A Nanny For Keeps

This wasn’t a nursery, but the master bedroom.

Jacqui turned, her intention to immediately withdraw. And found herself face-to-face with Harry Talbot, standing in front of a chest of drawers, apparently looking for underwear.

Bad enough that she’d walked into his room without even knocking, but then there was the small fact that he’d just stepped out of the shower and was naked but for a towel slung carelessly about his hips.

As he spun to face her it lost its battle with gravity.

He made no move to retrieve it and, despite opening her mouth with every intention of apologizing for having blundered into his room, she found herself quite unable to speak.

He was beautiful. Lean to the bone, hard, sculptured, his was the kind of body artists loved for their life classes.

Which made the scars lacerating his back, scars which he hadn’t moved quickly enough to hide from her, all the more terrible.

Without thinking, she reached out as if to touch him, take the pain into her own body.

A Nanny for Keeps

Liz Fielding

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

JACQUI MOORE peered through the low, swirling cloud, intent on keeping her precious car on the lane snaking between dry-stone walls that were much too close for comfort, and wished, not for the first time that day, that she was better at saying no.

‘It’s just a flying nanny job, Jacqui. A piece of cake for someone as experienced as you.’

‘I’m not a nanny, flying or otherwise. Not any more.’

‘A couple of hours, max,’ Vickie Campbell continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I wouldn’t ask but this is an emergency and Selina Talbot is a very special client.’

‘Selina Talbot?’

‘Now I have your attention,’ Vickie said, with satisfaction. ‘You know she adopted an orphaned refugee child?’

‘Yes, I’ve seen her photograph in Celebrity…’

‘We supply all her staff.’

‘Do you?’ Jacqui jerked herself back from the brink of temptation. ‘So why doesn’t she have one of your wonderful nannies to take care of her little girl?’

‘She does. At least she will have. I’ve got someone lined up, but she’s on holiday—’

‘Holiday! Now, there’s a coincidence. You do recall that you asked me to drop by on my way to the airport…’ she laid heavy emphasis on the word airport ‘…since I was passing the door anyway. You had something for me, you said,’ she prompted.

‘Oh, yes.’ Vickie opened her desk drawer and handed her a padded envelope. ‘The Gilchrists sent it.’

Jacqui took the envelope with its Hong Kong postmark and, heart beating like a drum as she tore it open, tipped out the contents. The supple silver links of the bracelet curled into her palm. A card fluttered to the ground.

With a feeling of dread she picked it up, turned it over and read the message.

‘Jacqui?’

She shook her head, blinking furiously as she bent over her bag, pushing it out of sight. Unable for a moment to speak.

‘What is it? Did the Gilchrists send you a keepsake?’

Unable to tell her exactly what the Gilchrists had done, she said, ‘Something like that.’

Vickie took it from her. ‘Oh, it’s a charm bracelet and they’ve started your collection with a little heart. How sweet.’ Then, ‘It seems to be engraved,’ she said, holding it closer to the light and squinting to read the tiny words. ‘I really must get my eyes tested, but I think it says…“…forget and smile…”.’ She frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s a quotation from Christina Rossetti,’ Jacqui said, numbly. “‘Better by far you should forget and smile, Than that you should remember and be sad.’”

‘Oh. Yes… Well. I see.’ Then, gently, ‘Maybe that’s good advice.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I know how much it hurt to lose her, Jacqui. She’ll never forget you. Everything you did for her.’

Jacqui knew exactly what she’d done. That was why she could never take the risk again.

‘Do you want me to fasten it for you?’

And because it would have looked odd if she’d stuffed it away out of sight with the card that had come with it, she allowed Vickie to fasten the chain about her wrist. Then, because she had to get out of there, she cleared her throat and said, ‘Right, well, if that’s all, I’d better be getting on my way.’

‘Don’t rush off. Your plane doesn’t leave for hours.’ Vickie smiled. One of those full-blooded, come on, I understand that you were upset, but it’s time to move on, smiles. ‘And, since you’re flying by a no-frills airline from some airport in the back of beyond, you undoubtedly need the money. You haven’t worked for months.’

