The Billionaire's Baby Mama [2.0]

Friday 9.00a.m.

That was how long Ivy Sinclair had left before her whole life landed on the sidewalk.

She stood in the hallway, still in her diner apron, staring at the yellow notice nailed to her door. FINAL, it said in big red. She had not had the strength to be angry.

"Don't look at me like that Sinclair." Mr. Brannigan came puffing up the stairs, keys jingling. "Three months late. I'm not a charity."

"I'll have it. I just need a few more days..."

"You've needed a few more days since July." He ripped a second copy from his clipboard and slammed it against her door for good measure. "Friday. Nine. Or I change the locks with your things inside."

He left and the pipes knocked. Somewhere a television laughed at a joke Ivy couldn't hear.

Ivy let herself into the one room she called home and sat on the edge of the mattress, doing the thing she had sworn never to do again. Opened the shoebox.

Inside lay a hospital bracelet, small enough to fit around two of her fingers. Baby boy. 6lbs 2oz. Beneath it a blur of a gossip-site photograph. A man in a black coat, he was surrounded by a group of bodyguards and held a phone up to his ear.

Five months ago she had stood in the rain, a worn out umbrella and a body still aching from labor and she had laid that baby down on a stranger's doorstep. She had rung the bell before running.

She told herself it was love. He deserves more than I can give him.

It was love. Just the kind that left her waking at three in the morning with her arms curled around nothing, still rocking.

Her cracked phone buzzed on the floor.

VANDERBILT HEIR SEEKS NANNY: Billionaire Alexander Vanderbilt and fiancée Vanessa Hartwell Hire for Baby Milo. Interviews tomorrow, 11a.m. Live-in position. Private quarters. Salary: $9,000 a month.

Ivy stopped breathing.

Milo.

Five months, and she hadn't known his name. She had called him baby and my love for the few hours he had stayed with her. Never once had she known what the world called him-Milo.

Her thumb hovered over the words private quarters.

A roof. A salary. And the only person on earth she would have walked through fire for.

She looked at the eviction notice in one hand and the glowing screen in the other.

That was the thing about losing everything. It made you brave.

She had expected a line. She had not expected an army.

The Vanderbilt residence rose out of its hedges like a cathedral built by a man who had never once worried about the heating bill, and the marble steps were crowded with women. Twenty, maybe thirty. Designer bags in every shade of leather. Dresses tight enough that Ivy wondered how anyone could lift an arm, never mind a baby. Heels like impatient fingers drumming on stone. Lashes like small black wings.

"Be honest," a woman in front of her murmured, checking her lipstick in a compact. "Do I look like a nanny?"

"You look like a wife," her friend whispered back. "Eight billion dollars, Tiffany. And the fiancée is never even home.

"I don't do diapers," Tiffany sniffed. "I do diamonds."

Then she turned, and saw Ivy's ironed navy dress and polished flats and her lip curled. "Sweetie. Are you lost? The staff entrance is around the back."

"Is it?" Ivy said evenly. "I thought the baby was inside."

Tiffany blinked. Ivy didn't. And from somewhere high above them, a thin, furious cry cut through the morning.

Ivy knew that cry. She had heard it exactly once, in a hospital room and she had never stopped hearing it since.

Her knees nearly gave out.

He's alive. He's loud. He's here.

She climbed the steps.

The drawing room is bigger than her entire building.

In a high-backed chair at the far end sat a silver-haired woman in a charcoal suit and pearls and her mouth was set in a line that suggested disappointment was a family heirloom. Mrs. Cordelia Vanderbilt did not rise. She looked each woman up and down and said "Sit," and every one of them sat like a schoolgirl.

Then a gray-haired housekeeper carried in the baby, and Ivy forgot the room.

He was bigger. Impossibly bigger. Dark curls, round cheeks, a tiny white sweater that cost more than her shoes, fist jammed in his mouth and a scowl so fierce it was almost funny. He had Alexander Vanderbilt's frown. She had studied it in that photograph a hundred times.

And he had her eyes.

"Mrs. Hale," Cordelia said coolly. "Miss Ashford first."

