Broken French: A widowed, billionaire, single dad romance by Natasha Boyd (books like beach read txt) 📕

It was probably the closest to an apology for our rocky start as I was going to get.

I nodded but wasn’t sure he saw me. “Of course,” I whispered. “And I’m sorry I reacted so strongly.”

He seemed to take my words in, and then without responding headed toward the door and vanished through the opening to his cabin.

I waited for the sound of him closing his door and instead heard his bathroom door close and the distant sound of running water. Then it opened and I listened to the sound of clothing being removed and the soft rustle of sheets. Was he going to sleep with his cabin door open too? I supposed as a concerned parent he would.

I lay awake for what felt like hours, straining to hear his breathing. It struck me how oddly intimate it was for us all to be sleeping separately, but yet all sleeping with no closed doors between us in such close quarters.

Chapter Twelve

XAVIER

I threw my pen down on the report I was trying to annotate in disgust after reading the same paragraph four times and ran my finger around my already loose collar.

I felt the itch of this Josephine Marin under the collar of my shirt like a sunburn. I was used to the au pairs from the agency being plain and no nonsense. They were sweet, mostly personality-less, and easily blended into the background. As they should.

It wasn’t as though I needed a plain nanny. I’d never been the type for that to be a problem, unlike some of the men I knew—my father being one of them, the old dog. I hadn’t picked the agency based on the nondescript looks of the childcare professionals. But Tabitha Mackenzie had always sent really fantastic professionals with endless amounts of patience, and who were much more sensible than beautiful. As long as Dauphine was safe and well-cared for, looks had nothing to do with it. Maybe some of them had been pretty, but I’d certainly never noticed.

But now … now it was a different story.

My first meeting with Josephine Marin yesterday had me second-guessing the decision from the instant I saw her. I knew immediately that she’d been the woman who’d stumbled into my video call with Tabitha. Who I was ashamed to admit to myself I may have also thought about again, in graphic detail, that night in the shower. I’d almost put her back on the train right then. I couldn’t even remember how to speak English properly. Me. A man who’d gotten his degree from the London School of Economics. My English was usually flawless. Evan was going to have a field day with me, since he’d witnessed the whole thing. As it was, he’d given me massive side-eye the whole drive to the boat. It was like he knew she’d knocked me for six. Her green-gray eyes seemed to shoot straight into my soul.

Something about Josephine Marin messed with the carefully ordered equilibrium I’d honed over the last few years, like a faint earth tremor along a catastrophic fault-line. The kind that made my hair stand on end. And last night when she’d tried to quit … well, I wasn’t going to even admit to myself that her tirade and the way she’d stuck up for herself had been like a blunt force awakening of my libido, so there was no point thinking about it. If it had been anyone else reacting like that I’d have been glad they quit. But for some reason I’d found that unacceptable.

As much as I’d sort of encouraged her to stay, I realized now after a long night of barely any sleep that she was far too dangerous. I should send her home. I had to send her home.

I pressed the intercom button in the master stateroom where I was using the desk while on board. “Evan? See me in my office please?”

Minutes later Evan appeared at the door.

I waved him in from the desk where I’d been trying to concentrate for the last two hours to no avail.

“I have the tender ready to take you ashore as soon as you’re ready,” he informed me.

“Bon.” I raked my hand through my hair.

“Are you ready for the meeting?” he asked.

Meeting?

Oh, yes. Meeting. I absently looked at all the final chemistry reports, the results of which would win our company a billion dollar contract if we could secure the final round of funding for production. I could pay for it myself, but it was always a good idea to spread risk. My company had been working for years on a special film-like paper that could record the technological knowledge and code languages of the world without deteriorating. We’d gotten it to where it could survive extremes of heat and cold for, we believed, two thousand years in the event of cataclysm. Which, let’s face it, with the way we were treating the planet, was bound to happen sooner rather than later. Every government needed it. So did every corporation, to protect their knowledge and survive. But the reports on my desk weren’t my primary concern right now. “This situation with the new girl is not going to work. She can’t stay,” I said instead, leaning forward on my desk.

“I’m sorry. Excuse me?”

“The au pair,” I explained, picking up my pen and waving it dismissively. “Nanny, or whatever.”

Evan smirked.

“What is that?” I made a motion at his face.

“That’s me smiling at seeing you so ruffled.”

“Ruffled.” I stabbed the table with my pen and slid my fingers down to the point before flipping it on its end and doing the same again. Slide, flip, stick, slide, flip, stick.

“Wound up,” he elaborated.

I blinked at him. Slide. Flip. Stick.

He rolled his eyes. “You finally realized your male equipment might not be dead?”

The pen flew through the air, smacking him in the forehead. “I could fire you for that. Don’t think because I’ve known you practically my whole life