by Aria Ford
Finally. “Listen very carefully, Kira. This is an emergency. It’s a matter of life and death. Do you understand?”
Her voice hardens. “I’m listening.”
“Ivy’s mother is trying to visit her again. It’s of the utmost importance that she doesn’t come anywhere near Ivy. Do you understand? She’s not to set foot within a hundred miles of Ivy. If she does, you’re to call the police and have her arrested. Do you understand?”
Kira sighs on the other end of the phone. “Listen, Isaac. It’s my first day at work, and I don’t want to get into your custody disputes with Ivy’s mother. I’m here to do a job. If you want to take it out on Ivy’s mother, leave me out of it.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I can’t believe she would flout me at a time like this. “Are you deaf? This is important. Don’t argue with me and just do what I say. You better open your eyes and pay attention, or you’re gonna wind up in a very uncomfortable position.”
“What uncomfortable position is that?” she shoots back. “Do you mean you’ll fire me? Well that would be a pleasure after talking to you. Keep your business out of my life. I’m not interested in whatever’s going on between you and Ivy’s mother. I’m busy now, taking care of your daughter.”
I hear my voice rising, but I can’t stop it. “This has nothing to do with whatever’s going on between me and Ivy’s mother. This has to do with Ivy’s safety. Don’t you get that? If Jade shows up at the house, you’re not to let her anywhere near Ivy. If you leave her alone with Ivy for a single second, she could steal Ivy away.”
“Come on, Isaac,” she chides. “I find it hard to believe the situation could be as bad as all that. She’s Ivy’s mother, not some serial killer.”
“You idiot!” I burst out. “Are you listening to a word I’m saying?”
“Don’t call me again, Isaac. This is my private number, and you don’t have my permission to use it. Good-bye.”
And then that little witch actually had the nerve to hang up on me. Me! How dare she? I’ll string her up for this.
I slam down the phone one more time, and this time, I don’t even try to do it gently. What’s one more phone in a man’s life?
Ten-twenty-eight. I don’t have time to screw around with this situation any longer. I scoop up my notes and head to the conference room. I don’t see or hear anything around me. I’m so fuming mad I’m ready to walk out on the whole conference.
I keep walking, though. I have to go through with this. I can’t let months of work and planning go down the crapper. I settle my notes on the podium, but I keep burning up inside. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be thinking and talking about some billionaire firm’s investment package.
I should be home. I should be there with Ivy. I should be the one to protect her instead of leaving her in the hands of some high school girl who doesn’t know the back end of a garden hoe.
What am I thinking? I worked for fifteen years to build up this firm. I slaved night and day and battled in court to keep what I earned out of Jade’s hands. I won’t let her rob me of it now.
Jade bent over backward to make my life a living hell. Only the steady rhythm of going to work every morning kept me sane. I can’t throw it away now. I’ll get Jerry on Jade’s tail, and as soon as this meeting is over, I’ll race home and protect Ivy myself.
CHAPTER THREE
Kira
I stare down at the phone in my hand. How in the world Isaac Gibbs got my personal number, I don’t know, but that phone call confirms what I suspected when I first showed up at this asylum. He’s out of his mind. He’s dangerous and violent, and he’s got a vendetta against the world and everyone in it. How did I wind up working for someone like this?
I look up from the phone to see Ivy regarding me. I put the phone in my pocket and look away.
She blinks her hair out of her eyes again. “That was my dad, wasn’t it? What did he say?”
“Never mind. Talk to me more about what you like to do. How do you spend your days?”
“After I finish my schoolwork, you mean?”
My eyes fly open. “Do you go to school? Which school do you go to?”
“No, I don’t go to school. I had a tutor for a while, but I got so far ahead in my lessons the guy told my dad I didn’t need a tutor anymore. Now I just study on my own, and my dad says I’m way ahead of where most ten year olds are in school.”
