The Billionaire's Nanny (The Stonecutters Billionaires Series)

by Aurora, Lexi

  “Careful, Jared! You’ll drop her!”

  “No way, Moira,” he called over his shoulder to his laughing wife. “As she just so sweetly reminded me, I’m strong.”

  “So strong!” Maddie chimed in, giggling like a little maniac all the while. “He’s so strong. He won’t drop me!”

  “See? I have the little one’s approval. All’s right in the world, my beautiful wife, and you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing, huh? That’s an awfully bold statement. What about the next car payment?”

  “I said nothing, and I meant it. Don’t you know I’ll always take care of you? Don’t you know I’ll always take care of you both? Y’all are my two best girls.”

  “Yeah!” Maddie crowed, setting Moira to laughing again and clearing the worry lines from her forehead. “Best girls in the world!”

  “That’s right, best in the world. And how would my best girls in the world like to go for a little walk?”

  Both Jared’s wife and daughter agreed that a walk would be the best thing there was, and with continued chatter amongst the little family of three, they all put on their winter coats. Texas was a large state with a geographical and climatic diversity that astonished most non-residents. The part of Texas the Lowe family lived in, the Hill Country, experienced a good deal more winter than some of the other parts of Texas, and out on the Lowe ranch, it got very cold in November. The wind whipping around and through the hills sometimes felt like it could cut through a person, and although it would not put a stop to the ritual family walks Jared and his family took, they were smart enough to bundle up. Jared led the way out of their front door, taking a moment to point out the lovely pink-and-orange sky produced by the setting sun. Sunsets were one of the things Maddie loved most, and this one was near perfect. Jared stopped, picking Maddie up in his arms so that they could admire it more closely, and from beside him, Moira slipped an arm around his waist. It was the most perfect moment Jared could remember having in his life. He was just about to open his mouth and say so when a great, booming noise shook the earth and knocked them all off of their feet.

  “No! Christ, no! Maddie! Moira!”

  It had been almost a year since the Great Reckoning, or at least as near as Jared could figure. At first, he had done his best to keep records of the passing time, to maintain some sort of normalcy for himself, but that was a charade a man could only keep up for so long. It was the kind of thing only a man dedicated to the idea of keeping the life he used to have alive in his heart kept up with. That was a dedication Jared had long since abandoned. Maybe it was the nightmares that did it. The goddamned nightmares he had every night he didn’t hit the bottle hard enough to pass out cold. On the few occasions that Jared did venture into town, he was always hearing people talk about where they were when “it” happened. It was all anyone ever wanted to talk about, where they were and what they had been doing before the world had switched over dark. All Jared wanted was to forget, and yet his sick brain wouldn’t go anywhere else every time he tried to get some honest-to-God rest. Each time, the dream was the same. He was with his daughter and his wife on the last normal evening of anyone’s life, looking at a sunset so brilliant it was almost too difficult to look at. That sunset was the thing he tried to cling to, especially since he had to live through it almost every night of his “after” life. At least a beautiful sky was the last thing his little girl saw before everything went dark for her. It was the last thing she’d seen in her short life, the last thing his wife had seen, too. It was the last really beautiful thing to happen for anyone before the whole world went dark. It was the thing he thought about when he was too hungover to think, or on afternoons like this one when he went about mundane tasks like cutting wood for himself. It felt pointless to do it, but it was November again, cold and with no electricity anymore to keep them warm. They didn’t have those kinds of creature comforts now that the world had basically ended.

  “Jared?”

  He whirled around to face the voice that had interrupted his morose thoughts, an axe still clasped tightly in hand. Jared had always been the kind of man to keep mostly to himself, and that was before the Great Reckoning. After, when he was living in the middle of an actual apocalypse? It was safe to say that company sneaking up on him was very far from appreciated.

  “Woah there, buddy! I come in peace!” Alex Morrow said quickly, hands up in a surrendering gesture as he took several steps backward. “Hey now. Why don’t you go ahead and put down the axe, what do you say? I’m not aiming to get myself hacked into pieces today. Seems to me we’ve had enough death and destruction around here, you know?”

  “Jesus, Alex, you shouldn’t sneak up on people like that. Not after everything that’s happened. For all I knew you could’ve been one of them, right?”

  “But I’m not. You can see that, right?”

  “I can see that now. But before? You oughta be more careful, man. Hill Country turned out to be the perfect place for that freak doc’s monsters to run around. With all of these trees, all of these hills, you could’ve been one of them. You could’ve been one of them easily.”

  “Monsters, huh? That’s interesting.”

  “Interesting?”

  “That you call ’em that. I always think it’s interesting to see what kinds of names people have for them—the ones who didn’t live like us. The ones who didn’t die like, you know, everyone else.”

  “What would you suggest I call them, Alex? They aren’t exactly people anymore.”

  "I call ’em shifters, myself. Seems fitting, don’t you think? That’s what they do, after all. It’s not like they aren’t ever people anymore; they just shift into other things, too. They shift into their animal forms and shit. You know. One minute they’re people, and the next minute you’ve got a bunch of lions standing in front of you.”

