So it took me forever to get back to you on this (sorry!!) but tonight felt like a good night to write it. Hope you enjoy!
(Prompt 46 is a nanny/single parent AU)
*****
Emma has never been one to ask for help – and she has a damn hard time accepting it when it’s offered. But the truth of the matter is, being a single mother is hard.
She doesn’t have family to lean on – she doesn’t have friends to call to ask for help. She’s lucky she has her job, but a seven-year-old son and being a cop don’t exactly go well together. It’s not nine to five. There is no daycare at three in the morning.
It’s with great reluctance she places the ad for a nanny, convinced she won’t be able to find anyone and the whole issue will be put behind her. She’ll be able to tell her sergeant she tried, she did, but there is no one else to watch her son. She wants this job, but she needs to keep her son safe.
If that means she gets stuck on desk duty until Henry is old enough to mind himself when she’s got to work nights, well, so be it.
The interviews go about as well as she expects. She puts them into two basic categories – girls too young and inexperienced to trust with her son when she may be unavailable for hours at a time or women who are from another generation, one that doesn’t understand a single woman working a dangerous job all hours of the night.
It was touch and go to start, but Emma isn’t stupid. She’s a good mom – at least, she thinks so most days. Her son is healthy and happy and cared for. But she wants to be a better mom, provide a better life for her son than she had. So she has to work.
When Killian Jones turns out to be a devastatingly handsome man about her own age instead of yet another woman (they’ve only communicated through email – she’s never heard the name Killian before and she just assumed) she almost slams the door in his face.
“No,” is all she says, the door already closing as he sticks his door into the door to stop her.
“Perhaps you might give me a chance to speak with you before slamming the door in my face, aye?” He says it in an especially charming accent, a half-smirk on his lips. She eyes him, taking note of the snug black jeans and leather jacket. He does not look like a man she wants around her son.
But then again, she’s just spent a week being told who she is by other people, so perhaps it’s a bit hypocritical of her to do the same to him.