Page 71 of The Strawberry Patch Pancake House

They settled in for the day, binge-watching Olive’s favorite shows all morning until she dozed off with her head in Iris’s lap. Her face was warm but not hot, which Iris found encouraging. She brushed a piece of dark hair from Olive’s face. It was damp from sweat, but somehow Iris didn’t find that as gross as she once would have. At the moment, she was just happy that Olive was feeling better and that she was napping, even though Iris now had to pee and was stuck until Olive woke up because she sure as hell wasn’t going to wake her.

Before Olive had fallen asleep, they’d been watching her latest favorite cooking show. Iris watched three chefs come up with crazy concoctions based on surprise ingredients. She tried to focus on the show, but her brain insisted on drifting to Archer and how much she liked watching him cook. About the way his precise chopping and dicing contrasted with his messy hair and scruffy stubble. About how he looked when he was worried about Olive.

Okay, so Iris was still refusing to have daddy issues, but she’d be a big fat liar if she said it wasn’t doing all kinds of things to her to watch Archer take care of his daughter. It was objectively hot. She was pretty sure it was some sort of evolutionary thing, right? As though her cavewoman brain was like,Oh, a man who can take care of his offspring?Hot.

Ugh. She nearly groaned out loud at her own stupidity, but the sleeping girl in her lap kept her quiet. Speaking of evolutionary urges, the small cuteness of this creature was obviously designed to lure her in.

She had never been one to coo over people’s babies (she was pretty sure they all looked the same) or to volunteer to babysit her friend’s children, but this one, Olive, whom she now knew as a complete person, well, the kid was kinda growing on her.

This whole thing was a mess.

She was here to do a job. She’d taken it in the first place because she felt bad that Archer was in this position and because she needed a reasonable place to live. She needed to remember that. Archer was doing much better in the dad department, so it wouldn’t be so bad when she bailed, right?

Olive stirred in her lap, a little drool streaming onto Iris’s leg. Okay, that was still gross.

She turned her head and blinked her big, please-don’t-eat-me-because-I’m-adorable eyes open. The small smile Olive gave, like she was happy Iris was there, made Iris’s heart feel weird.

‘Hi, Iris.’

‘Hey, kid. Have a nice nap?’

‘I didn’t nap.’

‘Okay, sorry. My mistake. You just had your eyes closed and you were snoring like this…’ Iris did her best super loud snoring impression and Olive giggled.

‘I was not.’

‘You definitely were.’

‘Iris?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Are you going to be my mom soon?’

That heart feeling got even weirder. Some bizarre combination of panic and happiness shot through her body and made Iris dizzy.

‘I’m your nanny, remember?’

Olive sat up and faced her on the couch. ‘Yeah, but you’re sort of like a mom.’

Iris frowned. How to explain this? ‘I take care of you when your dad’s at work, sweetie, but I’m not a mom.’

‘But you could be.’

‘I … well…’

‘Because Addison at school said her dad got married again and now she has two moms and a dad and I don’t even have one mom anymore and that’s not really fair. So, if you married my new dad then I would have one mom and one dad and that would be fair.’

Oh, Christ.

‘Well, families aren’t really a numbers game.’

Olive frowned.

‘What I mean is,’ Iris went on. ‘It’s not really about how many of everything you have, it’s more about having people who love you. And as long as you have some of those, then you have a family. And you have a dad and a grandma and all those new grandparents who love you so much and that’s amazing.’

‘And you? You’re in my family, too, right?’