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“Look at me,” he whispered.

He pushed himself inside of me, slowly. So slow it was almost torturous. I felt every inch of him and by the time he was fully seated inside me, I was shaking.

“You feel….” His voice cracked. “You feel like coming home.”

He set a rhythm that was brutal and deep, yet tender, which was strange in the middle of all this hunger. My ankles locked behind his back and my fingers dug into his shoulders.

“Come for me,” he said against my lips. “Let me feel you, Rosie.”

My back arched and my nails raked down his shoulders as my orgasm ripped through me in waves. He drove forward one last time as my body clamped down around him. His entire body went taut, and he came with a groan, saying my name again and again, each time quieter and more ruined. When he stopped, my name was only a breath.

I sat back and took a drink of my latte. Page one hundred and forty-seven was the hottest thing I’d ever written, and Everett directly inspired it. I saved the document, and read it over again, my face going hot by the time I’d finished.

My editor had emailed about the beginning of the manuscript I’d sent her earlier in the week. She told me that the changes I’d made to the story were amazing and that whatever had caused those changes, to keep it up.

If only she knew it was a six-foot-two tech mogul with silver hair and a chip on his shoulder the size of a country was the one responsible. But there was no way I could tell her that. I left my laptop open on the counter and went to find Sophie. I knew Everett would find it, because that was our game now. I wrote, I left the computer open, and he read it. It was the most elaborate form of foreplay I’d ever experienced, especially with scenes like this.

Sophie had mentioned she wanted help to pick out a photo to put in the frame she got for Everett and to continue working on the Lego dinosaur after her show. So first, we spent two hours on the Lego velociraptor. She placed each piece with care. We sat with the instruction manual propped open between us and every few minutes she’d look up at me and smile.

“Ember?” she said, snapping a piece of the tail into place.

“Yes?”

“Do you think you’ll stay? Like, for a long time?”

I put the piece of Lego I was holding down and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the other nannies didn’t stay. Nanny Maria lasted two months, Nanny Karen lasted three weeks, and Nanny Beth cried in the bathroom every morning and left one afternoon at lunch and never came back. It’s okay, because I like you the best.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Soph,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

She went back to the velociraptor as if my word on the matter settled everything. I sat there with the piece of Lego in my hand, feeling the full weight of what I’d promised weighing on me.

I’d promised.

I never promised. That was the thing about me, the thing my friend Jules had diagnosed years ago with brutal honesty over a cheap bottle of wine. I was a serial leaver in all aspects of my life. Instead of figuring out a way to stay in school after my mom got sick, I gave up and left. I showed up for the families I worked with. The Smiths with their twin boys, the Clarks with their impossible toddler and the Martins where I’d only stayed for five months and ended up crying in the car after my last day. While I’d like to think it was the families that no longer needed me, the truth was when I got attached; I had to go. I showed up. I loved them hard for as long as I could, and I left. Every single time. I left before they could need me less, before the kids outgrew me, and before the parents remembered I was staff and not family. It was my way of protecting my heart.

I never promised I’d stay because leaving first was the only thing I’d been good at, and here I was promising Sophie I’d stay. I’d messed up. I knew already that when I left this family, it wouldn’t be like the others. It wouldn’t be a clean break. It would be a crater. I imagined Sophie’s face crumbling the way I’d seen it crumble when she spoke of the other nannies. I didn’t even want to think about what it would do to Everett. I could imagine the walls he’d allowed to come down would slam back into place, thicker this time, because he’d been right all along. People leave.

There was no way I could be another person who left them.

However, staying meant trusting that I could have this. That was another brutal truth Jules had discovered that night. I was afraid of allowing myself to experience love, and I was deathly afraid that the universe would yank things away the second I stopped holding them at arm’s length. Was it even possible that a twenty-six-year-old nanny who wrote romance novels could build something real with a forty-two-year-old widower who’d already lived a whole life when I hadn’t started yet?

He’d had an entire chapter of his lift close and had learned the specific gravity of watching someone you love die.

I had absolutely nothing to compare that to.

The gap between us was so much bigger than our ages, it was experience. I was still trying to figure out who I was when I wasn’t taking care of my mom or someone else’s family.

Sophie sat beside me, snapping Lego pieces into place, humming a song I didn’t recognize. I was staying, and I was terrified.

“Do you want to pick out that picture now?” I asked, needing a distraction from my own thoughts.

“I already asked Daddy to print it,” she said, without looking up.