Forever and a Day by Jill Shalvis Read Free Book Online Page B

Dr. Josh Scott’s. He stopped short at the sight of Grace, and Tank plowed into the back of his feet, then fell to his butt and gave out a little startled yelp.
    “Toby,” Anna said. “You’re going to stay here with Grace. I’ll be back in an hour.”
    “Wait…what?” Grace shook her head. “No, I’m just the dog babysitter.”
    “Yeah?” Anna asked. “Are you babysitting the dog right now?”
    “Well, yeah, but—” She broke off at Anna’s amused look and whirled around to find the puppy chewing on the kitchen table leg. Crap. “Hey,” she said. “No chewing on that.”
    Tank kept chewing. Grace went over there and pried him loose but she was too late. He’d left deep gouges in the beautiful wood.
    Anna tugged affectionately on a lock of Toby’s hair. “The dogsitter will make you an after-school snack. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Slugger.”
    Grace was still shaking her head. A dog was one thing. But a kid? There was no counting the number of ways she could screw this one up. “Wait a minute.”
    But Anna wasn’t waiting. She was actually at the door. “No worries, he’s easy. The regular nanny, Katy, ditched Toby today, so we picked him up from school, but I’ve got things to do, so…”
    “We?”
    A horn sounded from out front. Grace looked out the window and saw a rusty pickup truck.
    “Gotta go,” Anna said, and wheeled out.
    “But…” But nothing. Anna was gone, gone, gone. And Grace had just been promoted to a job for which she had absolutely no qualifications. She looked at Toby.
    Toby looked at her right back, solemn-faced, his dark eyes giving nothing away.
    “Hi,” Grace said.
    “Arf,” he said.
    “Arf,” Tank said, dragging a running shoe that was bigger than himself. He’d already chewed a hole in the toe. Eyes bulging, tongue lolling out the side of his smashed-in face, Tank sat and panted proudly at the prize he offered her.
    It was going to be a long hour. She liberated the shoe and searched her brain for some way to relate to a five-year-old kid holding a toy lightsaber. Who barked. “So are you a Jedi warrior?”
    Toby swung the lightsaber wide. It lit up and went whoosh, vrrmm-whoosh .
    Tank promptly went nuts, so naturally Toby swung again.
    Whoosh, vrrmm-whoosh.
    Toby hit a home run with a cup of juice that had been on the kitchen table, sending it flying through the air. Luckily the cup was plastic. Not so luckily, the juice was grape, and purple sticky liquid splattered like rain on the table, the floor, the counters, Grace, and both Tank and Toby. Even the ceiling took a hit.
    Toby dropped the lightsaber as if it were a hot potato.
    Tank scooped it up by the handle in his sharp puppy teeth and began running circles around the table again, both belly and lightsaber dragging on the ground, still lighting up, still making whooshing noises.
    “It’s okay,” Grace said to a stricken-looking Toby, grabbing a roll of paper towels from the counter, swiping at the kid first. But the sticky clothes didn’t appear to bother him any because he stepped free and headed toward the fridge.
    Tank dropped the lightsaber, redirecting his reign of terror to licking the floor.
    “Toby?” Grace asked. “Where’s the trash?”
    The boy made a vague gesture over his shoulder toward the back door and stuck his head into the fridge.
    Grace went to wipe down the table and instead stared at the stack of twenties, underneath a grape-splotched sticky note that had Grace scrawled across it in bold print. She picked up the money and started counting. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty… One hundred and sixty bucks . It took her a minute to figure it out—forty for yesterday, triple that for today.
    It was ridiculous, of course, and yet…the things she could do with a hundred and sixty bucks. Staring at it longingly, she thought of her overloaded credit card, her student loans, and the weekly rent she had coming due at the B&B where she’d been living.
    Not to mention the