The Bear's Nanny Page 3

  Malik smiled crookedly. “I’ll hold you to that,” he informed her, but there was no malice in his words. He had to have some trust in Ainslie’s judgment, after all, or else he wouldn’t have hired her to take care of his children.

  He ushered her along to the kitchen as he headed for the stairs, presumably to wake Lily and Paisley for the day. Ainslie was accustomed to small children waking up early, but she always felt bad when the kids Lily’s age had to. Eight years old seemed too young to need to wake up before it was properly daylight.

  But she supposed there was no helping it. Regardless of how bad it was for kids and teenagers to be dragged out of bed so early, it wasn’t as if Ainslie could overhaul the schooling system herself.

  If she could, she would have done so while she was in school without a moment of hesitation. As it was, whenever she could actually afford to go to college, she had every intention of having nothing but afternoon and evening classes if she could get away with it, despite her ingrained habit of waking up early.

  Andy was in the kitchen, somehow managing to violently eat a bowl of cereal, still standing at the counter. She scooted over a step when Ainslie approached the counter, but otherwise made no efforts to engage with her. Ainslie couldn't say she was surprised, all things considered.

  She poured her own bowl of cereal, and halfway through eating it, Lily stumbled into the room, still straightening her clothes. Ainslie set her bowl aside to pour a new bowl for Lily, since it seemed like she still couldn’t see straight enough to pour the milk without pouring it on the counter, and as it was, she needed someone to straighten her ponytail for her.

  By the time Malik made it into the room with Paisley in his arms, cheerfully talking his ear off, Andy was finished eating. She dropped her bowl and spoon in the sink, turned on her heel, and marched away. Ainslie heard the front door slam a moment later.

  Malik looked slightly stricken, but Ainslie kept her mouth shut. It wasn’t her business to ask. She was still a stranger in their house.

  Lily, once she finished eating, mumbled something about going to do her vocabulary homework. Malik called after her, “You were supposed to do that yesterday!”

  Lily rather conspicuously didn’t reply, and Malik shook his head in indulgent exasperation.

  Ainslie took that as some sort of cue and followed Lily to the family room to offer some help.

  There were only ten words and only ten sentences to fill in. It took about six minutes.

  “Did you have to do homework when you were little?” Lily mumbled, shoving things haphazardly into her backpack.

  “All the time,” Ainslie confirmed. “Math was always my least favorite.”

  Lily nodded rapidly in agreement, dropping her pencil case as she did. She scrambled to pick it back up and shoved it into her bag. “Is there anything worse than division?” she asked, eyes wide and worried.

  Ainslie sighed and patted her comfortingly on the shoulder. “Someday you’re going to have to take algebra and geometry. You might even need to take trigonometry and calculus.”

  Lily groaned and slumped forward, her forehead landing on her backpack.

  Malik peered into the room around the edge of the doorway, a plate of toast in his hand. “Are you crushing my daughter’s spirit?” he wondered blandly.

  “I’m preparing her for the future,” Ainslie returned primly, linking her hands together behind her back and sticking her nose in the air.

  “Uh huh. I’m sure you are.” Rolling his eyes, Malik ducked out of the room again.

  From there, it seemed like no time at all passed before Lily was heading out the front door to meet her bus and Malik was heading for his car to go to work, leaving Ainslie alone with Paisley. She suspected it would be a common arrangement. She couldn’t say she minded; Paisley’s enthusiastic energy was almost infectious and she basically lit up any room she walked into.

  “Looking forward to seeing your grandparents this weekend?” Ainslie wondered.

  Beaming, Paisley nodded rapidly. So evidently Andy’s issues with them didn’t extend beyond Andy.

  Ainslie’s curiosity only grew.

  Despite that, she made no mention of it throughout the day. She had enough sense not to try interrogating a three-year-old girl to try to sate her own curiosity, and frankly she didn’t want to imagine what sort of rift might rip open if Paisley said more than Andy wanted her to.

  *

  It seemed to take an eternity for Saturday to arrive. Ainslie knew that, objectively, three days was not particularly long, and the individual days seemed to go quickly enough, but looking back from Saturday, it felt like it had been a full two weeks rather than just a few days.

  It was one of the days Malik was working from home, which Ainslie supposed made sense, given the circumstances. After a few hours of Ainslie amusing Lily and Paisley, Malik collected them and their backpacks and herded them in the car. He gave Ainslie Maria’s phone number, telling her that if anything went wrong, then she would most likely have better luck getting in touch with Maria, but just in case, he gave her the phone number for the grandparents’ home.

  Ainslie hardly caught a glimpse of Andy before that. But as she watched the car pull out of the driveway from the front door window, she heard quiet footsteps on the stairs behind her. Peering over her shoulder, she saw Andy standing halfway down the stairs, Christopher cradled to her chest, purring loudly enough that Ainslie could hear him from the bottom of the stairs.

  “They’re gone?” Andy asked, just to double check. When Ainslie nodded, Andy relaxed and made her way the rest of the way down the stairs.

