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LadySharkey1 rocks my world by being the most amazing, kick-ass beta I could ever imagine.
3.
Waking up in a strange bedroom, Bella felt completely disoriented. Sitting up, she scanned the room; the slightly salty smell of the sea and the sounds of waved crashing in lifting her out of the unease and mild agoraphobia her new surroundings instilled within her.
Like everything in this house, her room was huge; with the sofa and coffee table set on one end and the desk and bookcase in the other as well as, of course, the bed, it almost felt like she was in a studio apartment.
Not that she'd be able to afford any of the luxury she found herself in.
From what her dad had told her about his buddy, she'd already known Carlisle Cullen was loaded. Where both of them had an interest in law, Charlie had always leaned more towards the practical side of upholding it, whereas Carlisle had been more into theory and legal practice. He'd gone to Columbia Law after graduating from U-Dub and had made his career in the big city. By the time he was thirty, he'd already made partner in one of the most prestigious law firms in the city and had been raking in quite the little fortune for himself when he'd met the beautiful, and equally wealthy, Esme Masen.
And when money met money, it had the habit of making even more money. Then that money gives birth to homes like the one she was waking up in.
Stretching, Bella enjoyed the softness of her sheets for another minute or two before she pulled them away, her feet cold against the polished floorboards as she walked out towards the French doors. The sounds and smells of the sea as she opened them and stepped onto the small, private balcony made her squeal with delight. Her eyes followed a seagull as it rode the wind, flying right past her window before soaring out towards the sea.
To be as free as that bird… Bella smiled softly to herself as she got through her morning routine, not quite sure what kind of times the family kept since Esme had pretty much waved away every single mention of work she offered to provide the previous night.
Esme, of course, was already bustling around the house by the time Bella came down; rattling away on her phone while taking sips from a huge cup of coffee as she sauntered through the house in her casual chic attire. She was every bit the kind of woman you would expect living in a beach house in the Hamptons.
"You're awake!" Her face broke out in a radiant smile as soon as Esme spotted her new companion coming down the stairs. Her hand covering the phone, she quickly pointed her young guest towards the kitchen. "Please, help yourself to coffee or tea and whatever breakfast food you like. There's plenty to go around." And just like that, she went back to business, making arrangements for an event one of her charities was staging in the somewhat near future.
While she talked, Bella sat down at the counter, enjoying a quiet breakfast of coffee and some cut up fruit while gazing out over the sea. Though she'd lived near a beach for almost all of her life, and had spent many afternoons lying in the sand while staring out over the ocean, there had never been a time in her life when she'd lived right next to the shoreline. She could already tell she was going to like it.
"Well, that's a lovely start to the morning!" Esme sighed, the sarcasm in her voice not wasted on Bella. "That was my event manager telling me the location we had in mind for our benefit can't host our event any longer because they're remodeling unexpectedly. Something about a fire next door causing some smoke damage or something… And because the benefit is just two months away, and most of the places that can house a crowd as big as ours are already booked, we're going to 'have to be creative'." She made air quotes around the final part of the sentences, her eyes spitting fire as Bella shifted nervously in her seat. Apparently, there was a significant blaze roaring somewhere underneath Esme's genteel features.
"I hope you'll be able to find a place," Bella offered, completely out of her depths in discussing ballrooms and charity functions.
"Oh, I will." Esme sighed, calming herself again. "Just do me a favor and never get into the whole charity circuit, not matter how nicely they ask you. The only thing it's good for is getting grey hair before your time!" She chuckled, refilling her cup. "It's a good thing you're up so early, though. It gives us a little bit of time to discuss matters before the barbarian horde descends."
Bella laughed at the way Esme jokingly referred to her children but soon turned serious, eagerly anticipating the description of her job. "Should I write things down?"
"No." Esme shook her head. "There's not that much to it. Do you know you're actually the first nanny I've hired?" Esme waited for Bella to shake her head before she explained, "Of course I've gone through loads of babysitters but I've always wanted to be a good and very much hands-on mother to my kids. It's only been for the past year or so that I've started to get so swamped with all the charity work I'm doing that I find myself unable to combine the two."
