Page 5 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"Absolutely not," Mira said. "No. Lucy. That woman eats junior associates for a mid-morning snack. There was an entire feature on her in Ridge Monthly last year that was basically forty column inches of other CEOs being afraid of her on the record. My cousin's firm did a deal with Cole Developments and he still flinches when someone says her name in a meeting."

"I'm not marrying her, Mira, I'd be looking after her niece."

"You'd be living with her. In her house. At her mercy, on her schedule, three feet from the Ice Queen at all times⁠—"

"Grace," Lucy said. "The girl’s name is Grace. She's seven, and she lost her mother six weeks ago." She heard her own voice steady out, the way it always did once she'd found the actual point underneath the noise. "I don't care what Carrington Cole is like at the office. I care what it's like for a little girl who's currently living with a woman who scares her own lawyers. Somebody needs to be the calm thing in that house, and I'm apparently very good at being the calm thing. So. I’m taking the interview, at least."

Anjali reached across the table again, but this time she didn't squeeze Lucy's hand, she just let her fingers rest there, warm, wordless, the kind of support that didn't require Lucy to explain herself any further. Mira, for her part, looked like she wanted to argue three more times and had decided, visibly, against all of them.

"Text us the second you're out," Mira said instead. "The second. If we don't hear from you by ten fifteen, I'm calling the police and possibly a hostage negotiator."

"I'll text you."

Lucy did not sleep especially well that night, in the rented room with its one narrow window and its landlady's television murmuring faintly through the floor, but it was not Carrington Cole's reputation keeping her up. It was the other thing, the small, stubborn hope she'd been trying not to let herself feel in months, the hope that had gotten her hurt exactly once already and that she had promised herself she would guard more carefully from now on.

She dressed with care the next morning: plain navy dress, low heels, hair pulled back neat and simple, nothing that could be read as trying too hard and nothing that could be read as not trying at all. She took the bus two transfers north into Highland Bluffs, where the shops got quieter and the hedges got taller and the sidewalks, she noticed, were swept completely clean of the ordinary debris of a city, as though even the leaves knew better than to fall out of turn here.

By the third transfer, she was the only passenger left on the bus, and the driver glanced at her twice in the mirror like he was trying to place which household she might belong to, because women who rode this route alone in low heels at quarter to nine usually belonged to someone. She got off two blocks early on purpose, needing the walk to settle the flutter that had started somewhere around her sternum and refused to be reasoned with, no matter how many times she reminded herself that she had sat across from hostile parents and indifferent fathers and once, memorably, a golden retriever that had eaten a job application whole, and survived all of it.

The estate itself was set back behind iron gates twice her height, stone pillars on either side, a camera angled down at her. Beyond the bars she could see a drive curving out of sight through manicured hedge, and past that, just barely, the pale corner of a house too large to take in from the sidewalk. Lucy stood in front of the call box for a moment longer than she needed to, smoothing her dress with both hands.

She pressed the buzzer.

Static crackled through the little speaker, and then a voice came through it.

"You're two minutes early."

3

CARRINGTON

The security feed showed Lucy Harper standing at the gate with her hands folded and her spine straight, and Carrington let her wait out the full two minutes rather than buzz her through early, because early was its own kind of test, and the correct response to a test disguised as a kindness was never to take it.

At nine o’clock, she pressed the release herself, watched the gate swing inward on the monitor, and set the tablet face-down on the desk before Lucy had taken three steps up the drive.

She had already read the file twice. Lucy Harper, thirty-two, four years with the Marchetti family in Cedar Heights before an unexplained departure, glowing references from two households before that, a childcare certification from a community college that Carrington had never heard of and had therefore looked up, and a criminal background check clean enough to be almost suspicious. Nothing in the file explained why a woman with four years at one address would leave it with no forwarding employer listed for eleven months. Carrington intended to find out. She found out things. It was, along with the empire, more or less the entire architecture of her life.

Nadia, her assistant, showed Lucy in and Carrington remained where she was, at the window, back to the room, watching the city instead of the door. It was a deliberate arrangement. People revealed themselves in the moment before they thought they were being observed, and the floor-to-ceiling glass gave her a perfect, silvered reflection of anyone who entered behind her.

Lucy Harper did not fidget. She did not clear her throat to announce herself, and she did not sit down uninvited, though there were two chairs angled toward the desk clearly meant for exactly that. She stood, hands loosely at her sides, and looked—Carrington watched this happen in the glass—not at the view, which was what impressed people, and not at the desk, which was where the money sat in the form of a single sculptural lamp that cost more than most cars. She looked at the room itself, at the corners of it, the way a person might check an exit before deciding whether to stay.

"Ms. Harper." Carrington turned. "Sit."

"Thank you." Lucy sat. She did not say it was a pleasure to be here, or that the house was beautiful, or any of the six or seven opening lines Carrington had already heard twice this month from candidates whose composure had lasted exactly as long as the pleasantries did.

Carrington took her own chair, laced her fingers together on the desk, and began the way she began every negotiation—by establishing, immediately, who was asking the questions.

"You were with the Marchetti family for four years."

"I was."

"And then you weren't."

"That's right."

"Most agencies list a reason for separation. Yours doesn't." Carrington let the silence stretch, a technique that unraveled ninety percent of the people who sat in that chair within thirty seconds. "Why?"

Lucy held her gaze without hurrying into it. "Because it isn't mine to tell you. It involved the parents' marriage, not my work, and I don't discuss families I've worked for in a way they wouldn't want to be discussed. If you call Elena Marchetti, she'll confirm my work was never the issue." A pause, level, unbothered. "If that's not a satisfying answer, I understand if it costs me the position. I'd rather lose it than start by breaking a confidence for someone else."