Naughty Nanny Series-Free Loving Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright© 2009 Shara Azod

  Cover Artist: Shara Azod

  Editor: Jennifer Puckett

  Editor: Laura Guevara

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. Due to copyright laws you cannot trade, sell or give any ebooks away.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Trish was gone. Again. Travis knew his sister well enough to know she wasn’t coming back any time soon. She never stayed in one place very long, always on the move looking for the next big party. He had hoped having a child would change her; he had wished in any event. But Trish had been getting increasingly restless, wanting nothing to do with her new born daughter. Travis sighed; at least she had carried the baby to term and did not give her away or worse. Once she gave birth, Trish left the baby’s care up to him, the feedings, the changing, the loving. A book on how to care for newborns was his constant companion, though he had bought it for Trish. Travis had tried to get her involved but she wouldn’t even look at the baby.

  Where had he gone wrong? He had tried to raise his baby sister the best way he knew how, but he knew he had missed something crucial along the way. Why else would Trish be so flighty, so completely irresponsible and unstable? He had done his best, but apparently that hadn’t been good enough. Private schools, private tutors, boarding schools, nothing worked. What use was all the money he had earned if nothing seemed to work. Their parents had been killed in a deadly twister when Trish had only been eight years old.

  Running his fingers agitatedly through his hair he paced the nursery trying to figure out what he was going to do. Baby Lorelei slept peacefully completely unaware that her mother had walked out on her, not that she knew her mother at all. Trish had rarely held the baby, never talked to her. That surely couldn’t be good. A baby needed the love and warmth of its mother. What was more, Travis was due back in Hollywood to begin production on what he had decided was to be his final film in two weeks. The precious three month old needed a nanny. Looking down at the beautiful sleeping angel in the bassinet, he vowed he would not fail Lorelei. That was why he was quitting show business, so he could raise Lorelei himself. He would make sure that he gave her all the love and attention that he hadn’t given Trish.

  Travis never wanted to be a movie star, but it had been the only way he could support his sister after his parents were killed. Trish was just too young to help him with the tiny horse ranch that had been in their family for several generations, and he couldn’t afford to hire on help. At nineteen, no one was willing to extend him credit. With no source of income, the bills just kept piling up. When they lost the ranch he decided to pack up Trish and make the trek to California from Kentucky. By pure fate, he was “discovered” in true Hollywood fantasy fashion after they had been in California less than two weeks. Hell, they weren’t even in Los Angeles. He had moved to Corona before the major building boom, and had been hired on by a nice elderly couple whose children wanted no part of smelly horses or the hard work involved with working their horse ranch. Who knew that the old couple just happened to be the parents of the biggest movie agent on earth?

  Travis found himself groomed and starring in major motion picture blockbusters at the tender age of nineteen, all the while trying to raise an increasingly wild tween who missed her parents and decided to show it by going through puberty in the most painful ways imaginable. It had been a huge mistake to rely on babysitters he had barely known to take care of his baby sister. With long shoots and constant travelling he spent the majority of time away from his sister – not being there for her when she needed him the most.

  Trish took full advantage of Travis’ frequent absences. She partied, stayed out all night and took nothing seriously. By the time Travis purchased a ranch of his own it was too late to rein in the wild girl. She was eighteen, he couldn’t make her move from L.A. to Corona and no matter how much he threatened he couldn’t cut her off. Terrible things happened to girls with no money and no way to support themselves in a place as heartless and cruel as Southern California could be. Months would go by without hearing from her, showing up only when she needed more money or a hardnosed attorney to get her out of whatever problem she was in. Travis never denied her anything. He didn’t know if it was guilt or what but he just couldn’t say no to her.

  It was Trish’s latest episode that had put Travis in his current bind. When his sister had shown up eight and half months pregnant, he had hoped it was the incentive she needed to turn her life around. Instead, she had snuck out in the middle of the night two weeks after the baby girl had been born and Travis hadn’t heard from her since. That had been three months ago.

  His sister hadn’t even bothered to name the baby, Travis had done that. Lorelei wasn’t exactly a common name for a native California girl, not that his little angel was complaining. Then again, she couldn’t talk yet. Travis was determined not to make the same mistakes he had made with his sister. He wasn't going to be an absent guardian, depending on others to care for her as much as he did with Trish. Thus, his current problem; he needed to find a reliable nanny before he started shooting his next movie. Time was running out.

  “Travis, you have to be in LA next week! Shooting starts Tuesday, and believe you me honey buns they will replace you in a heartbeat.”

  Travis held his cell away from his ear. His agent, Liz, had a bad habit of shouting while on her cell.

  “Yeah, I know,” he sighed, tickling Lorelei’s stomach. “But that last nanny you sent out here was far more interested in crawling into my bed than she was taking care of a baby. Stop sending me bubble headed gold diggers and maybe I can start preparing for my role.”

