“Tell you what. Next time I visit my daughter in Denver, I’ll bring my toolbox back with me.”
Cade smiled. “That would be great. Thanks, Mrs. Poe.”
****
“That’s so cool,” laughed Michael Wargman, Cade’s best friend and second in command. “You’ll have to give her a raise if she starts taking care of the cars, you know.”
“Gladly.”
Michael took another swig of beer and laughed again. “We got ourselves a nanny-slash-mechanic. I told you the third time would be a charm.”
“Hey!” Roman said from across the woodshop. “Either of you want in here?” He indicated the three round tables in the middle of the shop floor, where several of Cade’s pack and a few guys from town were playing poker.
Cade waved a hand. “Nah. Too tired. I’ll just sit here and drink. You wanna play?” he asked Michael.
The big wolf shook his shaggy blond head. “Nope. I’m fine here.”
Michael had interviewed Mrs. Poe three years earlier, when Cade brought Rebecca home from Savannah. At the time, neither of them had realized how difficult it would be to find a normal, qualified nanny.
Much to their surprise, there weren’t a lot of experienced nannies with solid resumes looking to live on an isolated horse ranch full of single werewolves. They had a choice between young and inexperienced or old and ready for retirement. Michael chose to go with young and inexperienced. That was a mistake—an understandable mistake, in Cade’s view, but a mistake just the same.
Celine, the first nanny, was way too interested in Cade. The next one, Ingrid, was older and more qualified than Celine—but she seduced a couple of Cade’s wolves into her hippy dippy sex magic cult.
After that, they decided to give old and ready for retirement a try.
So Michael called Mrs. Poe, only to find that she’d accepted a position with a young family in Durango. They spent months vainly searching for someone else, until Cade said to hell with it.
He knew he and Sindri, the four-hundred-year-old brownie who’d raised Cade and his older brother, could raise Rebecca by themselves. But he couldn’t ignore the threats of Rebecca’s maternal grandmother, who’d visited the ranch all of one time and declared Cade incapable of providing a stable home life for his little girl. Family courts weren’t kind to single werewolf fathers of females.
Then one day, out of the blue, Mrs. Poe called Michael. The Durango family had moved overseas, she didn’t want to be so far from her kids, and was their position still open? Cade hired her over the phone and hadn’t regretted it for a moment.
Though the thirty-five-year US Army vet bore a disturbing resemblance to his and Michael’s Ranger instructor, she’d turned out to be a wonderful nanny.
“Hey,” Cade said to Michael now. “I’ve been thinking. She’s been with us for more than a year, which is a pretty big deal. And she’s doing a great job. So I was thinking of taking her to dinner as a way of saying thanks. Some good food, good wine, show her she’s appreciated. Wanna join me?”
“Sure. But I bet she likes hops better than grapes.”
“So I just said, ‘Well, never mind, then,’ and got the hell out as fast as I could!”
“And you never found out why the colonel was buck naked?”
“Nope, and I wasn’t about to ask!”
The three of them erupted into raucous laughter for the fourth or fifth time that night, drawing another round of annoyed glances from their fellow diners at El Rincon.
As it turned out, Mrs. Poe, despite being exactly the type of woman for whom the terms “broad” and “dame” were invented, drank neither wine nor beer. She gulped down several glasses of iced tea during dinner, politely declining Michael’s repeated offers to buy her a drink.
“Well, boys,” she said as their favorite waitress, Kelly, cleared the last remains of desert, “this has been a hoot, it really has. Thanks for showing an old lady such a nice time.”
“You deserve it, Mrs. Poe, and more,” Cade replied. “Hiring you’s the best idea Michael has had in years.”
“Aw shucks,” said his second. “Hey, are you sure you won’t have a drink with us?”
“No thanks, boys, I’m too old to drink anymore.”
“Bullshit,” scoffed Michael. “I bet you’re a hell of a lot of fun when you’re ripped!”
Cade rolled his eyes. “Do we really want to be getting the nanny shitfaced?”
Mrs. Poe’s raspy, booming chortle rang out again. “Oh, hell. I won’t sit here and get snockered, but I don’t suppose one drink could hurt me, could it?”
