Page 3 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

She meant it. She had built an empire on the conviction that there was always a difference, that feeling and function were separate systems and only one of them got you through a crisis intact.

Through the study window, she could see Grace still sitting on the porch steps, alone, arms wrapped around her knees, watching the adults orbit her with the same still, cataloguing patience she'd used on the casket. No one had gone to sit beside her. No one, Carrington understood with sudden, brutal clarity, was going to—not tonight, not this week, not for as long as it took the rest of the world to remember that a seven-year-old girl needed something none of them knew how to give her, and that the one person legally bound to give it to her had spent thirty years building a life specifically designed to require nothing of the kind.

This was not a hostile takeover. It was not a board revolt, not a market correction, not any of the several hundred disasters Carrington Cole had spent her career learning to solve with capital, timing, and sheer force of will.

But it was, still, a problem. And Carrington Cole did not sit with problems. She solved them, the same way she solved everything—by identifying precisely what was missing and then acquiring it.

She turned back to Diane Bell, and her voice, when it came, had already found its footing again, cool and level and entirely, deliberately, without feeling. “Please excuse me for a moment, I must make a call.”

Diane nodded solemnly and exited the room. By the time the door clicked shut, Carrington had already dialed the first number in her frequent contacts. As usual, her assistant picked up on the first ring.

"I'm going to need a nanny. The best one in the state. I don't care what it costs. Find me a name by Friday."

2

LUCY

Milo hit the pavement mid-shriek, both fists full of crushed blueberry muffin, and Anjali had barely gotten, "Milo, sweetheart, we don't—" out of her mouth before Lucy was already down on the grass at his level.

"Hey. Hey, look at this." She held up a single blade of grass between two fingers, turning it like it was the single most interesting object in Bellwood Park. "You ever try to whistle with one of these? My brother taught me. Took me a whole summer."

Milo's scream hitched, curious despite himself, one eye cracking open to check whether this was a trick.

"Watch." Lucy pressed the grass between her thumbs and blew, and it shrieked out a thin, ugly, wonderful note that made a woman two benches over glance up sharply. Milo's whole face changed. The crying didn't stop so much as get forgotten, the way a two-year-old's grief always did, total and then instantly obsolete.

"Again," he demanded, muffin still all over his hands, tears still wet on his cheeks, already reaching for the grass.

"Again," Lucy agreed, found him his own blade, and did not say a single word about the state of his hands, because the state of his hands was not the emergency. The emergency had been the muffin falling, and the muffin falling was already ancient history as far as Milo was concerned.

Anjali exhaled like she'd been holding her breath since spring. "I hate you. I hate you so much right now."

"You love me."

"I love you and I hate you. Both things." Anjali dropped back into her folding chair and grabbed her iced coffee, her shoulders coming down from around her ears all at once, the way they always did when a crisis ended before it really got started. "How do you do that? I have tried the distraction thing. I have tried it four times this week. It has never once worked for me."

"You do it like you're trying to fix a problem. He can tell." Lucy settled back into her own chair, brushing grass off her knees, and reached over to steal one of Anjali's fries without asking. "You have to actually think it's interesting. Kids can smell performance from a hundred feet."

"I don't have time to actually think a blade of grass is interesting, Lucy, I have a spreadsheet due at four."

"That's the whole problem right there."

Around them, Bellwood Park moved as it always did on a warm weekday afternoon—joggers cutting the long loop past the fountain, a knot of teenagers arguing over a speaker that was too loud for the hour, a woman in scrubs eating lunch alone on a bench like it was the only ten minutes of quiet she'd get all shift. Across the little wrought-iron table, Mira made a small, unimpressed noise into her wine and did not look up from her phone. She'd come straight from the courthouse, still in her paralegal blazer with the top button undone in silent protest, sunglasses pushed up into hair she hadn't had time to redo since seven that morning. "Some of us peaked at not having children, and we're thriving."

"Some of us are also three glasses in at noon on a Tuesday," Anjali said.

"It's a half-day. I have rights." Mira set the phone face-down, finally, and looked at Lucy instead, the particular look she got when she'd decided the small talk portion of lunch was over. "Okay. Real talk. How's the job thing."

And there it was. Lucy had known it was coming—Mira always circled twice before she landed—but she felt the question anyway, the small flinch that she'd gotten good at not showing on her face.

"It's fine."

"That's not an answer, that's a deflection with a fine paint job."

"It's a work in progress." Lucy picked at the label on her water bottle, mostly to have somewhere to put her hands. "I had two interviews last week. One family wanted someone forty hours a week for the price of twenty, and the mother kept saying 'like part of the family' in a way that made it very clear she meant unpaid overtime. The other family was fine. The kids were lovely. But the dad talked to me the entire hour like he was interviewing a vacuum cleaner, and I decided I'd rather stay unemployed a little longer than spend two years being talked over in my own kitchen."

"You don't have a kitchen right now," Mira pointed out. "You have a hot plate and moral high ground."

"The moral high ground has excellent acoustics."