His Curvy Nanny

Chapter 4: Watching

GRANT’S POV

I noticed things about Amara Johnson that I had no business noticing.

The way she hummed under her breath while she made breakfast, some tune I didn't recognize, unbothered by the fact that anyone might hear her. The way she crouched down to Ezra's eye level every single time he spoke to her, never once making him feel small for being quiet. The particular, unhurried patience she had with Elijah's endless questions why is the sky blue, why do we have to sleep, why can't dogs talk answering each one seriously, like it mattered, like he mattered.

I told myself I was simply a man paying attention to how his children were being cared for. Due diligence. Nothing more.

It was, mostly, a lie.

Business had been slow to pull my focus that week, a merger stalling out longer than projected, my partner Marcus Reid leaving increasingly irritated voicemails about a deal that was supposed to have closed by now. I sat in my study most evenings, laptop open, half-listening to the muffled sounds of bath time and bedtime stories drifting down the hall, and found myself getting less work done than usual.

"You're distracted," Marcus said bluntly, over a video call one afternoon. "You've read that clause three times, and you're still asking me the same question."

"I'm fine," I said, which was, at best, an oversimplification.

"Is this about the divorce?" Marcus had known me long enough to ask things like that without preamble. "Vanessa causing trouble again?"

"No." Not yet, anyway. "It's the boys. New nanny. Adjustment period."

Marcus raised an eyebrow, the way he did when he suspected there was more to a story than he was being told, but mercifully let it go. I wasn't ready to examine, let alone explain to anyone else why the "adjustment period" seemed to consist mostly of me finding excuses to be in whatever room Amara happened to occupy.

That Thursday, I came home earlier than usual, catching the tail end of what appeared to be a full-blown pillow fort construction project taking over my previously immaculate living room. Couch cushions stacked into precarious towers, blankets draped over dining chairs, both boys shrieking with laughter as Amara directed the whole operation like a general commanding troops.

"Structural integrity is important," she was saying, seriously, to Elijah, who was attempting to balance my lamp, an actual antique, atop the tallest cushion tower. "That's not structural. That's a hazard."

"It's the flag!" Elijah protested. "Every fort needs a flag!"

"Find a flag that isn't breakable," Amara said, and Elijah, after a beat of consideration, apparently decided this was reasonable and abandoned the lamp in favor of a sock.

I stood in the doorway, unnoticed for a long moment, watching. My house, my carefully ordered, professionally decorated, magazine-perfect house, looked like an actual home for once. Chaotic and lived-in and loud in a way I hadn't let myself want in longer than I could admit.

"Dad!" Ezra spotted me first, delight lighting up his face in a way that still, eighteen months into single fatherhood, caught me off guard every time. "Come see the fort!"

"I don't think there's room for me in there," I said, crouching to inspect the structure properly.

"There's always room," Amara said, not looking up from where she was reinforcing a wobbling section with an extra couch cushion, and something about the easy certainty in her voice landed somewhere in my chest I wasn't prepared for.

I ended up sitting cross-legged on my own living room floor for the better part of an hour, half-inside a blanket fort that Elijah insisted needed "at least one grown-up guard," listening to my sons narrate an increasingly elaborate story about dragons and knights that Amara participated in with the kind of full, unselfconscious commitment I hadn't managed since I was a child myself.

At one point, reaching past me to hand Ezra another cushion, her arm brushed mine briefly, accidental, gone before either of us could really register it, and I felt it anyway, a small jolt of awareness that lingered long after the moment passed.

I caught her eye across the fort a second later. Just for a beat. Long enough to see something flicker there too surprise, maybe, or the same inconvenient awareness I was trying and failing to suppress before she looked away first, focusing very intently on straightening a blanket that didn't need straightening.

This is not something you get to want, I reminded myself, for what felt like the hundredth time since she'd walked into my house.

I was starting to suspect I didn't believe that anymore, either.