The Nanny Bombshell

Sierra Evans rode the elevator down to the lobby of the attorney’s office building, sagging with relief against the paneled wall. That had gone much better than she could have hoped and she was almost positive that the job was as good as hers. It was a good thing, too, because the situation was far worse than she could have imagined.

Clearly Cooper Landon had better things to do than care for his twin nieces. He was probably too busy traipsing around like the playboy of the Western world. She wasn’t one to listen to gossip, but in his case, his actions and reputation as a womanizing partier painted a disturbing picture. That was not the kind of atmosphere in which she wanted her daughters raised.

Her daughters. Only recently had she begun thinking of them as hers again.

With Ash and Susan gone, it seemed wrong that the twins would be so carelessly pawned off on someone like Cooper. But she would save them. She would take care of them and love them. It was all that mattered now.

The doors slid open and she stepped out. She crossed the swanky lobby and pushed out the door into the sunshine, heading down Park Avenue in the direction of the subway, feeling hopeful for the first time in two weeks.

Giving the twins up had been the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, but she knew it was for the best. Between her student loans and exorbitant rent, not to mention her dad’s failing health and mounting medical bills, she was in no position financially or emotionally to care for infant twins. She knew that Ash and Susan, the girls’ adoptive parents, would give her babies everything that she couldn’t.

But in the blink of an eye they were gone. She had been standing in front of the television, flipping through the channels when she paused on the news report about the plane crash. When she realized it was Ash and Susan they were talking about, her knees had buckled and she’d dropped to the nubby, threadbare shag carpet. In a panic she had flipped through the channels, desperate for more details, terrified to the depths of her soul that the girls had been on the flight with them. She’d sat up all night, alternating between the television and her laptop, gripped by a fear and a soul-wrenching grief that had been all-consuming.

At 7:00 a.m. the following morning the early news confirmed that the girls had in fact been left with Susan’s family and were not in the crash. Sierra had been so relieved she wept. But then the reality of the situation hit hard. Who would take the girls? Would they go to Susan’s family permanently or, God forbid, be dropped into the foster-care system?

She had contacted her lawyer immediately, and after a few calls he had learned what to her was unthinkable. Cooper would be their guardian. What the hell had Ash been thinking, choosing him? What possible interest could a womanizing, life of the party, ex-hockey player have in two infant babies?

She’d asked her lawyer to contact him on her behalf using no names, assuming that he would be more than happy to give the girls back to their natural mother. She would find a way to make it work. But Cooper had refused to give them up.

Her lawyer said she could try to fight him for custody, but the odds weren’t in her favor. She had severed her parental rights, and getting them back would take a lengthy and expensive legal battle. But knowing Cooper would undoubtedly need help, and would probably be thrilled with someone of her qualifications, she’d managed to get herself an interview for the nanny position.

Sierra boarded the subway at Lexington and took the F Train to Queens. Normally she visited her dad on Wednesdays, but she had the appointment at Cooper’s apartment tomorrow so she had to rearrange her schedule. With any luck he would offer her the job on the spot, and she could go home and start packing immediately.

She took a cab from the station to the dumpy, third-rate nursing home where her dad had spent the past fourteen months. As she passed the nursing station she said hi to the nurse seated there and received a grunt of annoyance in return. She would think that being in the same profession there would be some semblance of professional courtesy, but the opposite was true. The nurses seemed to resent her presence.

She hated that her dad had to stay in this horrible place where the employees were apathetic and the care was borderline criminal, but this was all that Medicare would cover and home care at this late stage of the disease was just too expensive. His body had lost the ability to perform anything but the most basic functions. He couldn’t speak, barely reacted to stimuli and had to be fed through a tube. His heart was still beating, his lungs still pulling in air, but eventually his body would forget how to do that, too. It could be weeks, or months. He might even linger on for a year or more. There was just no way to know. If she could get him into the place in Jersey it would be harder to visit, but at least he would be well cared for.

“Hi, Lenny.” She greeted her dad’s roommate, a ninety-one-year-old war vet who had lost his right foot and his left arm in the battle at Normandy.

“Hey there, Sierra,” he said cheerfully from his wheelchair. He was dressed in dark brown pants and a Kelly-green cardigan sweater that were as old and tattered as their wearer.

“How is Dad today?” she asked, dropping her purse in the chair and walking to his bedside. It broke her heart to see him so shriveled and lifeless. Nothing more than a shell of the man he used to be—the loving dad who single-handedly raised Sierra and her little sister Joy. Now he was wasting away.

“It’s been a good day,” Lenny said.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said, pressing a kiss to his papery cheek. He was awake, but he didn’t acknowledge her. On a good day he lay quietly, either sleeping or staring at the dappled sunshine through the dusty vertical blinds. On a bad day, he moaned. A low, tortured, unearthly sound. They didn’t know if he was in pain, or if it was just some random involuntary function. But on those days he was sedated.

“How is that little boy of yours?” Lenny asked. “Must be reaching about school age by now.”

She sighed softly to herself. Lenny’s memory wasn’t the best. He somehow managed to remember that she’d been pregnant, but he forgot the dozen or so times when she had explained that she’d given the girls up for adoption. And clearly he was confusing her with other people in his life because sometimes he thought she had an older boy and other times it was a baby girl. And rather than explain yet again, she just went with it.