‘I haven’t worked for you for months,’ she corrected. ‘Which was quite intentional. But I have been working as a temp in a jolly nice office. Regular hours, no weekends and the money isn’t bad, either.’

Vickie rolled her eyes in a give-me-strength look, not fooled for a minute.

OK, ‘jolly’ probably overstated it.

‘They’ve asked me to stay on,’ she said. ‘Permanently.’

‘It’s not even as if you’ll have to put yourself out,’ Vickie continued, treating this statement with the contempt it probably deserved and completely ignoring it.

Jacqui had done a very good job for her temporary employers, doing all the dull, repetitive jobs that no one else wanted and doing them well. She’d hated every minute of it, but it was her penance and for six months she’d punished herself. But it hadn’t helped. She was going to have to try something different and maybe her family were right, a couple of weeks on her own, with no pressures, would give her time to decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

‘You practically pass the house,’ Vickie persisted, crashing into her thoughts and forcing her to concentrate on the immediate problem. But then she hadn’t attracted all those crème-de-la-crème clients by allowing herself to be put off at the first obstacle.

‘Is that so? The motorway runs right through Little Hinton, does it?’

‘Not exactly through it,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s a very minor diversion. The village is no more than five miles from the nearest exit.’

‘Five? Would that be as the crow flies?’

‘Six at the most. I can show you on the map.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll pass.’

‘OK, OK, I’ll be totally honest with you—’

‘That would make a nice change.’

‘I’m counting on you.’ Oh, help… ‘Selina Talbot will be arriving at any moment and it could be hours before I can find someone else to do this for me.’

‘If you go in for Machiavellian subterfuge, Vickie, you should always have a back-up plan.’

‘Please. It’s only a little job and you wouldn’t want to leave a small child here, in my office, bored to tears, would you?’

She pressed her hand over the chain on her wrist until it dug in painfully. ‘I could live with it,’ she said. ‘Whether you could is another matter.’

‘Please, Jacqui. I’ve got meetings, interviews—’

‘And an office full of your own staff—’

‘Who are all fully occupied on vital work. Just drop Maisie off at her grandmother’s house and then you can head for the sun and spend the next two weeks without a thought for the rest of us slaving away in the cold and rain.’

‘You think you can make me feel guilty?’ she enquired, with every appearance of carelessness.

The holiday hadn’t been her idea. It was her family who kept insisting that she needed a break. Not that she needed telling. She had to face herself in the mirror every morning. Vickie, she suspected, thought she knew better and had manufactured this ‘crisis’ purely for her benefit. It was about as blatant a piece of in-at-the-deep-end amateur psychology as she’d ever witnessed and it would serve her right if she walked out and left her lumbered with a spoilt brat causing chaos in her well-run office.

‘I’ll pay you double—’

‘That is desperate.’

‘—and when you come back,’ Vickie continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘we can have a little chat about your future.’

‘I don’t have a future,’ she declared forcefully, cutting her off before this whole thing got completely out of hand.

She’d only agreed to come into the office on her way to the airport because it gave her the perfect chance to tell Vickie face-to-face that she must remove her from her books once and for all. Finally. Irrevocably. Put a stop to the tempting little job offers that she kept leaving on her answering machine.

At least in Spain she’d be safe from these sneaky little raids on her determination.

‘Not as a nanny,’ she said as she headed for the door. ‘I’ll send you a postcard—’

Vickie leapt to her feet but before she could fling herself between Jacqui and freedom, Selina Talbot swept in; tall, golden and clearly worth every cent of the millions of dollars she earned as a supermodel. The fortune she was paid as the face of a famous cosmetic company.

Maisie, her six-year-old adopted daughter—familiar from endless full-colour ‘happy family’ spreads in lifestyle magazines and the object of Vickie’s unsubtle strategic planning—was at her side.

The little girl was not wearing the wash-and-wear clothes any sensible nanny would have dressed her in for travelling. Instead she was togged out in the full fairy-princess kit: a white, full-skirted voile dress with a mauve satin sash, opaque white tights and satin Mary Janes, the perfect foil for her beautiful chocolate-dark skin. A sparkly tiara perched on top of her jet curls completed the picture. Only the wings were missing.

