At His Service: Nanny Needed: Hired: Nanny Bride / A Mother in a Million / The Nanny Solution. Cara Colter

      Love.

      Her hand touched his face, stroked, comforting.

      “You didn’t want to,” Dannie guessed softly. “Oh, Joshua.”

      He glanced at her through the golden light of the dying fire. She was looking at him intently, as if she was holding her breath. Her hand was still on his cheek. He could turn his head just a touch and nibble her thumb. But it would be wrong. A lie. Trying to distract them both from the real intimacy that was happening here, and from her deepest secret, which he had just seen in her eyes.

      “No, I didn’t want to. I guess I wanted what I’d had before, a family to call my own again, that feeling. I cannot tell you how I missed that feeling after Mom and Dad died. Of belonging, of having a place to go to where people knew you, clean through. Of being held to a certain standard by the people who knew you best and knew what you were capable of.”

      He was shocked by how much he had said, and also shocked by how easily the words came, as if all these years they had just waited below the surface to be given voice.

      “What happened to the baby?” Dannie asked quietly.

      “Sarah didn’t want to be tied down. She wasn’t ready to settle down. I considered, briefly, trying to go it on my own, as a single dad, but Sarah thought that was stupid. A single dad, just starting in life, when all these established families who could give that baby so much stability and love were just waiting to adopt? My head agreed with her. My heart—”

      He stopped, composing himself, while she did the perfect thing and said nothing. He went on, “My heart never did. Some men could be unchanged by that. I wasn’t. I couldn’t even finish school. I tried to run away from what I was feeling. I had abandoned my own son to the keeping of strangers. What kind of person did a thing like that?

      “I traveled the world and developed an aversion for places that catered to families. Wasn’t there anywhere a guy like me could get away from all that love? I kind of just fell into the resort business, bought a rundown hotel in Italy, started catering to the young and hip and single, and became a runaway success before I knew what had hit me.”

      Her hand, where it touched his cheek, was tender. It felt like absolution. But he knew the truth. She could not absolve him.

      Silence for a long, long time.

      And then she said, “Funny, that your company is called Sun. If you say it, instead of spell it, it’s kind of like you carried him with you, isn’t it? Your son. Into every single day.”

      That was the problem with showing your heart to someone like Dannie. She saw it so clearly.

      And then she said, “Have you considered the possibility that what you did was best for him? That he did get a family who were desperate for a child to love? Who could give him exactly what you missed so much after your parents died?”

      “On those rare occasions that I allow myself to think about it, that is my hope. No, more than a hope. A prayer. And I’m a man who doesn’t pray much, Dannie.”

      “Have you ever thought of finding him?” she asked softly.

      “Now and then.”

      “And what stops you?”

      “How complicated it all seems. Just go on the Internet and type in adoption to see what a mess of options there are, red tape, legal ramifications, ethical dilemmas.”

      Dannie wasn’t buying it, seeing straight through him. “You must have a team of lawyers who could cut to the quick in about ten minutes. If you haven’t done it, there’s another reason.”

      “Fear, then, I guess,” he said, relieved to make his truth complete, wanting her to know who he really was. Maybe wanting himself to know, too. “Fear of being rejected. Fear of opening up a wanting that will never be satisfied, searching the earth for what I can’t have or can’t find.”

      “Oh, Joshua,” she said sadly, “you don’t get it at all, do you?”

      “I don’t?” He had told her his deepest truth, and though the light of love that shone in her eyes did not lessen, her words made him feel the arrow of her disappointment.

      A woman like Dannie could show a man who was lost how to find his way home. Like being in a family, she would never accept anything but his best. Like being in a family, she would show him how to get there when he couldn’t find his way by himself.

      For the first time in a very, very long time, the sense of loneliness within him eased, the sense that no one really knew him dissipated.

      “When you gave your son up for adoption, it wasn’t really about what you needed or wanted, Joshua,” she said gently. “And it isn’t now, either. It’s about what he needs and wants. What if he wants to know who his biological father is?”

      And suddenly he saw how terribly self-centered he had always been. He had become more so, not less, after he had walked away from his baby seven years ago. He had layered himself in self-protective self-centeredness.

      And he was so glad he had not taken that kiss with Dannie to where it wanted to go.

      Because he had things he needed to do, roads he needed to travel down, places he needed to visit. Places of the heart.

      For a moment, sitting here by the fire, exchanging laughter and confidences, eating off the same spoon, slurping spaghetti, he had thought it felt like homecoming.

      Now he saw he could not have that feeling, not with her and not with anyone else, not until he had made peace with who he was and what he had done.

      A long time ago he had given his own flesh and blood into the keeping of strangers. He had tried to convince himself it was the right decision. He had rationalized all the reasons it was okay. But in the back of his mind, he had still been a man, self-centered and egotistical, knowing that child would have disrupted his plans and his life and his dreams.

      Ironically, even after he’d made the decision that would supposedly set him free, he had been a prisoner of it.

      Dannie had seen that right away. Sun. Son.

      A nibbling sense of failure, of having made a mistake in an area where it really counted, had chased him, and chased him hard. He had barely paused to catch a breath at each of his successes before beginning to run again. He had lost faith in himself because of that decision.

      And no amount of success, money, power or acquisition had ever absolved him.

      But Dannie was right. It was about the child, not about him. If he found out if his boy was okay, then would the demons rest? If he was able to put the needs of that babe ahead of his own, then was he the man worthy of what he saw in Dannie’s eyes?

      Joshua realized when he had come back into this cabin, after Michael had roared away in the motorboat, leaving them here together until morning, he had thought his mission was to get her to trust him again, the way she had when she had told him about her disastrous nonrelationship with the college professor. The way she had when she had told him about a wedding gown that she had spent all her money on and that she would never wear.