Page 16 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"There's no version," Lucy said. "I promise. I'm fine. I just like the ocean."

"Uh-huh." Mira didn't believe her. Mira rarely did—and rarely pushed past the point of making that clear. "Text us when you're back. And Lucy… be careful with rich women and their nice coats. That's all I'm saying."

"Noted," Lucy said, and hung up before the woman could ask her anything further.

She found Carrington on the deck past ten, after Grace had finally gone down, a bottle of wine open between two glasses that Carrington had clearly poured in anticipation of company she hadn't been certain would arrive.

"The Ashgroves signed," Carrington said, without turning. "Eleven million in remediation, structured over three years, exactly where Anjalinka predicted they'd land. It should have felt like a victory."

"Doesn't it?"

"It feels like a Tuesday." Carrington handed her a glass without being asked, their fingers overlapping around the stem for a half-second longer than the transfer required, and neither of them moved to correct that either. "I used to live for the feeling of a deal closing. Now I find I'm mostly relieved I can go check on a seven-year-old instead of celebrating with people I don't particularly like."

"That's not nothing, Ms. Cole."

"Carrington." The word came out low, deliberate, offered rather than corrected. "You've fixed my collar and poured my coffee and told my niece I'm trying, all in the same twenty-four hours. I think we're past Ms. Cole."

The cove had gone fully dark below them, the tide somewhere out past hearing, and the only light came from a single lamp inside and the moon doing something unhelpful to the line of Carrington's jaw. Lucy set her glass down on the rail because her hands had started doing something she didn't trust around stemware, and Carrington's eyes tracked the movement, and then came back up to Lucy's face and stayed there.

"We shouldn’t be doing this," Lucy whispered, more to herself than to the woman standing eighteen inches away. "Whatever this is."

"What's it called, when you already know and you're doing it anyway?"

"A mistake, usually."

"Usually," Carrington repeated, and lifted one hand, slow enough that Lucy could have stepped back a dozen times before it arrived, and didn't, and felt the backs of Carrington's fingers come to rest against her cheek, warm despite the cold coming off the water, patient in a way nothing about this woman had ever been patient before.

Lucy's breath went somewhere it didn't usually go. Carrington leaned in, unhurried, deliberate, the way she did everything that mattered⁠—

And from inside the lodge, thin and rising fast, Grace began to scream.

9

CARRINGTON

"Don't turn the big light on."

Lucy was six steps down the hall already, one hand on the wall. Carrington reached the door a beat behind her and put her hand a foot short of the handle, which she had done every time since they arrived.

Grace screamed again, and it cut off abruptly.

The door wasn't latched. It swung on Lucy's palm into a gray room, curtains open a hand's width onto the cove, and Grace was sitting straight up in bed with both palms flat on the mattress. Awake. Eyes open too wide, mouth open, not blinking.

"That sound is the water," Lucy said from the doorway.

Grace didn't answer. Carrington stopped at the threshold and waited for Lucy to go past her. Lucy stepped back into the hall.

"Carrington."

Her hand was on the doorframe. She left it there.

"I'll be right here." Lucy put her back against the far wall, hands at her sides.

Carrington went in. The floorboards were cold under her feet. She stopped a yard from the bed, close enough to be seen, and Grace looked up at her.

"Where's Lucy?" Grace said.

"In the hall."