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Confessions of a Teen Nanny

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

How On Earth Did I Get Into This Mess?

December

Adrienne Lewis raised a Baccarat champagne glass and proposed a toast: "To a great party and the worst night of my life."

Across the empty room, Adrienne's best friend, Liz Braun, raised her glass and nodded. "You got that right."

"Tonight didn't turn out the way I planned at all," she said, half to herself and half to Liz. Adrienne looked around the incredible penthouse at 841 Fifth Avenue, the scene of an enormous party she and Liz had just thrown.

The apartment was famous in New York for its elegance, its size, and the fact that it was owned by the billionaire socialites Dale and Christine Warner and their daughters, Cameron and Emma. Adrienne and Liz both worked as nannies in the building. Adrienne had started with the Warners a couple of months ago, watching their eight-year-old daughter Emma. Liz worked for their neighbor, Dr. Mayra Markham-Collins, a prominent child psychologist and author, who had two children, Heather, age nine, and David, age five.

"More champagne?" Liz asked, waving the half-empty bottle at her friend. "We have tons left, and there's a load of food in the kitchen. Pâté? Caviar? Doritos?"

"No, I'm cool," Adrienne said, wishing the queasy feeling in her stomach would go away. Wishing she could rewind the night and figure out how the party had gone so horribly wrong.

Liz stood up and shook out her curly, dark hair. She smoothed her hands over the peach Chanel cocktail dress, conveniently "borrowed" from Mrs. Warner's amazing closet. Slipping her feet back into the Jimmy Choo heels that Adrienne had swiped for her from seventeen-year-old Cameron Warner's shoe closet (more like a shoe store, Liz thought), Liz walked over to her friend, and the two girls surveyed the wreck that was now the Warners' apartment.

Adrienne took a deep breath. "If we don't clean this apartment immediately, I am so totally fired."

Liz nodded. "Okay. Let's get to work. We can have this place back to normal in no time. It will be so clean, Mr. and Mrs. Warner will never know we had a party."

"That won't be too hard," Adrienne said. "Mr. Warner is always drunk. He won't even notice he's home!" They ran to where their clothes were stashed in one of the apartment's guest rooms near the Warners' master bedroom suite.

Slipping out of the Dolce & Gabbana designer dress Cameron Warner had given her, Adrienne sighed, smoothed out the wrinkles, and put it back on a hanger. I look so great in these clothes, she thought. I can't believe Cameron has so many. It's not fair. She tried to control the anger bubbling up inside of her. When it came to Cameron, nothing was ever fair.

She placed the dress in the wardrobe, where Cameron always hung the clothes she was sending out to have cleaned. The bills from Madame Paulette, the dry cleaner, frequently came to thousands of dollars a month. The Warners would never notice the extra cleaning.

Back in jeans, the girls finally looked like what they really were: high school students after a night of partying without permission. Turning up the music, Adrienne and Liz emptied the ashtrays, straightened the paintings, and cleaned the bathrooms.

"Adrienne?" Liz called from across the apartment. "Someone hurled in Mrs. Warner's toilet!"

"Well, flush it!" Adrienne called back. "And stop yelling. You'll wake up Emma!"

Adrienne kept thinking about her boyfriend, Brian, as she cleaned. Kept thinking about what she had seen before he left.

"The bathrooms are spotless, and all the shoes and accessories are back in Mrs. Warner's room. Do you think we're almost done?" Liz came in and asked Adrienne.

"Pretty close," Adrienne replied, dragging two huge bags of garbage into the service elevator area. "Tania gets here about six in the morning." Tania was the Warners' Russian housekeeper, who watched Emma when Adrienne wasn't working. Adrienne glanced at the clock. Three a.m.! "Tania will give this whole place another once-over. Mr. and Mrs. Warner will go straight to bed. They won't even check the living room. And they'll never go in the kitchen--I don't even think Mrs. Warner has ever seen inside the kitchen." Adrienne looked around the enormous room with its incredible views of the city, TV area, and casual dining corner. The Warners' kitchen was bigger than her family's apartment. "By the time they wake up, it will be like this whole thing never happened."

"I only wish that it would be like it had never happened for both of us," Liz said. "You know, you should go check on Emma, and then just run through each of the rooms and make sure someone didn't go into Mr. Warner's den, or Mrs. Warner's dressing room or bathroom, or something like that."

"Good idea," Adrienne said. Liz was always so practical.

Adrienne walked down a long hall off the entrance to where the girls' bedrooms were located. Cameron's was sleek and modern, filled with contemporary art and books that Adrienne doubted she had ever even opened. Cameron was one of the most beautiful young socialites in New York, but she was not known at her school, Pheasant-Berkeley, for her major intellectual contributions. Liz and Cameron went to school together, and Liz had told Adrienne plenty of stories about Cameron over the years.

Adrienne carefully opened the next door and looked in on Emma. Tiny, blond, and snoring slightly, the eight-year-old girl was squeezed into a ball at the top of the bed, her sheets and covers crumpled on the floor. Smiling, Adrienne gathered them up and carefully placed them on top of Emma, who rolled over with a sigh. Emma was really adorable. It's too bad she's an evil genius, thought Adrienne.

Adrienne backed out of the room carefully and closed the door as quietly as she could. The last thing she needed was for Emma to wake up and start asking questions. Emma was a born prosecutor.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Confessions of a Teen Nanny by Victoria Ashton Copyright © 2005 by Victoria Ashton. Excerpted by permission.
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