Tempestuous/Restless Heart (18 page)

two

WHAT A FACE! DANIELLE’S FIRST INSTINCT
was to grab her camera and capture it on film—even though she had given up taking portraits a year ago.

Twinkling black eyes stared at her from a face that was wide, strong, and utterly masculine. Faint laugh lines fanned out from his eyes as a smile tilted up one side of his black mustache. He had a solid square jaw and bold, aquiline nose. Danielle’s toes tingled. She’d always been a sucker for a man with a great jaw. A deep dimple in his left cheek revealed itself as his smile broadened. His even, white teeth flashed against his deeply tanned skin. The effect was enough to make a woman offer her services as a love slave.

His body wasn’t going to change her mind on the subject either. He had the build of a heavyweight boxer—broad shoulders and a thick chest. He wore a necktie, but the top button of his shirt was undone, as if he hadn’t been able to get the collar closed around his neck. Danielle would have bet her favorite Nikon that under his conservative white shirt and charcoal slacks this man was a veritable sculpture of muscle.

Her gaze drifted back to his face. “Let’s run away together.”

His dark eyes widened in surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind,” Danielle said dejectedly as a crashing sounded somewhere in the house behind her and reality returned with a vengeful rush. There were five little reasons she couldn’t fulfill her fantasy and one
big
reason. He had to be nearly ten years younger than she was and a hundred years younger than she felt. She couldn’t have run off with him: he would have had to push her in a wheelchair.

“I can’t leave the house,” she said flatly. “I’m waiting for a nanny—or the hardening of my arteries. Whichever comes first.”

“You’re Mrs. Hamilton?”

“
Miss
Hamilton,” she hastened to correct him. No sense in feeling more matronly than she already did in the face of all that youthful virility. “Danielle Hamilton.”

“Oh, I’m pleased to meet you.
Miss
Danielle Hamilton,” he drawled, his words tumbling out of his mouth lazily, all soft vowels and Cajun French inflection. He said her name as if he already knew her—intimately. His voice was like raw silk, at once rough and smooth. His eyes glittered like polished onyx.

Danielle’s toes curled against her fluorescent orange sandals. She wondered vaguely if anyone had ever formulated a theory on the voice as a sex organ. She could feel his every syllable stroking her senses. It was incredible and more than a little disturbing. She was a mature, experienced woman. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had turned her bones to marsh-mallow with nothing more than the sound of his voice.

Holding eye contact, he reached a wide hand through the bars of the security door. Danielle’s elegant hand inched forward to meet it tentatively, as if she wasn’t sure she could withstand the shock of touching him. Considering what his voice was doing to her internal temperature, she was liable to combust spontaneously if they touched.

“Remy Doucet,” he said, curling his fingers around hers. The left corner of his mouth tugged upward and his dimple deepened. “I’m your nanny,
chère
.”

Danielle stared at him in stunned disbelief. “I must be delirious,” she said at last with a twitter of hysterical laughter. “I thought you said you were my nanny.”

A delicious sexy grin spread across his face. “I am.”

“You are?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he said, his voice low and smoky.

Danielle shook her head, as if trying to come out of a trance. This devastating hunk of masculinity was a
nanny
?
Her
nanny? All she’d done was punch a phone number and someone had sent this piece of prime beef to her doorstep? Dial-A-Stud. What a concept!

She leaned heavily against the door frame as all sorts of illicit ideas sapped the strength from her knees. If he accepted the job, he would be in the house day and night—at Suzannah’s expense, Danielle thought, a malicious smile curving her wide mouth. She would be able to look at him whenever she wanted to. The trouble was, looking wasn’t the only thing her suddenly crazed hormones had in mind.

She thunked herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. Lord, she was getting the hots for the family nanny! She was fantasizing about having a handsome young man at her beck and call. What kind of depraved, nearly middle-aged person was she turning into? This was completely unacceptable behavior. She was Danielle Ingamar Hamilton, for heaven’s sake! She had dated princes. She had survived jungles and deserts and life in New York City. She was known the world over for her calm, cool demeanor in every circumstance.

“You did call for a nanny, didn’t you,
chère
?” Remy asked, his dark brows lifting.

“Sure I called for a nanny,” Danielle said, pulling herself together. She gave him a skeptical look. “But you’re not exactly what I had in mind, Mr…. ?”

“Doucet,”
he finished for her, his eyes flashing with a quick burst of Gallic temper. And this job wasn’t exactly what he had in mind either, lady. He was a geologist. But there wasn’t a lot of work for geologists in South Louisiana these days. Things had tightened up a few years back when the oil economy had gone belly-up. He’d still had a job then. But when Eagle Oil had been absorbed by the foreign corporate octopus Knox Amalgamated, just a year ago, corporate restructuring had left him with two alternatives—relocate to the Outer Hebrides or relocate to a new profession. He had tried the first. Now he was trying the second.

“What’sa matter,
chère
?” he said defensively. “You think a man can’t be a good nanny?”

“Well, no, I—”

He planted his hands at his waist and leaned forward aggressively. “You think a man would be a lousy nanny just ’cause he’s not a woman?”

“Um—I haven’t given the subject a great deal of thought, actually.”

He shook a thick finger at her through the bars of the security door. “You think I can’t be a nanny just ’cause I don’t have breasts?”

Danielle cast an appreciative look at the expanse of solid male pectorals straining the confines of the white dress shirt. “Believe me, Mr. Doucet,
I’m glad
you don’t have breasts. I can probably speak for all of womankind on that question.”

“There’s no rules against men being nannies, you know. A man can do this job just as well as a woman.” His words to his sister Annick had been more along the lines of “anyone could do it,” but he prudently decided to modify the statement slightly for his future employer.