I stare at this girl. She just keeps pulling rabbits out of her hat. “Okay. I understand. So what do you do when you finish your lessons?”
“I practice a lot.”
“You must be pretty good at the violin then.”
“I play more than just the violin. I play piano and flute and trombone, too.”
My eyes bug out of my head. “You do?”
She nods, and a sneaky smile creeps across her face. “I like music.”
I have to smile back. “I guess so. What else do you like?”
The smile vanishes, and she gazes out the window instead of looking at me. “Nothing.”
I wait. “Nothing?”
“I don’t usually get to go do anything. I’m usually stuck in this room. It gets boring sometimes.”
I study the side of her head. “I bet it does.”
She turns her eyes on me, and for the first time, I see the pain hidden under her clear face. She’s a prodigy—that’s for certain—but she’s still just a regular kid. She’s a little girl, all alone in the world.
“My dad is worried something will happen to me,” she says. “He doesn’t like me going out, and he’s always busy with work so he can’t take me. We’ve had a bunch of other nannies, but they never stay long.”
I’m sure they don’t stay long. I can understand why. They don’t want to put up with her father’s bombastic attitude.
I can’t help feeling sorry for this girl. Times like these are the reason I became a nanny in the first place. I straighten up. “Well, now that I’m here, maybe we can change that.”
Ivy doesn’t turn around. “You won’t stay long, either. You’ll get sick of my dad, and you’ll leave, too.”
I choose my next words with care. “It must be hard to live with your dad when he gets mad so much. I can understand why you don’t want to spend time with him.”
“Oh, I want to spend time with him. He never gets mad at me. He’s really nice and sweet, and he loves me more than anything. I wish I could spend all my time with him. I even asked him to take me to work with him, but he said he couldn’t, even though he wanted to.”
I blink, but I can’t bring myself to believe her. That guy—loving and kind and sweet? I don’t think so. He couldn’t control himself around his own daughter if he tried.
I sit down in a chair across the table from her. “I don’t suppose you need me to help you with your schoolwork.”
Ivy jumps up. “No, I don’t, but I could show you my science experiment.”
She rushes out of the room. She throws open a door communicating with another room next door and comes back with a huge ant farm. She sets it on the table in front of me. I study the ants scurrying through their tunnels. “This is amazing.”
She sets up the ant farm and gets out several notebooks full of child’s scribbles. “This is my experiment. I started this ant farm with a hundred ants, and now there’s over forty thousand.”
I gasp out loud. “How do you know that?”
“I count them.” She opens one of the notebooks. “This is my population record, and this is my nutrition guide. I developed seven different diets for them based on scraps from the kitchen downstairs. I feed them certain diets, and then I count the population to see which diet is the best for them.”
I stare through the glass. “How do you count them? You couldn’t count forty thousand ants one at a time.”
Her laughter peals through the room. “No, I don’t count them one at a time. I invented a counter.”
She races out of the room and comes back with two boxes, o
ne tiny and one the size of a shoebox. She attaches the small box to a slotting window at the bottom of the ant farm. “This is my counter.” She attaches the other box to it. “They pass through the counter into this box. After I count them all, I put them back.”
I can’t believe I’m talking to a ten year old. “Do they all go through the counter?”
“All the workers and all the drones go through. Usually there’s the queen left behind with about twenty or thirty workers surrounding her. Them I count one at a time. Then I take the counter away and reattach the holding box, and they all go back inside. It’s easy. It takes about ten minutes to count them all.”
“Wow, Ivy,” I breathe. “This is incredible.”
She beams at me. “It’s interesting, isn’t it? I found out organic vegetables make their population increase more than twenty percent more than conventional food. My dad switched all our food to organic, and my ant population exploded.”
I suppress a smirk. “Wow. That really makes you wonder what conventional food is doing to us.”
“Exactly.” Ivy closes her notebooks and puts her counter away.
“Have you entered this in the city-wide science fair?” I ask. “You could do a lot with an experiment like this.”
