Page 30 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"You stood right there and watched me do it and you didn't say a word." Lucy took her hands out of her pockets. "I've been down at the cottage since nine trying to figure out what that was."

"And?" Carrington said.

"I couldn't," Lucy said. "So what was it?"

Carrington didn't have an answer.

"You'll freeze out there. I'll have Nadia—" Carrington said and stopped.

Nadia was asleep in her own bed nine miles away and could not do one thing about any of this.

"Come inside," Carrington said.

Lucy came in as far as the mat and no further. Carrington shut the door behind her and turned off the outside light.

"We can talk in the study," Carrington said.

Six steps down the hall, she turned around. Lucy hadn't followed her and hadn't taken her coat off.

"I'm not going to sit at your desk," Lucy said.

"It isn't a negotiation," Carrington said.

"Everything in that room is," Lucy said.

Carrington came back down the hall. She stopped a few feet short of her. "The woman needed two names on the sheet," she said. "You drop her off every morning and pick her up every afternoon. It was the accurate thing to write down."

She heard herself while it was happening. It was true, but it wasn’t really an answer.

"That isn't what I asked you," Lucy said.

"No," Carrington said.

She put a hand up to her own hair, still half down, and took it away again.

She wanted her hands on Lucy. She had wanted it on the gravel in the rain and she had wanted it that morning in a plastic chair with two hundred people in the room, and she had never once in her life known what to do about wanting something.

"Lucy," Carrington said. "I don't know how."

Lucy took her coat off and laid it over the arm of the chair by the door.

"Then don't do anything," Lucy said. "I'll do it."

She crossed the mat and put one hand flat on Carrington's sternum, above the top button, and held it there long enough for Carrington to step back. Carrington's own hands hung at her sides and stayed there. Lucy's palm was cold from the path. Then Lucy took a fistful of her shirt and kissed her.

Carrington got a hand into Lucy's hair and one arm around her and pulled her in because she wanted her there, and Lucy came against her all at once, and Carrington's shoulder came up against the wall. Lucy made a low sound into her mouth, the one from the hallway at the lodge.

Then Lucy took her mouth away and put her forehead against Carrington's jaw and just breathed there, and Carrington stood in her own hallway with her hand shaking against the back of her neck.

"Upstairs," Carrington said.

The stairs were the worst part.

Carrington had lived here since the year Grace was born and had never once climbed her own staircase with a thought in her head about the noise it made. Carrington took them at the outside edge where the wood was newest, and behind her Lucy did the same without being told to. On the fourth step from the top, something settled deep in the house and both of them froze.

Ten seconds. Carrington counted them out with her hand on the rail and her heart pounding in her carotid, standing in her own hallway, waiting to be caught.

Grace's door was still ajar with the light coming out of it in its strip. They went past it, and at the far end of the landing Carrington reached her hand back without turning around, and Lucy took it, and they walked the last of it joined up like that. Her own door shut with the handle turned. She let the latch down by degrees and lifted her fingers off it.