Page 15 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"I'm no longer certain it's the whole point." Carrington turned then, and the early light did something unfair to her face, softened the sharp architecture of it into something Lucy had no professional reason to be looking at this closely. "Thank you for the coffee, Ms. Harper."

"You made the coffee. I just poured it."

"You're aware that isn't what I meant."

Lucy didn't have an answer for that, and the silence that followed had the particular texture of a held breath, both of them looking out at a gull worrying the same six feet of shoreline, neither one willing to be the first to walk away from a two-foot distance that had started, without either of their permission, to feel smaller.

She was the one who broke it. She always was, lately, and she noted that fact the way she noted everything she didn't like about herself—filed away but not forgiven.

"I should get Grace up before she finds the tide pools without a supervisor," she said, and left before the coffee had cooled enough to drink.

The collar happened three hours later, in the hallway outside the lodge's largest meeting room, forty minutes before the Ashgrove family's lawyers were due to arrive and renegotiate a fault line into eleven million dollars of somebody's problem.

Carrington had dressed for it—dark suit, hair pinned back with the same controlled precision as always—but her collar had gone crooked somewhere between the mirror and the hallway, one point folded under instead of crisp, and she was reading through Anjalinka's final notes with the kind of attention that meant she had no idea her own collar had betrayed her.

"Hold still," Lucy said, before she'd fully decided to say it, and reached up before Carrington could object.

Carrington went still the way a struck bell went still, all the vibration still moving somewhere underneath the stillness. Lucy fixed the collar with two efficient motions, straightening the fold, smoothing the fabric flat against her collarbone, and was almost finished, almost safely back in the territory of a task performed and completed, when her knuckles brushed the warm skin at the base of Carrington's throat and neither of them moved to correct it.

It lasted perhaps a second. It felt considerably longer.

"There," Lucy said, and stepped back, and heard her own voice come out steadier than anything currently happening in her chest. "You'll intimidate them properly now."

"I was already going to intimidate them." Carrington's voice had gone lower than the sentence required. "You've simply ensured I do it correctly aligned."

"Someone has to maintain standards around here."

Carrington held her gaze a beat past what the joke needed, something unguarded moving behind her eyes before she visibly filed it away, the way she filed away everything that threatened to cost her composure in a hallway with Anjalinka approaching from the far end with a stack of contracts.

"Wish me luck, Ms. Harper."

"You don't need it. You need the fault-line report and a chair that doesn't creak. Luck's for people who haven't already done the reading."

Something that was almost a laugh moved through Carrington's face, rare enough that Lucy would have remembered it even without what had just happened to her hand, and then she was gone, into the meeting room, the door closing behind her with a soft, final click that left Lucy standing alone in the hallway with her fingers still faintly warm.

She stood there a moment longer than the task required, and made herself a promise she'd made once before, in a different house, with a different woman, and had broken so thoroughly it had cost her four years and a mixing bowl she still missed.

Not again. Not this. I will be useful here. I will not be anything else.

She almost believed herself.

She called Mira from the lodge's back porch that evening, phone pressed to her ear, watching Grace two hundred feet down the slope collecting shells with the flashlight app on Nadia's old phone, because full dark had come on fast out here, faster than in the city, and because some habits—checking in, being findable—she'd kept even eleven months unemployed and four years heartbroken.

"So, you're on a private jet now," Mira said, without preamble. "Living your best life while the rest of us take the bus."

"It was one jet. I've flown coach my whole life. I'm allowed one jet."

"How's the Ice Queen? Anjali wants to know if she's actually terrifying in person or if that's a media thing."

"She's—" Lucy watched Grace crouch over something in the sand, gray rabbit tucked under one arm even out here, and chose her next word with more care than the question probably deserved. "She's trying. It's not nothing."

"That's not an answer, Lucy, that's a deflection wearing a very nice coat." A pause, the particular pause Mira used right before she asked the real question underneath the small one. "You sound different. Since the job started. Good different, I think, but different."

"I'm sleeping better. The cottage has a real bed."

"That's not it either." Mira let it sit a second, and Lucy could picture her exactly, wine in one hand, phone in the other, deciding how hard to push. "You know you can tell us things, right? Whatever this is. We didn't get the whole story with Elena either, and I've never once made you give it to us. I'm not starting now. I'm just saying the door's open, if there's ever a version of this you want to say out loud."

Lucy's throat did something complicated, fast, before she got it back under control. She doesn't know, she thought, watching Grace hold a shell up to the flashlight, turning it over. None of them know it was Elena I loved, not just Elena's house. None of them know what I actually lost when that check landed on the counter. She had built four years of friendship on the version of the story that made her sound unlucky rather than reckless, careful rather than the woman who'd let herself be loved by someone else's wife and then acted surprised when the wife chose her marriage. She wasn't going to hand that over now, over a phone, on a stranger's porch, with the woman she was currently failing not to fall for close enough that Lucy could still feel where her fingers had been that morning.