Page 14 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"Lucy—" she started, and didn't know, even as the name left her mouth, what was meant to follow it.

She never found out. Her cellphone buzzed to life on the island, harsh and sudden in the quiet kitchen, and the screen lit up with the name of an associate in Hong Kong.

In that second, Carrington remembered who she was. And where her priorities should lie.

She picked up the phone and stalked to her office without giving Lucy a second glance.

8

LUCY

The suitcase wouldn't close over Grace's fourth stuffed rabbit, and Lucy was on her knees on bedroom floor at six in the morning, negotiating with a seven-year-old who had staked her entire diplomatic position on smuggling contraband animals past airport security.

"One rabbit," Lucy said. "The gray one. He's the ambassador. The other three stay home and guard the house."

"They'll be lonely."

"They have each other. That's the whole point of an embassy." Lucy zipped the case around the single, victorious rabbit before Grace could counter-propose, and stood, brushing off her knees. "Coat. Shoes. We leave in ten minutes or your aunt starts pacing, and once she starts pacing, nobody in this house gets breakfast."

It had been three weeks since the caseworker's visit—a brisk, watchful woman named Alvarez who'd spent ninety minutes in the house asking Grace what her favorite color was and watching, closely, to see whether Carrington already knew. Carrington had known. Teal, she'd said, without hesitation, and Lucy had stood in the doorway with her heart doing something complicated and watched five weeks of triangle toast and bedroom doors left properly shut pay for themselves in real time. The follow-up letter had used the word stable. Lucy had read it twice before she let herself believe it.

She hadn't expected the letter to change anything about how Carrington ran her calendar. She'd been wrong about that, too. Two days after the letter arrived, Carrington had called her into the study and informed her, in the tone she used for board resolutions, that she'd be traveling to Cormorant Point to close the Ashgrove acquisition in person, and that Grace and Lucy would accompany her, and that this was not, Ms. Harper, open for negotiation.

"You could leave her here with me for four days," Lucy had said, testing it. "It's not a crisis."

"I left her mother for thirty years believing that was an acceptable arrangement." Carrington hadn't looked up from the contract she was annotating. "I've reconsidered my position on acceptable arrangements. Pack for four days. Nadia has the flight details."

So now there was a private jet waiting at a regional airfield an hour outside Phoenix Ridge, and Grace was buckled into a seat twice her size with the gray rabbit tucked under one arm, and Carrington sat across the narrow aisle in a suit the color of wet slate, reading a document with a pen already moving through it before the wheels had left the tarmac. Anjalinka—younger than Lucy had pictured from Carrington's phone calls, sharp-eyed, visibly delighted to have been promoted from Tokyo delegate to in-person acquisitions counsel—sat one row back with her own laptop open, occasionally leaning forward to murmur something about zoning easements that made Carrington's pen stop and then start again, faster.

Lucy had flown exactly twice in her life before this, both times economy, both times with her knees against the seatback in front of her. This was quieter. The quiet made her suspicious of it, the way she'd learned to be suspicious of anything that came without a visible cost attached.

Grace fell asleep somewhere over the mountains, her head listing sideways against Lucy's arm, and Carrington glanced up from her document at the exact moment it happened, something crossing her face too fast to name before she looked back down at the contract as though she hadn't seen anything at all.

Cormorant Point turned out to be a lodge built into the shoulder of a headland, cedar-shingled and low-slung, with a wall of glass in the main room that framed the cove below like a painting somebody had commissioned specifically to intimidate potential buyers into paying more than the land was worth. Ashgrove Holdings had run it as a private retreat for forty years before deciding, for reasons Lucy gathered involved a very expensive divorce among the Ashgrove siblings, that they'd rather have the money.

The rooms Nadia had arranged sat along the same hallway—Grace's between the other two, a connecting door on either side so that neither adult had to walk through a public corridor to reach her in the night. Lucy noted the arrangement without comment. She suspected Carrington had specified it herself, down to the exact configuration, the same way she specified breakfast menus, and found something almost touching in the idea of a woman drafting the architecture of her own care for a child in the margins of an acquisition memo.

The first night passed the way travel always did with a seven-year-old: overtired, overstimulated, a meltdown over the unfamiliar smell of the pillowcases that resolved itself, eventually, into sleep only after Lucy had read four chapters of the fox book in a voice pitched low enough not to carry through the wall. She heard Carrington's door open once, sometime after midnight, and close again without anyone knocking, and understood it for what it was: a woman checking that the house, this borrowed house on a rented headland, was still standing the way she'd left it.

Lucy was awake before dawn on the second morning, the way she often was in unfamiliar beds, and she'd pulled a sweater over her sleep shirt and gone looking for coffee in the lodge's main room rather than lie there listening to the unfamiliar creak of cedar settling in the cold.

Carrington was already at the window, in a robe instead of a suit, which was its own small dislocation—Lucy had never seen her in anything that wasn't armored, tailored, buttoned to the throat. The robe made her look, for one disorienting second, like an actual person who occasionally slept and occasionally got cold rather than a headline that happened to eat breakfast.

"You're up early," Carrington said, without turning from the glass.

"I could say the same."

"I never went to sleep, strictly speaking. Ashgrove's counsel sent a revised term sheet at three, and I wanted to have opinions about it before Anjalinka woke up and had her own." Carrington nodded at the carafe on the counter, French press, dark enough that Lucy could smell it from the doorway. "I made too much. Nadia isn't up for another hour."

Lucy poured two cups without being asked twice, and something in the domesticity of that—pouring coffee in someone else's borrowed kitchen at five forty in the morning, no schedule dictating it, no binder requiring it—settled over her more gently than she wanted it to. She crossed to the window and stood a careful two feet away, close enough to share the view, far enough to keep it a view and not something else.

Outside, the cove was still the color of iron, the tide pulling back off rocks that wouldn't be visible again until noon. A single gull worked the shoreline, methodical, unbothered by the cold.

"It's beautiful here," Lucy said.

"It's a liability with excellent light. There's a fault line under the eastern parcel that will cost someone eleven million dollars to remediate before anyone builds so much as a gazebo." Carrington sipped her coffee, and something in her shoulders came down half an inch, the way they never did in the study, in the boardroom, anywhere Lucy had seen her be observed by people who mattered to her balance sheet. "I used to think that was the whole point of me. Seeing the fault line before anyone else did."

"Isn't it still?"