  Of the three nannies Liz had sent him, all three had been far more interested in becoming the lover of Travis Carter than taking care of Lorelei. It had gotten so bad with the last one, he had to not only lock his bedroom door at night, he had to move the crib inside his room because the woman refused to interrupt her “beauty sleep” to care for the child. None of the three lasted more than a week.

  “I am bringing you a nanny right now,” Liz hollered into the cell. “A real one this time! You’re gonna love her! You just get ready for the movie!”

  In typical Liz fashion, she didn’t give him the opportunity to respond. Liz was as tenacious as a pit bull when she had her mind set on something, and this upcoming film was something she was adamant about. Unlike his usual blockbuster action movies, this one Liz swore had Oscar potential written all over it. It was an epic love story set in a time of the Apocalypse. The script was good, the love story was hot, but Oscar worthy? Travis didn’t see it.

  But they were offering him a hell of a lot of money. It was the last movie Travis planned on doing. He already had more money than he could ever spend, and owned a slice of heaven on earth right here in Corona with his land and his horses. The extra money would guarantee that Lorelei had a secure future and he would never have to work again. He had never really enjoyed the bright lights of stardom. He planned to just go quietly into the proverbial night and live his life in peaceful quiet. Let one of the other up an
d coming heartthrobs take his place, he didn’t care.

  It was bad enough he couldn’t go to the store without someone mobbing him, but he would never find someone to settle down with while he was still acting. All the Hollywood relationships he’d seen left a lot to be desired. Travis didn’t want or need to be in competition with his real life love interest. Rampant cheating and lies on both ends where as rampant as they were disheartening. And the media ate it up. Sure there were exceptions, but that wasn't the life he wanted. No more having his face plastered on magazines or billboards. No more having to answer questions or dispel rumors. No more needing security to keep the groupies at bay. All he needed was peace, solitude, a woman who loved him for himself and would help raise Lorelei.

  Well, eventually. He was only thirty-two, no need to rush. Besides, he had a little girl to raise, and she was the most important thing in his life right now. He would raise her outside the deceptive glam and false glitter he had to deal with in his career. Lorelei deserved a real childhood, one he hadn’t been able to give his sister. This time, he was determined to get it right.

  Chapter Two

  Free wasn’t sure she wanted to be here at all. She took early childhood development seriously, she wasn’t too sure a movie star would. Free was only twenty-five, but she boasted a doctorate in Education with a focus on early childhood. It was her firm belief that children began learning from birth, and you could teach them so much more than the current education system allowed – far earlier, in fact. The human brain had an enormous capacity to learn before humans taught it to be lazy. It was her goal to start a small school for children from about six months through high school to prove it.

  Unfortunately, that took money, and that was the one thing Free never really had much of. Before now, she never really needed much. She had won scholarships to private schools and college, her parents were academics who raised Free and her three brothers in something similar to a commune, where people didn’t own anything but shared with the collective. It had been a great way to grow up, at least she thought so, but she wanted more than to simply teach the children at Shangri-La, the sprawling mansion and grounds in which she had lived all her life. She wanted to spread her wings and experience life outside the compound walls. Yeah, she and the others had grown up, had left for school, but most of them came back and took their place in the community.

  A couple of people never came back, and chose to live their lives immersed in the greed and selfishness of the outside. Free didn’t want that either. She simply wanted to prove her hypothesis. To do that, she needed to find her own space, set up a school outside the one that the elders at Shangri-La had offered her. The people who lived in the commune tended to all be of exceptional intelligence, teaching their own children from birth, and encouraged learning in all forms. She wouldn’t be proving anything by continuing to teach there. What she needed was a tabula rasa – a blank slate. Not that she wholly bought into John Locke’s theory that all were born with a blank slate, there were limits to an individual’s capacity to learn to a certain extent, but Free really believed that children could learn so much more if they were only taught how to learn from an early stage.

  The only way she was going to build her school all on her own was to take a job that paid well. An associate professor’s salary wasn't going to get her anywhere near her goal. And Free insisted on paying her full share at Shangri-La, not allowing her parents to do it for her. At the rate she was going, it would take years before she could open the doors to her school. When she saw the ad for a nanny position in the college paper, she had been intrigued. So she had called and was blown away not only by the salary offered, but at the opportunity to have her very first student.

  But that had been before this Liz person had picked her up and driven her here. The closer they got to the sprawling horse ranch, the more insecure Free felt. She would be dealing with a movie star, someone so far outside her sphere of comfort it was ridiculous. She didn’t know much about the type, but what she had heard hadn’t been good. Moonflower, one woman she had grown up with, had worked as a nanny as an undergrad. Moonflower had told her many a horror story of the mother coming home completely smashed, waking the children up to parade them in front of equally smashed friends and hangers on; of parents ignoring all thing parental until they needed their progeny for publicity, or even worse, completely screwing up the children’s ch’i.

