to where she was and pulled it down. “Our town definitely needs this so that our trucks can fuel up.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Tat makes sense.”

I set it to the side. “What else do you think we need?”

She looked around, her head stopping where her dad leaned his butt against the arm of the couch. “What do you tink, Daddy? CJ says we need a town to pay trucks.”

Kevin focused completely on his daughter as he tapped his finger against his lips. “I think your town needs somewhere to eat.” His gaze moved to the play kitchen. “I know.” He opened the oven doors and took out a miniature blue stock pot. “You can use this to represent the diner in town.”

She turned back to me. “Does tat work, CJ?”

I nodded, stretching out my hand to take it from him. “It sure does. This is exactly what I’m talking about. The room isn’t big enough to put in a real restaurant, so we have to get creative.”

She stared at me, considering, then jumped up. “I know.” She went into the fold of her swinging chair and grabbed an elephant stuffed animal. “My el-phant can be for da zoo.”

“Now you got it,” I said.

She grinned. “What’s next?”

We proceeded to make a pile of her toys and what they could represent in our town. Kevin participated a little, but mostly he sat back worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. I wanted to pull the poor abused flesh into my mouth and suck it, soothing it better, but this wasn’t the time nor the place.

Once we’d added a plastic Paw Patrol figurine to represent the pet store, a tiny carton of plastic eggs for the grocery store, a head with holes on top for Play-Doh fun became our hair salon, several different colored blocks that would be houses in a neighborhood, and Lexi sweet-talked her father into bringing in a chocolate chip cookie on a napkin for our bakery.

“Homemade?” I asked as he handed it to me.

“Yeah. We had a baking adventure this morning.”

“I made it snow,” Lexi yelled. Oh boy, I wondered if she used flour or sugar to make it snow.

Kevin held a finger up to his lips. “Inside voice, Lex-Lex.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she responded without changing her volume…at all.

Kevin and I exchanged a smile. Then he flushed and glanced away. The poor guy. If it had been any other hook-up I’d ever had, I’d probably cut the man a break, and I would’ve left immediately. But there’d been something about Kevin that had grabbed a hold of me and hadn’t let go yet. Something I’d have given anything to explore deeper.

And to find out now that he was a single dad, too? Jesus. It was all I could do not to fan myself watching him with his child. He was patient and kind, and she checked in with him continuously, like she knew that he’d have every answer to every question she might ever have.

I clapped my hands together. “Who’s ready to assemble our town?”

Lexi jumped up and down. “I am. I am. What we do?”

“Yes, show us,” Kevin said, sounding like maybe he was having a little bit of fun, too.

So I did. I asked Lexi where she wanted things, and together, the three of us set up Lexi-town with enough space between items for her to have roads to drive the trucks through. “Tis is awesome, CJ.” She drove the Hess truck all the way through town, parking it behind the gas station where her father had laid a brown piece of construction paper for a parking lot. “I going to park your truck, too.”

As she began to make the vrooming noises, driving down our self-made roads, Kevin said, “Okay, Lex-Lex, CJ and I need to chat.”

“Okay, Daddy, but you stay here?”

Kevin eyed the only couch in the room. There was plenty of space for both of us, but I understood his hesitation. We’d had smokin’ hot sex, and now I was here interviewing to be his daughter’s manny. I didn’t know about him, but it was only her presence that kept me from crowding into his space, craving his touch, and wanting another taste of his delicious mouth. I wanted to celebrate the fortuitousness of running into him again.

“Do you think that hanging chair will hold me, or am I too big?”

“It will!” he half-yelled with relief.

He was so loud it startled Lexi, and she spun her head and glared at him. “Inside voice, Daddy. You said.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled, cheeks flaming brightly again.

Giving him a minute to compose himself, I went to the chair. I gave a test pull on the cord that came out of the top of the material.

“The mount in the ceiling holds up to six hundred pounds.”

“Really?” I asked, tugging a little harder. I hadn’t wanted to make him uncomfortable by sitting next to him on the couch, but now that I knew it was a possibility, I was pretty stoked about swinging in the hanging chair.

He shook his head, a reluctant smile appearing on his handsome face. “Go ahead, sit down. I know you want to.”

