The Ultimate Billionaire Romance Bundle

I am desperately trying to avoid the single dad who lives next door.

Technically, it’s the house across the narrow path and the hydrangeas I keep pretending not to notice.

Same porch swing. Same light in the kitchen that never quite turns off. Same gravity I’m not supposed to feel.

I stack my last two clean mugs in the cupboard of the guest house and stare at the message from my landlord—final notice—like it’s a dare.

Two hundred and some dollars to my name. A box half-packed under the table. I was going to leave tomorrow. Run. Start over again, again.

Three hard knocks split the morning.

My heart lurches. Not polite. Not patient. Urgent.

I open the door.

Nathan fills the frame—bare feet, T-shirt inside out, eyes wrecked. His daughter is in his arms, limp, head lolling against his shoulder, lips swelling, hives stippling her sweet neck in furious pink.

“Please,” he says, voice torn and low, and the word is a blade and a vow. “She’s allergic. It’s getting worse. I didn’t know where else to go.”

Everything inside me snaps into one clean line.

“Inside,” I tell him, already moving. “Couch. Head to the side. Good. Emma, sweetheart—”

Her breath rasps. That sound. The awful scrape of panic against a closing throat. She’s hot under my palm. Too hot. Tiny ribs lifting, not getting there. The room contracts to a bag, a drawer, a blue cap, an orange tip.

I pull the Epi from my kit; the plastic cracks in my hand. “Hold her steady.”

His hands are shaking. Mine aren’t. Not now. Not for this.

“Big pinch,” I murmur to her, to myself, to the memory of every child I’ve ever refused to lose. The auto-injector clicks as it bites through her pajama pants into the muscle of her thigh. One—two—three. Out. Massage.

I’m counting beats under my fingertips, oxygen in with the mask, the soft hiss a metronome, the world narrowed to the space between two of her breaths.

“Nathan,” I say without looking up. “Call 911. Say pediatric anaphylaxis post-Epi, stable for transport. Now.”

He moves. God, he moves, voice clipped and calm for the stranger on the other end, ruined and raw for the small body in his arms.

“It was a cookie,” he says to me, hand fisted in his shirt like he might keep himself from falling apart by sheer force. “One stupid cookie. I couldn’t find the kit. New nanny—she moved it—”

“It’s okay.” It isn’t, but I say it like a spell while I draw up the next dose to stand by—just in case, just in case. “We’ve got her.”

A beat. Another. Then, like a stubborn door giving way, her chest opens. Air slides in. Not perfect. But in. The squeal eases into a wheeze, the wheeze softens, color creeps back into her cheeks—faint, brave. Her lashes tremble. She blinks.

“Daddy?” she croaks, a wet whisper, and it guts me.

“I’ve got you.” His voice breaks on the got, and he gathers her as if he can build a shield with his body, with the breadth of his chest, with his faith alone. His chin drops into her hair. He’s shaking. I pretend I don’t see it. He pretends he can hide it.

Sirens rise, crest, arrive—blue and red strobing across the window glass. The medics’ boots hit the path; I’m already talking, handing over, listing timings and doses, oxygen flow, vitals.

They see the hives, the swelling easing, the small hand gripping her father’s T-shirt. We’re all moving now, together, the ballet of competence and fear and relief.

Emma keeps hold of his collar and of me with her eyes. “It stopped hurting,” she whispers, brave and sleepy.

“It stopped,” I tell her, and my voice has to climb over the lump in my throat to get to her. “You did so well.”

They take her, but not away from him; never away from him. The door of the ambulance closes, and the yard is suddenly too quiet, hydrangeas nodding like witnesses.

I go back inside to clean up because that’s what you do when you might fall apart—you wipe a surface that’s already clean. I line up caps and wrappers in a neat little graveyard and wash my hands too long, too hot, until the sting brings me back into my skin.

“Rachel.” His voice finds me in the doorway, low and rough, the kind that makes something inside me stand very still.

He’s there, barefoot on stone, T-shirt still wrong-side out, eyes blown wide with adrenaline and something I refuse to name. He looks like a hurricane that remembers how to be a man.

“Don’t,” I say, because if he thanks me, I might break in a way Epi can’t fix. “This is why I’m here.”

He nods—one, sharp—and steps in. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out an envelope, thick and cream and heavy. He lays it on the table. Doesn’t push. Doesn’t flinch.

“You just saved my daughter’s life,” he says, voice steady now, crafted, dangerous.

“Now let me do this for you.”