Ex-Convict Nanny and Billionaire Single Dad novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Loft

I didn't answer.

The woman from Mercer Island took her hand off the bar.

She didn't argue.

She took a card out of her pocket, plain white with a phone number written on the back in pen, and pushed it through the gate.

"When you're ready to stop saying that," she said, "call me. I'll listen. I owe you that much, if he's right."

She walked back to a gray car parked on the shoulder and drove away.

I stood at the gate with the card in my fist until the security chief cleared his throat behind me.

"Mr. Roarke would like to see you in his office."

Of course he would.

There was a camera on the gate.

Nate's office was all glass on one side, over the lake.

He was standing at the window with his back to me when I came in.

On his desk, on the big monitor, the gate footage was paused on her hand on the bar.

"I didn't hear what she said," he said. "There's no audio at the gate."

"Okay."

"I saw your face." He turned around. "Whatever she said got through something nothing else has. I want to know what."

I sat down in the chair across from his desk because my knees weren't working.

"That was the boy's mother," I said. "The boy from the pool."

He went still.

"What did she want?"

"The truth."

"Did you give it to her?"

"No."

He came around the desk and sat on the edge of it in front of me.

"Holly."

"Please don't," I said. "Please don't ask me again. If I break it now, what was any of it for?"

My voice cracked down the middle.

I hated it.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he reached down and took my hand, and turned it over, and ran his thumb across the palm.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"I won't ask. Not today. Not tomorrow." His thumb kept moving. "You'll tell me when you can, or you won't. I'll take you either way."

I didn't understand him.

"Your company," I said. "Your board. Monday."

"Let them have Monday."

"Why?"

"Because I watched you on that gate camera," he said, "lying to a woman for somebody else, and it was killing you. Liars don't look like that, Holly. People who are carrying something look like that."

I put my other hand over my face.

He didn't say anything else.

He just held on.

That night Lulu went to sleep with a brass cow bell tied to her doorknob with a ribbon.

She'd chosen it herself from a farm store online and named it Doris.

"If I open my door, Doris tells on me," she explained to me, very serious.

"Doris is a snitch."

"Doris is a good girl," Lulu said, and was asleep before I'd finished the page.

The housekeeper had the room across the hall from her. I told her I was stepping out. She nodded without a single question in her face.

I took the baby monitor and crossed the lawn in the dark.

There was a new gate at the bottom of the boathouse stairs.

It was locked.

Nate was standing on the other side of it with the key.

He opened it for me without a word.

I went up the stairs ahead of him.

In the loft the woodstove was going and the window was black and wet.

I set the monitor on the sill. Lulu was a small still shape under her quilt.

Then I turned around.

He was standing just inside the door with his hand still on the knob.

"You said I can't pretend anymore," I said. "So I'm not."

"Holly."

"I'm done waiting for my life to start," I said. "I've waited four and a half years. I'm not waiting tonight."

He shut the door behind him.

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