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‘I admit I’ve lost three nannies in swift succession.’ He interrupted her as though he hadn’t even been listening. Probably he hadn’t, since he never took any notice when she tried to prove a point. ‘The boys have been ratty. None of the nannies had a lot of experience. Frankly, I don’t think you would last any longer with them than the others have.’
‘So you’d like me to simply get out of the way?’
Instead of answering straight away, Max glanced down at his shirt, grimaced, tugged it off and wadded it into a ball in one tanned fist. Only then did he meet her gaze, his own unflinching and uncompromising. There wasn’t a shred of warmth in it. ‘I’m glad you understand. Now that we have that sorted out, I’ll see you to the door.’
Suiting action to words he stepped forward, intent, apparently, on manoeuvring her outside with as much haste as possible. The gall of the man left her speechless. So, unfortunately, did the sight of so much of his bare skin.
Phoebe made a concerted effort to pull herself together. ‘You’re not throwing me out. I won’t go.’
She slapped a hand against the centre of his chest, intent on stopping his motion towards the door. Heated, hard male flesh met the pads of her fingers, the palm of her hand.
Big mistake. She drew back, flustered and rather appalled because her body was telling her in a very clear tone that this was a man. One worthy of her feminine interest. On a personal level.
This was no sense of homecoming bothering her now. It was attraction to Max. She may have tried to deny it, but the proof was in her tingling fingers. She was on completely alien territory and had no idea how to cope with the change.
She decided to ignore it, and hope it went away. It had to be some sort of aberration, anyway. So yes, she would just shrug it off and, before she knew it, it would be forgotten. A faded memory, never to be repeated.
‘I’m staying, Max, and I’m going to help your sons.’ If she focused on the purpose of her presence here she would be just fine. She squared her shoulders and stepped around him.
‘I’ve worked at Sydney Platypus Daycare.’ Until they tossed me out on my ear for having too much of an opinion about everything, but that was the only bad ending I’ve had in a job so far. ‘Trust me, four-year-old kicking screamers don’t frighten me in the least, and nor does their father. You wanted a seasoned childcare worker, and that’s what you’ve got.’
‘What I’ve got is more trouble than I want.’ Max muttered the opinion beneath his breath.
Phoebe still heard it and, typically, was goaded into retaliation. ‘Don’t tell me the famous Maximilian can’t balance two small boys and a nanny? Doesn’t sound like much of a challenge to me.’
His mouth tightened.
She told herself it served him right. He had asked for it, after all.
Stand aside, Max, and let me show you how things are done.
Besides, she had been having just the slightest bit of trouble finding a new job. When Katherine had told her about Max needing help, Phoebe had been somewhat out of funds, and she had given up her tiny bedsit in Sydney to come here. Not a good time to try to move on elsewhere just now.
Oh, bother Max anyway. This wasn’t about him. She deliberately raised her voice without looking at his sons. ‘I am so hungry. You won’t mind if I go to the kitchen and make a big, ugly, sloppy sandwich with heaps of really gooey stuff dripping out the sides and drooling over the floor, will you, Max?’
This question elicited an appalled expression from Max, and startled but definitely interested expressions from both boys. Phoebe breezed past the lot of them to the large kitchen and hauled the fridge door open.
Secretly, she was horrified by the sight of the long, rectangular kitchen. Max prided himself on keeping that room spick and span, but at the moment it rivalled a garbage dump, with mess from floor to ceiling.
She made the best of riffling through the slim pickings inside the fridge, tossing anything edible she could find on to the one bit of service counter that wasn’t already cluttered with dirty dishes. All the while she raved about her appetite and how good it would feel to stuff this sandwich down.
‘I’ll probably even burp loudly at the end, just like a pig,’ she added with a fiendish wiggle of her brows.
Max’s sons, wide-eyed and encouragingly silent, sidled inside the door, shoulder to shoulder, their gazes locked on the monster sandwich tower Phoebe was assembling with deft hands.
She hoped Max had more supplies stashed in the cupboards than he did in the fridge but, for now, she focused on her sandwich and on getting the two little boys fed so they could give in to their exhaustion and conk out for the night.
Beneath the identical sets of hazel eyes—they must have got those from their late mother—both boys sported dark, weary smudges and overly pale skins. Poor things.
‘Mmm hmm. I haven’t had a monster sandwich for ten thousand years.’ She cut the sandwich into four enormous pieces and crammed as much as she could of the first piece into her mouth, chewing in feigned ecstasy. Actually, it wasn’t too bad, given the raw materials. ‘All this needs is some milk to wash it down.’
