Page 24 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

Carrington let her have that. Down in the courtyard a car pulled out through the hedge, engine climbing and then thinning away to nothing.

"Are you coming to it?" Grace asked.

Carrington hadn't looked past Thursday on her calendar all week. "Yes."

"Okay." Grace rolled onto her side, facing the wall, and that was the end of it.

Carrington went down to the study a little after nine, poured two glasses of wine she had no plan to drink, and set one on each side of the desk. She took the envelope out of the drawer and set it in the middle of the blotter and waited.

Lucy walked up the gravel pathway a little after half past, her hair still wet at the ends. She stopped two steps inside the door.

"Carrington." Lucy looked at the wine. "What's this?"

"Sit down, or don't. It won't take long." Carrington came around the desk and pushed the envelope into Lucy's hands before Lucy had decided whether to sit.

Lucy turned it over and opened the unsealed flap.

"You said two things to me in the car," Carrington said. "This is both of them, answered."

Lucy read the first page, still standing.

"The first eight pages are the position," Carrington said. "As of the first of the month, you don't work for me. You work for Grace's trust, through Diane's office, on the trust's payroll. I'd have no standing over you as an employer. None."

"None?" Lucy looked up to see if she meant it.

"None." Carrington pressed two fingers flat on the desk. "It isn't paperwork for its own sake. Read the term clause and you'll see what it actually does."

Lucy found it, read it, stopped halfway down the page, and went back to the top to read it again. Carrington stood at the corner of the desk and watched her do it twice.

"It extends for three years," Carrington said. "You can end it with thirty days' notice, any time, no reason required. The trust can only end it for cause, and cause has to be written up and signed off by two people, neither of them me. There's nobody on this property who can put you off it. I made certain of that."

"The cottage," Lucy said.

"Two years' license after you go, whenever that is, and a housing allowance after. Your salary goes to a hundred and ninety-five, the retirement piece is funded from the first, and the log stops." Carrington watched that land. "You've written in that book every night since the week you got here because it wasn’t optional or negotiable. It's optional now."

Lucy looked up properly for the first time since she'd opened the envelope. "The log stops?"

"Yes."

She turned two more pages in silence. Page nine was the one Carrington had spent longest on, an hour deciding where in eleven pages a single clause should sit, alone on its own page, so it couldn't get lost between two other things.

"Page nine says there's a personal relationship between us," Carrington said. "It says the reclassification means it isn't a conflict of interest under the trust's terms. And it sets a date."

"A date for what?" Lucy said.

"Disclosure. The day Ashgrove closes." Carrington heard her own voice come out level and clipped, and she couldn't stop it happening even standing here with Lucy. "It's written down, so it can’t be changed or forgotten about later."

Lucy read page nine slowly and didn't turn it over when she finished.

"There's an addendum," Carrington said. "You asked not to be a secret. That's who finds out, and in what order."

Lucy turned to the back.

Carrington knew the order without needing to see it upside down: Diane Bell first, then Nadia, then the trust's outside counsel—all three the same day Ashgrove closed. She'd spent most of the second night on the fourth line: six dates proposed and rejected in the column beside it before she landed on the first week of the school holidays, when there'd be nobody around to notice Grace being told anything at all.

Grace Cole.

Lucy's hands went still on the page. She'd been holding the sheets in one hand and turning them with the other, and now both hands simply stopped, her thumb against the edge of the last sheet, not moving it.