Page 2 of Substitute Bride

“That was mean,” Julie said with a gasp, fisting her hand around her spoon again and continuing to eat. “Poor Topsy.”

“Was the stepmother the one from the movie?” Rose asked lightly, carefully watching Jill’s face.

Jill’s eyes shot up quickly and then back down. “Y-yeah.”

Rose knew that wasn’t true. The girl just didn’t want to say who the evil stepmother in her dream had been—which meant it was almost certainly Genevieve Brown.

Genevieve was their father’s fiancée and one of the snottiest women Rose had ever met.

She knew the girls didn’t like their future stepmother. They tried to do as their father told them and get to know her, but the woman made very few efforts as far as Rose could tell. She acted overly sweet whenever James was present, but Rose wasn’t deceived. Genevieve didn’t seem to care for the girls at all.

Rose hadn’t realized Jill was so worried about it though.

This dream—as childish as it was—was troubling.

“Well,” Rose said, pitching her tone to be encouraging, “the important thing to remember is that dreams aren’t real. We would never let anything happen to Topsy, would we?”

“No!” Julie exclaimed.

“No,” Jill agreed, less enthusiastically.

“And your daddy wouldn’t let anyone be mean to you,” Rose continued with a smile. “So you know what we do with bad dreams?”

“We file them away in the back of the drawer and tell them to stay there!” Julie was grinning now, making the motions of putting a paper in a file and then sticking it into a file cabinet.

James, the girls’ father, worked from home a lot, so they were very familiar with office supplies.

Jill’s expression was clearing, so Rose caught her eye and gave her a significant look. “What do we do?”

With a long exhale, Jill gave a little smile. “We file it away in the back of the drawer.”

“And tell it to stay there!” Julie added.

“Did someone have a bad dream to file away?” The male voice came from the side entrance of the kitchen, surprising Rose so much she gave a little jerk.

She turned to see James Harwood, her employer of two years, walking into the kitchen in a dark gray suit and blue tie. He wasn’t a traditionally handsome man—with a too-high forehead and a too-square jaw—but Rose thought he was attractive anyway. He had brown hair and broad shoulders and hazel eyes like the girls. He was in his midthirties and already a rising executive in an international corporation.

His wife had died two and a half years ago quite suddenly from a random brain aneurysm. Rose had started working for him as the nanny of his girls a few months later.

She instinctively glanced down at herself to make sure she was presentable. She wore a baggy T-shirt and a pair of yoga pants, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail—none of which was very flattering.

It didn’t matter of course.

The first year she’d worked for the Harwoods, she’d gotten up an hour early every day so she could be showered and fully dressed before breakfast, but she’d given up on that eventually as she started to feel more a part of the family. No one cared what she looked like at breakfast, and it seemed better use of her time to shower and dress after she’d taken the girls to school.

It wasn’t like she was any sort of a beauty queen, even when she was dressed up. She had long brown hair and normal brown eyes, and she was just a little too curvy, always needing to lose about ten pounds. She was here to take care of the girls—not wow anyone with her appearance.

“Jill had a bad dream,” Julie informed her father as he made a beeline for the coffeepot. “But she already filed it away.”

James turned his gaze on his oldest daughter as coffee streamed into his mug. “Is that right, Jill?”

“Yes. It’s all over now.”

“Good.” He stepped over and brushed the girl’s hair back from her face so he could better see her expression. “Did it wake you up last night?”

“Yes, but Rosie came in and took care of me.”

James glanced over at Rose, a question in his eyes.