Free Marrying the Northbridge Nanny by Victoria Pade Page B

rather do that than have him think whatever negative things he was thinking because of her remark about Rick Weaver’s lack of intelligence.
    “My top three weaknesses…” she said as she considered what to tell him. “I’m not outgoing enough—that’s the biggest. It’s my nature to sit in the corner or the back of the room, to watch and listen. But participating or socializing? I have to force myself. And meeting new people makes me a wreck.”
    “Don’t you have to do that all the time in your not-the-nanny job?”
    “I do. But the difference is that I come in as the person people are looking to for help, the person who has the education and training and experience to make things better. It’s not about me, it’s about what I know and can do for them. That’s kind of my version of Superman’s costume—mild-mannered, retiring Clark Kent turns into someone completely different when he gets into those tights. Give me a file full of cognitive test results and assessment reports, and I’m fine. A dinner party or a first date? I’m too nervous to eat. Youcan bet that I will have a candy bar in my purse that will very likely get eaten on the way home—or in the ladies’ room in the course of things if they’re really going bad.”
    “So when you pull out the I’m-A-Psychologist stuff it’s because you’re nervous?”
    She hadn’t expected him to put that together. And wished he hadn’t.
    “That happens sometimes, yes…” she admitted with reservation and then, to keep things moving away from that, she said, “That’s one. Two, I have a crazy-strong sense of smell—”
    “That’s a weakness?”
    “It’s so strong that when I was a kid I could never eat lunch at school because I couldn’t stand the mixture of smells in the cafeteria. That’s the kind of thing I would fix for kids I deal with now by making sure they can eat somewhere else. And certain people have a scent to me that I just can’t take—”
    “I hope I’m not one of them,” Logan said, sounding slightly alarmed.
    “You aren’t,” she assured. It would actually have made things much easier if he was one of the people she hated the smell of. As it was, whatever scent he gave off did just the opposite—it made him more appealing to her.
    “That’s two weaknesses. One more,” he reminded.
    “If I find a single hair in my food, that’s it for me.”
    “I’m not sure that should count,” he said.
    “Believe me, if you saw the gag reflex that happens if I find a hair in my food you would count it as a weakness.”
    He looked skeptical but by then they’d reached the new home improvement store that had been brought into Northbridge by his recently-revealed cousins, the Graysons. Home-Max was closed but they paused in their walk to look in the windows. It was a major change that had come to the small town.
    They crossed to the other side of Main Street then and Meg said, “Okay, now you. Three weaknesses.”
    “I’m a big macho man—macho men don’t have weaknesses,” Logan joked.
    “So now we know that you lie—not so much a weakness as a flaw…” she goaded.
    He laughed. “Okay, okay. Three weaknesses…Tia has to be the top of the list. You don’t realize how vulnerable a kid makes you until you have one and start worrying about something happening to them. She’s definitely my Achilles’ heel.”
    “Okay, but that’s a given and not exactly a weakness in your character or personality or psyche so the other two had better be good.”
    “I’m overly sensitive about the fact that I didn’t go to college….”
    That was surprisingly candid. “Really? You didn’t go to college?”
    “Not everyone does, you know.”
    Ooh, he was sensitive about it…
    “I know. I guess I just assumed with all you’ve accomplished that you did.”
    “I didn’t. Neither did my business partner, Chase. It didn’t seem as if it would ever matter. But sometimes it does…”
    Meg had the impression that it mattered