“Naw.” She pushes the notebooks away. “I just do it because I like it. After I finish counting the ants, I like to sit and watch them. Aren’t they interesting? What do you think they think about in there, running around? They probably think this ant farm is as interesting and exciting as our city.”
“I’m sure they do.”
A creak attracts my attention, and I look over my shoulder to see the door swing open. A tall woman in a power suit steps into the room. Her blonde hair hangs to her ears in a fresh-cut bob, and sparkling jewelry decorates her wrists and fingers. She wears exactly the right amount of make-up to make herself look classy and tasteful.
She rests one glittering hand on the doorknob and smiles at us. “Are you counting your ants again, Ivy?”
I get out of my chair and turn around. “Can I help you? I’m Kira Malone, Ivy’s new nanny.”
The woman extends her hand. “I’m Jade Brewer. I’m Ivy’s mother.”
I freeze to the spot. Ivy’s mother? This upscale lady couldn’t be the monster Isaac warned me about. Her smile lights up the whole room.
She turns her attention to Ivy, who sits on her side of the table and stares into her ant farm. That’s odd. She doesn’t look all that happy to see her own mother. Isaac’s warning comes back to me. He said Jade wasn’t to come within a hundred miles of Ivy, that she threatened Ivy’s safety.
I don’t see anything dangerous here, though. Isaac’s so unreasonable, maybe he’s wrong about Jade, too. People get mixed up about a lot of things in custody situations. It can’t hurt Ivy to visit with her mother for a little while, especially not with me in the room.
Jade takes the chair I just got out of. She croons across the table at Ivy. “How many do you have now?”
Ivy traces an ant’s path along the glass. “Forty thousand. I just counted this morning when I woke up.”
“What are you feeding them now? Still working the organics?”
Ivy nods and doesn’t lift her eyes from the ants. I step forward. “Excuse me, but Isaac said…”
Jade cuts me off with a wave of her hand. “That’s all right. I talked to Isaac right before I came over here, and you don’t have anything to worry about. When did you start working here?”
“This morning. I just showed up as Isaac was on his way out to the office.”
Jade bestows her most gracious smile on me. That smile fills me with a warm fuzzy feeling. If only I could get every rich person to look at me like that, I might not think of myself as a glorified servant. What am I saying? I am a glorified servant. Most of the time, I’m not even glorified.
“Where did you work before this? Have you lived in the city long?”
“I worked in London for two years for a family with three children,” I tell her. “I got back to the States three months ago, and I’ve just been spending time catching up with my family since I got back. This is my first job.”
Jade smiles. “That’s so interesting. You must have had lots of nice experiences in Europe.”
“It was wonderful,” I gush. “I used to take the train all over the place when I had time off, and the family took me with them on their holidays. I saw almost every country in Europe.”
Jade’s eyes widened. “I would love to do that with Ivy. I want her to experience Europe while she’s young. It’s the only way to give children a sense of the wider world outside. I traveled with my parents when I was young, and I cherish those memories.”
“That sounds fascinating,” I reply. “I’m sure she would love it. Do you have any particular country you’d like to visit?”
“My family traveled all over the Middle East,” Jade tells me. “My father belonged to the diplomatic corps. We lived in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Turkey. I would love to show Ivy those places. They’re so exotic and different from our tiny little world.”
My eyes lock on her face. “Wow. That’s amazing. I wish I had an experience like that in my past, but I’m just boring old me.”
She gives me her beatific smile. “I’m sure you’re just as interesting under your mild-mannered exterior. I’m sure there’s much more to you than the surface.”
I blush and lower my eyes. “I don’t think so.”
She touches my arm with her dazzling jewels. “I’m sure of it. I can always tell. I always tell Isaac he has to get Ivy out of the house more, expose her to different elements, instead of keeping her cooped up in here.” She waves her hand at the room.
“I know what you mean,” I reply. “A growing girl needs fresh air and friends. It does seem like he keeps her isolated from the world.”
