Filed to story: The Alpha and His Nanny Luna (Tiffany & Asher) Book PDF Free
Asher’s words made me curious. “Why is that?” I asked as I looked back down at my sketchbook and continued working on my most recent drawing: a picture of the city at night, using the view from my balcony as reference. “Is something threatening the image of your company?”
The Alpha billionaire was silent for several minutes — so long, in fact, that I wondered if he was even going to answer at all. He laid down on the other side of the bed on his side, with his back turned to me. The only sounds in the room were the sounds of the city below, which was nothing but white noise to me after growing up in the city. Aside from the sounds of the city, there was the sound of my pencil scratching on the paper as I shaded in some of the buildings in my drawing.
All of a sudden, he spoke.
“It seems that some… human… workers in the factories think that they’re not treated as equally as their werewolf counterparts,” he said. “It’s absurd, really. I’ve always tried my best to be fair to everyone in my company. And now the media is trying to contact my PR department in order to weasel payroll reports from us.”
I paused, looking up from my sketchbook to look over at Asher. “Why do they say that they’re being treated unfairly?”
Asher shrugged. “It’s the pay.”
I frowned. “So… You don’t pay the humans the same as the werewolves, even for equal work?”
Asher was silent for some time before finally admitting to it… in his own way, which I had already become all too familiar with over the past few weeks since I had been working for him. “I do the best I can, given the circumstances,” he said, still facing away from me. “I can’t risk being looked down upon by my colleagues for being too fair. It would make me look… weak.”
My frown deepened. I snapped my sketchbook shut and set it down on my bedside table, folding my arms across my chest.
“So… You think that money will cover up the fact that you don’t treat people fairly and with equity,” I responded. “You think that donating money to a single orphanage will make up for that?”
Asher sighed and sat up, but still didn’t look at me. In the dim light of my bedroom, I could see that his sharp jaw was clenching and unclenching, as it always did when he was trying to find the right words.
“Money fixes everything,” he said finally after thinking for a few moments. “It’s practical, and it’s better than spending an hour a week teaching kids how to finger paint–“
I scoffed incredulously. “So, once again, this is really about Ethan,” I said. “As soon as you found out that he volunteers at the orphanage, you have to go and donate a huge sum of money. You’re trying to outshine him.”
Asher shook his head, finally turning to glare at me with his steely gray eyes — when he was angry like this, they were so much like his father’s that it was almost frightening. “How dare you,” he growled. “This has nothing to do with Ethan. You should apologize.”
Between Asher’s hard glare and the fact that I didn’t want to lose my job, I decided to shut my mouth. “Sorry,” I muttered, laying down and turning my back to him.
I wasn’t sorry in the slightest, though. In fact, as I fell asleep that night, all I could think about was how disappointed I was that even a donation was just a way to cover up his own selfishness and to upstage his brother.
Tiffany
When I woke up the following morning to the sun streaming in through my window, Asher was already gone. Yawning, I sat up and threw the covers off of myself before swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and standing.
Ella was already wide awake when I left my room. In fact it seemed that the other servants were also wide awake, and all of them were standing in the living room with their wide eyes glued to the television. I furrowed my brow as I approached, finding this behavior strange — especially for Selina, who was nervously clutching her apron.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I joined the group. Amy merely raised her finger to her lips, then pointed at the television screen. I followed her finger, my own eyes widening as I saw what was being broadcasted.
On the screen was a reporter standing in front of a crowd. Behind her, the crowd was marching back and forth with picket signs that depicted anti-werewolf sentiments, as well as images of both WereCorp’s logo and
Asher’s face with big, red X’s painted over them.
“As of right now, WereCorp’s youngest CEO, Asher Sterling, has not made an official statement about the unequal pay between human and werewolf employees,” the reporter said, holding her finger to her ear and shouting over the din of the protesters behind her as they chanted “Equal pay for equal work!”
The reporter continued: “According to recent speculation, there are reports that werewolves are being paid ten percent more than their human counterparts, in both the offices and the factories, for the same work. Some even believed that the Alpha CEO deliberately made a large donation to a local orphanage just yesterday in an attempt to assuage these claims and create a positive image for the company, but the footage from earlier this morning has completely turned that attempt on its head.”
Just then, a video clip popped up on the screen. It showed Sophia and the children from the orphanage standing outside the WereCorp headquarters; Asher walked past with his briefcase, completely ignoring them.
One of the children tried to reach out and give him a handmade thank-you card, but he deliberately moved out of the way, as though the child’s display of appreciation disgusted him, then pulled a wad of cash out of his wallet and tossed it at the child’s feet. The footage cut out just as a security guard stormed out the door and began to usher the children away from the door, with the video pausing for several moments on one of the children’s scared, crying faces.
Suddenly, the TV screen went dark. I looked up to see Selina holding the remote, her lips pressed into a thin, hard line.
“Get back to work, you two,” she said, addressing Amy and Lily. “No more of this nonsense. It’s not even nine o’clock in the morning.”
Selina was right; Ella didn’t need to be seeing this sort of thing at her age, and especially not first thing in the morning.
“Come on, Ella,” I said, reaching out to take the little girl’s hand and leading her to her room. “Let’s get you a bath. If you’re good, we can have crepes for breakfast.”
I led her to her room, where I closed the door tightly behind us and walked over to the adjoined bathroom to start running the bath. While the tub began to fill with steaming hot water, I returned to her room to open the curtains and the windows and to let some fresh air in.
“Is my daddy gonna be okay?” Ella asked. Her voice sounded even tinier than usual; I could tell already that what she had seen on the television scared her.
“Yes, sweetheart,” I replied, walking over to her and crouching to her level to take her into my arms. “He’ll be fine. It’s just business; the news always makes everything look worse than it really is.”
Ella sniffled on my shoulder, and when I pulled away, I saw that she was crying. Her sweet little cherub-like face was twisted into a grimace, and her cheeks were red as apples. “I’ll tell you what,” I said, brushing a bit of hair out of her face, “after your bath, we’ll call your daddy if you’d like. I’m sure hearing your voice would make him feel better, too.”
…
I kept my promise; after Ella’s bath, she called Asher, who reassured her that everything would be fine. I even kept my promise to take her downstairs to the bakery for crepes, which seemed to lighten her mood, but as the hours ticked on and Asher didn’t come home at his usual time, we all started to grow worried. After I put Ella to bed with a glass of warm milk and a lullaby to soothe her nerves, even Selina shot me a concerned glance before disappearing into her bedroom for the night.
For some reason, I couldn’t sleep. After tossing and turning for almost an hour in my bed, I finally gave up and decided to head to the kitchen for my own glass of warm milk. I crawled out of bed and slid my feet into my slippers before quietly retrieving my milk and settling into the big armchair in the living room with a book.
Just then, the elevator doors slid open and out stepped Asher. His face appeared almost gaunt, and his eyes looked hollow; he was so tired, in fact, that he didn’t even see me as he came in. I watched silently for a moment as he tossed his briefcase down on the floor and shuffled over to the bar to pour himself a drink before I jumped up and grabbed the whiskey bottle out of his hands, causing him to jump with surprise.
“Drinking will not help you right now,” I said, keeping my voice low so as not to wake Ella and holding the bottle out of the way as he tried to take it back from me. “Your daughter was worried sick all day. So were the rest of us.”
“I told her I was fine, didn’t I?” Asher asked, giving up on the whiskey bottle and reaching for a vodka bottle instead.
I frowned. “What would you do if she woke up and came out here to see her father stumbling around the apartment, drunk, after telling her that he was ‘fine’?”