Miss Ashford, in red, took him like a bag of groceries. Milo looked at her. Consider her. Then draw back one tiny fist and smack her squarely on the nose.

"He's feisty!" she squeaked.

"He's teething," Mrs. Hale murmured with the patience of a woman who had said it forty times.

The second applicant wore false lashes. Milo screamed so loudly a chandelier trembled. The third wore a necklace. One tug and Cartier pearls rained across the floor like hail.

"That was Cartier," she whispered.

"It was," Cordelia said without blinking. "Next."

The fourth lost a fistful of hair. The fifth, Tiffany, had the full cascade of breakfast down her silk blouse and shrieked loudly enough to wake the dead. Ivy bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing, and to keep from crying and couldn't tell which.

By the seventh woman, Milo had run out of anger. He made a broken, hiccuping sound, shoulders shaking, cheeks streaked with tears. Ivy's chest cracked straight down the middle.

Someone hold him right. Someone make it stop.

"You are ruining my dress," the seventh woman hissed, bouncing him far too hard.

Milo clawed on her.

She screamed. And in pure terror and with reflex she let go.

Ivy didn't remember deciding to move.

One moment she was against the wall. The next she was sliding across polished marble on her knees, arms outstretched, a sharp crack of pain shooting up her shins.

She caught him an inch from the floor.

No one breathed.

Milo stared up at her, wide-eyed, lashes wet, shocked quiet. Then Ivy pulled him against her chest, palm cradling the back of his head, and did the only thing her body had never forgotten how to do.

"I've got you," she whispered into his curls. "I've got you, baby. Mama's got you."

The last word slipped out. She felt it go. She swallowed hard.

"I have you," she corrected, voice shaking. "It's all right, little bean."

He hiccuped. His fist uncurled. His wet cheek settled into the hollow of her neck and a long, shuddering sigh left his tiny body, the sound of someone who has finally been set down in the right place. Then he was asleep. Just like that.

"Well," said a voice from the doorway.

Low. Cool. A voice that expected rooms to rearrange themselves around it.

Alexander Vanderbilt stood in the doorway with his phone still at his ear, mid-sentence, charcoal suit cut like it had been tailored from his own shadow. He was taller than the photograph. Harder. Gray eyes locked on the baby asleep in the arms of a stranger on his floor.

"Pull the contract," he said into the phone, not looking away. "I'll call you back."

He lowered it slowly. "He doesn't sleep for anyone. Not for me. Not for Miss Hartwell. Not for the specialist my mother flew in from Boston."

"He was tired," Ivy said. "He's been passed around all morning. He needed someone who wasn't afraid of dropping him."

Something flickered across his face. A muscle ticked in his jaw. "And you're not afraid?"

"I'm terrified, Mr. Vanderbilt," Ivy admitted, before she could stop herself. "I just don't let him feel it."

For one second the cold left his eyes. Then it came back, sharper.

"Name."

"Ivy Sinclair."

"Experience?"

"Urr.. sir I- I raised four cousins," she lied, because it was the only lie she'd rehearsed. "I've been taking care of babies since I was twelve."

"Mother." He still hadn't looked away from her. "Choose someone and let's be done."

"I already have." Cordelia rose, and the room shrank. "Miss Sinclair is hired."

"What?" Tiffany shrieked.

"Alexander," Cordelia said, ignoring her. "Your son has not slept through the night in six weeks. This girl put him down in forty seconds. We are done here."

A beat. Alexander's jaw tightened. "One week," he said. "Trial."

He crossed the marble and reached for his son. Ivy, instinctively, held on a second too long, and his hands closed over hers around the small, warm body. Large hands. Warm. A little rough at the knuckles. Her breath snagged.

He felt it. She saw him feel it.

"Do I frighten you, Miss Sinclair?" he asked, very quietly.

"A little, Mr. Vanderbilt."

"Good," he murmured. "Keep it that way."

He lifted Milo out of her arms. The baby stirred, whimpered and reached blindly back for her. Alexander looked down at his son's small fist curled in Ivy's sleeve, then at Ivy, and for one unguarded moment he looked like a man who had been handed something he didn't know how to hold.

Then he handed the baby back and walked out.