  “You’re going to love it!” the woman, Liz, was yelling. Free had never been around anyone so fond of being heard before. It was like the woman needed every eye in the immediate area to be on her. “You’ll be traveling during the shoot, Travis likes for the child to be near. It’s still small so it shouldn’t be too hard to deal with.”

  How horrifying to refer to a baby as “it”. A child was a human being for crying out loud, not an accessory! If this Travis character was anything at all like his agent, this wasn’t going to work out. Free couldn’t stand idly by while anyone treated a precious baby like a thing. She would probably be fired and have to start all over again.

  “It’s not his child,” Liz went on though Free hadn’t said a word throughout most of the two hour ride. Liz apparently didn’t need another person to keep a conversation going. “It’s his sister’s kid, but she skipped out after the kid was born.” Oh, dear. Family drama wasn't a very edifying atmosphere to raise any child in. Poor baby. “Travis was such a dear to take on the responsibility. That sister of his, such a disappointment. All of this is confidential of course. You signed the agreement, don’t forget. It’s iron clad by the way.” One would wonder why the woman was telling her so much if she didn’t want Free to run around telling tales. Not that she would in any event, it was really none of Free’s business. She was here for the baby. “You might be required to expand your wardrobe, but don’t worry it’s covered. I doubt the kid will be required to be at many events, but for appearances sake, we will need to get you some more appropriate clothes…”

  The woman droned on and on but Free had stopped listening. Yeah, she dressed like a modern day hippie, but that’s because she was! Man, this job was going to take a lot of meditation and tons of patience. If Travis Carter was anything at all like this woman, Free was going to have a miserable year. The only reason she didn’t ask Liz to turn around now was because the baby needed her. Free was sure of that fact, and it would feel like she was abandoning the baby she had yet to meet.

  Chapter Three

  He wanted to see her naked. Travis was hit so hard by physical need at the first sight of Free Windsong Summer. It was like a physical blow straight to the gut. It wasn’t that she was beautiful – hell, beautiful women came a dime a dozen in Hollywood. She was just so…different. Her hair was in tiny dreads falling down her back. Locs, Travis was pretty sure that’s what they were called. They were mostly jet black, with a reddish gold one thrown in here and there. He couldn’t really tell her body shape, she was wearing bright colored, light, flowing clothes that gave no hint to how she might look underneath, but somehow he just knew that the treasure underneath would be perfection. Most of all, it was her eyes that nailed him. A fool would call them basic brown, but there was a light in those eyes, a spark of intelligence and humor, coupled with a banked sensuality that was already driving him crazy.

  Yeah, you’re crazy all right, Travis thought to himself. The immediate, intense physical attraction to this woman was not exactly sane. She had barely looked in his direction. Her entire focal point had been Lorelei, who was happily cooing in the woman’s arms. He had to get a grip on his emotions and focus. She was here because of Lorelei.

  “Did I come through, or did I come through,” Liz crowed as Free walked around the large den talking softly to his niece.

  “Yeah, good job,” Travis threw out absently, his gaze never wavering from his new nanny.

  “Did I tell you she is a bona fide PhD? In early childhood education. She took this job to open money for some New Age school or something,” Liz went on. “I
saw her transcripts myself.”

  “Is she ready to start today?” Travis asked anxiously. He wanted Liz gone. It wasn't the smartest thing, but he had a burning need to get to know Free better.

  “Yes, she is,” Free smiled at him, Lorelei in her arms. “I brought my stuff with me, but don’t you want to interview me or something first?”

  Damn, that smile went straight to his dick. It was an open and honest smile, without a trace of “come-hither” or anything untoward. Still, it was the sexiest smile he had seen in a decade. Maybe longer.

  “No, I am sure Liz has done a great job of vetting you,” Travis smiled back, gently nudging Liz in the direction of the front door. “Thanks for bring her, Liz. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

  “You’re sure?” Liz looked genuinely confused, and he really couldn’t blame her. Travis had grilled all three of the former nannies, demanding Liz stay as long as possible before leaving him alone with them. “I can stay a while. I planned on sleeping over at my parents’ place…”

  One woman hadn’t lasted twenty-four hours before Travis was screaming for Liz to get her ass back to his ranch to take the woman away. It would not happen today.

  “Nope, no need,” Travis grasped Liz by the arm walking determinedly to the front door. “You did an awesome job this time. I am absolutely positive it will work out.”

  “She’s a hippie,” Liz whispered once outside Free’s hearing range. “Grew up in some kind of commune, so you might need to go over appropriate behavior on the set. But you’re right, this one won’t be trying to climb into your bed anytime soon!”

  With a delighted laugh, Liz was gone, leaving Travis scowling behind her. He was all too afraid she was right. Funny, but this was one nanny he wouldn’t mind crawling into his bed in the middle of the night. It was the universe’s little joke on him.