The Lumberjack's Nanny: A Forbidden Romance (Rockford Falls Romance) Read online

  The Lumberjack’s Nanny

  A Forbidden Romance

  Natasha L. Black

  Copyright © 2021 by Natasha L. Black

  All rights reserved.

  The following story contains mature themes, strong language and sexual situations. It is intended for mature readers.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  My Fake Husband (Sample)

  A Note from the Author

  Books by Natasha L. Black

  Connect with Natasha L. Black

  Introduction

  Max needs to hire a nanny.

  I need money.

  It’s a perfect deal:

  1. Follow his (overprotective) rules.

  2. Take good care of Sadie.

  3. Walk away at the end of the summer.

  No problem!

  Right?

  There’s a big problem.

  I caught feelings for Max, the sexy lumberjack dad.

  Flirting turned into a secret affair.

  Now I’m carrying around more than a broken heart. I have a little secret that’s Max’s and mine.

  How can I go ahead with the deal and walk away, when I’m carrying his baby?

  The Lumberjack’s Nanny is the third standalone book in the Rockford Falls Romance series. Whether you want forbidden lovers, secret babies, or second chances, this series has it all. Just grab a glass of something cold because these sexy alphas and their fabulous leading ladies are sure to leave you hot and bothered in all the right ways! And don’t forget, a sweet HEA is always included!

  1

  Rachel

  “So, where’s my girl?” I said, pouring Laura a cup of coffee.

  “Brenna’s with my mom today. She has to have a chance to spoil her every couple of days, or they’ll both have a panic attack,” Laura joked.

  “So, you’re saying you knew you were coming in here for coffee and pie and you deliberately left my precious Goddaughter somewhere else?” I asked, hand on my hip.

  “Yes. You’re stuck with just me.”

  “You? I’ve been putting up with you for thirty years. She’s new and cute. Step aside,” I teased.

  “You’re saying I lost to a two-year-old?” she said.

  “She’s two and a half. Jeez, you’d think you’d know that since you gave birth to her,” I said.

  “I do know that. And it’s not weird AT ALL that you can tell me how many months old she is at any given time.”

  “Thirty-one months. And six days,” I said with a grin.

  “Seriously?”

  “I don’t know about the six days. I just tacked that on to freak you out. I’m not obsessed. She’s just incredibly cute.”

  “Yeah, you say that because she didn’t wake you at one in the morning because she wanted juice. And Mickey Mouse on TV. It isn’t so damn cute when you’ve got dark circles under your eyes that could double as Halloween makeup,” Laura sighed.

  “You’re gorgeous, shut up. And I don’t think Brody has a problem with your dark circles. Since he always looks like he wants to jump you.”

  “He does always want to jump me. But that’s men. They’re not picky,” she laughed.

  “Trust me, hon, Brody was the pickiest of the lot. Nobody ever thought he’d get married again after his first wife died.”

  “Then I came back to town with my unique sex appeal,” Laura joked with a goofy grin.

  “You two are so adorable I could gag.”

  “Speaking of gagging, who the fuck made this banana cream pie, ‘cause I know it wasn’t you.”

  “Hugh. The old man goes through spurts of thinking he could run this place without me, even though I’ve made all the pies and managed the joint since high school. So he tried his hand at baking.”

  “It’s nasty. I’m gonna go throw it at him. He will lose his entire customer base if he keeps serving whatever this is—soap and slime?”

  “Once he sees all the leftover unsold banana cream—”

  “Do not call it that. It’s an insult to bananas. You could’ve warned me when I ordered it, you know,” she said.

  “What fun is that? If you’d have brought Brenna in to see me, I never would’ve let you get it, because you might’ve given her a bite.”

  “Good to know where I rate these days.”

  “Yep. What do you want instead?”

  “Cherry. I need a true classic to cleanse my palate. You did make the cherry yourself, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just checking. I wouldn’t put it past you to keep bringing me shitty Hugh pie without comment just to watch me gag.”

  “He won’t spring for live entertainment, so I do what I can to pass the time, what can I say?”

  “When are you gonna buy this place? I mean he can’t hang on forever. He’s gotta be seventy,” she said.

  “He told me five years ago that he’ll quit when he’s seventy-two. That’s a little over a year from now, and I’ve been budgeting and saving to have the down payment scraped together by that time. It’ll be close. I had to dip into my savings when my furnace went out last year. That set me back four thousand dollars, which is a shit ton of money.”

  “Yeah, it is. I would’ve just started busting up furniture and burning it for warmth.”

  “Yeah, don’t ever let your brother hear you say that. He’s like Mr. Fire Safety.”

