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A grin tugs at my lips when Lucy’s head pops out of the kitchen several inches lower than Henley’s. “We got this, Daddy, so please take a seat, and someone will serve you shortly.”
When Henley giggles at the cute impersonation of her southern twang, Lucy snaps her eyes, which are crinkled in the corners, to her. “Sorry,” Henley caves, her apology not authentic. “It won’t happen again, boss.”
Quicker than her scowl can turn into a smile, Henley scoops Lucy into her arms, tickles her belly, and disappears into the smoke-filled kitchen.
I’d follow them with a fire extinguisher if the texture and taste of the cloud didn’t register as familiar. A dangerous inferno isn’t destroying my kitchen. It is the wholesale bags of flour Ms. Mitchell left in the butler’s pantry in case our new nanny had a hankering for baking.
Henley is the first to accept her challenge, but I wouldn’t say she’s winning.
5
BRODIE
The whoosh of an email landing in my inbox piques my interest, but only as long as it takes to spot the out-of-office automated reply Nancy’s server issues when she’s out of town. It announces what Henley broadcasted yesterday. The agency I’ve used since Lucy was six months is closed until Tuesday morning, and Nancy, the lead nanny recruitment officer, is uncontactable even longer than that.
She is on a two-week hiatus to visit her family in Sweden, and although her team could assist in fixing her error when they reopen on Tuesday, I’m not sure I will survive the wait.
It is only three days away, but those three days may very well kill me.
I’m thirty-fucking-seven, but the maturity that should come with digits that high didn’t free me from spending most of the night having inappropriate thoughts about my twenty-two-year-old employee.
Even once the jumping sheep succeeded in their plan to have me nodding off, Henley invaded my dreams. Her fresh smell before showering. Her wonky smile when she’s riling me. Those fucking shorts. They played through my head on repeat all night, making me the most restless and horniest I’ve ever been.
Fuck! I am officially one of the creeps I regularly lock away.
This is why I veer for older, more mature nannies. If she hasn’t celebrated her sixtieth birthday, I don’t want her is the motto I’ve lived by the past five plus years.
A motto I remind Nancy of when I email her while waiting for Lucy and Henley to find the detonation button in the kitchen. I keep my correspondence professional. Fuck only enters the equation once, and it is more in response to how my responsibility as a father only extends to not fucking up my daughter’s life. My moral compass doesn’t swing to a stranger’s offspring.
She’s young.
I sign off with.
Too damn young.
As I click the send button, Lucy and Henley enter the dining room from the other end. Their cheeks are dusted with flour, jam is smeared across Lucy’s lips, and her teeth are stained with chocolate syrup, but they’re in one piece.
I can’t say the same for the pancakes balanced in their hands. It looks like mixing the ingredients was an afterthought. They are gooey and floury—an odd combination for a cooked product.
“That isn’t sherbet,” Henley warns while placing a large stack of pancakes in front of me. “I would suggest eating from the outside in.”
“Do you like your surprise breakfast, Daddy?” Lucy asks, stealing my focus from the humored twinkle in Henley’s eyes. “I know you like big pancakes, so I added extra ingredients for you.” She stumbles over “ingredients.” She finds large words like that hard.
While ruffling her hair, I ask, “In the middle of the batter after Henley scooped it on the skillet?”
Henley’s eyes sparkle with laughter at my questioning tone, but all Lucy hears is pride.
She nods before leaning across the table to hand me the syrup. “You go first. It’s your special treat.”
“Thank you. That’s very polite of you.”
I was wrong when I said Henley’s stay might kill me.
Death by pancakes will be the only slogan written on my headstone.
“Thanks for the tip of eating the pancakes from the outside in.”
Henley grunts out a laugh at my grumbled praise before scraping the clumps of unmixed batter into the bin and placing my plate in the dishwasher. “She can’t cook to save her life, but she’s so precious. How could anyone ever get mad at that face?”
“You say that now, but ask me after you’ve finished bringing up breakfast for three hours straight.”
She chuckles again but doesn’t refute my claim we could get food poisoning from Lucy’s breakfast surprise. Eating uncooked eggs is rarely recommended.
While Lucy draws in the dining room, Henley and I move around the kitchen with ease, cleaning up the mess stretched from one counter to the next. I’ve done the same multiple times with Ms. Mitchell’s replacements, particularly on Sundays when they were meant to have the day off, but it feels different today. Henley’s presence still demands the space, but it isn’t suffocating this time around. We work together as a team instead of opponents at opposite ends of the court.
