Nanny for the SEALs by Cassie Cole

14

Heather

Rogan gave me a quick tour of the residence. It was huge, spanning the entire second floor of the building. In addition to the eight bedrooms, there was the living room, kitchen, an office, and a man-cave. The latter two had key-code entry to keep the children out.

“Where’s everyone else?” I asked.

“Brady and Asher are already at work downstairs. And Cora is in here.” He stepped into one bedroom, which was painted salmon and had four bookshelves full of books. “Knock knock. Can we come in, Cora?”

Cora was quietly reading on the floor. She was adorable, with a mane of blonde hair that ran down her back in thick braids. She marked her place with a bookmark, then calmly closed the book and looked up.

“Hi, daddy.”

“I want you to meet someone special. This is Miss Heather, the new nanny.”

Cora bounded to her feet and approached me. She was wearing a daffodil-yellow skirt, which she spread wide to give me a perfect curtsy.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“Well aren’t you a little angel?” I said.

“You can go back to reading,” Rogan said.

Cora nodded at me, then folded her legs on the ground and resumed reading her book.

“She’s definitely the easy one,” I said when we were back in the hallway.

Rogan grimaced. “A fact Asher always makes sure to point out.”

Just wait until she’s a teenager, I thought.

I frowned. “She called you daddy. But she’s Asher’s girl?”

“We sort of communally raise all three of them,” Rogan explained. “Any other questions for me?”

“What’s their schedule?”

“Schedule?”

I blinked. “You know. Their daily routine. When they watch TV, when they eat lunch, when they nap…”

Rogan scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. “Patty didn’t really have a schedule. She put them down whenever they got tired. I guess they eat around noon.”

“No routine?” I forced myself not to laugh in his face. This was crazy. “Okay, well that’s going to be the first thing I establish.”

“Perfect. Sounds good. Whatever you think is best.” Rogan looked at his watch. “I need to get downstairs. We’re meeting with a new client.”

“Anyone famous?” I asked.

“Actually, it’s someone you know. Amirah Pratt. The real one, I mean. She signed with us.”

“Oh, wow! She needs a bodyguard?”

Rogan grimaced. “She’s been getting death threats on social media. Ever since her show launched on Netflix, they’ve been getting worse and worse.”

“I wish I was famous enough to get death threats,” I muttered.

“Trust me: you don’t want any of this kind of attention. All right, you have my number. Call me if you need anything.”

I wanted to kiss Rogan goodbye—a real kiss, not the wimpy cheek-pat he gave me outside—but he was already walking back into the living room. He said goodbye to the boys, who paused their game of chase long enough to wave bye, but not a second longer than necessary.

“Excuse me?” I called. They didn’t respond, so I stepped forward to block their route around the couch. “Hi. Let’s stop and have a chat real quick.”

Both boys skidded to a halt in front of me. Dustin, the one with curly black hair, frowned. “Who are you?”

“I’m Miss Heather. You met me a few minutes ago.” I pointed at Micah. “You threw a pudding cup at me.”

“Yeah, I was playing,” he said, as if I was the idiot.

I smiled sweetly. “I’m going to give you a free pass on that, because I’m a nice lady. But I’ll only stay a nice lady if we establish some rules.”

Structure was important for all people, but it was especially crucial for children. It was the framework for controlling behavior and setting boundaries and limits. So it was the first thing I needed to establish.

I looked at my watch. It was 8:15. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

Micah rolled his eyes. “Duh. Pudding.”

“I had purple toast!” Dustin said proudly.

I gave a start. “Purple toast? You know what, nevermind. My favorite cartoon growing up was Rugrats. What’s your favorite?”

Both of them answered in unison: “Trollhunters!”

I sighed with relief. I knew this one. That would make things easier.

“Trollhunters is one of my favorites too,” I said. “I love Jim Lake Jr.”

Micah’s mouth went slack. “You know Jim?”

“Of course I do! And what did Jim do after finding the Amulet of Daylight?”

I had their full, undivided attention now. “He made a plan!” Dustin answered.

I snapped my fingers. “That’s right! He had a plan, so we’re going to come up with a plan, too.”

Micah shook his head. “Jim had a plan because he was going on an adventure. We aren’t going on any adventure, are we?”

“We might!” I replied happily. “And it’s good to have a plan every single day. That way, if an adventure comes along, we’re prepared for it! Now, which of you can find me some paper and a pencil?”

Both of them screamed that they could, and went running down the hall to their rooms. Micah returned first with a fistful of colored pencils and a notebook. The first seven pages were covered in scribbles, but the ones after that were blank.

“Let’s come up with a plan,” I said. “Nobody will know the plan except us.”

“Nobody?” Micah asked.

“Cora will know it too, but that’s it,” I replied.

Dustin gawked. “Not even our dads will know?”

I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial level. “Not even them. Just us!”

They both got excited about that. Kids loved secrets, even if they were innocent ones.

The comment about dads, plural, made me think of something. “You have three dads. But what about your moms?”

