A Prince of a Guy Read online

  AT HIS FIRST opportunity to work without the interruption of a high-strung four-year-old, Sean sat at his desk. He meant to dig in but found himself staring out the window instead.

  Melissa was running as fast as her short, chunky legs would take her. Hair flying out behind her, wide, mischievous grin on her face.

  Sean rose, swearing, thinking she was on the run from whatever terrible thing she’d done to the new nanny, when said new nanny appeared in the window, as well.

  Hair flying behind her, running, and though he doubted her legs were short and chunky like Melissa’s, he couldn’t say for certain as they were hidden beneath her skirt. Just like his niece, she wore a wide and mischievous grin, and there was something in her infectious laughter that made him smile, too. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was incredibly…real. He liked real.

  He liked her.

  “Can’t catch me, can’t catch me,” squealed Melissa, slowing with a hopeful, expectant glance over her shoulder.

  She wanted to be chased.

  She wanted to be caught.

  And Sean stood there with a sudden pit in his stomach, because he couldn’t remember a single time over the past days that he’d spared the time to play with the little girl like that. Couldn’t remember not being annoyed or tired or frustrated.

  Couldn’t remember laughing, or just…being.

  “Can’t catch me,” Melissa sang.

  Catch her, Sean willed Carly, leaning close as if he could do it from the other side of the glass. Do for her what I never did.

  At the same moment he wished it, Carly surged forward and scooped the little girl up in her arms, swinging her around and around, looking young and happy and free.

  Their joined laughter rang out, and finally, they both collapsed in a fit of giggles to the grass. Melissa crawled into Carly’s lap.

  Carly’s arms lifted, and for a second hovered in the air as if she wasn’t used to such easy affection, but then she wrapped them around the child, her face filled with such contentment it almost hurt to look at her.

  Sean sat down, still watching. Still…yearning?

  No, that made no sense. No sense whatsoever.

  “SO WHO’S IN CHARGE of dinner?”

  Sean lifted his gaze off the plans he’d been studying, the plans he’d been trying to finish since Melissa had stepped into his life, turning it upside down. Slowly he blinked Carly into focus.

  She was standing in the doorway of his office, looking quite a bit more rumpled then when she’d arrived for her interview that morning. He knew without asking that the dirty smudges on her wide skirt were from grubby four-year-old hands, that the wrinkles in her shirt came from lifting that same four-year-old, and likely her hair was rioting around her face because of something Melissa had done.

  But somehow, she looked…cute. He knew from having a sister, and also a fair amount of relationships, that the word cute wasn’t exactly considered flattering, but he thought it should be.

  What made her so attractive that he couldn’t tear his eyes off her? He hadn’t a clue.

  “Dinner?” she repeated, pushing those huge glasses closer to her eyes. “Melissa’s hungry.”

  “Sure. What are you making?”

  She gave him a long, baleful look. “I wasn’t offering to make it.”

  “Oh.” The radio at his elbow switched from good old-fashioned rock music to the news.

  “And on the celebrity front,” the announcer said. “It’s rumored that Princess Carlyne Fortier has gone AWOL. Her grandfather denies this, claiming his granddaughter has merely left for a private vacation, but for the first time in ten years the princess didn’t attend the International Muscular Dystrophy fund-raiser, held last night in D.C.”

  Carlyne let out a sound of annoyance, so Sean turned the volume down. “Is it dinnertime already?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She glared at the radio, which continued to spit out the top-breaking story, very softly now.

  “Rumor has it she is close to a nervous breakdown from her heavy social schedule,” claimed the announcer, sarcasm in his voice. “Must be a tough life, folks, huh?”

  “He hasn’t a clue,” Carly muttered.

  Because she was obviously agitated, Sean flicked the radio off. “Uh, where were we?”

  She sighed. “Dinner.”

  “Yeah. To tell you the truth, I was kinda hoping you could cook.” Sean tried his most charming smile.

  She merely arched an eyebrow, looking suddenly very aristocratic. “Was cooking in my job description?”

  “Well, no.” His charming smile was clearly rusty—he hadn’t tried to charm a woman in a good long while. He was about to give wheedling a shot when the doorbell rang.

  His new nanny sent him a smile every bit as charming as his own—and just as manipulative. “I’ll make you a deal,” she said, already backing away. “I’ll get the door, you get dinner going.”

  “Not a fair trade,” he called, rising from his chair, listening as her laughter floated toward him.

  “First one to the door,” she called tauntingly.

  A challenge. He loved challenges. He raced down the hallway after her, enjoying the way her far-too-big skirt flew up, flashing him his second view of her legs. Why she wanted to hide them was a complete mystery.

  But then again, most women were mysteries.

  With his long strides, he could have easily overtaken her, but he got distracted by those legs, so she hit the front door a fraction of a second before he did. Whirling, she pressed her back to the wood, twisting to laugh at him.

  To stop his motion, his arms came out automatically, his hands landing on either side of her head to avoid crushing her against the wood.

  Both of them were laughing like little kids.

  Until his body brushed hers. Time stopped as he stared wide-eyed at her, stricken by the strange electrical current that ran through them.

  She seemed similarly conflicted.

  Being pressed against a woman wasn’t a new experience. Yes, it had been awhile, but not that long. Not long enough for him to be holding himself utterly still in order to get a better feel of all those warm curves he could feel beneath her clothes. And not just warm curves, but really great warm curves.

  Breasts smashed into his chest. Soft feminine hips pressed to his own. Not an inch of space between them. That combined with the real fact of already being attracted to her as a person caused a very base reaction, and she couldn’t have missed it.

  Her eyes went wide.

  Nope, she didn’t miss it. No more than he missed the way her nipples hardened to two tight tips, drilling through all her layers into his shirt.

  She felt amazing. Her mouth opened, but the only sound to escape was a little sigh he would have sworn was the sound of helpless awareness. Arousal.

  And he couldn’t help it. He lowered his head just a fraction, so his mouth nearly touched hers. She was a near stranger, but he needed to kiss her more than he needed his next breath. Given the way she angled her head and parted her lips, she felt the same way.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Slowly Sean pulled back, his chest, his belly, his thighs leaving hers reluctantly.

  She made that little sound again, the one that tugged at him so primally. Hardly able to think, he pulled open the door.

  Mrs. Trykowski, Slovak immigrant, next-door neighbor and local pest, brushed past him and marched right on in without being asked.

  The eighty-something woman was barely five feet tall, walked with a little skip in her step and had a voice like a truck driver’s. “Brought you some fruitcake,” she barked in the gravelly, heavily accented voice that assured everyone she’d been smoking like a fiend for over half a century.

  She brought Sean fruitcake on a regular basis. Not because he couldn’t feed himself, but because the woman had a curiosity streak a mile long.

  True to form, she craned her neck down the hallway, looking for new and exciting clues to his life.

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