Hot & Heavy in Paradise: Single Dads Collection

VOLUME ONE: FALLING FOR THE NANNY KHLOE THE PHONE HADN'T FINISHED its second ring before I swiped my finger across the screen and answered breathlessly. Damn clothing manufactures making women's pants that don't have pockets to store a phone. Thankfully, I was only a few feet away when the first ring happened, and I set a sprinting record in high school. Otherwise I might have missed the call that would change my life. "Is Khloe there?" A high-pitched woman asked on the other line. "I'm calling from Helping Hands." Yes! I did a little Napoleon Dynamite in my living room and it bit my bottom lip to stop from screaming in excitement. Only twenty-four hours on the job market and I got my first case. Or family. Or assignment. I didn't know what they were called yet, but I was determined to be the best damn nanny this town had ever seen so I'd learn the lingo, eventually. Let's hope they had a Wikipedia page or something. "This is Khloe and I am ready and willing for whatever you want to give me." Hopefully that didn't make me sound like an eager beaver, but even if it did, my mama always said the truth will set you free. Fingers crossed this time it would get me a cushy job. I needed money and did not have the boobs to be bouncing them around on The Strip for cash. Not that I had anything against women who did, but you needed something bigger than a B cup and the only way I was getting bigger involved plastic surgery, which cost money. The lack of money situation had already been established, so it was all a vicious cycle making the entire industry off limits. I didn't have the chest for a Vegas job, but I rocked the top bun like no other and I had more black clothing in my closet than all the drag queens in Vegas combined. I couldn't be a stripper, but I definitely had the skills to be a nanny for one of the rich and famous in Vegas. Given my luck, it probably be a mom who started out as a stripper, met a sugar daddy, and got to spend the rest of her life living it up in her mansion paying me to watch her kids so she got the biggest prenup payout possible. I did not fault that woman. "Do you think you can get there in the next forty minutes?" the woman on the phone asked, bringing me back to the reality where I missed all of her previous information about the job while doing my dance of celebration. Crap. I couldn't say I hadn't been listening to my very first job. My best friend Letty worked hard to get me the position at Helping Hands. Her boss, Tina, married the owner Ted who helped nannies and mannies find positions all over the county. If I messed up, I'd be eating noodles for dinner every night. "Of course, I'm ready to go." I'd figure out the small details later. "Do you know how to find the neighborhood?" she asked, sounding relieved to have a competent employee. Boy was she in for a surprise. Double crap. I'd missed the address? "Um, can you give me it one more time so I can make sure I got it right for my GPS?" She rattled off a street address, which I scribbled on a scrap piece of junk mail from my kitchen table. I don't want to say I was poor, but I didn't live in the high-rent district these people did. If traffic was right, I could get there in sixty minutes. Probably. "He'll be expecting you in forty minutes so please don't be late. As I said, this is an emergency case and we do our best to keep all of our paying customers satisfied." I nodded my head once even though she couldn't see. "Keep them extremely satisfied. Got it." We hung up, and I typed the address into my phone GPS. I waited as it calculated the distance at one hour and fifteen minutes. Triple crap. There would not be time to change into something more nanny-like if I needed to make it there in forty minutes. I'd need a miracle. With a quick prayer to God to keep the traffic under control, I grabbed the little black cardigan with Helping Hands embroidered in the left pocket area and made a mad dash to my car. "You are in charge, Teeny," I yelled back to my oversized Great Dane as he slumbered on his sofa. Yes, when you own a Great Dane, they get their own personal couch. Better than him thinking my lap was for him to sit on. I hit the light getting out of the neighborhood, but I hit my first jam at the on-ramp for the expressway. With no time to waste I veered to the right and drove on the shoulder, cutting off a few cars. I gave them a helpful wave as I passed. I wouldn't have to be breaking federal traffic laws if I hadn't lost my previous job as assistant to Mr. Parker Balls, one of the leading businessmen in Las Vegas. It should have been a cake job. Job duties included getting coffee and running copies, but nobody warned me the boss was the biggest jackass of anyone in Vegas. And trust me when I say that because the town was full of jackasses. Vegas made its fortunes as the number one jackass vacation destination in the world. Nothing I did was ever good enough. He couldn't have his coffee at 8 a.m. like anyone else in the working world. No, I needed to personally deliver it to his desk by 6 a.m. and then he wanted a top-off every forty-seven minutes. Yes, forty-seven minutes. Not forty-six minutes and not forty-eight minutes, and it didn't matter if the copier jammed when I was been halfway into a three-thousand-page report that he also wanted at the same time. I put up with it because the money was great even though my emotional stability crumbled by the day. The last straw came when he ordered a triple cream latte with four dashes of espresso topped off with a cinnamon stick. Not only would that have been enough to gag anyone, but of course it would taste disgusting. It wasn't my fault he had a horrible taste in caffeine. He should get it in the form of Coke like the rest of us. An employer can't hold his bad drink judgement against an employee. In my frustration I may have used my lunch hour to type up a scathing email about my dragon boss to my best friend Letty, except when I sent it to her I accidentally sent it to everybody in my contact list. Which at the time meant everybody in his contact list. Apparently, in the US they can fire you on the first offense if you're deemed to be grossly negligent. And calling your boss a fire-breathing dragon bastard without a heart falls into the category of negligence. There also may have been an unflattering p***s and Mr. Balls comment. Not that I'd seen it in person, but any logical person would assume he was overcompensating for something. Right? I mean, the man came to work every day in a stretch limo. He's fifty percent of the reason we have traffic problems in Vegas. No amount of buying carbon offsets would fix his bad personality. It would've been a tragic experience to begin with, but it was made even worse by the fact I found him so damn hot. Somebody so gorgeous shouldn't be so mean. He filled out a three-piece suit like an Abercrombie model who just hit puberty. The big silver chunky watch he wore on his wrist was hot-guy fodder. The way he flicked his watch up to time me on his coffee runs often caused a gleam of light to cast on his face in just the right way, leaving me drooling on the other side of his big wooden desk. It wasn't fair. Really. One little email with a few accurate representations, and I went from staring at my dream man every day to changing poopy diapers. But this was life, and we didn't always get what we deserved. With forty-one minutes on the clock, I pulled my little Toyota Camry into a glitzy neighborhood and my mouth hung open as I drove past all the excessive houses. These people had money. They drove sixty on the shoulder of a Vegas highway and didn't flinch at what the ticket would cost. This was true Vegas money. And I mean like wow money. Hell, it was money even for Vegas. I'd eaten one half of a pop tart this morning to save myself the grocery bill and these people were eating filet mignon instead of cereal. Oh well, money from one rich person spent just the same as another, and as long as I kept the children alive and got to cash my check at the end of the week, I would still consider myself rocking this adulthood business. 127 Mockingbird Lane showed up on the left-hand side of the road just as my GPS predicted, and I parked on the curb side not wanting to diminish the look of their mini mansion - never mind the house I'd been sent to work at wasn't just a mini mansion but three times bigger than mini - with the unwashed condition of my vehicle. The struggle to get there on time - well, I checked my clock at four minutes late - left my hair frazzled, and I re-secured my topknot and adjusted my Helping Hands cardigan as I walked to the front door. The gold oversized lion head knocker looked like a better choice over the doorbell and I rapped it twice hoping that Mrs. Whoever-she-was hadn't given birth to Satan's spawn. The door opened, not slowly like you'd expect when faced with future doom, but quickly, unveiling his presence in a big swoop. His gelled back hair looked the same as it had every day we worked together. His suit sat unbuttoned and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, but in the crook of one he held tight to his chest a half-naked blond-haired child. "You," I said, taking a step back in disbelief.