One of her hands was in fingertip contact with her mother. From the other dangled a small white linen tote bag on which the words ‘Maisie’s Stuff’ had been appliquéd in the same mauve satin as her sash.

The designer’s logo embroidered in the same colour suggested that the outfit was a one-off creation for his favourite model’s little girl.

Most small girls of her acquaintance—and she’d known enough to be certain of this—would have been crumpled and grubby within five minutes of being dressed in such an outfit.

Not Maisie Talbot. She looked like an exquisite doll. One of those collector’s editions that was kept in a glass case so it wouldn’t get spoiled by sticky fingers.

Most children faced with the prospect of being left in the care of complete strangers—and once again Jacqui had plenty of experience as a flying nanny to back up her theory—would have been clinging tearfully to their mother at this point.

Maisie remained still, silent and composed as Selina Talbot air-kissed her daughter from about three feet above her head and—having acknowledged Vickie’s introduction to ‘Jacqui Moore, the very experienced nanny I told you about’ by the simple expedient of handing over the matching white holdall that contained her daughter’s belongings—departed with an unnerving lack of maternal fuss.

A tug of something very like compassion for this doll-child slipped beneath Jacqui’s defences; a dangerous urge to pick her up and give her a cuddle. The impulse was stillborn as Maisie’s dark eyes met hers and, with all the poised hauteur of her mother on a Paris catwalk, warned her not to think of doing any such thing.

Then, having firmly established a cordon sanitaire about her person, Maisie said, ‘I’d like to go now, Jacqui.’ And headed for the door, where she waited for someone to open it for her.

Vickie Campbell mouthed the words ‘please’ as Maisie tapped her foot impatiently and Jacqui was sorely tempted to walk away, leaving Vickie to deal with the fallout. It wasn’t Vickie’s mute appeal that made the difference. She just couldn’t bring herself to reject a child who, despite her cool, in-charge exterior, seemed very much alone.

And she was practically passing the door.

‘You owe me, Vickie,’ she said, surrendering, helpless in the face of this two-pronged attack.

‘Big time,’ Vickie replied, with a grin that had better be of relief. ‘Come and see me when you get back and I’ll have the kind of job waiting for you that will make you drool.’

Aaah… She’d nearly fallen into the carefully set trap. Once money had exchanged hands…

‘On second thoughts, have this one on me,’ she replied. Then, giving her full attention to her unexpected charge, she said, ‘OK, Maisie, let’s go before my car gets clamped.’

‘Is this it?’ the child demanded, unimpressed, as they reached the street and she was confronted by a much cherished, but admittedly past its best, VW Beetle.

‘This is my car,’ Jacqui agreed, opening the door.

‘I never travel in anything but a Mercedes.’

At which point she began to understand Vickie’s anxiety not to be left alone with Miss Maisie Talbot for any length of time.

‘This is a Mercedes,’ she said, briskly.

‘It doesn’t look like one.’

‘No? Well, it’s a dress-down-at-work day.’

Maisie’s little forehead wrinkled as she considered this outrageous statement. Then she asked, ‘What’s a dress-down-at-work day?’

It was too late to wish she’d kept her mouth shut. Something to bear in mind, though, next time she thought of being smart with a six-year-old.

‘It’s a day when you’re allowed to go into work wearing jeans instead of a suit,’ she explained.

‘Why would anyone want to do that?’

‘For fun?’ she offered. Then, because Maisie’s idea of fun was dressing up, not down, ‘OK, well, sometimes, to raise money for charity, grown-ups pay for the pleasure of wearing whatever they want to work. Wouldn’t you like to wear your princess outfit to school instead of your uniform and raise some money for a good cause at the same time?’

‘I don’t go to school.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I have a home tutor.’ Then, ‘Is that why you’re not wearing a proper uniform? Because you’re dressing down for charity?’

Jacqui, who had never worn a uniform, proper or otherwise, pretended she hadn’t heard as she busied herself brushing down the back seat, retrieving a couple of toffee papers from the floor before she tossed in the white linen holdall next to her own bag and said, ‘OK, Maisie, hop in and I’ll buckle you up.’

