Page 51 of Mountain Men’s Nanny

“I’m okay.” A choked-up laugh rippled out of him. Sad and dead. “You need to hear this. I want you to hear this.”

His eyes had become glossy, but he didn’t cry. He simply refused to, so I did it for him. A tear slid down my cheek. I imagined him skiing down frantically, watching his wife, the mother of his child, go toward her death. He was helpless. There was nothing he could do.

“She hit a tree on her way down, but the final blow was from the rock she landed on.” Tobias turned away from me, his chest rising and falling quickly. “There was nothing I could do, no doctor I could pay to save her. She left me. She left Lexi to grow up without her.”

I sat frozen in my chair, holding my breath. I was caught in his grief and overwhelmed by it in a way that made me finally understand his need for control. If he could predict what would happen, he could stave off the threat of another heartbreak.

“I couldn’t get over that in the house we had built together. Living with all her things in there to remind me of her. I couldn’t raise Lexi in a world full of danger and idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. So I had to walk away.”

“I can’t imagine how you feel,” I said, dabbing my eyes.

He gave me a bitter smile. “That’s probably a good thing. It’s the worst feeling. I just want you to know me, to understand. When you climbed up on the roof that day…”

“You saw her falling again,” I said, finishing his sentence.

Tobias shook his head. “No. I saw you falling.”

I blinked. I thought I understood what he was going to say, but I was wrong.

“Within days, I already knew how happy Lexi was around you. There was something about you that made me want to protect you. It almost drove me mad,” he laughed.

“Almost?” I asked. “You were livid! I swear you were foaming at the mouth.”

“Okay, okay,” he raised his hands in surrender. “So now you understand how I feel about you. I didn’t think it was possible to see another woman that way, but you changed that. I love you, Brie. And even though I don’t think I can explain it as clearly as I wish I could, I want you to understand just how much.”

The intimacy we had built started to fray. Tobias opened up to me. He was vulnerable, and even though he knew how I felt, he was setting me up to break his heart.

“And I love you too,” I said, already anticipating the blowout that would come not only for me, but for Gunner and Gideon too.

We had barely recovered from Tobias’s mood this morning, but more than anything, I didn’t want to mess up the relationship we had, even if it wasn’t a conventional one.

“I know you don’t want to settle down into the drag of monogamy. Everything you want goes against everything I have ever known about love and myself.” Tobias’s voice was rising, passion taking him over.

He stared at me earnestly. My heart pounded in my throat as I waited for the other shoe to drop. I stared back at him, wanting to commit this to my memory before I had to ruin it all. Another rejection would be the end.

“I know you won’t change your mind. What I didn’t expect was to love you anyway. I still want you. If I can’t have you on my terms, I’ll have you on yours,” Tobias confessed.

25

The Calm Before The Storm

~

Brie

For once, everything was settled. The wind had stopped, the tension was diffused, and no one needed me to play nurse.

I walked into the main room feeling light. Lexi sat reading the news out loud from Tobias’s laptop.

“Extreme weather conditions expected in the northeastern part of the US with snowfall predicted at 3ft and winds higher than 35 mph,” she read seriously. “What’s mph?”

“Miles per hour,” Gunner explained. “It means the wind will be blowing very hard and very fast.”

I looked out the window, and it was calm outside. Still a little cold, still a blanket of snow on the ground, on the roof, and on the trees, but no sign of a blizzard. Nothing as extreme as what Lexi had just read.

“Don’t let the calm fool you. This is where the saying ‘the calm before the storm’ comes from,” Gunner said, taking my coffee cup from Gideon and giving it to me.

I took a sip and warmed my hands against the mug. The smell of cinnamon and warm spices that Gideon added to the oatmeal filled the kitchen and spread into the living room. He was learning, no more bland breakfasts. I was learning too. We used fewer ingredients and better seasonings. The unpredictable weather made stocking up on food harder. Another trip into town was not on the cards for a while, so we would have to make do with what we had.