“I do. You’re sure I won’t fall?”

He held up his hand like he was going under oath. “Promise.”

I’d seen so many of these online and in the stores, but I’d never seen one in person. Unlike a lot of them, this one didn’t have a back to it, but it was one piece of circular cloth with a hole in the middle. If Lexi hadn’t done it yet, I bet it would be no time before she was lying with her head coming out one side and her legs shooting out the other so she could fly. Gingerly, I backed into it and sat down.

Kevin moved toward the couch, then looked at the distance between it and me. The room wasn’t exactly huge, so we’d be able to talk fine, but it might be a little distracting with Lexi playing on the floor between us. Instead, he pulled a bin of blocks over, picked the lid up off of the floor, put it on, and sat down on that. The chair hung low enough with my weight that we were practically eye to eye. A little flustered, he said, “I hope this is okay. It’s not very professional, but…” He shrugged.

“Since I’m applying for a position to watch your daughter, this seems pretty perfect to me.” I wouldn’t embarrass him by saying that every interview before now had been much more structured and without any of the children present. That worked for those families, but this felt right between us, given our first meeting.

He clutched his hands in his lap, resembling a kindergartner perched on a bucket. I sort of wanted to lick him and claim him as mine like we’d done in elementary school. I bit back a chuckle at my own ridiculousness.

“About that. I’m not sure that its appropriate for me to hire you since…” He gestured between us.

I had a feeling he was going to say that, so I’d been mentally preparing to convince him otherwise while we’d built Lexi-ville. “I don’t agree. What happened the night we met at Rafters was great. Amazing, really. And we were two consensual adults out for a night of fun. This is another situation entirely. You need someone to watch your child. Someone who will take care of her and keep her safe while you work. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m a fantastic manny.”

He gazed at me speculatively. “May I ask how you decided to pursue this as a vocation?”

“I’d be surprised if you didn’t. My sophomore year of college, I needed a job, so I went to the career center. They didn’t have a lot of openings that would work with my schedule, but there was an open babysitting job. The parents were a flight attendant and a doctor. The kids were getting a little older, and the mom wanted to go back to work, but she needed to make sure someone was always available to pick her children up from school and help them do their homework, that kind of thing. The husband’s schedule wasn’t stable enough for that.”

“And they needed someone who lived in-house? To be honest, that’s the other thing I’m worried about. I wasn’t really looking for a live-in nanny or manny or whatever. My hours aren’t unpredictable, so a nine-to-five person would be the ideal candidate. I was even happy settling with someone who could only do part-time.”

Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. I’d been waiting for a couple of weeks, hoping a job would come up sooner rather than later. I’d had a feeling this would be the biggest issue when the agency sent me the information for the Wadsworth family. Even before knowing that Kevin—my Kevin, hook-up extraordinaire—was the parent, I’d been prepared to plead my case.

I didn’t mind sleeping back in my childhood home at all since my parents really were awesome, but I loved working with kids and feeling like I was contributing. If anyone needed that, it was the man who’d strolled into a bar with what I now knew were the signs of parenthood displayed on his shirt.

“Actually, no, originally, they didn’t need a live-in childcare giver. It was while watching their kids, though, that I finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.” I air-quoted the last bit. “Up until that point, I was only taking my core courses in school, but I had no idea what direction to go after that. All I’d ever really wanted was to marry a nice person and have a family. Then, all of a sudden, I stumbled into this job that feeds most of those desires, and I knew it was my path.”

Kevin leaned forward, balancing precariously on his bin. “I’m surprised you didn’t decide to pursue teaching then.”

“Yeah, a lot of people have said that, but really, I love it all. I enjoy helping with homework, but there’s more to guiding a young person’s mind than just book stuff, you know? Look at Lexi.” The little girl’s head jerked up at the sound of her name. I waved at her, but since nothing interesting was going on, she went back to vrooming her trucks. Her father and I smiled at each other before I continued. “She’s two, right?”

He nodded. “Two and a half.”

“So she’s probably helping pick out her clothes already.”

Kevin chuckled. “More like demanding. I had to bribe her with baking cookies this morning to get her into the dress I wanted her to wear. I’m sure you can imagine how it went after that.”

