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‘Don’t shout at him for running off,’ she said before he could speak. ‘He already thinks you can’t wait to get rid of him, so don’t make things worse. I’ve already spoken to him on the walk back about not running away any more.’
Cal didn’t even flinch at her words, which made it worse somehow. Ryan was right; he didn’t want the responsibility of the children. But now he had it she was going to make damn sure he realised how lucky he was to have them—and how his responsibility stretched far beyond their financial futures.
She had no patience for people who walked out on their obligations to their children.
‘He did it for Daisy,’ he said, surprising her.
She hadn’t expected him to realise that.
‘It was a plan. She wanted to visit the place where their parents died, and Ryan distracted you so she could slip away here. Apparently they’ve done it to all the other nannies.’
Heather winced, looking over at the two children together by the tree stump. ‘Those poor kids.’
‘Yeah. Apparently none of the other nannies told me about Ryan’s running away because they thought they’d get into trouble.’
He gave her a look she couldn’t quite read.
‘You’d have told me, right? If I hadn’t been here?’
‘Yes.’ Because it would have been the right thing to do. He was their guardian, and he deserved to know what was happening in their lives. And because it might have prompted him to take slightly more interest in their emotional well-being.
‘Good.’ Cal glanced up towards the castle, frowning. Obviously he was still thinking about whatever paperwork or accounts he’d left undone that morning, rather than about the children in his care.
Heather opened her mouth to tell him what she thought of that, but then Daisy and Ryan appeared. Daisy was holding a teddy bear Heather hadn’t noticed on their way into town. She must have been hiding it under her summer jacket.
‘Can we go to the bakery and get sausage rolls for lunch?’ Ryan asked, seemingly unaffected by their visit to the spot where his parents died.
Heather supposed that in the end it was just another place. Although it seemed that it meant more than that to Daisy.
She really needed to talk to Daisy.
After she’d straightened Cal’s priorities out, anyway.
‘Yes, we can get sausage rolls,’ Heather agreed. ‘And then go back to the castle. We’ve got work to be getting on with.’
* * *
Daisy was silent all through the sausage roll eating and the drive back to the castle. She was even silent through the discovery of the three laptops that had arrived for them while they were out.
Ryan, apparently more comfortable around Heather since their talk that morning, happily chatted and asked questions as she set the laptops up, plugging two of them in to charge at the desks in the playroom next to the kids’ bedrooms. For now, it would have to double as a classroom, too.
Daisy, meanwhile, sat on the window seat pretending to read. Heather knew she was only pretending, because she’d forgotten to turn any pages for the last twenty minutes. Plus, she was staring at her and Ryan.
‘Right—here we go,’ Heather said eventually, as she got the evaluation website she’d chosen up and running on both the kids’ laptops.
Ryan leaned in closer, manoeuvring himself onto the seat at his desk without ever taking his eyes off the screen. Daisy ignored her.
Heather held in a sigh. ‘Daisy? Would you come over here, please?’
With a considerable amount of eye-rolling, and slamming the book closed, Daisy crossed the room to join them at the two desks.
‘Before I can start teaching you I need to know how much you’ve already learned,’ Heather explained as Daisy took her seat. ‘So, what I would like you to do this afternoon is work your way through the questions on the screens—I’ve started you off on the ones that are appropriate for your ages.’
A tiny fib; she’d actually started them both one stage lower. That way they wouldn’t be intimidated if they found it a little tricky, and if they flew through them they’d feel better about themselves—and hopefully the idea of education in general.
