Alle Kapitel von Babysitting The CEO's Daughter : Kapitel 101 – Kapitel 110

Nicole's POV I woke up in my own bed although I didn't remember getting there.The last thing I remembered was Fletcher's arms and the warmth of his collar against my cheek and the sound of his heartbeat counting me down into sleep. Sometime between then and the grey morning light coming through my curtains, someone had moved me, and the someone had covered me with my blanket and left my glass of water on the bedside table exactly where I always put it.I lay there for a moment and looked at the ceiling and felt the echo of last night in my chest,

Nicole's POVThe invitation came through the office system, which was the first thing that was wrong about it.Not a personal message. Not a call. A formal calendar request, subject line reading Lunch — business matter re: Jade Enterprises partnership, sent to my work email at nine fourteen on a Tuesday morning with a restaurant attached and a time that assumed I would say yes.I stared at it for a moment.Then I accepted it because declining required an explanation I didn't have and because the subject line had been chosen specifically to make declining feel unprofessional, which told me everything I needed to know about how carefully Rachel Harrington planned things she wanted to appear spontaneous.The restaurant was the kind that didn't have prices on the menu.Rachel was already seated when I arrived, which I was beginning to understand was a Harrington family preference, the slight advantage of having chosen the location and arrived first and arranged themselves in it before you

Fletcher's POVI left the kitchen without explaining myself.Nicole called after me and I heard her voice and kept walking because there are moments when staying in a room requires a composure you have already spent and I had nothing left to spend. I made it to the study and closed the door and stood with my back against it and looked at the ceiling and breathed.The necklace.L.H. Platinum. The same weight, the same pendant, the same two letters I had watched a jeweller set with his own hands in a shop in a city I had not allowed myself to think about for six years.She had reached for it like it was hers.Because it was hers.Except it couldn't be, because the woman I had given that necklace to had dark blonde hair and blue eyes and features that could stop a room from the doorway, sharp and striking and entirely unforgettable, and Nicole Harrington had soft dark hair and black eyes and a face that was gentle in a way that made you want to protect it, and the two women were not the

Nicole's PovI waited two days before I asked him.Not because I was afraid to ask — I had moved past afraid somewhere around the third time I had stood in his kitchen and said something that made him go still — but because asking required a version of the conversation I needed to construct carefully. I needed to ask without explaining too much. Without mentioning my mother's name or her hospital or the three options the doctor had laid out at the end of the month deadline because that information felt too exposed, too personal, too much of the interior of my life to hand to a man who had offered me an arrangement and called it enough.I found him in the study on a Wednesday evening after Loise was in bed.He was at his desk with his laptop open and the particular focused stillness that meant he was working through something that required all of him. I knocked on the open door and he looked up and waited, which was his way of inviting you in.I sat in the chair across from his desk."

I packed the same way I had arrived.One bag first. Then the second, the one that hadn't existed before Mr. Newton loaded my recovered things into the boot of Fletcher's car outside a dorm that smelled like cigarette smoke. I folded everything Diana had chosen with the careful hands of someone who understood that these clothes had not been bought for the life I was going back to, and I packed them anyway because they were mine now and I had learned, recently and with some difficulty, not to leave my things behind.I did it while Loise was at her Saturday tutoring session.I did it quickly, which was the only way I knew how to do things I didn't want to do, and I put both bags by the door and I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my palms against my thighs and felt the fabric of my trousers under my hands and looked at the room that had been mine for the past several weeks.The water glass on the bedside table where I always put it.The book on the chair with the spine cracked at th