I kind of wished I had asked Rogan about this last night. I was too busy letting him lick chocolate off my ass cheek to think about it. He didn’t have a ring on his finger, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a mom in the picture.

Micah shook his head. “We don’t have moms. We don’t need them!”

“We have Aunt Patty,” Dustin explained. “But she’s an aunt, not a mom.”

Interesting. No moms. Something to ask the men later.

“Do your dads have girlfriends?” I asked.

Both boys looked at each other, then grimaced. “Ew! Gross!” Dustin shouted.

“Girls are icky!” Micah said.

“Cora’s a girl,” I pointed out.

Dustin shook his head. “Cora isn’t a girl. She’s our sister.”

“I’m a girl, too.”

Micah scrunched his face in thought. For a few seconds, the gears in his little brain cranked away.

“You don’t count,” he finally decided. “You’re our nanny, not a girl.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “Let’s get to work on the plan. This is serious business, so we need to sit down at the table.”

I was trying to establish basic behaviors to go along with their activities. When we played with colored pencils and paper, we sat at the table. It was a small thing, but if you put together enough small things, you ended up with well-behaved young children.

I drew a grid on the paper. “Did you have breakfast right before I got here?”

“Yes! Dustin shouted. “Purple toast!”

“That’s right.” I wrote 8:00 in the left column, and breakfast in the right column.

“What do you like to do after that?” I asked.

Micah shrugged. “Whatever we feel like.”

“We need to come up with a plan,” I reminded him. “What activity do you want to do next?”

“Trollhunters?” Dustin asked.

I nodded. “We can do TV time next.”

“I don’t want to watch TV,” Dustin complained. “I want to watch Trollhunters.”

“Okay. That’s fine.” I filled in the grid: from 9:00 to 11:00 they would watch cartoons. I had no idea how much TV they normally watched, but based on their behavior, it was a lot. I would need to discuss this with the men, but for now this would be a good starting point to build off.

“What about games?” Dustin asked. “We have tablets with so many games. Want to see?”

“You can show me later. How about we play tablet games in the afternoon?”

“Okay!”

I looked around the room. There were colored pencils and crayons scattered on the couch and two of the recliners. “What about art time?”

“I love coloring,” Micah said. “Dustin sucks at it.”

“Do not!” Dustin shot back.

I let the word sucks slide. We could work on language later, after I had built a routine for them. Baby steps.

“We’ll do art at eleven,” I said, filling in the schedule. “And after that, lunch.”

The boys both thought this was agreeable.

I scheduled quiet reading time after that. I wasn’t sure the two of them could sit quietly for thirty minutes, but that was usually a good lead-in to nap time, which I put down next.

“Do you play outside at all?” I asked. I remembered seeing a little yard area downstairs, behind the offices.

“I play baseball,” Dustin said. “Micah plays basketball.”

“I play both,” Micah argued.

“After the nap, we’ll have outdoor sports time,” I said, scribbling on the page. “And then we’ll play games on your tablets.”

The boys were excited about their plan once it was done. They even insisted on trying to read it out loud. Dustin was a pretty good reader, and went down the list no problem. Micah was slower and had to sound out every letter before figuring the word out. Both were normal for their age.

I attached the schedule to the fridge with magnets. “I’m going to put the plan right here on the refrigerator.”

“No!” Dustin wailed. “Our dads will see it there! It’s supposed to be a secret.”

“Oh, right,” I said. Then I dramatically waved my hands over the paper. I flashed my fingers, then let my hands drift to my side. “Whew. It’s done.”

“What is?” Dustin asked.

“I cast a spell on the plan. Nobody can read it but us. And Cora.”

Micah gasped. “Just like Jim!”

“Just like Jim.”

Here’s a secret about nannying: it’s just acting. You’re acting like you’re interested in everything the children do. When you need to, you act like their fun friend. And when they do something wrong, you act like the disciplinarian—even when the wrong thing they did was really funny.

As such, I fell into a groove with the boys as the day went on. They were calm during TV time, yet grew fidgety near the end. They wanted to do other things, so I kept reiterating that we had a plan.

“You can play with your colored pencils after TV time. We have to stick to the plan!”

I checked on Cora during a particularly exciting scene in Trollhunters. She was still sitting on the floor where I had seen her last, reading her book. Right now, I was exempting Cora from the schedule because it was easier to handle the two boys without introducing another distraction. If she was happy sitting in her room reading, then I was happy to let her.

“I really like your braids,” I said.

She calmly marked her place in the book before looking up. “Thank you very much. My daddy braided them.”

I pictured Asher, with his serious face and thick glasses, braiding this little girl’s hair. It made me smile.

“Did you need something from me?” Cora asked.

If a teenager had asked that, it might have been snarky. But coming from this adorable little girl, it came off as polite. “No, I was just checking on you.”

A shout from the other room disrupted the calm. I said goodbye and hurried out there to find Dustin on top of Micah, trying to shove crayons into his mouth.

I cursed—internally, not out loud—and rushed to stop them.