Bella nodded, still unsure of where the conversation was leading. She took a sip of coffee as she tried to pay as close attention to Esme's words as she could, determined to pick up as much as possible about the Cullen household.
"Last summer was particularly awful," Esme continued, folding her hands in front of her. "We usually spend our entire summer at this house, with Carlisle traveling back and forth between Manhattan and the Hamptons and me staying with the kids. Last year, though, I was called back to the city for crisis after crisis, leaving me at my wits end about what I was supposed to do with the kids. I couldn't leave them here on their own but sometimes it was simply impossible to find a sitter so I had to cart them back and forth all the time."
Bella smirked, the journey between the airport and the beach house still fresh in her mind. "I bet they didn't like that!"
"You're right!" Esme smiled wryly, remembering how both her children had protested against the disturbance of their routine. "So this year, I thought I'd try something new. So imagine my relief when Carlisle told me his best friend's daughter was looking to move to New York."
"And here I am," Bella smiled awkwardly, wishing Esme would just hurry up and tell her what her job was. For as much as she was starting to like the woman, she was still her employer and Bella was eager to get to work.
"Yes, you are." Esme smiled gratefully, patting Bella's hand, "and if this morning's conversation is anything to go by, not a moment too soon."
Unable to prolong the moment for much longer, Bella decided there and then to just jump in the deep as she asked, "So what do you expect of me, exactly?"
"Most of the time, I hope your job will be very boring," Esme started, chuckling at the confused look she saw in Bella. "I hope to be here a lot over the summer and when I am, we'll both be working together, I suppose. It's only when I'm called away that your official duties will start."
Bella nodded, the picture suddenly starting to become clear in her mind. "So you want me more as a sort of stand-by babysitter than an actual nanny."
Esme nodded. "I have to admit I feel sort of ashamed to have lured you over here under false pretenses but I hope that the free time to explore the beaches and towns around here will sweeten the deal? And we'll pay you the full-time fee we agreed upon."
"I'm sure I'll manage," Bella answered. More time to read and enjoy her time while still raking in quite good money? She had a hard time believing any of what she was hearing was real! As much as she hated being idle, with the hectic year she knew to be ahead of her, a couple of months of lounging at this beach house and catching up on her reading before the academic year kicked off wouldn't exactly hurt.
"I'm so happy to have you here," Esme insisted, the gratitude in her smile making Bella like her even more. "Just the fact that you're here and able to step in to take care of my little devils at a moment's notice is a weight off my back!"
"Can you tell me a little bit more about them?" Bella asked, wanting to make sure she got off to a good start with both the kids. "You said Jasper was more an introvert and Rose a bit of a princess, but what do they like to do? And more importantly, what would you like me to do with them whenever you're away?"
"I think most things are fine as long as you don't take them to a tattoo parlor to get inked or cliff diving," Esme joked. "They both love trips to the zoo or just lazy days at the beach. Jasper's quite the little surfer and loves being out in the ocean—which is fine as long as he stays within view—while Rose will be happy to stick to the beach acting far too old for her age." Esme smiled, her love for her children rolling off her in waves. "A lot of Rose's Manhattan friends are down here as well, so on most days she'll either be off with some of her friends or they will be joining us."
"And Jasper's more of a solitary guy?" Bella asked, assuming as much since Esme had only mentioned Rose's friends.
Esme smiled, nodding. "He knows a lot of the other surfers along our stretch of the beach and usually they hang out together while out on the water, which is great because some of the older guys keep an eye on the younger ones while they're out there. Most of the time that he doesn't spend on his board, he's happy to stick to the music room, strumming his guitar or playing video games."
Esme then went on to show Bella around the downstairs area of the house; a guided tour that had been postponed when they had arrived the previous evening due to both the darkness and the fact that Bella had been exhausted. Apart from the usual rooms, it had a big office where both Carlisle and Esme had their desks, a downstairs playroom that seemed to be dominated by Rosalie, judging from the pinkness of it, and a music room that had been taken over by Jasper.
