“A cougar?”
I stood in the kitchen, staring at my unanswered texts while my stomach tied itself into increasingly creative knots.
The kids exchanged one of those silent sibling looks across the room.
I noticed immediately. “What?”
CJ closed his notebook slowly. “We think you should go check on her.”
“I already told you, I don’t know where she?—”
“Yes, you do,” Bianca interrupted.
I blinked. “No, I don’t.”
“You have her employment contract,” she said patiently. “Legally there has to be an address, right?”
Shit. Of course there was.
Billie hugged Bianca hard. “We can rescue her.”
“We are not rescuing anyone.”
CJ tilted his head at me carefully. “But you want to.”
Unfortunately, yes. Very much. I scrubbed a hand over my face.
An hour later, Lady Ferdinand arrived. She seemed deeply alarmed by the collective tension radiating from all four of us.
“Heavens to Betsy,” she said once she was inside. “You all look like you’re in mourning.”
“That’s because Nanny Winnie is missing,” Billie informed her.
“She’s not missing,” I corrected automatically.
Lady Ferdinand studied my face. “You don’t seem convinced of that.”
No. No, I wasn’t.
The kids swarmed her with increasingly ludicrous theories while I grabbed my keys.
CJ followed me toward the foyer. “If she’s secretly being held hostage by evil hunters, blink twice.”
“Why is that your first assumption?”
“Pattern recognition.”
I pointed toward the living room. “Homework.”
He sighed heavily but let me leave.
The drive to Winnie’s address took nearly fifty minutes. Fifty increasingly unsettling minutes. The farther I drove, the more isolated everything became. Streetlights disappeared, then neighborhoods. Even the roads narrowed, winding through thick woods that swallowed most of the remaining daylight.
Winnie lived all the way out here?
Alone?
I didn’t like that one bit.
