Grace Green - The Nanny's Secret

The caller was Greta Gladstone, the owner.

“You’ll have to come and pick Mandy up,” she said. “She’s been having hysterics ever since you dropped her off. This isn’t going to work out, Mr. Maxwell. You’ll have to come up with some other arrangement.”

His day was going rapidly from bad to impossible.

“I’ll be there,” he said, “in five minutes.”

He surged to his feet. “Phil, I’m sorry, I have to—”

“You took three months off to be with your daughter after you lost your wife, Maxwell. Fine. Understandable. But enough is enough.” Morningstar pressed a hand to his chest and belched. “I’ll give you one more week. Get your personal problems sorted out before next Monday or—”

“Next Monday. Right. Thanks, Phil.” Jordan was already halfway out the door. “Thanks a bunch. I’ll have everything sorted out by then. I swear.”

Jordan called his sister the moment he got Mandy home.

“Lacey, thank the lord you’re there.” His daughter had fallen asleep in the car, and he held her limp figure in his arms as he spoke. “I need you to come up. Are you free?”

Lacey was twenty-five to his thirty-four and a world-famous model. She was forever flying off somewhere to a shoot; and she routinely smiled or pouted at him from the cover of top fashion magazines when he passed the local newsstands. With hair like sable, skin like cream, and legs that didn’t know when to stop, she was drop-dead gorgeous.

She was also super-smart, and he was hoping she would come up with some way out of his present dilemma.

She lived just a few minutes away, in a waterfront condo, and by the time he heard her car purr up his drive, he’d made a pot of coffee. As he was walking across the foyer to the sitting room with two steaming mugs, Lacey let herself in by the front door with her own set of keys.

“How come you’re at home?” she asked. Lending elegance to a simple white cotton T-shirt and blue jeans, she preceded him into the sitting room, walking with the trademark fluid glide that had graced hundreds of catwalks. “Shouldn’t you be out selling houses, now that Mandy’s at the Wedgwood Avenue Day Care?”

“Sit down, Lace.” He waited till she’d arranged her long willowy body in an armchair, before he handed her one of the mugs. Setting his own mug down on a side table, he paced the room. “Mandy’s not at day care. She’s upstairs, asleep.”

“Is she sick?”

He shook his head.

“Then wh—”

“She was expelled.” He scratched a despairing hand through his hair.

“Oh, honey.” Lacey rested her mug on her knee. “She wouldn’t stop crying?”

“Yeah, she’s been the same all week. When I made to drop her off today, she was sobbing and clinging to me like a terrified kitten. I felt like a monster, prying her little fingers free and then handing her over…as if I didn’t want her.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, to try to blot out the ugly image. When he opened them again, he saw worry clouding his sister’s face.

“Oh, Jordan, I’m so sorry.”

“What the hell am I going to do?” he asked. “If this goes on, she’s not the only one who’s going to be thrown out. Morningstar’s had it up to here with me. I may be one of the top salesmen in the Lower Mainland but he’s given me till a week Monday to get my personal affairs in order and if I haven’t, it’s—” He slashed his throat with his index finger. “Game over.”

He slumped down in a chair and somber silence fell on the room as they drank their coffee.

When they’d finished, Lacey said in a tentative tone, “Honey, won’t you even consider Fel—”

“No!” He shot up from his chair and scowled down at her. “Don’t even say that name in here, I don’t want—”

“We’re not talking about what you want now.” Lacey stood and confronted him, her green eyes pleading. “Jordan, I understand how you feel—after what happened, I don’t blame you for hating Denny Fairfax—”

“Lacey, I’m warning you—”

“But his sister had no part in what he did, she didn’t even know until after the car accident that he and Marla had been involved in an affair for several months before it happened. And although you lost your wife—”

“In more ways than one!”

“—Felicity Fairfax didn’t come out of the whole mess unscathed. She lost her brother—or as good as lost him. According to all reports, he’s never going to come out of that coma. And, honey, Felicity and Mandy adored each other. I saw them together, it was beautiful. Won’t you at least consider rehiring her? You wouldn’t even have to see her—at least, not too much, only when you dropped Mandy off as Marla used to, and then pick her up again at night—”

A heart-rending wail coiled its way down the stairs and into the sitting room.

Jordan blew out a sigh. “She’s awake,” he said. “Let’s see what you make of her.”

They went upstairs and into her bedroom, which opened off the landing. The child was still crying.

Jordan felt a sense of panic as he and Lacey crossed to the crib. The situation was escalating out of his control. If this continued, he’d lose his job and then how would he support himself and his daughter? He’d made a helluva lot of money over the years but Marla had spent it as fast as he could earn it—sometimes even faster.

“Poor little mite.” Lacey bent over the crib rail, but Mandy wasn’t aware of her because her eyes were tightly shut. She was lying on her back, her cheeks wet and flushed scarlet as she wailed at the pitch of her voice.

Lacey waited till her niece stopped to catch her breath, and then she said, “Hi, sweetie, what’s the matter?”

Mandy froze, and then gulping back a choking sob, opened her eyes. When she saw Lacey, she started crying again, harder than ever, and rolling over she pressed her face to the pillow, so that her cries were muffled.

Jordan leaned over and lifted her up into his arms. Holding her close, he murmured soft words, and in a while, she stopped crying and just clung to him, shaking and giving an occasional gulping sob, her arms clamped around his neck.

Lacey ran a hand down her niece’s back, lightly. “Sweetie—”

Mandy jerked away from her caress. And tightening her grip around her father’s neck, started to sob again.

“I thought,” Lacey whispered to Jordan, “that you’d have managed to get her to sleep in her bed again by this time. She won’t give up the crib?”

He shook his head. “No way. It’s a lost cause. Look, you may as well go. I shouldn’t have had you come over, wasting your time. There’s nothing you can do, nothing anyone can do. This is one problem that doesn’t have a solution.”

Lacey opened her mouth to speak. But thought better of it when she saw the forbidding frown that warned her not to bring up Felicity Fairfax’s name again.

“Thanks for coming over,” he said. “I do appreciate it, Lace.”

“You’re welcome, big brother.”

She gave him a hug and walked over to the door. But when she reached it she paused. And just before she disappeared around the corner, she said, in a rush, over her shoulder, “There is a solution to your problem, Jordan, and you know very well what it is!”

Felicity wrapped her lavender and pink floral-patterned china teapot in bubble wrap and tucked it carefully into the packing box. Then straightening, she smiled when she noticed RJ batting a wad of tissue with his paw.

Some people said cats sensed when a move was afoot and became twitchy and unsettled. Not RJ. Felicity had been cleaning out her apartment and packing her belongings ever since she’d recently sold the street-level property and RJ was exactly as he always had been: playful and inquisitive and supreme monarch of all he surveyed.