Jade draws close to me, and her nostrils flare as she murmurs into my face. “That’s exactly what I say. I can see you and I are going to be good friends. We can work together to give Ivy the life she deserves.”
I shrink from her closeness. She’s a stranger, after all, and she talks to me like we’re lovers or something. I cast a sidelong glance at Ivy. She hasn’t taken her eyes off her ants. Something weird is going on here. She hasn’t said two words to her mother since she walked in the door. She pretends her mother isn’t there.
Jade moves away and saunters around the room. She studies Ivy’s books on the shelf and the toys and games until she comes to Ivy’s violin resting on the window seat. “How is your practice coming along, Ivy? Would you play me that Beethoven you were working on when I saw you last week?”
Without a word, Ivy crosses the room, rests the violin under her chin, and starts playing. She faces the big windows gazing out at the gardens, and the sultry tones rise from the strings. She sways with her bowing, but she doesn’t look at her mother or me.
Jade turns around with a heavenly smile on her face. She inhales a deep breath and lets her eyelids sink half-closed. Her hands clasp over her heart and speaks above the music. “Isn’t it divine? What mother wouldn’t be proud to have a child so talented and intelligent?”
She beams at her daughter, at me, at everything in the room. I watch from my place across the table, but I can’t help the sinking sensation that something’s not right. Jade is behaving like any proud mother, but an impassable barrier separates her from Ivy. Not all the kind words in the world can overcome that. She hasn’t touched her daughter once since she walked in, not even a hug.
Still, that doesn’t make her dangerous. I’m more convinced than ever Isaac has her all wrong. From where I’m standing, it sure looks like he’s the one who poses a danger to Ivy’s wellbeing, not her mother.
CHAPTER FOUR
Isaac
I shift from one foot to the other while I wait for the meeting to start. The clients are late. So much for me being on time. Now I have to stand around like a teenager and wait for them. I check the time. They’re alre
ady ten minutes behind schedule.
What’s happening at home? Is that new nanny smart enough to do what I told her to do? Her face flashes before my eyes one more time, but I immediately push it away. I don’t need or want any woman in my life, especially not an attractive one. Women are the bane of my existence.
I concentrate on the numbers I’m supposed to present. That will take my mind off anything. While I’m standing there, Connor Armstrong comes into the room. He looks right and left. “Where is everybody?”
I smack my lips. “Don’t ask me. Maybe they decided to stop off at the hairdresser’s. How am I supposed to know where anybody is?”
He laughs out loud. That guy could laugh at his own funeral. I don’t see anything funny around here, but his laughter always put me at ease. That’s why he’s been my best friend for over twenty years. Then again, maybe it’s because he can laugh at me, too, that he’s stuck it out so long. He’s the only person who can take my insults and laugh at them.
He crosses to the podium, but I can’t stop pacing. “Don’t worry about this, man. You’re gonna knock it out of the park like you always do. You’ve got these people in your back pocket.”
I wave my hand toward the stack of notes. “I’m not worried about that. I can do that with my eyes closed.”
He puts his head on one side. “No? Then what is worrying you?”
I spin away. That guy can read my mind. “Nothing.”
A low chuckle touches my ear from behind. “Come on, man. Quit fooling. Something’s bothering you, or you wouldn’t be pacing around like a hungry bear before a meeting like this. I think I know you well enough to recognize the signs. What happened to throw you off?”
I pace back the other way with my hands on my hips. I want to keep quiet and tell him nothing’s wrong, but when I get near him, it just sort of jumps out of my mouth by itself. “It’s Jade. She’s up to her old tricks. She just called me up to say she’s coming after Ivy again.”
Connor stiffens. He’s not my best friend for nothing. “Holy crap.”
I nod and pace back the other way. I look all around the room, but I don’t see anything in front of me. “We got this new nanny coming in this morning. She’s home with Ivy right now.”