"Mom! Where's the chocolate milk?" A voice yelled by the time we finished up our tour. Jasper.
"It's in the fridge, you idiot, just like it was yesterday and every day before that!" A second voice—Rosalie's—hissed as the sound of cereal being poured into bowls and glasses being grabbed from cabinet drifted out from the kitchen.
Getting back into that room, I could immediately see that while there were certainly some family resemblances in the two of them—the golden honey hair and vibrant, cerulean eyes for one—outwardly the contrast between Rose and her pink and white Gingham dress and matching flats, and Jasper's long, unkempt hair, baggy pants and vintage Nirvana shirt couldn't be bigger.
"Kids," Esme demanded, getting their attention almost immediately as they looked up from their breakfast, a temporary cease-fire on their bickering started the second they spotted the new person standing next to their mom.
"You must be Bella." Rosalie stood up from the barstool she'd been occupying at the kitchen counter and daintily stepped over to the new arrival, holding out a perfectly manicured hand. "I'm Rosalie Cullen."
"Bella Swan," Bella introduced herself, smiling before heading over to the kitchen island where Jasper had returned his attention to his breakfast, scarfing it down with a gusto only matched by other boys his age. "And you're Jasper… Nice to meet you both."
"Hey." Jasper nodded, only pausing long enough to give out the fastest of handshakes before he went back to eating.
The initial meeting set the tone for the rest of the day, which was filled with lazily lounging around the house and getting to know one another. Rose constantly took the lead, asking a million and one questions and appearing quite eager to make a favorable impression while Jasper hung back and limited himself to one syllable answers as much as possible.
It wasn't that he was hostile or anything; he just seemed a little jaded, or perhaps studiously jaded, since on those few, rare moments that she managed to catch him off guard, an eagerness and interest that rivaled his sister's shone through.
All in all, by the time Bella made it back to her room that night, she was pretty satisfied about how the day had gone. The whole setup was still a little strange but it had its upside and the family was nothing if not welcoming and nice. It gave her something good to share with her dad when she called him that night.
It wasn't long after she'd ended the call that noises started to drift up from the terrace, the open window making her privy to the conversation going on below whether she wanted to be or not. Determined not to pry, she booted up her laptop and logged onto Facebook but not even the change of a former boyfriend's relationship status from 'single' to 'in a relationship' could divert her attention from it.
"Seriously, Carlisle, what was I supposed to do?" Bella heard Esme's voice argue, heals clicking on the deck as her employer made her way outside. "I couldn't very well leave him to rot away in jail when I had a perfectly good solution to get him out!"
"I would have expected you to at least discuss this with me," an unfamiliar voice that had to belong to the as yet unsighted Carlisle Cullen responded. "The guy is a drug addict and in jail for supplying drugs to a minor, for heaven's sake. Think about our kids!"
"There never was any proof of that! You know as well as I do how ruthless those paparazzi magazines are these days. They'll make a story out of anything!" Esme snapped back. "Do you honestly think that I would let him come here if I thought he posed a danger to our children?"
"No," Carlisle conceded, "but I do think that when it comes to your brother, you have a hard time seeing the truth. You want to protect him and that's great, but not if it puts our family on the frontline."
"Then what was I supposed to do? Let him stay in the city with those disgusting so-called friends of his?" Esme countered. "He reached out to me, Carlisle. I think he wants to be better and he needs to be out of Manhattan in order to make that work."
Carlisle remained silent for a while but by the tone of his voice as he did speak, Bella was quick to sense that he'd given up. "You know how I feel about this, darling, and as much as I know that nothing I can say will keep you from opening our home to him, I'll have you know I'm keeping my eye on him. One mistake and he's out."
"I know." Esme sounded so sad, her shape vaguely outlined in the twilight as she stood by the railing looking out over the ocean.
Bella slinked into the darkness of her room, uneasy about overhearing the conversation but also curious about the person they were discussing.
After all, weren't the most interesting members of every family those that everyone was always so desperate to keep out?
Thoughts?