Maisie stepped aboard, like a princess boarding a Rolls-Royce, and spread her skirts carefully across the seat. Only when she was satisfied with the result did she permit Jacqui to fasten her seat belt.

‘So,’ she said, in an effort to move the conversation along a little, make a connection. ‘Are you planning to be a model when you grow up? Like Mummy?’

‘Oh, please,’ Maisie said, giving her a look that would have withered nettles. ‘I’ve already done that and it’s sooo boring.’

‘I’d heard that,’ Jacqui said, getting behind the wheel and starting the car.

‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a doctor just like…’

‘Like?’ she prompted, checking the road and pulling out. But Maisie didn’t answer, she had already got out her personal CD player from the bag containing her ‘Stuff’ and clamped the headphones to her ears, plainly indicating that she had no further interest in conversation.

It was fine, Jacqui told herself. She’d got used to journeys without endless kindergarten chatter. Eventually. You could get tired of making up new verses for ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.

‘We’re nearly there, Maisie,’ she said, as she took the exit from the roundabout marked Little Hinton.

‘No, we’re not,’ Maisie replied, without bothering to look up. It certainly made a change from the more usual, ‘Are we there yet…? Are we there yet…? Are we there yet…?’

But then there was nothing ‘usual’ about Maisie.

Unfortunately the child knew what she was talking about.

The village itself was nearer ten miles than six from the motorway, but it was easy enough to find and it certainly lived up to its name. There was a village shop with a post office, a pub, a garage and a small school, where a group of children were playing a skipping game in the playground, and a scattering of houses huddled around an untidy patch of grass masquerading as a village green. It took all of five minutes to check them all out, but it didn’t come as a complete surprise to discover that High Tops was not among them.

The clue, of course, was in the name.

The village nestled in a small valley. Behind it rose a range of hills that were mostly obscured by low cloud. It didn’t take a genius to work out where a house called High Tops was likely to be.

‘So much for the “minor” in diversion,’ she muttered, pulling up outside the village shop. ‘You can forget the postcard, Vickie Campbell,’ she muttered to herself.

‘I told you we weren’t nearly there,’ Maisie said.

‘So you did.’

‘It’s miles and miles and miles. Up there,’ she added, pointing in the direction of the mist-covered hills.

‘Thank you for that, Maisie. Please don’t move while I ask for directions.’

‘I know the way. I told you, it’s up there.’

‘Lovely. I won’t be long.’

The child shrugged and clamped the headphones back in place.

‘High Tops? You’re going up to High Tops?’ The doubtful look she received from the woman behind the shop counter was not reassuring.

‘If you could just point me in the right direction?’ she prompted.

‘Are you expected?’

The city girl in Jacqui resisted the urge to enquire what possible business it could be of hers; this was, after all, deep in the country, where, according to folklore, everyone considered it their right to know everyone else’s business. Besides, she really needed directions.

‘Yes, I’m expected,’ she said.

‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then. Could you take their post for me?’

The woman didn’t wait for her to reply, just handed her a carrier bag full of mail.

‘Right, well,’ she said, ‘if you can give me directions. I’m running a bit late.’

‘All the same, you city folk. Just don’t go racing up that lane. You never know what’s on the road up there. I saw a llama once.’ She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well, since Jacqui couldn’t hope to top a stray llama, but led the way out of the shop to point her in the right direction. ‘It’s simple enough. Carry along here, take the first turning left past the school and keep going until you get to the top. It’s the only house up there. You can’t miss it.’

‘Thank you so much. You’ve been very helpful.’

‘Just be careful how you go. The cloud’s low today and that lane is so full of ruts and potholes it really isn’t fit for anything but a Land Rover.’ She gave the VW a doubtful look and then did a swift double take as she caught sight of Maisie sitting in the back. ‘Is that…?’ Then, obviously deciding that it was, ‘Proper little doll, isn’t she? Her mother was just the same at that age.’ Then, ‘Well, obviously not the same…’ Perhaps realising that she was treading a dangerous line, she said, ‘She always looked like a little princess, too. I swear if she’d fallen in a midden she’d have come out smelling of roses.’