  “So, what now?” she asked cautiously, eying Ainslie over the top of Christopher’s head. “Are we just going to sit on the couch and watch TV all day, or what?”

  “I mean, we can if you really want to,” Ainslie replied, “but I had a bit of a more exciting idea.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew two slim strips of paper, both of them purchased in a hurry and rather last minute.

  The thing about being a nanny was that some amount of day-to-day tidying was expected of her, so she had to pop into the girls’ rooms a few times a day to drop off laundry or things that had been forgotten downstairs. So, it had been a little hard to miss the guitar, the ukulele, and the sheets of music that covered Andy’s room like snow. It had given her an idea, and as she held the tickets out and Andy’s eyes grew large, Ainslie felt a quiet thrum of satisfaction in her chest.

  Cautiously, as if she expected Ainslie to snatch them back, Andy reached out to take one of the tickets, boosting Christopher up to lean against her shoulder so she could hold him with one arm. Her voice a low mumble, she offered, “I gotta go get my shoes,” before she turned around and darted back up the stairs.

  “Getting shoes” took a surprisingly long time, as evidently it turned into “changing the entire outfit” as Ainslie realized when Andy jogged back down the stairs. In fairness, though, she certainly knew how to dress herself. The jean skirt and jean jacket looked like they had been tailor made, the black leggings were tasteful, and the slightly iridescent purple shirt matched the knee-high, purple and silver canvas sneakers admirably. She had a bag slung across her shoulders with her ukulele in it as well.

  Really, Ainslie was just glad she had finally found something that got Andy excited, so she didn’t comment on any of it as she ushered Andy out the door and to the car. Not her car, but Malik’s second car, because she had been given free rein to borrow it whenever she saw fit, and it was a lot more fun than her own ancient sedan.

  If Ainslie sped a little more than was strictly recommended, well, at least there weren’t any cops on the road and Andy seemed disinclined to say anything about it.

  *

  On the whole, it wasn’t anything fancy. Ainslie could only arrange for so much with just three days of warning and only the barest knowledge of what Andy was interested in. Music was a rather broad category, so Ainslie had tried to stick with something as innocuous as she could
.

  True, the Carson family lived reasonably far out into the country, but the hour-long drive into the nearest city wasn’t that long, and Crestholme had always been pretty, and it had always had a slightly bewildering number of parks.

  And in one of those parks there was a music festival, spanning each weekend of the month.

  Ainslie parked on the street, as close to the park’s main entrance as she could get. The walk to the gate was calm enough, but as soon as Ainslie and Andy handed their tickets over and they got their hands stamped with a neon green logo, Andy took off like a shot straight out of a gun, her ukulele in its bag bouncing against her back as she ran.

  Laughing, Ainslie took off after her, glad that she’d had the foresight to wear a half-way decent pair of sneakers.

  If nothing else, it was a striking contrast to how sullen Andy typically was back at the house.

  And Ainslie worried a bit. She was around the house enough that she was comfortable assuming she would have noticed anything like abuse going on, but she knew she wasn’t infallible. So as unlikely as it was and as nice as Malik seemed, Ainslie still worried just a little bit.

  Ainslie caught up to Andy in short order, and finally Andy slowed from her run down to a hasty walk. That, at least, was no problem to keep up with.

  “So,” Ainslie wondered cheerfully, and Andy looked up at her with a startled jerk, as if she had forgotten that she wasn’t alone, “where to first?”

  *

  The music was loud, as Ainslie expected, though the crowds were unexpectedly polite. Other than some mild shoving, they managed to make their way through the festival with relatively minimal trouble.

  They stopped at various stages, some just for a curious moment, others to listen to entire songs or, in one case, nearly an entire set before moving on once again. Andy was excitedly rambling about every bit of trivia she knew about that particular band (which was almost more impressive than Paisley’s knowledge of sharks and their diets) when they nearly walked straight into a portion of the crowd that wasn’t moving, and they both came to a halt.

  Andy’s stream of words finally stumbled to a halt when someone tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention, and as she blinked up at him in bemusement, he asked, “So, can you actually play that?” while pointing at the ukulele on her back. To Ainslie’s annoyance, he looked like he was expecting a show, but not a musical sort of show.

  She knew his type. The sort of man who looked at any target he could find and thought to himself ‘I can make myself feel bigger,’ even when that target was a child. Ainslie had been in that position before, holding a client’s child and smiling stiffly as a jackass leered at her while her hands were full, willing him silently to go away. Ainslie tensed, prepared to intervene.

  Andy stammered at first, hands rising to curl her fingers around the strap of her bag until her knuckles went white. “Well—I—um—” Senseless syllables, trying to be words but not quite managing it, tripped over themselves as they fell from Andy’s mouth. Being put on the spot, evidently, did not agree with her.

  The man laughed and waved it off. “Nah, I figured it was a toy or something,” he replied with a grin like he was waving keys in front of a toddler, and he mussed her hair with one hand.

  Andy jerked back a step, away from his hand, as Ainslie shifted over a step to stand between them.