Considering she now had on a pair of gray sweatpants with a gray Teenage Mutant NinjaTurtle shirt with blasts of pink color, I was pretty sure I knew. “That sounds about right for her age. And one day, she’ll want to put all her clothes on herself, then she’ll want to zip her own jacket and tie her own shoes. At breakfast, she’ll want to pour her own cereal and milk into a bowl or make her own chocolate milk.”

“Strawberry,” he said. “She likes the Nesquik strawberry powder.”

“Ah. A girl after my own heart.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I’m not sure if it’s about the taste or the fact it’s pink. She likes all red and pink foods.”

“Like ketchup,” I said in a teasing voice.

He covered his face with his hands, groaning. “Oh God, don’t remind me.”

Seeing as how I really wanted this job, I didn’t think now was the best time to tell him that I couldn’t forget. Didn’t want to forget. Ketchup might well be my favorite condiment ever since it drove off the men who weren’t deserving of this curly-haired cutie and gave me the opening I needed. Now that I was back in his orbit, I was damned sure going to take advantage of it.

“Anyway, then there’s also the other stuff. My cousin, Ricky, gives me a hard time, says I don’t want to grow up since I’d rather sit on the floor and play blocks instead of getting my hands dirty and doing real-men’s work.” Another air-quote. “But there’s so much more to it than that. Children have amazing imaginations, and if you’re open to it, you can learn so much from them while also guiding them. It’s an honor, really. Don’t you agree?”

Kevin blinked, looking completely stunned. “Uh, yeah. I…do, actually.” A slight smile tilted his lips. “You still didn’t tell me how you went from a part-time babysitter to a full-time manny for that first family.”

“Oh yeah. Sorry. I tend to get a little passionate about why I do what I do. So I was talking to the mom about how much I loved it and was considering dropping out of college.” Kevin opened his mouth, and I held up my hand. “I didn’t. I have a degree in early childhood education, which I don’t really want to use yet.

“I enjoy what I’m doing, but that conversation is what gave her the freedom to pose something that she and her husband had been discussing. Me moving into their guest room, room and board becoming part of my payment package, and then she would have the freedom to bid for some overnight trips, knowing that I’d be more available to them.”

“That makes sense for them, but you couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, right? I’d have thought you’d have wanted a little more freedom to be young and dumb.”

“My friend, Eddie—the guy I was at Rafters with—and I had been talking about getting an apartment, but it’s so expensive, and we were young. His brother had offered for Eddie to move out of their parents’ home and in with him. I think the only thing holding him back from taking him up on it at the time was he didn’t want to disappoint me. This worked out for both of us. Eddie is a vacation manny?—”

“A what?” Kevin’s face scrunched in confusion.

“A vacation manny. Believe it or not, there are families who pay for someone to go with them on vacation to help with the kids. He’s been all over the world now, and he still lives with his brother, so it’s worked out really well for him.”

“That’s interesting. I had no idea that was even a thing. Sorry, go ahead.”

“Nothing else to say, really. I worked for them for a few years until their kids didn’t really need me anymore. That’s when I signed on through the same agency Eddie works with. I love it.”

“And you’ve never regretted your decision?”

“Nope. The last few weeks haven’t been ideal, though. The family I was working for moved unexpectedly, and I wasn’t interested in going with them. How quickly it all happened didn’t give me enough time to line something else up, so I’m back in my childhood bedroom at my folks’ house.”

Kevin’s eyes narrowed. “So we were at your parents’ house the night we…met?”

I shook my head. “No. I was housesitting.”

He shook his head slowly. “People do that, too? Pay someone to…”

“Daddy, you’re being boring,” Lexi interrupted, leaning into his legs. “I want to pay wit him.” She pointed at me.

Kevin stroked his hand through his daughter’s hair. Then his green eyes landed on me, thoughtful and full of speculation. Matching green eyes twinkled as his daughter smiled at me. “You pay, CJ?”

“Well, that’s up to your dad.”

Kevin rubbed a hand down his face. “Lord help me.” Peering at me between his fingers, he said, “Let’s talk details.”