Jacqui thought that extremely unlikely, but didn’t say so. Instead she smiled and said, ‘Well, thanks for the directions. And the warning. I’ll watch out for the potholes. And the llama.’

She was definitely watching. Easing carefully over another deep rut as the wipers swatted away the moisture clinging to the windscreen, she gritted her teeth and continued to inch her way up the lane in low gear.

‘Nearly there,’ she said reassuringly, although more to herself than Maisie, who was ignoring the jolting with as much composure as a duchess. A lot more composure than she felt, as the bottom of the car ground on the edge of a deep, water-filled pothole that stretched most of the way across the lane. A broken exhaust was the last thing she needed.

The torture continued for another half a mile, ratcheting up the tension and tightening her shoulders. Finally, when she was beginning to think that she must have missed the house in the mist or that she’d taken the wrong lane altogether, an old, lichen-encrusted gate that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years loomed out of nowhere, blocking the way. On it were two signs. One might have once said ‘High Tops’ but was so old that only the odd letter was still clear enough to read. The other was new. It read ‘Keep Out’.

She climbed out, and doing her best to avoid the mud and puddles, lifted the heavy metal closure and put her weight behind it, anticipating resistance…and very nearly fell flat on her face as it swung back on well-oiled hinges.

Maisie didn’t say a word as Jacqui scraped the mud off her shoes and climbed back behind the wheel, apparently still totally enraptured by the CD she was listening to. But she was wearing a thoroughly self-satisfied little smile that betrayed exactly what she was thinking:

Little Princess, 1—Dumb Adult, 0.

Jacqui put the car into gear and a hundred yards or so further on the shadowy outline of a massive, ivy-clad stone house, towers at each corner, the crenellated roof suggesting a fortified stronghold rather than the home of someone’s grandma, appeared out of the swirling mist.

Despite the fact that she’d never been anywhere near High Tops before, it looked vaguely familiar and Jacqui felt an odd sense of foreboding. It was, doubtless, caused by the combination of mist and mud.

She might not be totally in the mood for sun, sand and sangria, but given the choice she knew which option she’d choose. She almost felt sorry for Maisie.

Totally ridiculous of course, she told herself. At any moment the vast door would be flung open and the child enfolded in a loving welcome from her grandma, who must surely be looking out for them.

The door remained closed, however, and rather than expose Maisie’s satin shoes to the elements unnecessarily she said, ‘You’d better wait here while I ring the doorbell.’

Maisie looked as if she was about to say something, but instead she just sighed.

Jacqui was enfolded in the cold, damp air as she ran up the steps to a pair of iron-studded front doors that offered no concessions to the twenty-first century. There was nothing as remotely modern as an electric bell. Just an old-fashioned bell pull.

As she lifted her arm the silver bracelet slid down and the heart caught the light and flashed brightly. For a moment she froze, then she tugged hard on the bell pull and a long way off she heard the jangle of an old-fashioned bell.

From somewhere a dog raised its voice in a mournful howl.

Jacqui looked around nervously, half expecting a near relation of the Hound of the Baskervilles to come bounding out of the mist. Ridiculous. This was not Dartmoor… But nevertheless she shivered and, grasping the bell pull rather more firmly, she tugged it again.

Twice.

Almost before she let go there was a thud as a stiff bolt shot back. Then, as one half of the door opened, she realised why the house seemed familiar. She’d seen it—or at least something very like it—in a book of fairy stories she’d been given as a child; the one with all those terrifying tales about witches and trolls and giants.

This was the house where the big bad giant lived.

He still did.

Half an inch short of six feet—without her socks—Jacqui was tall for a woman but the man who opened the door loomed threateningly above her. OK, she was a step lower than him, but it wasn’t just his height; he was broad, too, his shoulders filling the opening, and even his hair, a thick, dark, shaggy lion mane that clearly hadn’t been near a pair of scissors in months, was, well, big. Gold eyes—which might have been attractive in any other setting—and three days’ growth of beard only added to the leonine effect.