“I’m sure you’re right.” At least Danielle wasn’t about to argue the point with him. By the look of him, she figured he could probably do anything he darn well wanted to. It was kind of sweet, really, that this incredibly macho-looking guy wanted to take care of children for a living. The idea touched her in a very private, very vulnerable part of her heart.

“So, you gonna let me in, or what, darlin’?” Remy asked with a sudden irrepressible grin. His flare of temper had passed as quickly as a summer cloudburst. He leaned a beefy shoulder beside the door, crossed his ankles and fanned himself with his hand. “It’s gettin’ hot out here.”

Not any hotter out there than it was inside her skin, Danielle thought, but she kept that little observation to herself. Remy Doucet struck her as a man who didn’t need a great deal of encouragement to be outrageously flirtatious.

She unlatched the security door and, with a sweep of her hand, stood back and motioned for him to come in. As he stepped past her, her mind searched frantically for a room they could go to that didn’t look like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. There wasn’t one. Since their parents’ departure the Beauvais offspring had reduced the showplace home to a shambles. They could have gone into the darkroom for the interview, but considering the man’s magnetism, that didn’t strike her as the brightest idea—appealing, yes, smart, no.

Remy glanced around the elegant entrance hall. Ivory silk moiré wallpaper, a chandelier of crystal prisms, a curving staircase that was like something out of
Gone With the Wind.
Nice. And despite the fact that the lady standing before him was obviously dead on her feet, there was an air of elegance about her from the top of her tousled blond head to the tips of her—fluorescent orange sandals? He frowned a bit at the footwear.

“We’ll go into the salon down the hall,” she said.
There’s no food on the walls in there.

Remy followed her down the hall, his appreciative gaze assessing his potential employer. She was tall, no more than a few inches shy of his own six feet, and built with the angular grace of a model. Svelte, but not skinny. Nice behind.
Really
nice behind. The kind of legs that haunted a man’s most erotic dreams. He wondered if they were as silky as they looked. He flexed his fingers at the thought of running them down those long limbs.

Hold it back, Remy, he warned himself, the lady’s gonna be your boss.

Well
, said the little devil on his shoulder,
lookin’s no sin.

As usual, he took the devil’s advice with a grin.

As they drew even with an archway a blast of rock music hit them with the force of a hurricane wind. Jeremy leaped out of the hall closet directly in front of Danielle, a nylon pulled down over his face, mushing his features grotesquely. Danielle shrieked and flung herself back up against the wall, banging into a narrow Louis XIV table and overturning a cobalt vase of fresh flowers. Tinks dashed out of the family room with a replica Uzi propped on her hip. She executed a neat shoulder roll and came up behind a startled Remy. Using his muscular legs for cover, she took blind aim at her brother and shot a staccato burst of grape Kool-Aid across the hall that left a wet purple trail on the floor.

Before Danielle could do anything more than holler their names, the marauders vanished out the front door. Her heart sank. There was little doubt in her mind Remy Doucet would now take his gorgeous body and his child-rearing skills and head straight back to the nanny agency from whence he had come. He had a rather shell-shocked look about him at the moment. As soon as he came around he would bid her adieu and vamoose like any sane, sensible person.

A sudden sense of panic gripped her. She didn’t want him to go. He was the only adult she’d been able to find who was brave enough or foolhardy enough to set foot inside the Beauvais house. What was she going to do if he took off? She would be left alone again with
the children.
Goose bumps raced over her flesh. The children would be left alone with
her.
The combination was toxic.

She leaned in the family room doorway and shouted at the top of her lungs. “Dahlia, turn that stereo down or you won’t live long enough to find out what ‘I Want Your Sex’ means!”

Dahlia flipped a knob on the stereo and sauntered toward her aunt with a smug look. She flipped her long copper hair back over her shoulder and said, “I already know.”

Danielle turned to Remy with a pained smile and gave him one of Suzannah’s most famous lines. “They’re such spirited children.”

Remy ducked his head and cleared his throat.

“Who’s the hunk?” Dahlia asked, eyeing him with outrageous audacity.

“I might be your new nanny,” Remy said, trying to look stern. He was fairly certain the nanny training manual would take a dim view of being amused by impudence.

Dahlia grinned. “Radical!”

Danielle turned the girl by the shoulders and nudged her back into the family room. “Why don’t you go browse the catalogs for training bras, dear?”

“I want the push-up kind. Like Madonna has.” Dahlia dropped to her knees and dug through the rubble on the coffee table for a catalog. “Molly Gerard’s mother ordered her one just like this.” She glanced up out of the corner of her eye to see how well her story was being received.

Danielle gave her a look. “Right. Nice try.”

Remy looked over the girl’s shoulder, his eyebrows bobbing up at the sight of a red lace bustier. He glanced askance at Danielle. “She’s got good taste.”

“Small consolation,” Danielle muttered dryly. “She may not live to make use of it.”

A floor above them a baby began to cry. The sound came in a kind of stereo effect, crackling over the monitor Danielle wore hooked to her beaded belt and wafting down the stairs. To her extreme horror, Danielle’s eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. She was exhausted. She was frustrated. She was secretly terrified of babies. Why, oh why had she let Suzannah talk her into this?

Biting her lip, she stepped past Remy with her head down, her hair shielding her face from his curious gaze. She took the stairs two at a time, her hand skimming up a mahogany banister that was dull with sticky fingerprints. She could hear Remy’s footsteps right behind her.

“How many are there altogether?”

“Five.”

His eyebrows shot up. She didn’t look like the mother of five. Nor did she seem particularly well equipped to deal with five children. But then this was a swanky part of town. Danielle Hamilton didn’t have to be well equipped for motherhood. All she needed to be able to do was dial the phone so she could hire someone else to handle the task. Anger flared through him. He was of the firm belief that people shouldn’t have kids if they didn’t know how to love and care for them.