o have options!” I object, and come to think of it, I don’t like my tone either. I sound too desperate, too emotional.
“Like what?” he asks.
“Well. We could get, like, three women to take shifts?” I suggest off the cuff. “Maybe grandmothers from Argentina or something. The little sprout will grow up speaking two or three languages anyway right? That’s the way to go.”
He’s avoiding me, I can tell. I walk around to the front of him to force him to make eye contact with me. The big, sad giant. He looks like a cartoon.
“That’s not the best thing for the baby and you know it. One woman. Somebody she can rely on. Someone Sophia can really get to know. Not just shift workers, Royce. Not just glorified housekeepers. A mother.”
For all his size and impressive demeanor, Sully is a real softy. Tenderhearted. That’s why I can’t believe he would want to go through all this again.
“But think of what happened with Nina, Sully. Think about what we all went through, would you? And there’s always the chance she’s going to come back—”
“—She’s not coming back.”
He might as well have closed a door when he said that. It seems so final. I can’t help but wince. It’s hard to think about.
Nina had Sophia with us… with all of us. We searched a long time for her, to try to find someone who would agree to our special proclivities. We needed someone who would agree that an heir for the Worth hotel fortune was a good move. That being the mother of that heir was a really good move.
We offered her everything. Ridiculous amounts of wealth. Even a nanny of her very own to help out with Sophia’s day-to-day needs. Drivers. Cooks. And probably way too much love.
I suppose a stable of five billionaire brothers just turned out to be more than she could handle in the end.
“She’s not coming back, Royce,” Sully repeats softly. I know he’s saying it in the hopes it’s going to get through to me. But there are just some things I’m never going to be ready to really hear.
“So... what? We’re just giving up? Just finding Sophia a new mom? And calling her a nanny? Or girlfriend? Consort?”
“I don’t know why you need to put it that way, but if that’s how you want to say it… Yes. I suppose that’s a legitimate way of describing it, Royce. So can you interview her?”
“And what about everything else? Did August say she was cool with all of that? The rest of the package?”
Sully tips his head back to look at the ceiling. “Can you just do it?”
“You didn’t tell him, did you,” I accuse him. I realize as soon as I say it that it’s totally true. Sully definitely did not tell August that our intention is to have Sophia’s nanny/mother also be our shared lover. It’s the only way to make sure we are not creating more dead ends of the gene pool. That’s why we’ve all agreed.
“I don’t need to tell him. He already knows. He wouldn’t have sent someone who wasn’t mentally prepared for this.”
“The way Nina was prepared? Remember, she just gave up, Sully. She had been through the whole thing… all the psych evaluations, all the wooing, pretty much everything we could think of. She signed documents saying she was ready. And in the end, she wasn’t ready at all.”
Sully just stands there, taking it all in. I know he feels like I’m beating up on him, and maybe I am. But I’m still mad. Am I mad at Sully? Maybe not, but he’s definitely closest to me right now.
“Now you’ve got three minutes,” he informs me, and backs out of the room. He moves slowly, like a cruise ship. He’s almost as immovable too.
I guess I have to do this, so I head quickly over to my locker and try to find a clean shirt. I peel the sweaty one over my shoulders and toss it on the bench behind me.
“Oh!” comes a voice.
I turn around to see two of the biggest, most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. She’s holding my shirt in her hands, because I guess I threw it to her by mistake. I reach out and take it from her, noting the way she bites her lower lip and stares me up and down. Suddenly I feel a little bit more than naked, like she could see through my track pants too.
She blinks, pressing her lips together impishly. Automatically I stand up straighter, tensing my muscles. She smiles just a little bit and a small pink triangle of her tongue comes out to wet her lower lip, sliding slowly across the surface of her full, plush mouth.
We don’t say anything, but somehow the silence doesn’t seem inappropriate. After all, I did just throw my shirt at her. And she did just catch it. She stands there long enough that I can look her up and down, see the faint outlines of her hips under that flirty skirt, see the subtle points of her nipples tracing circles under her blouse as she breathes.
This is supposed to be our nanny?
Finally she raises her eyebrows slightly. I notice the way the freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose seem almost to dance with the tiniest shift in her expression.
Clearing my throat, I realize I’m still holding the other shirt in my hands. But it seems silly put it on now. It seems silly to interview her, also. She’s taken charge of the entire room. What am I going to say, no? When she’s already here?