  “No, Alex.” Jared interrupted his unwanted visitor’s musings with a voice so firm the man jumped in his boots. “They aren’t.”

  “Aren’t what, man? I mean they do shift into other things, don’t they?”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re still human. That freak saw to that. They aren’t human, and they aren’t safe. They’re what we have left to deal with now that the whole world is on its knees.”

  “Right,” Alex said slowly, shifting from one foot to the other in a movement that served as a painful reminder of something Maddie had always done when she thought she was in trouble for something. “That’s probably why they sent me.”

  “Why they sent you? What are you talking about? Who sent you?”

  “Some of the other survivors, man. Not everyone’s been holing up the way you have. A lot of us, even the ones who had ranches just like this one, we moved on into town. Figured we gotta band together, since everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket.”

  “Right. And what’s that got to do with me?”

  “We’ve formed a council of sorts, I guess you could call it. We’re holding a town meeting tonight about what to do with the shifters. Or I guess the monsters, if we’re going to use your word. I don’t hold with them all being bad the way that some folks do—”

  “Then you aren’t using your head.”

  “Like I said, not like some folks do, but I’ll agree that there’s enough of ’em causing trouble to warrant talking about. They sent me. They guys who formed the council. They thought it would be best to invite you in. Thought you would make a pretty damned good asset.”

  “Asset for what?” Jared was suddenly very, very tired, his lack of sleep from the night before catching up with him in a big way. “What are you trying to get at?”

  “For fighting back, man. We want to finally start fighting back. We want to take our world back.”

  Chapter Two - Jade

  “W ELL, WELL, WELL. LOOK at what we’ve got here, folks? Somebody got a little cockier than she should have, and now she’s going to pay.”

  “What should we do with her, Morris? What do you think about that
? What should we do with a pretty, little young thing like this?”

  Jade Rivers stopped dead in her tracks, thankful beyond measure that she’d started being stealthy just by force of habit. It’s not like it would have made any sense for her not to be stealthy, what with the whole world turning inside out on itself and everything. And rummaging through the woods wasn’t a safe thing. If she needed any reminders of that, any proof, she was looking at it right now. God only knew what had possessed this poor woman to come out into the woods on her own. Desperation, perhaps? She was sure that there was a steadily declining availability of resources ever since the Reckoning, and that could only make things terrifying for the people still living in normal society. The normal society that was no longer available to her. The society that had kept her relegated to the outskirts of everything just for suffering the same losses that they all had. Sure, she wasn’t dead, that was true. But becoming what she was? Becoming this thing that was still partially human, but not entirely, meant she was unwanted by the few people who still populated the town she had grown up in her entire life. Not that she really thought they would be able to tell what she was, not just by looking at her, but still. She had skulked around the town’s outskirts enough to know that shifters like her weren’t exactly welcome additions to society. From the way people acted, one might have thought it was the shifters themselves that had been responsible for the Reckoning. One might have thought they were the culpable ones instead of another set of victims. And it was jackasses like this lot that kept that fear-driven belief alive and well. She knew this and yet felt petrified to act in any capacity.

  “Please!” the girl Jade half recognized but couldn’t quite place begged, her basket of foraged food dropped and utterly forgotten. She looked up at her two assailants with wide, petrified eyes, backing away from them so slowly that a normal human with an attitude problem could have caught her, never mind the shifters. Either this girl had never known what it meant to stand up to a shifter or actually seeing one had driven all of her knowledge about them right out of her head. Either way, she looked like she was in some serious trouble. Because guys like Morris and his buddy Trevor weren’t safe. They were exactly what everyone who was still human thought all of the shifters were like. They were as close to monsters as a human could get, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The people still living in towns were afraid, that and devastated by what they had lost. The shifters like her, the ones who didn’t have any desire to make people suffer more, were afraid, too. They were afraid of the same things Jade was afraid of, she supposed. They were afraid of what they had become, the powers they now possessed that they had never asked for. They were afraid of the way they had been ostracized from the people and town that had once belonged to them. Then there were the ones who really had turned into something very closely resembling the monsters of their childhood. They became one of the most frightening things of all, especially when they were being dealt with in a world that no longer resembled the one they had all taken for granted a year ago.

  “Please!” the young woman cried, clinging to the basket she’d brought along to scavenge, and scurrying backward. “Please, you don’t have to do anything! You can just let me go!”

  “Aw,” Morris growled, his human form already beginning to blur with that of the tiger that lay beneath, “ain’t that cute? She thinks she can reason with us. What do you have to say about that, Trevor?”

  “I think she went and forgot that the world went and moved past what it used to be. I think she forgot that it’s our time now.”

  “I didn’t!” the young woman cried, cringing when she realized she’d backed all of the way into a massive tree blocking her from going farther. “I didn’t forget! You guys are in charge! I know that, I promise! I know that—just please, let me go!”

  “What do you think, Trevor? Should we let her go?”

