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Home / Romance / Nanny To The Billionaire's Secret Heir / Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

All Chapters of Nanny To The Billionaire's Secret Heir : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

11 Chapters

One

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

Two

The gate took a six-digit code just to open, and Marielle sat in the back of the car a beat too long before the driver cleared his throat."Miss. We're here."Right. Here.The lawn stretched out ahead of the house so flat and green it looked fake, like something you'd walk on in a video game before the graphics loaded properly. Marielle climbed out with her duffel bag digging into her shoulder and stood there feeling exactly like what she was: a smudge on somebody else's clean window.A woman in a gray cardigan had the door open before she reached it. Mid-fifties. Sharp around the eyes. The kind of person who'd spent thirty years running someone else's house instead of her own and had the posture to prove it."You're the nanny." Not a question. "Odette. I keep this place running. Mr. Cole doesn't want to be bothered before eight, so you'll meet Theo first.""Okay," Marielle said, because what else was there.The boy sat cross-legged on the living room rug, lining up toy cargo ships al

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

Three

Marielle made it downstairs in under four minutes, hair shoved into whatever bun she could manage, and found Grayson wearing a track in the kitchen floor like the marble had personally wronged him. "Eleven hours," he said before she'd even cleared the doorway. "No warning. Just a call to say expect them at six." "Is that bad?" "It's bad if this house looks like a hotel and my nephew looks like he's raised by a payroll." He shoved a hand through his hair. For the first time since she'd met him, he looked less like a man who ran a shipping empire and more like someone standing three feet from a cliff edge. "She wants routine. Stability. Not staff scrambling at midnight." "Then we build routine tonight." Marielle grabbed a legal pad off the counter, the kind he probably used for cargo manifests, and started a list without waiting for permission. "Theo's room needs to look lived in, not staged. Toys everywhere, not lined up like a store display. You eat breakfast at that table, not in

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

Four

"Say something," Grayson said, when the silence went on a beat too long. "I've closed hostile takeovers faster than you're taking to answer this.""This isn't a takeover. It's a marriage.""It's a business arrangement wearing a marriage's clothes." He crossed the room, stopped close enough that she caught the clean, expensive smell of him again. "One year. My lawyer drafts a full agreement. You keep the nanny salary plus a settlement at the end, enough to set your mother up somewhere better if that's what you want. In return, no judge argues Theo's home isn't stable."She thought about her mother's cramped apartment outside Lyon. About Marc and Sylvan sharing a room barely big enough for one bed. About the ring some other man had slid onto her finger four years back, right before he found out her father's death left them with debt instead of money, and how fast he'd vanished once there was nothing to inherit."If I say yes," she said, slow, testing each word, "I want it written down t

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

Five

The gala took over the top floor of a hotel Marielle would once have scrubbed bathtubs in for a living. She stood at the edge of the ballroom in a dress that cost more than three months of her old rent, feeling like an extra who'd wandered onto the wrong film set."You look like you're about to run for the exit," Grayson murmured, appearing at her elbow with two glasses of champagne. "Don't. Everyone's watching the new Mrs. Cole, and bolting reads badly on camera.""There are cameras?""There are always cameras." He passed her a glass, his sleeve brushing her bare arm, and the small contact did more to settle her nerves than the champagne. "Smile like you like me. Apparently I'm charming.""According to who? Your accountant?"His mouth almost gave in to a real smile, and she was still riding that small win when a voice cut through the noise behind them."Grayson. You didn't tell me you'd gotten married."Marielle turned to find a tall woman in a dress the color of dried wine, hair pul

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

Six

Grayson crossed the study first and shut the door, even though the gala noise sat two floors and a marble staircase away. Only then did he turn around."Sit down," he said."I don't want to sit down. I want you to tell me what you know about my father.""Sit down. Please."She sat, mostly because her knees had gone unreliable somewhere around the word Duvall. Grayson pulled a chair around to face her instead of putting his desk between them, and she noticed that without knowing yet what to do with it."My father ran Cole Maritime for thirty years before I took over," he started. "There was a cargo accident nine years back. A ship went down off the Carolina coast, lost most of its load, two crew members hurt badly enough that it made the papers for a week. Duvall Shipping was the contractor responsible for the loading manifest.""My father worked loading manifests. For a company out of Marseille that partnered with American firms." Her voice held steadier than she felt. "He died two mo

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

Seven

Marielle did not sleep.She tried.She turned off the lamp. She closed her eyes. She told herself that tomorrow she would need a clear head because there was a court battle waiting, a husband she barely knew, and a five-year-old boy who had somehow become the one person in this house she couldn't imagine leaving.None of it worked.Every time she drifted close to sleep, she saw her father's face.Not the one from the last years when money was tight and worry had settled into the lines around his eyes. The younger version. The man who used to lift her onto the kitchen counter while he cooked dinner. The man who checked every document three times because he believed mistakes cost people more than money.Her father had spent his whole life protecting his name.And someone had taken it from him.By sunrise, she gave up pretending she would rest.When she walked downstairs, she found Grayson already in the kitchen.That alone surprised her.The man usually looked like he had been awake for

Last Updated : 2026-07-27

Eight

The investigator's name was Renata Cho, and she called four days later with a voice that gave nothing away about whether the news was good or bad."I found your ballast records," she told Grayson, on speaker so Marielle could listen from across the desk. "There's an internal memo dated eighteen months before the accident, flagging the exact mechanical fault that caused the cargo shift. It's signed off by your father, marked resolved. It wasn't resolved. Nobody ever fixed it.""Who covered it up after the accident?""That's where it gets complicated." Papers shuffled on her end. "The falsified report that blamed Duvall Shipping was filed by someone with executive-level access to the legal file room. Someone who wasn't your father.""Who, then?""Your brother. Julian Cole approved the final version six weeks after the accident, right before it went to the insurance company and the press."Marielle watched Grayson's face move through several stages at once, disbelief, then something cold

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

Nine

Julian went white. "You can't be serious. That's not just my exposure, that's the company's. Shareholders will run. The board will demand you sell your stake before the quarter ends.""I don't care.""You will care when Theo's college fund is tied up in stock worth half of what it was last week." Panic bled through Julian's voice now. "You're going to burn down everything Dad built over a mistake I made when I was barely out of college.""A mistake." Marielle let her voice shake. "A man died. Not right away, maybe not from the accident itself, but from watching everything he'd built taken from him over a lie your family told to protect its stock price.""I didn't know that would happen," Julian said, quieter now."You didn't ask," she said. "That's not the same thing."Grayson held up a hand before either of them could push further, and something in the gesture carried enough weight that both stopped. "Here's what happens. I release the corrected accident report through legal channels

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

Ten

Marielle's hand went still on Grayson's chest. He must have felt her stiffen, because he pulled back to look at her, and whatever he saw wiped the softness from his face instantly."What is it?"She turned the phone toward him without a word.He read it twice. His jaw worked through something complicated, disbelief maybe, or the particular dread of being accused of something you're not entirely sure you're innocent of. "I never reviewed a ballast contract," he said. "I told you, I was twenty-five, I signed whatever my father put in front of me and stayed out of the technical side completely.""Did you sign contracts you never read?"The question landed harder than she meant it to. He flinched at it, an actual flinch, and that told her more than any answer would have."I might have," he admitted. "There were dozens of routine approvals every week back then. My father trained me to trust the paperwork his people prepared and focus on the bigger deals. If my signature's on something tied

Last Updated : 2026-07-21

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