But now, it had become something that turned those clear-cut lines into a wild chaos of zigs and zags. He couldn’t sort any of this out. All he knew with any kind of certainty was that he was going to London with her in a week, and somehow his goal had changed. When she’d first proposed their unconventional arrangement, he gave a yes borne from years of lust and desire for her.

Now he was saying yes for other reasons. Reasons that weren’t entirely clear in his head—reasons that came from a different place inside him.

A place he tried hard to deny even existed.

Nate had once thought that his job was pretty damn exhausting, but running a multinational hotel conglomerate was nothing compared to entertaining two newly walking, hardly talking, very busy one-year-old twin girls. Thank the Lord, Casey had handled the diaper changes. The woman needed a medal for that. The rest of the time though, they had been a team, and hell, did his nieces require a team.

After their evening bath, which resulted in his T-shirt becoming completely soaked when they splashed virtually the entire contents of the tub onto him, Casey and Nate dressed the girls in their pajamas.

“So let me get this straight. You yanked Bryan out of the luxury suite and that’s why we’re babysitting your nieces a few hours on a Sunday night before we fly to London?” Casey asked him for probably the twentieth time as she nudged him with an elbow.

“Hey, I had very important business to attend to at Yankee Stadium and I don’t regret it whatsoever.”

“Nor do I,” she said with a wink as she tugged a short-sleeved shirt on Cara. “And I certainly don’t regret spending time with these adorable little chunks of love,” she said, cooing at the baby.

He froze momentarily. Her eyes nearly popped out when she saw his expression.

“Oh my God, did you just prematurely freak out about the prospect of a woman wanting children?” she said calling him out on the deer-in-headlights stare he must have been sporting.

He held Chloe tighter. “I love my nieces. That’s all I’m going to say. And thank you again for helping me out here.”

“There’s no way I would let you do this on your own. I’m just as responsible as you are, and I also feel horribly guilty that you took them out of the stadium. Though, not too guilty,” she said with a laugh, as they made their way to the girls’ bedroom and tucked them into their cribs for the night.

But twenty minutes later, Chloe and Cara were crying up a storm, and neither Nate nor Casey had a very good idea of how to handle them. They had fed, bathed, and played with them, so the only recourse was to hold them. They retreated to the living room, each with a baby in their arms.