  “He gets it from our dad. Third generation fireman. We didn’t even get to have candles on our birthday cakes because it was ‘too risky.’”

  “I remember. You always pretended though. And blew on the cake anyway out of spite. Like, fine, no candle to make a wish on, but I’m gonna spit on this crap anyway.”

  “That’s me in a nutshell, babe,” she said with a grin. “Now get me some decent pie.”

  I glanced over my shoulder, “Give me a second.”

  “You can’t go to the counter because Max just came in? This is so middle school.”

  “I want to give them time to sit down. Their booth’s clear. Sadie likes the one in the corner because you can see the daffodils starting to bloom outside the library.”

  “So, if someone was in their booth what would you do? They don’t come in every day, do they?” Laura asked.

  “No, about once a week, usually Tuesdays,” I said.

  “But you don’t pay any attention to him, right? I mean, his comings and goings, where his kid likes to sit and why… it’s not like you’re obsessed or anything.”

  “I’m just being a good waitress, attentive to what my cust
omers like.”

  “You’d throw some trucker bodily out of the diner if they were in that booth right now. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Not bodily. I’d just—offer them a free piece of pie if they’d switch tables. And then give them some banana cream,” I said with a grin.

  “Right. Not calculating at all,” she raised an eyebrow. “Do you run into stuff and drop trays when he’s around? Because you haven’t taken your eyes off him.”

  “Shut the front door, Laura. I’m a professional. I don’t drop shit just because there’s an unusually hot man here with shaggy black hair and green eyes and the biceps and shoulders of an actual lumberjack.”

  “I’ll grant that he’s good-looking, but he’s a little too Hollywood for me. He may be a lumberjack, but he doesn’t have that rough-hewn, mountain man face. He’s too handsome. It distracts from the backwoods Paul Bunyan vibe he’s working.”

  “Maybe if he grew a beard,” I wondered aloud.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” she laughed. “Tell him to grow a beard. It might rough him up a little, make him less of a pretty boy.”

  “He’s not a pretty boy,” I said, “he’s a woodchopper with an exceptionally handsome face. Like Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling had a black-haired son.”

  “You know those are both men, right? I mean, do you know about the birds and the bees and how neither of those guys ovulates?”

  “Shut up. He’s sitting down. I’ve got to go get their order.”

  “What about my new pie?” she demanded. I shrugged.

  “I’ll get to it. These are paying customers.”

  I fixed my ponytail which was getting a little droopy after five hours at work and glided on over to their table. Max’s eyes were fixed on his six-year-old as she knelt at the window and pointed out the place where the flowers were starting to push up out of the soil.

  “Hey, Sadie-Lady, are they blooming yet?”

  “Nope,” she said. “But they will be soon. We just gotta keep watching them. You got any crayons?”

  “For you? You bet,” I said, taking the box of crayons out of my apron pocket for her. “I’ll be right back, just you hold on a sec.”

  I went back behind the counter and dug out the new coloring books I’d hidden in our stack of used ones we let customers’ kids color in.

  “LOL or Paw Patrol?” I asked, offering them to her. Her green eyes lit up.

  “LOL! This is new!”

  “It’s a sad day,” I said, turning to Max. “A year ago it was all Zuma and Everest. Now she doesn’t care anything about Paw Patrol. She’s too grown-up,” I sighed.

  “Yesterday she was bugging me to get her ‘big girl’ sheets for her bed,” he said with a head shake. “Because the Baby Shark sheets are too baby.”

  “Baby Shark is so last year,” I said. “So, am I bringing her the wine list?” I teased.

  “You have a wine list here?” he said dubiously.

  “Nah, but I have a pie list.”

  “Bring me that!” Sadie piped up and we laughed.

  “You have to eat more than two bites of food first,” Max said.

  She drooped a little in her seat.

  “Hey, we have chicken strips today,” I told her conspiratorially.

  “Can I have barbecue sauce to dip in?”

  “May I,” her dad corrected.

  “May I?” she said brightly.

  “I think I can work that out. You want some garlic toast while you wait on your food?”

  “Only if you don’t want her to eat the chicken at all,” he grumbled. “Sorry,” he said, seeming to remember himself. “We’re having the picky eating wars at home. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, “when I was little, my mom swears I lived on peanut butter and crackers and Rice Krispies treats.”

  “At our place it’s Goldfish crackers and gummy fruit snacks,” he said. “Not exactly the entire food pyramid.”

  “I understand. Now, Sadie-Lady, are you giving Dad a hard time?”

  “No. I just don’t like meat. It’s squishy.”

  “What about vegetables?” I pressed.