Michael beamed. “Course not! What’s your poison?”
“Well, back when I drank, I liked a good cab.”
“There you go!” Cade exclaimed.
He ordered a bottle of Harlan Maiden—because she was worth it—and when they each had a glass in front of them, Cade raised his. “To Mrs. Poe!”
“To Mrs. Poe!”
“Aw, shucks,” the old lady grinned.
The next couple weeks passed uneventfully, save for one troubling development. Cade, who had a semi-telepathic ability to read people’s emotions and intentions, if not actually their minds, knew that Mrs. Poe was unhappy. Maybe she was just stressed out, anxious about something. Maybe it had nothing to do with Becca, or Cade, or any of them. But it was a very recent change in her emotional state and, whatever the source of the problem, her distress was strong enough for him to risk offending her by asking about it.
She insisted that nothing was wrong, she was just a little tired (“Keeping up with a three year old is hard on an old lady!”) He knew she was lying. Her misery was so obvious to him that he was shocked no one else noticed it.
“Maybe your sixth sense is misfiring, y’know?” Michael said one night.
Cade knew it wasn’t. He knew something was wrong. But even so, he was shocked when it happened.
****
They got home early one Sunday morning following a New Moon Big Boys’ Night Out, and as they walked into the house, Cade had a sudden flash of premonition, a big old Something Bad’s Gonna Happen Right About Now feeling. He suddenly thought back to more than a year ago, when they came upon Ingrid, Nanny No. 2, banging two of Cade’s wolves in the middle of the woods. That had happened on a New Moon Big Boys’ Night Out as well – was there something about a NMBBNO that precipitated the bad shit?
Cade and Michael split up to shower before breakfast. But when they met up again in the kitchen, there was no sign of Mrs. Poe or Rebecca, who would normally be up by now. They heard Becca babbling in her room upstairs – all the bedrooms in the house were soundproofed, so they always made sure Becca’s door remained opened at night.
“Morning, Baby Girl.”
“Hi Daddy!”
“Have you see Mrs. Poe yet?”
“No,” she said absently, having already turned her attention back to the neatly assembled stuffed animals she’d been lecturing when Cade walked in.
He walked past Becca to knock on the interior door that separated her room from her nanny’s. “Mrs. Poe?” He turned back to his daughter. “If you go downstairs, Sindri will give you breakfast.”
“Okay.” She made no move to get up.
He sighed and knocked again. “Mrs. Poe?” Still no answer.
He put his ear to the door, hoping to hear something in spite of the soundproofing—and, in fact, he thought he heard snoring, but he couldn’t be sure. He walked out into the hall and ran into Michael, who was coming up the stairs. The two of them stood outside the door of Mrs. Poe’s room.
Michael knocked. “Mrs. Poe?” He rattled the door knob – it was locked. He banged on the door a little harder. “Mrs. Poe? Are you all right?
“Mrs. Poe! Open the door!” Cade was genuinely worried now. “I thought I heard snoring,” he said to Michael.
Becca had joined them on the landing, watching the banging and yelling with calm curiosity.
“Go downstairs, baby.”
; “What are you doing?”
“I said go downstairs, Rebecca!” He hadn’t meant to shout.
She burst into tears and fled downstairs to Sindri’s sanctuary.
Michael and Cade looked at each other.
“Well?” asked Michael.
“Yeah, do it,” Cade replied.
Michael put a shoulder to the door and gave a shove. The flimsy pin lock surrendered and the door banged open.
Mrs. Poe didn’t twitch. She just lay there, sprawled on her back, mouth wide open, snoring peacefully.
She was fully dressed, thank God—Cade had worried he’d burst in to find her in a nightgown or something worse, and he’d feared he’d never be able to face her again. But she still wore the blue jeans and knit top she’d had on yesterday. She was even still wearing her old lady tennis shoes.
They stood there staring at her, speechless, for the space of a few heartbeats.
“I don’t believe it,” Michael whispered.
