Page 19 of The Billionaire’s Nanny

"No."

"You could have had her down in ten minutes."

"Probably." Lucy took her time getting up off the floor. She put one hand on the wall and pushed against it to un-pretzel her legs to stand up. "I was going to give it another twenty minutes and then take up drinking."

The sleeve of Carrington's shirt was crushed into a fist-shaped mess of creases from the cuff to halfway up the forearm. Lucy looked at it but didn't say anything about it, and she didn't reach out and smooth it either. Something in Carrington's chest came apart very quietly at that restraint.

"You were bad at it," Lucy said.

"For about ten minutes."

"Longer. You told a scared kid her dream wasn't real, which is the worst thing to say when a kid has a nightmare, and then you offered to buy her a different bedroom." Lucy pushed her sleeves back up past her elbows. "And then you sat on the floor for an hour until your arm went numb until she went to sleep."

She didn't add anything to that. She put her back against the wall and waited to hear what Carrington was going to say next.

"The car's coming at eleven," Carrington said. "I'll have Devika push the signing set to Thursday, and if the weather holds we could take her down to the pools at seven, which gives us an hour and a half before we have to⁠—"

She stopped.

She took two steps and put her hands on Lucy's face, and she kissed her.

For a second, Lucy didn't move at all. Then her hand came up and closed on Carrington's wrist, not pulling it away, holding it where it was, and she kissed her back. Lucy’s other arm went around Carrington's waist under the ruined sleeve. Lucy made a small sound into the kiss, and Carrington walked her back into the wall, just to hear her make it again. She wanted more. That was all she could think about.

When they broke apart for air, she left her hand where it was, her thumb under the bone of Lucy's jaw, and Lucy breathed against her wrist. Lucy took her other arm back and put both hands flat on the wall behind her, palms to the wood, and left them there.

Carrington had a whole speech ready. They could talk about it before the car came. But she kept it behind her teeth and just stood there with her hand still caressing Lucy's face. "Goodnight, Lucy."

She didn’t wait for a response. Carrington let herself into her own room and closed the door, then stood in the dark with her hand still on the handle.

10

LUCY

Lucy put her hand into the pool up to the wrist and held it there until her knuckles ached. Under her fingers, the anemone shut itself, slow and complete, and stopped being a green flower and became a lump of jelly stuck to the rock.

"That's nineteen," Grace said.

"Nineteen what?" Lucy asked.

"Of the green ones. There's an orange one, too, but I don't know if it counts."

"Count it separately."

Grace was flat on her stomach on the shelf with her chin on her fists and her boots hooked over the lip behind her, close enough to the water that Lucy had put a hand on the back of her jacket twice already and taken it off again. The tide was as far out as it was going to go. Down past the last of the rocks, the water made the gapped, unhurried noise it had made all week, the gull that never caught anything flew over low and went away toward the point, its beak empty again.

Carrington was crouched at the other end of the same pool with her weight on the balls of her feet and one hand flat on the rock. She had come down the steps in flat leather shoes, and the salt had already dried into a white line across the toe of each one. She hadn't said anything about it.

"There's a fish," Grace said.

"Where?" Lucy asked.

Grace pointed at nothing Lucy could see. Carrington came around the rim of the pool to the near side and, putting a hand on the rock to stabilize herself, bent down on one knee to see what Grace was seeing. Lucy looked down. Carrington’s hand was mere inches away from her own, so close she could feel the heat radiating from it, and Carrington didn’t move it.

"There is," Carrington said. "Under the ledge on your side. It's been there the whole time."

"What kind is it?" Grace asked.

Carrington leaned over to get a better look at the fish. "I don't know."