Unsuitable

He blinked in surprise. “Do you seriously think that’s a reason not to love you?”

“No. Yes.” It should be easy to set him straight. “Yes. Not the number, but the fact we’re at different stages in our lives. I have a child.”

“I did notice that.” He kept a completely straight face.

She scrubbed hers with her open palms. How to make him understand? “I have a career.”

“What I do might not look like much to you, but it’s important to me.”

She dropped her head. That’s not what she’d meant. She didn’t mean to sound like a bitch. She didn’t want to insult him, just help him see this couldn’t be a permanent thing. “I’m sorry, that’s—”

“That’s reality. I get it. I don’t have much to offer. I wasn’t asking you to marry me.”

Her leg buckled and her hand shot out to steady herself. He was there. Taking her arm, holding her upright.

“If I thought you wouldn’t send me packing I’d be on my knees now.”

“Oh Reece.”

She stepped into his embrace. It would be so easy to let him love her all the way like that, let him make the family a forever thing. But it wasn’t right for him. And it terrified her. What if she let herself love him that way and in five years he was tired of it, raising someone else’s kid? In five years, in ten, the difference between their ages would be more pronounced. What if he wanted his own kid? Of course he would. She had no intention of having another baby and that would be a rank injustice to a man who loved kids like he did.

“Don’t cry. Please don’t cry, Audrey.”

For a person who’d describe herself as stoic, she’d cried a lot this year. It made her feel weak and powerless and she couldn’t afford to be either. She tried to turn away and Reece folded around her back, protecting her like the crumple zone of a car body. She had crushed him just as surely with her reaction as if she’d run into him with a road train, and yet he was saving her.

He pressed his cheek to hers. “We have this. We have now and I won’t press for more.”

She had to tell him. “I think I’m going to lose my job. They’re making cutbacks, redundancies. I left them with problems on my projects and I’m not senior enough to avoid being targeted.”

Into his steady breathing, his enveloping warmth, she told him the rest. “If it happens, it may take me a while to get a new job. Months, at least. I couldn’t keep you on as Mia’s nanny.”

She felt the muscles in his arms, across his chest harden.

“And if I can’t be Mia’s nanny then I can’t be in your life, is that what you’re saying?”

Was that the conclusion? Is that what she wanted? Reece gone entirely from their lives. She pivoted to face him, caught his face in her hands.

“I’m not saying that.”

The only way to fix this was to tell him she loved him, but did she love him, or the idea of him, the carer she wouldn’t have to pay, the family she’d employed instead of made?

“I’m not saying that. I don’t want you going anywhere. I didn’t even want to tell you.”

She sniffed back tears because that was the truth. “We’ll work the rest out.”

She pressed her lips, wet and too spongy to form a kiss against his. He had to trust her in this. She would find a way to keep her job or get a new one quickly. She

would find a way to keep him close and a definition of that closeness they could both live with.

“I’m hungry.”

Reece pulled away. He was sombre, a shade of emotion rare to him. “Nearly dinner time, Mia. How about a jigsaw puzzle before we eat?”

Mia hugged his leg, tipping her head back to look up at him. “Are you sad?”

He picked her up, set her on his hip. “A little bit.”

Audrey pressed her lips together hard. He was so much better at this than she was. She’d have denied it and Mia would’ve learned nothing but deception. The kind of thing she’d learned from Esther.