I Nannied for a Widower Who Plays a Voicemail Meant for Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Wrong Number
Bridie explains she never checked her voicemail; Jude breaks down in the kitchen, they kiss against the counter, and his daughter catches them on the stairs.
Jude's hand stayed around my wrist while I told him.
I told him I'd had that number for three years and given it up last June.
I told him that in the first month a dentist and a pharmacy had called it for a woman named Nora, and I'd said wrong number to every one of them.
"Nora," he said.
His voice went flat and careful.
"Callie talked about a Nora from college once.
"It was near the end, when the medicine had her half asleep.
"She said, 'I should call Nora.'
"I asked who Nora was.
"She said, 'Nobody. Never mind.' "
He let go of my wrist and sat down hard at the kitchen table.
"I asked everyone.
"Her sister in Arizona, her cousins, the foundation people.
"Nobody knew a Nora."
"I never played it," I said.
He looked up.
"The voicemail.
"I don't listen to voicemail, I never have.
"If she left it on my phone, it sat in a box with forty others until the carrier wiped them.
"I'm sorry."
It came out smaller than I meant.
I stood in the middle of his kitchen in my socks, holding a sentence I couldn't make big enough.
Jude pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
When he took them away he was almost smiling, and it was the worst thing I'd seen all day.
"Twenty months I thought it went to nobody," he said.
"I thought she was talking to a dead line, and nobody ever heard a word.
"Now it went to a girl in a sweatshirt who ignored her voicemail."
"That's not funny," I said.
"No, it isn't," he said.
He laughed anyway, once, rough and short, and then his face broke open.
He didn't make any sound.
His shoulders shook, and his hands came down on the table, and I crossed that kitchen before I decided to.
I put my hands on either side of his face.
His beard was soft over the hard line of his jaw, and his skin was hot and wet.
"Hey," I said.
"Look at me."
He looked up, eyes red and open, and I didn't know what the man in front of me wanted.
Then he put his hands on my hips and pulled me between his knees.
He rested his forehead against my stomach, through the sweatshirt, and I felt him breathe in.
I slid my fingers into his hair.
It was thick and dark and going silver at the temples.
"I'm sorry," he said into the fabric.
"You've worked here six hours."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine.
"You came down here in your socks to find out why your boss is a lunatic, and I'm crying on you."
"You're not a lunatic."
I tilted his head back with two fingers under his chin.
"You're the only person I've ever heard of who called a dead number for twenty months because she asked."
His gray-green eyes held mine, and something in the room changed.
His hands tightened on my hips.
I knew that look.
It was the one that comes right before somebody does something.
I could have stepped back.
I didn't.
I bent down and kissed him.
It was a short, soft kiss with the salt of his face in it, and he went completely still.
Then a sound came up out of his chest, low and starved, and he stood up out of the chair and took over.
His hands went into my hair.
My back met the edge of the counter, and his mouth opened mine and he kissed me like he'd been waiting to be asked.
He tasted of coffee and tears and something warmer underneath.
I grabbed fistfuls of his thermal.
He was solid all the way down, a wall with a heartbeat, and my knees went.
His hand slid under my sweatshirt and found the bare skin at my waist.
His palm was huge and scarred and rough, and it spread across my ribs, slow, learning me.
"Bridie," he said against my mouth.
"Yes."
"Tell me you want this."
"I want it," I said.
His mouth dragged down my jaw to my throat.
I felt his teeth, careful, and his beard, and then his open mouth on the pulse under my ear.
I arched into him, and my hand went to the back of his neck.
"You're twenty-five," he said roughly.
"You're forty," I said.
"I'm your boss."
"Then you should have said so before you put your hand up my shirt."
He laughed against my neck, and his hand slid higher.
A stair creaked.
We froze, his palm just under my bra, his mouth on my throat.
Another creak, and a small voice said, "Daddy?"
Jude's hand left my skin.
He stepped back and turned, shoving his hair off his forehead, and I tugged my sweatshirt down with shaking fingers.
At the bottom of the staircase stood a little girl in dinosaur pajamas, with a stuffed rabbit hanging from one fist.
Posy Maddox looked at her father, then at me, then at the dark window.
"Why is the nanny in the kitchen?" she asked.
"She couldn't sleep," Jude said, and his voice came out almost steady.
Posy considered that.
"The lady on the monitor woke me up," she said.
"I know, bug."
He scooped her onto his hip, rabbit and all, and she put her head on his shoulder and watched me over it.
"Is the nanny going to call her back?" she asked.
Jude stopped with one foot on the first stair.
He looked back at me, and the whole question was in his face.
"Tomorrow night," he said quietly, "after she's asleep.
"If you still want to."
I didn't have to think.
"I will," I said.
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