  “I can play it just fine,” Andy snapped, and she shrugged the bag off. Carefully, she pulled her ukulele out and dropped the bag to the ground beside her feet.

  Ainslie watched as she fiddled with the strings for a moment, making sure everything was properly tuned. She didn’t need to do anything to prove herself, least of all to some asshole who wanted to make himself feel good by poking at a little girl. She didn’t need to prove herself, but just going by the look on her face, Ainslie was pretty sure Andy already knew that. She didn’t need to prove herself, but she wanted to.

  So, Ainslie kept quiet as Andy began to play.

  She didn’t recognize the song, and just going by the look on the guy’s face, neither did he. It seemed entirely likely that the song was Andy’s. It was a light, lilting, pleasant tune, with an energetic thrum underneath the main melody, as if it had so much more it wanted to say but couldn’t find a way to say it all.

  Gradually, as Andy played and the expression on the man’s face soured, a few other people stopped to listen. Soon enough, a small audience had built around them. And while the man who had initially challenged Andy’s skill looked as if he had been forced to lick dirt off of someone’s boot, everyone else in the cluster of people looked pleased. “Content” would probably be a better word, in fact.

  The song wasn’t especially complicated and it wasn’t the most original thing Ainslie had ever heard—Andy was only twelve, after all, and there was still a lot to learn—but Andy’s fingers were sure on the strings and there was something pleasantly soothing about the song.

  Ainslie wouldn’t have expected the light, cheerful song from Andy, who seemed so much more likely to try to tie the world in knots if it would help her get her way, but thinking about it a bit more closely, Ainslie supposed that maybe it actually fit perfectly.

  Andy’s eyes had drifted closed after the first few notes as she concentrated, so she seemed to be entirely unaware of the impromptu audience.

  It wasn’t a particularly long song, but Ainslie wouldn’t expect her to memorize an entire set off the top of her head when she wasn’t expecting to have to play. And it wasn’t until the song came to an end, the last note gradually fading, that Andy opened her eyes once more and realized how much of a crowd she had gathered. She looked around quickly, practically hugging her ukulele to her chest with one arm as she shoved her hair behind her ear with her other hand. There was a smattering of polite applause.

  After a moment she shook off her daze and managed a brief, stiff curtsy. Her face reddening up to her ears, she hurriedly shoved her ukulele back into her bag and slung it across her shoulders again, before grabbing Ainslie’s wrist and towing her away. She had to shove past the man who had initially challenged her, and she said not a single word to him as she did, as if she didn’t even recognize him after just a few moments without speaking to him.

  She was grinning as they walked away, with a spring in her step that Ainslie hadn’t seen before.

  *

  “So you write music.”

  They were standing by a square of picnic tables, because both Ainslie and Andy were slightly too wary as to what was actually on the picnic tables and what had been done to them in the past to sit at them, but it meant they could stand out of the way while they ate their French fries.

  Andy groaned and hid her face behind one hand for a moment. “I guess?” she offered, her voice slightly muffled before she let her hand fall away from her face so she could keep eating. “I mean, kind of.” Her voice dropped to a mumble and she shrugged one shoulder as she scuffed the toe of one shoe against the dirt. “I got bored of just flipping through practice books and looking up sheet music online is super obnoxious.”

  “You guess?” Ainslie needled, her eyebrows rising incredulously. “That was awesome,” she argued right back, as if it was as plain as the nose on her face. “That guy looked like you were making him suck on a lemon the whole time.”

  Andy smiled, small and private. “I guess that was pretty cool,” she conceded, her voice more of a mumble. She shrugged. “I needed to do something that everyone else couldn’t do,” she offered, and she immediately looked conflicted by the slip-up. Whether it was related to whatever was going on with the rest of the family or simply a matter of her not wanting to acknowledge that she had feelings, Ainslie couldn’t be sure, but it wasn’t the proper time to address the topic, and Ainslie let it drop. Andy cleared her throat in the silence and ducked her attention back to her fries.

  Ainslie pondered those words for a moment, but she didn’t ask. Not yet, at least. It didn’t seem like Andy actually wanted to talk about it, and
trying to pry it out of her wasn’t going to do either of them any good.

  *

  By the time afternoon faded to early evening, Ainslie had been exposed to more jazz music than she had ever heard before, because apparently that was Andy’s favorite and since the entire afternoon was for Andy, Ainslie was willing to follow where the girl led.

  It definitely wasn’t horrible, and Ainslie was always open to having her horizons broadened.

  But by the time the sky was just beginning to change colors, Andy was already yawning. Ainslie couldn’t say she was surprised; the park and the festival were huge, and Andy was still only twelve.

  Andy didn’t protest when Ainslie suggested they head back to the house.

  It seemed like she’d had a good time. Ainslie was willing to consider the night a success. Because on the whole, it hadn’t been about making any huge breakthroughs in… whatever the problem was. That would be a nice perk and Ainslie certainly wouldn’t have complained if that had happened, but mostly it had been to let Andy know that she had someone in her corner.