Cordelia waited until the footsteps faded. Then she stepped close enough that only Ivy could hear.

"Understand me, Miss Sinclair. This is a position, not an opportunity. Every woman in that line wanted my son's bed. I did not hire you because you are different. I hired you because my grandson stopped screaming. You will care for the child. You will not charm my son, climb my household, or imagine yourself anything but staff."

Ivy lifted her chin, arms never loosening around the baby.

"I understand perfectly, Mrs. Vanderbilt."

"Good."

The nursery was soft blue and gold, with a crib like a small palace, a rocking chair by the window, and a little brass coat rack in the corner where a nurse might hang a cardigan.

Ivy laid Milo down with hands that wouldn't stop trembling. His fingers stayed tangled in her sleeve. She didn't have the heart to pull away.

"He likes you," Mrs. Hale said quietly from the door.

"He's a baby. He likes anyone warm."

"He's been held by twenty warm women today." The housekeeper's eyes were kind, and a great deal sharper than they had any right to be. "But he was calm in your arms."

Ivy opened her mouth to answer, and her eyes slid past Mrs. Hale to the coat rack.

Between a knitted cardigan and a spare apron hung a worn-out black umbrella.

Her breath stopped.

One rib bent inward. The handle faded and chipped where she'd dropped it on the bus. And along the seam a line of crooked white stitches, because she'd never been able to afford a new one.

No. It can't be.

Mrs. Hale followed her gaze. "Oh, that." She smoothed the edge of Milo's blanket with a practiced hand. "It's been on that rack for five months. Whoever brought it never came back for it."

"Brought it?" Ivy's voice came out thin. "Where did it come from?"

"Oh, it just came," Mrs. Hale said lightly. "I hung it there, and no one in this house has ever asked after it. Not once." She paused at the door. "Some things only get noticed by the people who are looking for them."

The door clicked shut behind her.

Ivy stood very still. The umbrella swayed, barely, in the draft from the window. Five months ago it had dripped rainwater all over a stranger's doorstep while she pressed a kiss to a sleeping forehead and ran.

She turned back to the crib, her vision swimming. Milo had gone slack with sleep, one fist curled loosely at his chin.

"I'm here," she whispered. "I'm so sorry it took so long. I'm here, and I am never leaving you again."

A floorboard creaked.

Alexander leaned against the doorframe, jacket gone, sleeves rolled to the elbow, tie loosened. She had no idea how long he'd been standing there.

"That's a very strange promise for a nanny," he said.

Her heart slammed. "babies like to hear a voice, Mr. Vanderbilt."

"Do they."

He came closer. Not enough to touch. Just enough that the lamplight caught the edge of his jaw, the shadow under his eyes, the faint scent of cedar and whiskey on him. He looked tired. Not billionaire tired. Human tired.

"Eleven doctors," he said, almost to himself. "Four nannies. A sleep specialist. He screams for all of them. And you walk in off the street, and he's asleep in a minute." His gray eyes lifted to hers, and stayed.

"Who are you, Miss Sinclair?"

I'm the woman who left him on your doorstep.

"No one important," she said softly.

Something unreadable moved across his face. His gaze dropped, for half a second, to her mouth, and Ivy felt it like a hand against her throat. Then it lifted again, and narrowed, the look of a man trying to catch a name on the tip of his tongue.

"Have we met before?"

The air left the room.

The lounge. The dark. The champagne she should never have touched. His hands, his mouth, his voice low against her ear, a night she had spent five months trying to forget.

"No, Mr. Vanderbilt," Ivy said. "Never."

He studied her for one long, unreadable moment. He did not look away.

And then, from somewhere down the corridor, came the slow, unhurried click of heels, and a woman's voice, lilting and sweet, not even raised to carry:

"Alexander, darling? Leave the new nanny alone. We have a wedding to plan."

The heels faded.

Alexander's jaw tightened. For one second longer, he held Ivy's gaze as though weighing something he hadn't decided to say. Then he straightened, murmured, "Goodnight, Miss Sinclair," and was gone.

The door closed. The house went still.

Ivy stood motionless in the blue lamplight, her pulse roaring in her ears, her son breathing softly beside her.

A wedding?