THE BROKEN DADDY ALPHA

The little girl looked up from the floor, sniffed the air twice, and said, "You smell like my mommy." Elena froze with her wet coat half off her shoulders. Rain was still running down the back of her neck from the long walk up the driveway, the taxi she couldn't afford had left her at the gate, and she had been inside the most intimidating house she'd ever seen for exactly ninety seconds. Long enough to be soaked. Not long enough for this. "I'm sorry, sweetheart." She crouched down, because the child was small and serious and clearly meant it. "I think you've got me mixed up with someone." "No." The girl shook her head, certain in the way only very young children are certain. She had dark hair and eyes too old for her face, and she leaned in close and breathed Elena in again, like she was checking. "You smell like my real mommy is supposed to. Not the picture mommy. The real one." "Lily." The voice came from the top of the staircase, and it dropped the temperature of the entire room. Elena straightened so fast her knees cracked. The man standing up there had not been there a second ago, she would have sworn it, and now he filled the landing as though the house had been built around him as an afterthought. Tall. Broad through the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with the suit. A face carved out of cold marble, and a jaw that looked like it had not unclenched in years. He came down the stairs without seeming to hurry and somehow arrived at the bottom far too quickly, and when his eyes landed on Elena they were the flat dark of a man sizing up a threat. "Who," he said, "are you?" "Elena Vance." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I'm the nanny. The agency sent me. I have the paperwork. I emailed ahead, your assistant confirmed the position." "I don't have an assistant who hires nannies." Each word was a closed door. "I didn't hire a nanny. I would remember deciding to let a stranger into my house to be alone with my daughter." The floor seemed to drop a little under Elena's feet. She had spent her last forty dollars getting here. She had given up the room she was barely renting, because the woman on the phone had said the position came with board. She had no backup. There was no version of tonight where she got back in a taxi and went somewhere, because there was no somewhere, and the man in front of her could see all of that on her face. She watched him see it. Something flickered behind the cold for half a second, there and gone, and it was almost worse than the coldness. "Damon." A woman came in from a side hall, pulling a cardigan around herself, and the relief on her face when she saw Elena was real. "Oh, thank God, you came. I'm so sorry, the weather's been awful. You found the place all right?" "Sienna." The man did not look away from Elena. "Tell me you did not do this." "I did this." His sister lifted her chin. "Lily needs someone, and you won't let anyone past the gate, and I am tired of watching that child raised by a rotation of terrified strangers who quit inside a week because you glare at them. So yes. I hired her. I used your name because no one answers a call from mine." She crossed the room and put a hand on Elena's wet shoulder, steering her gently away from her brother as though moving her out of a fire. "She's staying tonight, at the very least. Look at her, she's soaked through. We are not putting a person back out in that." For a long moment, nobody said anything. The rain hammered the windows. The little girl, Lily, had drifted over to stand against Elena's leg, one small hand fisted in the hem of her coat, and Elena did not dare move for fear of dislodging the only thing in the room that seemed glad she existed. "One night," the man said finally. His eyes had not warmed at all. "You're gone in the morning. And you do not"—he looked at his daughter, and the cold cracked just enough to show what was under it, which was fear, raw and badly hidden—" You do not put ideas in her head. Whatever she said to you when you walked in, you forget it." "She said, I smell like her mother," Elena said, before she could decide not to. The change in him was instant and total. The man went absolutely still, the way you go still when something has touched a wound you thought had healed over years ago, and the look he turned on his daughter was so naked, so wrecked, that Elena had to look away from it. "Her mother," he said, very quietly, "is gone. There is no one in this house who smells like her, because she is not here, and she is not coming back." He picked Lily up. The little girl went without protest, but she kept her eyes on Elena over her father's shoulder the whole way up the stairs. "Sienna will show you a room. In the morning you'll go." He climbed three steps and stopped. "Miss Vance." He didn't turn around. "That necklace you're wearing. The little charm in your throat." A pause that lasted a year. "Take it off while you're under my roof. I don't want to see it again." And then he had gone up the dark stairs, and Elena was left standing in a puddle of rainwater in a billionaire's marble hall, one hand creeping up to the small worn charm she had worn against her skin every day of her life, the only thing in the world that was truly hers, wondering how a man who had never met her could hate a piece of jewelry he had no way of recognizing. Except, she realized slowly, the way he'd said it, he hadn't sounded like a man who didn't recognize it. He'd sounded like a man who did.