Page 9 of Grump's Nanny

“No, Ben!” Leann cried out. “I’m playing now!”

“We can set it to two players,” he argued. “Come on, Lee, I want to play too!”

“You can wait your turn,” she shot back. “Tomorrow you can play.”

“Tomorrow?” he shrieked.

“Guys,” I said, standing between them and the TV. “If you can’t play nice, there will be no video games at all.”

If looks could kill, I’d have dropped dead with the way Leann was glaring at me. Ben, on the other hand, looked smug and stuck his tongue out at his sister.

“Hey,” I said. “None of that. Now, are you sharing or not?”

Leann continued to give me the evil eye as she changed the setting to two players and moved to the side so Ben could sit with her.

“Good choice,” I said, moving to sit at the table nearby so I could open up the folder James had given me with the information I needed to watch the kids.

Leann was nine and in the fourth grade. She liked art and video games, as well as playing in the snow. Ben was seven and in second grade and was a total prankster. Apparently, he loved magic, but the paper warned me to be careful of his tricks since sometimes they ended in the aforementioned pranks. Katie was five and in kindergarten.Very quiet, slow to warm up but trusts quickly once she does.She loves to fingerpaint, and is usually pretty well-behaved unless she gets caught up with trouble from one of the other two.

There was a schedule of school days and after-school activities. They didn’t have much. In fact, the only thing I could see on their afternoon schedules was a list of extra schoolwork they were supposed to complete for a tutoring program they were enrolled in to give them a head start on their education. The instructions clearly said no playtime until they finished with their work.

I looked down at the schedule for today, and it showed that they should have been working on math lessons until five, and it was only three-thirty.

“Uh, guys?” I said, turning to them. None of them answered at first, so I walked into the room and stood in front of the TV again.

“Aw, come on,” Ben whined. “I was winning.”

“You guys are supposed to be doing your math work, and I think you know that.”

Katie blushed and looked away, but Leann was cool as a cucumber.

“We finished it already,” she said, not even breaking eye contact. “We went quick today because Daddy said we needed to be ready for the new nanny.”

I waffled for a moment. Unfortunately, this was my first day, and I had no way of knowing if she was telling the truth or not since I hadn’t been there earlier. And since the work was, according to the sheet, online, I couldn’t even properly check to see if Leann was full of shit.

“Okay,” I said, resigning myself to whatever fate would come about as a result of this. “You kids have fun and behave. I’m going to be right there reading through the rest of the papers your dad left me.”

I’d been in enough families as a nanny to know when a battle was worth fighting and when it wasn’t. If I had no proof that they were lying, there was little I could do, and nothing I should do. I knew better than to punish or scold a child who was innocent, and I would rather let the naughty child off the hook than cause emotional harm to one who was being good.

I did as I said and went back to the papers, skimming them for the kids’ medical information in case there was anything I needed to know for preparing their food, like allergies. There was nothing, and it was all pretty straightforward–especially the part where I was the latest in a long list of nannies who had all quit.

I pulled out my phone while the kids were distracted and typed out a text to Max.

Good god, what have I gotten myself into?

Chapter Four

James

Some days managing a hotel could make you feel like you were the king of the world, and then other days–days like today–it could make you feel like the ringleader of a three-ring circus.

I was called down to the lobby by my front-end manager to address a situation straight out of the hotelier’s playbook of nightmare scenarios. A VIP guest had booked our master suite for the same days that a newlywed couple had. There was literally no good choice here.

“Hi there,” I said to the two parties and my manager, Kyle, as I approached. “I’m James Warner, the owner. What’s seem to be the problem?”

Of course, I’d had Kyle brief me before I ever left my office, but I wanted to see if either group ratted themselves out as assholes. It wasn’t a good strategy for determining how to handle this, but it was a strategy.

“Hi there,” said a pretty young woman with a mini veil on her head. “We booked the master suite about six months ago for our wedding and honeymoon. But your worker here says that it has already been rented out to this man.” She indicated a middle-aged man wearing sunglasses indoors. He looked extremely put out by all this and was on his cell phone complaining already.

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