The Ceo's Nanny Affair. Joss Wood

opened her mouth to utter a very snarky comment, but he spoke first. “Ellie is crying.”

      Tate blinked, trying to make sense of his words. Who? What? Where?

      “The baby is crying, Tate. You need to go to her.”

      Through the monitor on the dining table Tate heard Ellie’s soft wail, heard the desolation in her muffled cry, and she snapped back to the here and now. Oh, God, the poor thing sounded like her heart was breaking. How long had she been crying? Minutes? An hour? Longer? How long had she and Linc kissed? She couldn’t tell, she’d lost all sense of time, and of reality.

      Oh, my God... She almost lost her freaking mind. She’d been a heartbeat away from asking her sister’s ex to do her on the kitchen counter!

      What must he think?

      And more important, what must Ellie think? Did she think that Tate had abandoned her just like her mother? Not wanting to make the little girl wait another minute, Tate whirled away from Linc and sprinted for the stairs.

      Yes, she was desperate to get to Ellie, but honesty made her admit that she was equally desperate to get away from Linc. She had absolutely no control of herself around him, and she thanked God for Ellie’s interruption. And for his keen ears because she hadn’t heard a damn thing.

      She’d been deaf, dumb, blind with lust for him...

      It was a very good thing, Tate thought as she sprinted up the stairs, that she was leaving tomorrow.

       Four

      Linc, after a night short on sleep and long on aggravation, hustled Shaw through his morning routine, trying not to think about the fact that he’d been so close to taking his ex’s sister on the kitchen counter the night before. He’d been desperate to know if she was as hot and honeyed as he expected, and his hands had been in her pants, about to push the fabric over her hips, when he’d heard Ellie crying. Would he have stopped if she’d slept through?

      Possibly. Maybe. Not a chance in hell.

      In his bedroom, Linc muttered a curse as he pulled on his shoes. What the hell happened last night? Yeah, he was horny; it had been a while since he’d last got lucky, but, crap, he never lost control like that. Even as a teenager and at his craziest with Kari, he’d never felt so desperate for a woman, so utterly and incomprehensibly caught up in pleasure.

      And the fact that he felt this way about his ex’s sister just pissed him off. Bloody Harper women. They had a way of turning his life upside down and inside out. But, he was compelled to admit, he hadn’t, not once, thought of Kari when he’d been kissing Tate. Thank God, because this situation was weird enough without getting them confused.

      And thank God again that Tate was leaving today because he didn’t know if he could spend another night tossing and turning and talking himself out of the urge to go to her room and finish what they’d started.

      The sooner Tate left, the better. The world could then stop trying to spin off its axis.

      She was the exact opposite of the woman he thought that he and Shaw might someday want. On those odd times when he wished that his life had turned out differently, he fantasized about a sexy, funny stay-at-home mother and lover, someone who adored Shaw. Someone who’d put him and his son at the center of her world, someone he’d trust to stay with him, surfing the waves of life with him and never swimming away.

      If he ever got to that place where he felt he could trust again, risk again, Linc knew that he’d want someone who believed in traditions, in order, someone who could fit into his life and who looked the part. He wanted a woman who was easy, and he wanted calm, a lake and not a storm-swept sea.

      Tate was exactly what he didn’t want or need. She’d create waves and whirlpools, the turbulence he tried to avoid at all costs in his personal life. The woman didn’t have a conventional bone in her body; her clothes were bohemian, and, according to Kari, they’d had an unstable upbringing. Tate was a modern-day nomad, a free spirit, innately unconventional.