thought simply made him angry all over again, for hadn’t he tried to ensure her financial security in the past, only to have her toss his efforts back into his face in no uncertain terms?
She was Katherine’s friend, Max had plenty of funds and didn’t see the problem, but Phoebe was ever Phoebe—stubborn, cantankerous and totally unwilling to listen, even to the most reasonable of ideas.
Like accepting a permanent loan from him to set herself up in a home and get some formal training. Instead she flitted from one poorly paid assistant’s job to the next as the mood took her.
‘What was Katherine thinking, to encourage you to come here now?’
And why was he still standing here, allowing this farce to go on?
‘She was thinking smart. Something you appear to have lost the ability to do at the moment.’ Phoebe licked a drop of milk from the corner of her mouth and Max’s stomach contracted.
He recognised the feeling. He just didn’t understand why it was happening to him. This was Phoebe. The bane of his life. He did not find her desirable. He simply couldn’t.
Liar, liar, his libido chanted.
‘I’m not scared of monsters.’
‘I’m not, neither.’
Jake and Josh strode towards Phoebe on sturdy small legs, hands fisted on hips, chins stuck out.
‘I eat monster s’wiches.’
‘I eats ’em too.’
Since they’d arrived a week ago, his sons had alternately played up, cried inconsolably, sulked, and mashed and smashed his house to pieces. Max wondered what form the next outbreak would take, and how many seconds of peace remained until it started.
Phoebe may have got his sons to speak, but her methods were unorthodox and bound to lead to trouble. It would be best if he dispatched her now.
He fixed her with a glare and gestured towards the living room. ‘If you’re quite finished demolishing my kitchen, we need to talk.’
‘Not right now.’ She smiled back at him blandly, but with the threat of daggers in her pale blue eyes. Even the spare eyes on her bow seemed to be glaring. ‘A person can’t simply leave a monster sandwich sitting around the place. It might jump up and run away.’
‘Don’t make yourself any more ridiculous than you already are.’ Max had had more than enough of her silly talk. Monster sandwiches, indeed.
But the boys giggled at her suggestion. Actually laughed. Their faces crinkled and they chortled for a full few seconds.
Something tugged at Max, deep down in his gut. How was he going to do this? They were so vulnerable, so completely dependent on him. How could he raise them or, rather, find somebody to raise them, who would come somewhere close to making up for his inadequacies? Someone who would allow them to find joy in their lives, to be happy and cheerful and carefree?
‘Me eat it,’ said Jake.
‘Me, too,’ Josh added.
‘Eat the monster switchwitch.’
‘And drink the milk.’
Phoebe hummed and hawed, but offered to share with a gleam in her eye that revealed a certain satisfaction.
Moments later, his sons were eating with every indication of pleasure. They drank a small cup of milk apiece, while Phoebe scooped up dishes and dumped them into the over-flowing dishwasher and Max stared, stupefied, his feet rooted to the floor.
Phoebe had only been here minutes and she had the boys literally eating out of her hand. This minor miracle. How had it come about? He had no time to consider further, because as fast as his sons had eaten and drank they drooped, and Phoebe swooped.
‘Clean jammies, Max, in the bathroom.’ She scooped a boy on to each hip, as though she did it all the time, and swept them away.
By the time Max joined her, bemused, with two pint-sized pairs of pyjamas in his hands, she had washed faces, supervised teeth and stripped two small bodies to the bare minimum. The boys were slipped into their night attire and herded along to their beds.
‘I’ll be sleeping in the room next door to yours if either of you get scared or decide your beds are too lumpy or anything.’ Phoebe gave each child a quick pat and backed towards the door. ‘I happen to know my bed is the most comfortable in the house, because I’ve slept in it heaps of times before.
‘See you.’ With a wave and a grin she stepped out the door, somehow managing to herd Max with her. As she did so, she brushed against him. Max’s body tensed in reaction to her nearness.
‘They’ll be crying before you can say boo.’ He stood in the corridor, waiting for the yells of rage or screeches of fear, but they didn’t come.
That just left Max, trying to deal with wanting Phoebe and wanting her out of his house in roughly equal measures. Or he told himself the balance was about fifty-fifty.
‘I’m too tired to deal with you tonight.’ He grumbled the words at her gracelessly, a counterpart to his body’s unwelcome reaction to her. She was his sister’s best friend, not to mention all wrong for Max in every way it was possible to imagine.
He did not need to desire her on top of every other thing going on in his life at present. ‘Now that they’re asleep I can’t leave them in order to drive you back into town, either. Brent—my new gardener—was going out for the evening, so I can’t ask him to do it. You’ll have to go tomorrow.’
‘No need to thank me. Yet.’ Phoebe stepped past him into the doorway of the room she always used when she visited, which, thank God, Max thought, hadn’t been often lately.
‘I realise your pride must be tangled around your ankles right now,’ she added. ‘Get some sleep. Maybe tomorrow you’ll be able to accept that I’m the best thing that’s happened to you this week.’
‘You’re not staying.’ The forceful words were a wasted effort because she’d closed the door in his face.
Disgusted, speechless, Max stared at it. Who did she think she was, anyway?
It was more of a splintering sound than an all-out crunch. In fact, as accidents went, this one almost registered as a non-event. Until Phoebe looked over her shoulder and saw the damage.
‘Oh, poop. I’m in trouble now.’ She had her hand on the door latch of Max’s monster four-wheel drive, preparing to get out, before she remembered what she had, for a split second, forgotten. She wasn’t alone.
Her two small charges didn’t hesitate to offer their reminders, gleefully, from the back seat of the Range Rover.
‘Poop, poop, poop,’ Josh crowed, getting louder with each use of the word. ‘Poop, poop, poop!’
‘You crunched it.’ This came from Jake, who had managed to slither himself around enough in his car seat to survey the farmhouse’s wrecked veranda latticing. ‘Max be mad. Mad, mad, mad.’
Phoebe