“Growing like a weed,” she told him, and before he could ask more questions they announced over the intercom that it was time for bingo in the community room.

“Gotta go!” Lenny said, wheeling himself toward the door. “Can I bring you back a cookie?”

“No thanks, Lenny.”

When he was gone she sat on the edge of her dad’s bed and took his hand. It was cold and contracted into a stiff fist. “I had my job interview today,” she told him, even though she doubted his brain could process the sounds he was hearing as anything but gibberish. “It went really well, and I get to see the girls tomorrow. If the other applicants looked anything like the bimbo who interviewed right before me, I’m a shoo-in.”

She brushed a few silvery strands of hair back from his forehead. “I know you’re probably thinking that I should stay out of this and trust Ash and Susan’s judgment, but I just can’t. The man is a train wreck just waiting to happen. I have to make sure the girls are okay. If I can’t do that as their mother, I can at least do it as their nanny.”

And if that meant sacrificing her freedom and working for Cooper Landon until the girls no longer needed her, that was what she was prepared to do.

Two

The next afternoon at six minutes after one, Sierra knocked on the door of Cooper’s penthouse apartment, brimming with nervous excitement, her heart in her throat. She had barely slept last night in anticipation of this very moment. Though she had known that when she signed away her parental rights she might never see the girls again, she had still hoped. She just hadn’t expected it to happen until they were teenagers and old enough to make the decision to meet their birth mother. But here she was, barely five months later, just seconds away from the big moment.

The door was opened by a woman. Sierra assumed it was the housekeeper, judging by the maid’s uniform. She was tall and lanky with a pinched face and steel-gray hair that was pulled back severely and twisted into a bun. Sierra placed her in her mid to late sixties.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked in a gravely clipped tone.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Landon.”

“Are you Miss Evans?”

“Yes, I am.” Which she must have already known, considering the doorman had called up to announce her about a minute ago.

She looked Sierra up and down with scrutiny, pursed her lips and said, “I’m Ms. Densmore, Mr. Landon’s housekeeper. You’re late.”

“Sorry. I had trouble getting a cab.”

“I should warn you that if you do get the job, tardiness will not be tolerated.”

Sierra failed to see how she could be tardy for a job she was at 24/7, but she didn’t push the issue. “It won’t happen again.”

Ms. Densmore gave a resentful sniff and said, “Follow me.”

Even the housekeeper’s chilly greeting wasn’t enough to smother Sierra’s excitement. Her hands trembled as she followed her through the foyer into an ultra-modern, open-concept living space. Near a row of ceiling-high windows that boasted a panoramic view of Central Park, with the afternoon sunshine washing over them like gold dust, were the twins. They sat side by side in identical ExerSaucers, babbling and swatting at the colorful toys.

They were so big! And they had changed more than she could have imagined possible. If she had seen them on the street, she probably wouldn’t have recognized them. She was hit by a sense of longing so keen she had to bite down on her lip to keep from bursting into tears. She forced her feet to remain rooted to the deeply polished mahogany floor while she was announced, when what she wanted to do was fling herself into the room, drop down to her knees and gather her children in her arms.

“The one on the left is Fern,” Ms. Densmore said, with not a hint of affection in her tone. “She’s the loud, demanding one. The other is Ivy. She’s the quiet, sneaky one.”

Sneaky? At five months old? It sounded as if Ms. Densmore just didn’t like children. She was probably a spinster. She sure looked like one.

Not only would Sierra have to deal with a partying, egomaniac athlete, but also an overbearing and critical housekeeper. How fun. And it frosted her that Cooper let this pinched, frigid, nasty old bat who clearly didn’t like children anywhere near the girls.

“I’ll go get Mr. Landon,” she said, striding down a hall that Sierra assumed led to the bedrooms.

Alone with her girls for the first time since their birth, she crossed the room and knelt down in front of them. “Look how big you are, and how beautiful,” she whispered.

They gazed back at her with wide, inquisitive blue eyes. Though they weren’t identical, they looked very much alike. They both had her thick, pin-straight black hair and high cheekbones, but any other traces of the Chinese traits that had come from her great-grandmother on her mother’s side had skipped them. They had eyes just like their father and his long, slender fingers.

Fern let out a squeal and reached for her. Sierra wanted so badly to hold her, but she wasn’t sure if she should wait for Cooper. Tears stinging her eyes, she took one of Fern’s chubby little hands in hers and held it. She had missed them so much, and the guilt she felt for leaving them, for putting them in this situation, sat like a stone in her belly. But she was here now, and she would never leave them again. She would see that they were raised properly.

“She wants you to pick her up.”

Sierra turned to see Cooper standing several feet behind her, big and burly, in bare feet with his slightly wrinkled shirt untucked and his hands wedged in the pockets of a pair of threadbare jeans. His dirty-blond hair was damp and a little messy, as if he’d towel-dried it and hadn’t bothered with a brush. No one could deny that he was attractive with his pale blue eyes and dimpled smile. The slightly crooked nose was even a little charming. Maybe it was his total lack of self-consciousness that was so appealing right now, but athletes had never been her thing. She preferred studious men. Professional types. The kind who didn’t make a living swinging a big stick and beating the crap out of other people.