  Morris shrugged and turned away from the woman as if he were going to go. Trevor looked down at the girl and shrugged as well, his face registering disappointment but fully willing to go along with what his leader said. The girl clung to her basket as she rose, her entire body trembling as she turned to run. It was turning her back that was the real mistake, not that they were likely to have let her go regardless. When she turned, that was when Morris and Trevor both shifted. Even having seen it before, even being able to do it herself, Jade felt her stomach drop when she saw it. It was what some of the people in town were calling an abomination. Morris’s body began to lengthen as he fell to a crouch on the cold, rocky ground. His back arched so severely that it looked like it might break as his muscles rippled beneath the skin that was rapidly being replaced by thick, bristly fur. He threw his head back and roared, as did Trevor who had begun his own transformation the moment his leader had. Jade opened her mouth to say something, to do anything that might help this poor girl survive, but before she could even get a word out, Morris and Trevor pounced upon her. There was a scream and a sickening crack as they landed on her back, breaking it instantly. As she watched, the two beasts began to rip the girl apart like shreds of cloth. That was when Jade turned and ran. She ran without seeing, without looking where she was going. She ran until she was stopped by another body colliding squarely with her own.

  “No! No, let me go!”

  “Hey! Cool it, Jade, it’s me! It’s Tommy!”

  “What? No!”

  “Jade? Jade, look at me! It’s Tommy! You’re home now, okay? You’re home. Why don’t you calm down and tell me what the hell is going on that has you so worked up?”

  Jade’s wildly turning eyes finally landed on the man who had caught her and stopped her running. For a second she still saw Morris, and she could feel her shift beginning to take her over. Then her eyes focused and she saw that it was Tommy after all. He was one of the shifters like her, one of those who hadn’t gone crazy and decided none of the rules applied anymore. There weren’t tons of them, but there were enough to have formed their own little society of sorts, a camp none of the humans knew about yet that they were using as a home base. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something, and she was grateful for it. She was especially grateful for it now when she was so freaked-out by what she had just seen Morris and Travis do. The bad ones didn’t like to live in such large groups, and it was unlikely they would ever venture into the camp. She was safe there, or as safe as she was ever likely to be in this awful new world.

  “Jade,” Tommy insisted again, slinging one arm around her shoulders and leading her farther into the depths of their safe space, “seriously, tell me what’s going on. You look like you’ve just been through a war or something.”

  “In the woods,” she panted, still trying to catch her breath from how fast she had run. "I saw two of them. Morris and Trevor. They ripped a girl in half, Tommy. They ripped her into ribbons, and I didn’t do anything to stop it. I didn’t do anything to help.”

  “Jesus. It’s okay, Jade. What could you have done on your own?”

  “I don’t know. Something! More than she could do! I just stood there! I didn’t shift, didn’t use the powers I have to help her. I just stood there.”

  “It’s funny you should mention doing something. I was talking to Sharon, and she wants to put you on a mission.”

  “Me?” Jade asked dubiously, afraid of the woman who had taken up the leadership role for their encampment despite her respect for her. “But why me?”

  “Because you have the best control over your shifts. You can keep from doing it when you don’t want to, and that’s something most of us still haven’t learned.”

  “But why would I need to do that? Control it, I mean?”

  “Because. She wants you to go into the survivors’ town. She wants you to go in and pretend to be one of them. You’re on an intel mission, my dear.”

  Chapter Three - Jared

  “C OME ON, PEOPLE, PLEASE ! If you guys really want to have a meeting, we’ve got to have some order!”

  Jared looked out over
the crowd of people sitting in folding chairs in front of the podium he’d been put behind. When he’d agreed to attend this town meeting, an agreement that had been tentative at best, he hadn’t realized that the plan was for him to lead the damned meeting. If he’d known that, he would never have agreed to come, which was probably why Alex hadn’t told him the plan in the first place. Now here he was, standing up in front of a crowd of people who were all afraid, mostly angry, and all looking to him for some kind of guidance. That was the last thing he wanted. He wanted nothing to do with a position of leadership for these men, women, and children. Maddie and Moira had looked to him as the leader of the family, and look where that had gotten them. Dead, that’s where. And yet here he was, all of these faces looking up at him as if he had some answers.

  “Come on, guys!” he shouted again, rapidly losing patience for the chattering, which was doing nothing but keeping any decisions from getting made. “If we can’t stop talking for long enough to get things done, we might as well just forget this whole thing.”

  He looked around the room and saw that this comment, at least, had been taken seriously. The room shut up quickly, which was good. It was true that he was operating blind, but his audience didn’t know that.

  “Good,” he said gruffly, clearing his throat and gazing around the room. “That’s good. Now I’m not going to pretend that I understand what this meeting is about. As far as I know, everything’s been going as well as we could hope for in a situation like the one we’ve got now. The best thing I know to do is open the floor. Maybe one of you can give me a better idea of what’s going on here. It’s no secret that I haven’t been much a part of the goings-on of the town since it happened.” A woman in the front raised her hand, and Jared acknowledged her gratefully. If he could keep these people talking, they might just be able to get through the meeting quickly so that he could go back home where he belonged.