But even if her face hadn’t been flushed, and even if the room hadn’t reeked of wine, the sight of three empty bottles—two on the bed at her feet, one on the floor just beneath her hand, which hung limply off the side of the bed—would’ve left no doubt.
“She’s dead fucking drunk!” Michael said.
“Holy shit,” Cade breathed. They were both still whispering, though there seemed little chance she could hear them.
“Mrs. Poe?” Michael asked softly. He shook her shoulder gently. No response. “Mrs. Poe?” he said more loudly. He picked her hand up, let go, and watched it flop to the bed. “Cade, I think maybe we should call an ambulance. Cade? Cade!”
“My Screaming Eagle,” Cade said in wonder, staring at the empty bottle he’d picked up. “She drank my Screaming Eagle.” He looked up at Michael. “2006. That’s a fifteen hundred dollar bottle of wine, Michael. I was saving that shit.”
“Cade, her pulse is very weak. If she polished off three bottles in one night, she could have alcohol poisoning. I mean, we don’t really know what—”
“And a bottle of Silver Oak, and—shit, Opus One! I’ve got plenty of thirty dollar wine down there, and a bunch of Two Buck Chuck’s I bought for the guys, but she goes straight for Screaming Eagle and Opus. She’s got damned good taste for someone who’s too fucking old to drink!”
“I know you’re pissed off, Cade, but we need to get her to a hospital. Like, now.”
“Did she think I wouldn’t notice they were gone? Why the hell would she even—” Michael was staring at him with something like disapproval. She was an old woman, and she could be very ill. Cade sighed. “Shit. Yeah, you’re right. She probably needs a doctor. Just pick her up and let’s go. We can get to the hospital faster than the ambulance can get out here and back.”
Michael lifted her carefully out of the bed. She was as limp as a rag doll, still snoring like a chainsaw.
They hurried down the stairs as Cade muttered, “I knew something was wrong. I knew it. Goddamn. My Screaming Eagle…”
****
“Why’d I sit there and beg her to have a drink? Twenty-five years on the wagon, and I’m the asshole who pushed her off,” lamented Michael as they rolled out of the hospital parking lot and headed for home.
Mrs. Poe would recover from her acute alcohol poisoning. Her daughter and her AA sponsor had arrived in Fremont that morning.
“Don’t, wolf. She said it herself—it’s not your fault. She chose to take that glass of wine at dinner that night, and she stopped at one, that time. She thought she could control it. But she can’t, because she’s an alcoholic.”
“I’m so ashamed of myself,” she’d said when she was recovered enough to talk. “I just thought…it’s been so long, and I hadn’t touched a drop, and I was sure one glass couldn’t hurt me, but after that it was all I could think about and when I opened that first bottle…Cade, I swear I only meant to drink a little, but it was like something else had a hold of me then, and I couldn’t stop….”
And she’d started to cry again, and he’d patted her hand and told her not to worry about it, and Michael made a lame joke about her excellent taste in wine, and she swore she’d pay for all three bottles and Cade refused the offer. So she’d cried some more, and asked if she could have another chance, but her daughter broke in then and said she was taking her mother back to Denver for a while, and Cade knew she wouldn’t be coming back.
Rebecca would get over it. He wouldn’t.
“I just wish she’d said something when I interviewed her,” Michael said sadly. “Either time. We would’ve hired her anyway.” He glanced at Cade. “Wouldn’t we?”
“Of course. But now…” Cade shook his head. “I mean, I sympathize with the woman, I do. And I hope she can get up and start over. But she’s got a lot of work ahead of her, and I just don’t think she needs the pressure of taking care of a small child, plus living around a bunch of wolves who drink as much as we do, while she tries to get dry again. She needs to be back in Denver with her daughter and her sponsor.”
“I know, I know,” muttered Michael with a sigh. “Shit. At least with Celine and Ingrid, we could laugh about it afterwards. But this…this isn’t funny. This is just sad. Okay.” He sighed again, more heavily this time. “Want to go back to Premier Childcare? Or stick with Denver Nannies?”
“Call them both. Maybe if we get two companies working on it we can find a replacement in less than six months. Goddamn it,” Cade said softly. “She was a really good nanny. Are we snakebit? Am I gonna keep going through this til Becca’s in high school?”
