She found her voice. “Get out!”
The flags of livid, burning color high on his cheekbones told her he wasn’t immune to her nakedness. Strangely enough that knowledge gave her the confidence she needed to sit upright in the bath.
If he wanted to ogle, let him damn well look.
Candace was pretty sure her body would hold no surprises that he hadn’t seen before. And she would have another reason to detest him when he feasted his eyes on her.
But instead of leering, Nick retreated to the doorjamb. “Get dressed,” he muttered, jerking his eyes back up to hers, his color high. “I want to talk to you.”
“It will have to wait until I’ve finished my soak.”
Two long strides across the expanse of polished black-slate tiles and he was looming over her. “This can’t wait.”
The bathroom that had seemed so decadently glamorous only minutes earlier was now suffocatingly intimate.
“I want you out of here.” Candace hoped she didn’t sound as shaky as she felt. “You’re my employer and I’m entitled to some privacy.”
When Nick bent forward, Candace tensed, snapping, “Do you want me to file a suit for sexual harassment?”
Then her breath rushed out her lungs as he scooped her out of the bath. Shocked by his action, she stared up at him. He was plastered against her, the water from her body streaming down his shirt. Their gazes clashed. Beneath his anger she detected a maelstrom of other pent-up emotions—heat and turbulence and a host of indefinable nuances that were impossible to read.
Candace decided the wisest course of action right now might be silence. Nick looked fit to explode.
He stepped back, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her, pushing the edges into her nerveless hands.
“No harassment, see?” he snarled.
His actions had paralyzed Candace. “You can’t just walk in here and—”
“This is my house. I can do exactly as I please. You have ten minutes—that should give you time to dry yourself off and change.” Over his shoulder he tossed, “Don’t make me come and fetch you. I’ll be waiting for you in my study.”
Nick halted outside Candace’s closed bedroom door, his head in turmoil.
His ordered existence had been turned inside out. All that he’d thought was true…wasn’t. And the only person who could give him the answers he sought was naked, only one flimsy wall separating them.
God.
Nick broke into a sweat all over again as the unwanted memory of the pearlescent gleam of Candace’s wet, naked flesh flashed through his mind. He’d been tempted to strip off his clothing and get naked with her. Only her timely reminder that he was her employer had stopped him.
It had been hard enough to keep his imagination reined in before; now that he’d actually seen what previously he’d only fantasized about, his body was going into overdrive.
Yet everything had been complicated by the incomprehensible discovery he’d made. Candace wasn’t his daughter’s nanny…nurse, he amended. Candace was Jennie’s mother.
Nick didn’t understand it. The situation was too surreal to absorb. How had Jilly come to have Jennie? And what had happened to the baby his wife had been carrying? The baby who had been created at the Namkhet Island clinic.
He’d watched Jilly’s body changing. Every time he returned from an overseas trip sourcing products, or returned from a visit to one of the cross-country garden centers, her pregnancy had advanced. The baby had been born while he was overseas.
Had there been a switch? So where was Jilly’s baby? Or had the baby died? Was there something wrong with it? Where was it? And then when had Jilly arranged for Candace to be impregnated? Or had Candace already been pregnant and sold her child?
That was the scenario he liked least of all.
But Nick was struggling to make sense of it all. His feet had carried him outside the nursery. Softly he pushed the door open and went in.
Jennie was lying in her crib, in some kind of white jumpsuit with pink ears on the hood.
Nick found himself grinning down at her, and for the first time since the unwelcome call from his doctor, the coiled tension that had him strung tighter than a bow started to unwind.
“Ears…?” He shook his head. “Who on earth designed ears for the top of a baby’s head? You’re not a rabbit!”
Jennie flapped her arms, and Nick could’ve sworn her eyes gleamed with humor. He bent close to her and whispered, “I never understood why Jilly was so desperate for a baby—” Nick broke off and gulped “—until I met you.”
It was a life-changing admission.
Only now, almost too late, was he coming to realize how much Jennie meant to him. He’d resented her. She’d underlined the emptiness in his life: the wrong wife, the wrong life. It had taken the realization that he might lose the baby to realize that he wanted another chance.