Page 12 of The Billionaire's One-Night Stand Nanny
“I mean. How funny that we have friends in common.” She paused. “Mr. Walker,” she added, offering up an uncomfortable smile. Then it faded from her face, leaving in its stead an expression that made me long even for the awkward grimace: panic. “You cannottell him.”
And yes, there it was.
“No,” I agreed. “We can’t. We can’t tell either of them.” I’d never live it down: hiring my one-night stand as the nanny? Even the thought of it made my stomach lurch. I could take the guys’ ribbing about most things–but this affectedMaddie.Icould take it, but my daughter didn’t need to have Charlie making ‘clever’ comments about her dad’s indiscretions with the nanny every time he came over to drink beers in my tiny backyard. And fuck–Flora didn’t need my friends eyeing her, wondering what she looked like naked. Not like they’d try anything with her–and they definitely wouldn’t, not after I made it clear that as Maddie’s nanny, she was off-limits–butstill. I didn’t want to put ideas in their heads. My fists clenched tight around my coffee cup.
“Okay, good. We’ll just tell them we met at the book launch, we got to talking, you mentioned needing a nanny–”
“And you needed a job,” I said, picking up where she left off, “until you find another teaching position–”
Flora grimaced. “Actually…” she said, hesitating. “I haven’t told Edie I got fired, so please don’t tell her or James that, either. Just tell them… Well, just tell them I’m the nanny for the summer. I’ve had summer jobs in the past.”
“Sure,” I nodded. If she didn’t want to tell her friend about her job situation yet, that was her business.
“Thanks,” she said, looking into her coffee.
A loud thump sounded from upstairs, and it was my turn to grimace as Flora looked up at me.
“Well,” I asked, rolling back my shoulders, “ready to meet her?”
Flora let out a soft laugh. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “But I suppose I have to be by the time we get upstairs.”
CHAPTER8
Flora
I followedRyan up the staircase toward the upper stories of his townhouse. We continued past the second floor–where his bedroom was, I thought,where I slept last night, in his expansive, luxurious bed–and up to the third, where a door at the end of the short hallway was cracked open. The soft sound of pop music drifted out. Maddie’s room.
I stood behind him, staring at his back as he reached up to knock on the wooden doorframe. His rumpled Oxford cloth shirt pulled across his shoulder blades, and I looked away.What am I doing?I thought for the hundredth time in the past fifteen minutes. But I knew what I was doing: I was doing what needed to be done. Maddie needed a nanny. I needed a job. It made perfect sense. This way, I could earn some extra money–andoh god, we hadn’t even talked aboutpayment, and how was I supposed to bring it up now, when he’d already thought I was an escort once… There was nothing to be done for it. I needed the money, and a job nannying–a fifth grader, no less!–was much less suspicious than a gig delivering pizzas or something. It looked…extra-curricular, rather thandesperate.Professional development-adjacent.
No one would suspect that I’d lost my job, and I would make enough to get me through the summer without having to ask for help.You can do this, Flora.You can make it work.I had to. I’d always been independent. My mom had raised me that way, but more importantly, I’d seen what happened when she relied on my dad for money, and it hadn’t been pretty. They’d never managed to stand face to face, smiling pleasantly, like Ryan and his ex-wife.
“Come in,” said a high voice, and I schooled my face into the friendly-but-firm expression I wore in the classroom as Ryan–Mr. Walker–nudged the door open.
“Maddie,” he said, and his voice was warm and rich, stirring my insides in a way I had to tamp down. “This is Miss Connelly. She’s here to spend the day with us today, on a trial as the new nanny.”
He stood aside, letting me into his daughter’s room, and I stepped forward a half-step to stand at his side, slightly behind him.
“Hi,” I said. Her duffle bag slung into a corner, the girl sat on a queen-size bed, neatly made up with a lavender bedspread, a notebook in her lap and pencil in hand. The walls of the room were purple, too, an even paler, barely-there shade, and on them hung a chaotic assortment of prints and posters and that told of a decade spent growing up in this room: pastel watercolors of picture book characters alongside taped-up pictures from tween magazines, mostly prom-ish looking dresses. A framed, cut-paper silhouette of a round-cheeked toddler, wispy hair curling at her nape, hung above a small collection of polaroids of elementary schoolers, their tongues sticking out. The floor was much the same: a huge, nearly overflowing basket of plush toys sat in a corner behind a tween-sized mannequin draped in a scarf. I smiled. Ten was a good age. I returned my gaze to Maddie to find her looking at me with eyes the exact shade of brown as her father’s. Her expression was all her mom’s, though: skeptical and closed.
“I didn’t know we were going to do a nanny today,” she said, and the phrasing made me swallow hard.Yeah, Ryan didn’t know he wasdoingthe nanny, either. You live and you learn.“I thought we were going to go to the park.”
“And we are,” Ryan–Mr. Walker,damn it–said. “And Miss Connelly will be joining us. She wasn’t going to start just yet, but her schedule was unexpectedly free, so you can get to know her a little today.” He shrugged.
“You don’t have to call me Miss Connelly,” I said, to father and daughter alike. “I’m Flora. It’s nice to meet you.” She frowned.
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I like your name too, Maddie.”
Her frown deepened. “It’s short for Madeline.”
“Oh, really?” I asked, keeping my tone neutral.Was that a good or bad thing?
“Yeah,” she said. “Notlike the book. I don’t have red hair likethatMadeline. You do, though.” My hand came up to the ends of my tousled hair self-consciously. I loved my hair–now. I hadn’t when I was Maddie’s age.
“But I don’t speak French,” I said. “Only a little bit of Spanish.” I shrugged.
“I speak a little bit of French,” she said. “You have to, if you want to work in fashion.”