  “They taste like feet.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. “Have you tasted feet lately?”

  She giggled and I smiled at her. She was a mini version of her dad, for sure, her unruly black hair pulled into a lopsided ponytail that failed to keep it back out of her face.

  “Let me see what I can do,” I said. “And for you?”

  “I’ll have the fish sandwich and a salad,” Max said and handed me his laminated menu.

  When I brought his salad, I brought some carrots and celery cut up and a little side dish of two dressings for her, ranch and French. “I want you to try two bites of each one. Then you can pick the winner. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I cleared a table, picked up my tip, took another couple of orders, and then ran a slice of cherry pie to Laura.

  “Took you long enough. If I was a hot single dad, maybe I’d get better service. I only have about a decade's worth of blackmail-worthy pics of you.”

  “Do you want me to spit on your pie or what?” I asked. “I have customers.”

  “Why don’t you just flirt with the man already? You’ve been looking at him with get-me-naked eyes since he walked in.”

  “Untrue. My eyes don’t say things like that. I just have an astigmatism so maybe they look that way to hussies like you,” I teased.

  “Hey! You’re a hussy!” she laughed and took a bite. “But you’re a damn fine cook, for a nasty little tramp.”

  “Don’t you forget it. My Tinder profile says that. Good cook, nasty tramp. Shame I don’t get more right swipes on that thing.”

  “Probably geography. You live in Rockford Falls. It’s not exactly a mecca.”

  “Overton has more than one stoplight.”

  “And that’s our criteria for a big city. More than one stoplight and a Starbucks. We’re not exactly cosmopolitan.”

  “Maybe that’s what I like about it. I know everybody. I make the best pie, I know Trixie does the best flowers, if I need someone to be taken out, I call you or your husband.”

  “He’s the sheriff. He’s not a hit man.”

  “Whatever, if I offer him chocolate pie, he might pull the trigger for me.”

  “Knowing your pie, I wouldn’t bet against it,” she said. “So, who do you want whacked?”

  “I didn’t say whacked. I said, ‘taken out’ and no one right now. It’s just good to know I have friends to help me out if there’s a problem.”

  “So, you have access to flowers and gunmen? That’s what Rockford Falls has going for it?”

  “There are towns that have less to recommend them,” I said, and took her coffee cup. “Want a refill?”

  “No, I better go. My mom’s probably hand-feeding Brenna M&M’s and buying her anything she wants off Amazon by now. But you should totally ask Max out.”

  “Are you kidding? He’s a single dad. He doesn’t have time for anything like that. Plus, I need to work every shift I can get to save to buy the diner. Nobody has time for your matchmaking, girl.”

  “Fine, be alone and miserable. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Okay, love you,” I said. I hugged her bye and she left.

  I got the order for Max and Sadie’s table and delivered it. All the celery was still on her plate except one microscopic bite, but she’d eaten two and a half carrot sticks and the entire cup of ranch.

  “So, I got some Vitamin A in the kid, and recruited another lifelong ranch-lover. My work here is done,” I said, setting the fish sandwich in front of Max.

  “Are you sure it was regular ranch? I’ve tried that at home.”

  “Same as they have at the grocery store.”

  “So she only likes it if you serve it to her? That’s not gonna help get vegetables in her at home,” he said.

  “Try putting it in a little cup instead of on t
he plate where it touches her food.”

  “Yes, Daddy. It can’t touch my other food!” Sadie said as if vindicated.

  “Sorry, did I step into an ongoing argument?”

  “Yes. And I got her a divided plate. But I think she wants barbed wire fencing between the food and maybe a moat. It can never touch. If barbecue sauce touches a tater tot, we’re all doomed,” he said. I laughed.

  “I—it’s probably not funny to you. It sounded funny,” I said. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “A side order of ranch to go. In a little plastic cup please,” he said.

  I shrugged and bagged up a couple dressing-on-the-side cups of ranch for him.

  “Pie?”

  “Yes!”

  “How many bites did we say?” he asked Sadie. She frowned.

  “Seven. But it isn’t fair because I’m only six.”

  “Sadie-Lady,” I said, “not a good strategy. You’re walking right into the obvious, then I guess you only need six bites of pie.”

  “I’ll take big bites,” she giggled.

  “I know that trick,” Max said. “We’ll share a piece of apple.”

  “With ice cream!” she said.

  “Maybe next time,” her dad said, and she nodded.

  “Ice cream next time,” she assured me.

  “I’ll remember,” I said.

  When I had waited on a few more tables and filled Damon’s to-go order and heard about Ashton’s ear infection, I took the pie to Max and Sadie with two spoons.