One

One wheel on the housekeeping cart squeaked the whole way down the twelfth-floor hallway, and Marielle wanted to put her foot through it. Twelve rooms left before her shift ended. Two hours, maybe less if the guests hadn't trashed anything.

She knocked on the door of the penthouse suite. Waited. Knocked again, counted to three in her head the way the training video told her, then let herself in with the master key.

Money had a smell, she'd decided a long time ago, and this room reeked of it. Marble under her sneakers. A chandelier that probably cost more than her mother made in a year. She dragged the cart in behind her, towels stacked up her arm, and didn't bother calling out this time. Her phone had buzzed twice already, her brother texting about something, and her mind was half on that when she pushed open the bathroom door.

Steam hit her first. Then he did, quite literally almost, stepping out at the exact wrong second with a towel scrubbing at his hair and absolutely nothing else on him.

The towels in her arms hit the tile with a wet slap.

She heard herself make a sound she was never, under any circumstances, telling her mother about, and spun so fast she nearly clotheslined herself on the vacuum cord.

"What the hell," the man said behind her, not even sounding embarrassed, more like mildly put out. "Where did you come from?"

"I'm so sorry, I knocked, the sign wasn't on the door, I checked twice, I always check—" She was babbling. She hated when she babbled.

"I was in the shower. Water was running. You could've knocked till Tuesday and I wouldn't have heard you."

She risked a glance over her shoulder. Wrong move. He hadn't grabbed the towel back up yet, just stood there dripping, unbothered, watching her with eyes so pale green they looked wrong on a person, like something out of a filter. She turned back to the wall so fast her neck cracked.

"I need to go," she said.

"Wait."

Just the one word, said the way people say things when they've never once had to say them twice in their life. She kept walking anyway. Got as far as the living room, hand already on the vacuum handle, when his voice caught her again from the bedroom doorway. Towel on now, thankfully.

"Sit down. Two minutes."

"I have ten rooms left on my board and a supervisor who counts them."

"I'll square it with your supervisor. Sit."

She should have walked out. She thought about it for exactly as long as it took her landlord's name to flash across her brain, three days late on rent and counting. She sat on the very edge of a couch that cost more than her car.

"Grayson Cole," he said, like the name should do something to her. It almost did, some flicker of recognition she couldn't place yet, gone before she could grab it. "What do you make an hour, cleaning rooms?"

"Excuse me?"

"Humor me."

She told him, mostly to get this over with faster. Something in his jaw tightened, just slightly, like the number offended him personally.

"I'll triple it. Today, if you give me ten minutes."

Every single warning her mother had ever given her about rich men lit up at once, a whole switchboard going off in her skull. But rent was rent. "Ten minutes. Talking only."

"Talking only," he agreed, and dropped into the chair across from her like a man closing a business deal, not making one.

The story came out fast and clipped, no wasted words. Six weeks ago his sister and her husband died in a car accident outside Geneva. Their son had been staying with him that week, which meant the will made Grayson, a man who ran cargo ships on four continents and had never once changed a diaper in his life, sole guardian to a five-year-old boy who hadn't said a full sentence since the funeral.

"There's a hearing Thursday," he said. "Family court's sending someone to look at the house, decide if it's stable enough for him to stay with me. If she says no, his grandparents in Ohio take him."

Marielle blinked. "I clean hotel rooms. I'm not a nanny, and I'm definitely not a lawyer."

"You didn't scream for security when a naked stranger walked in on you. You apologized to him." Something flickered across his face, gone before she could name it. "Theo needs someone in that house who's kind before Thursday. Live-in nanny. Full salary. A place to stay. And a bonus big enough you could fly your whole family out here, if that's something you want."

Her mouth went dry. She hadn't seen her mother in two years, not since the funeral money ran out and there was nothing left over for plane tickets.

"Why me," she said. "You don't know one thing about me."

"I know you check the door twice before you walk in." A short breath that might've been a laugh, might not've. "I don't have time to interview twenty strangers before Thursday, Ms. Duvall."

She opened her mouth to say no. Meant to say no.

Her phone buzzed a third time, and this time she glanced down. Not her brother. Her landlord, the message preview enough to make her stomach drop through the floor.

"Fine," she said, before she could talk herself back out of it. "But if this is some kind of setup—"

"It isn't." He was already reaching for his phone. "Pack tonight. Car comes for you at seven."

She nodded like her head belonged to someone else, and it wasn't until she was back in the hallway with an armful of damp towels that the actual weight of what she'd just agreed to landed on her.

She was moving in with a stranger and a grieving little boy by tonight.

And she still didn't know one real thing about the man whose roof she'd be sleeping under in less than twelve hours.