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“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s a gift from my boyfriend.”
His eyebrows went up slightly.
She realized in horror that it sounded like she was bragging to him that she had an actual boyfriend.
“Just a going-away present,” she continued stupidly. “A good-bye gesture.”
“You’ll have plenty of space for it in your room,” Ruler Kreed said after a moment. “There’s good light, too.”
“I believe it,” she told him. “This whole place has incredible light.”
He nodded, looking pleased.
She tried not to revel too much in his expression of pleasure. Why did she already care so much about pleasing a man she just met?
A few minutes later, they reached the end of a long hallway. Ruler Kreed placed his hand against the sensor and waited while it scanned his palm. Security must be serious if the sensor was in full-scan mode. But she supposed that made sense. He was an important man, after all.
“Do you have a particular nursery philosophy?” he asked while they waited.
She wished she’d had time to read the whole manual and memorize some of the more pertinent sections. But she had found out she had this job less than two days ago. And she’d spent all day yesterday in a single training session with Janice from the Nanny Agency, who was normally on phones, and not a trainer at all.
She hardly knew enough to be here. She certainly didn’t have a philosophy yet.
Speaking from her heart was the only choice.
“I think a foundation of trust and caring is the most important thing,” she said carefully. “Everything else is built on top of that.”
“That’s an unusual outlook,” Ruler Kreed said. “But I believe in hiring passionate people, so maybe it’s just right for working here.”
Unusual? How did I go wrong with trust and caring?
The doors swung open, and he gestured outside with a flourish.
“Here are your babies,” he said with a half-smile.
He was pointing at what looked like an orchard of small fruit trees.
There were no children anywhere in sight.
Stunned, Yasmine looked from the trees to her boss and back to the trees again.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“I, um…” she swallowed.
“Ah, you don’t have many fruit trees outside the greenhouses on the Terras, do you?” he asked. “No wonder you put such an emphasis on caring in your nurseries.”
She blinked up at him and suddenly it all clicked.
The plant. The simple working clothes.
He thinks I’m the gardener…
And now I have to correct the most powerful man on the planet, maybe the whole system.
“I’m the nanny,” she said quietly, looking down at her feet.
For one horrible moment, there was only silence.
Yasmine berated herself inwardly for embarrassing him. He was probably about to start bellowing at her. She hadn’t even lasted ten minutes. That had to be some kind of record.
Instead, the silence was broken with a gorgeous, booming laugh that reverberated in her chest like the engine of one of the tilling machines back home.
She looked up in wonder to see that the great ruler of Ulfgard was laughing uproariously, his golden circlet glimmering in the afternoon sunlight.
In that moment, he was more beautiful than any of the artwork she’d seen inside.
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