Marrying the Northbridge Nanny by Victoria Pade Page A

tried—and he didn’t like that.”
    “So he didn’t like you.”
    Another good guess.
    “I don’t think this particular kid feels anything the way you and I would feel things,” she said, slightly surprised by how ominous it had come out—an indication that she was still shaken.
    But she didn’t let Logan know that. Instead she just went on. “Anyway, I was in a session with the kid and he was doing his best to get me to think what he wanted me to think. It wasn’t working, I was calling him on his lies and tall tales and basically the game he was playing that day—I was confronting him, which is a part of what I do at calculated moments…”
    Meg hesitated, having the same difficulty she alwaysdid getting this portion out. She shrugged and glanced at the porch light on the rear of the main house rather than at Logan because it somehow seemed less serious to say it that way.
    “The kid picked up a pencil and stabbed me with it.”
    She didn’t have to be looking at Logan to know the impact that had on him because it was a jolt that yanked his spine a bit straighter.
    “He stabbed you?”
    “In the side. Luckily he didn’t hit any major organs but the pencil went in about three inches and broke off—”
    “My God, Meg…”
    “I know, he could have killed me. And to tell you the truth, he was so calm about it, so…soothed, almost, by doing it, that I was actually afraid he might go on and do more just for the fun of it. I guess I was lucky that he just laughed and walked out of my office as if he didn’t have a care in the world.”
    “I hope that kid isn’t loose on the streets— ever. ”
    “He won’t be for a long time.”
    “What about you? What happened to you then?”
    “I had to have surgery.”
    “And right about then you decided you needed the lighter side of kids for a change—no wonder.”
    “Actually, this was months ago. I was back at work in a week.”
    “You weren’t.”
    “I was. But the whole thing did start me thinking. And evaluating things. And wondering if I was getting burned out—”
    “Yeah, I would think that being stabbed might burn youout just a little,” Logan said, his facetious understatement making her smile and helping to ease some of the tension.
    “Actually, I started to wonder if that’s why I had been stabbed. If, over time, I’d begun to relate less to the kids, if they weren’t relating to me because maybe I’d gotten too detached, too impersonal—”
    “You blamed yourself?” he asked as if he couldn’t believe that.
    “I wouldn’t call it blame. I just wondered if I was off my game. If maybe I wasn’t building the kind of rapport I needed to with my kids and if maybe that had contributed to the situation. I also started thinking about how long it had been since I’d had contact with kids who didn’t have problems, and how much I missed it. I thought I needed a shot of normal. I thought I needed to just get back in touch with…well, the lighter side of kids. Tia is perfect for that.”
    Meg glanced at Logan again then and concluded, “That’s why I’m here, being a nanny instead of a psychologist.”
    And it actually felt better to have been honest with him. But then there was something about being with him that gave her an all-round sense of well-being, that took away the negative fallout from The Incident. It made her attraction to him that much harder to ignore.
    Logan was studying her, though, and rather than letting her last words put an end to this, he proved just how carefully he’d listened to her when they’d talked other times, too. And how much of it he’d retained.
    “So when you told me about what it was like growing up under your grandfather’s rules,” he said, “you toldme that part of why you were here this summer was to make sure you don’t fall into his way of doing things—the kind of structure and control you grew up with. Does that tie into this, too?”
    Meg’s eyebrows rose all on their own,