Michael shook his head emphatically. “No. No way. I’m not gonna believe that. Let’s go home and get drunk.” They glanced at each other sheepishly. “Tomorrow I’ll call the services. We’re not giving up, boss. The next one will be the last one.”
NANNY NO. 4 — Mrs. Lawrence
Yours, Mine and Howls
The Nanny Years, Part 5
“Sindri, have you seen my watch?”
The wizened little brownie looked up in surprise. “No. You cannot find it?”
“Nope. I’ve looked everywhere.” He always left his watch on his dresser at night, in an unthinking ritual stretching back to his teenage years. This morning it wasn’t there. Nor was it in the living room, or here in the kitchen.
“You have been very busy. Perhaps you took it off in the stables.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
He gratefully accepted a cup of coffee from his childhood guardian.
It had been a busy January for Cade MacDougall and his pack. Four foals birthed, six Icelandic ponies sold, a lawsuit that had fortunately been dismissed, but only after Cade had paid his fancy Denver lawyers a lot of money. And now the ranch had three new full time residents: two young betas who’d shown up looking to join Rocky Mountain, and a new nanny.
The nanny seemed to be working out beautifully, but it had only been three weeks and Cade was jaded by now. Well, not exactly jaded—more like deeply fucking cynical. From now on, he had to assume any nanny was a disaster waiting to happen.
Mrs. Lawrence didn’t look disastrous. Then again, neither had Celine, or Ingrid, or poor Mrs. Poe.
Rebecca was bundled up and romping in the snow in her grassy play area at the center of the ranch compound. Mrs. Lawrence was ensconced in a rocking chair on the front porch keeping an eye on her charge while they waited for Cade.
“Ready?” he asked as he joined her on the porch.
She smiled up at him. “Ready. Becca! Come on, honey, we’re going into town with Daddy.”
Mrs. Lawrence was from Augusta, and her soft drawl reminded him of the family he’d grown up with after his parents died.
In the short time she’d been with them, she seemed like a sweet, attentive old lady. Becca liked her. Becca liked everyone, but Cade worried about the emotional effects the constant succession of nannies might be having on his daughter. So far she seemed fine.
Five minutes after they were off the ranch, Becca slumped over in
her car seat and went to sleep.
“Good!” Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed softly. “I did worry about her missing her morning nap.”
Cade shrugged. “The car puts her out like a light every time. And if she’s grumpy later, we’ll put her to bed early. I haven’t spent enough time with her lately.”
Mrs. Lawrence beamed at him. “I can tell you’re a wonderful father, Mr. MacDougall.”
“I told you, you have to stop the Mr. MacDougall. Please call me Cade.”
“Thank you, Cade.” She was still beaming at him, waves of sweet old lady approval washing through the car. “It must be hard raising a daughter with no wife and a whole pack to look after at the same time.”
Cade was already grateful that she hadn’t invited him to call her Mary; his grandmother would’ve been appalled. But now he was surprised at how good it felt to hear her high opinion of him. It didn’t matter if she didn’t really know him well enough to make that judgment—at least she didn’t automatically assume he couldn’t raise his daughter.
“Well, thank you,” he said gruffly, a little embarrassed. He cleared his throat. “I mean, you-- some people don’t think single wolves should raise girls by themselves.”
“Oh pfft.” She waved a hand dismissively. “A werewolf is just a guy who can turn into a wolf. It doesn’t make him an animal.”
Cade laughed out loud. “I wish more people understood that, Mrs. L!” Should he be calling her Mrs. L. already?
Oh, what the hell.
“Well, I’ve always liked werewolves.”
“You’ve known a lot?”
“I’d say so.” She stopped, and he knew she was suddenly feeling reticent, afraid to say something, although her expression hadn’t changed.
He didn’t push. The next couple miles flew by in an easy silence.
Cade was about to ask where he could drop her off when she said, straight out of nowhere, “My third husband was a werewolf.”
Werewolves in Love 1.5: The Nanny Years Page 5