A half bottle of the stuff being the only thing of note now left in the fridge, she helped herself to a plastic mug, which was miraculously still clean and secure in the cupboard, and swilled some down.
‘Brilliant. My tummy is starting to feel better already.’ She rubbed it appreciatively. ‘But then, not just anybody can eat a big monster sandwich like this. Only really brave people can, and people who drink milk as well to wash it down properly in the monster-honoured tradition.’
She glanced at Max and almost laughed at the expression of pure outrage on his face. Didn’t he know what she was doing?
Given that he hadn’t said anything, she assumed he was so appalled he was speechless. ‘Thanks for the food, Max. I’m sure you didn’t mind that I helped myself like this.’ She grinned at him through her milk moustache.
Inside, she silently warned him not to blow it. The boys were close to capitulating. She could feel it. But if Max went off at her now, goodness knew what would happen.
She wished he would put a shirt on, too, drat it. How could the man be so comfortable in his own skin, and so oblivious to the effect of the sight of that skin on others? Her, for example.
She stuffed more sandwich in before the thought could tumble out of her foolhardy mouth, and rolled her eyes at the boys as she slurped more milk from her mug.
Any moment now they would drop their guards fully and let her start to help them.
And any moment now Phoebe would get past wanting to run her hands all over Max Saunders’s bare chest. Sandwiches she could handle. But that other kind of craving was pure trouble.
CHAPTER TWO
‘DO YOU suppose we could give some consideration to my sons at some point?’ Max glared at the interloper in his kitchen and marvelled that he could want her so badly. His desire to throttle her was as strong as the desire had been earlier to kiss her! The first was perfectly normal. It happened to him all the time. The second was a shock.
This was Phoebe. His sister’s untamed and untameable best friend. Normally, the sight of her simply made him want to grind his teeth. He was, in fact, grinding them right now. Well, just look at her, for heaven’s sake!
Wild, coarse-looking hair in every shade from blonde to middle brown crowned her head like an unruly mop. In the centre of this display of hairdressing disaster rested an enormous pink bow with a pair of black eyes imprinted on it. When Phoebe moved he got the impression of two sets of eyeballs darting this way and that, instead of just one.
She had an elfin face, with a pointy chin that always seemed to be angled to challenge him. Right now, the normally lean cheeks were distended with sandwich and milk coated her upper lip.
‘Mmph.’ Phoebe chewed, then mumbled something around her sandwich that sounded like, ‘We are considering your sons.’
‘Not in my reality, we’re not.’ Max’s gaze moved from her face to her outrageous clothing. Her overalls were such a bright shade of pink they made his eyes ache. The green shirt she wore underneath clashed abominably. And here she was, calmly eating him out of house and home while Jake and Josh stood watching, starving. How was that helping the boys?
‘Calm down, Max.’ Phoebe had finished her mouthful of food and looked ready to take another enormous bite.
She claimed to be here to help. What a joke that was.
‘I need round the clock, competent childcare,’ Max informed her in a tone that would have made icicles sprout in a scorching desert. ‘Not some wraith-like fairy creature with nothing to share but silly monster talk that will probably make my boys cry in the night.’
As if Max needed any more of that. He wasn’t cut out for this parent thing. Just look at the mess he had made of trying to raise Katherine after their parents had died. After a few weeks of Max trying to involve himself in her life, his twelve-year-old sister had begged him to go back to working long hours. Jake and Josh’s advent into his care hadn’t met with any better success.
Max might be great at money but he stank at family. The sooner he got his sons into organised care and returned to his normal way of life, the better it would be for everyone.
First up, he had to get rid of the eating machine, namely Phoebe. Guilt pinched him briefly. Maybe she was eating because she was hungry. She did look thinner than the last time he had seen her—what, six months ago? Did she not have enough money?
That 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 grimaced a smile into the rearview mirror at the identical mirthful faces. Isn’t it great that they feel safe and happy enough to express themselves to me this morning?
‘It’s probably best if you don’t say poop too often, Josh,’ she corrected automatically. ‘Words like that are really best left for the big people. And, Jake, Max is your father, as I’ve already explained several times today. You address him as Dad or Daddy, not Max, and you don’t know if he’ll be mad because he hasn’t seen the damage yet.’
Phoebe knew, but that wasn’t the point. She had been doing so well today, too. She had got the boys up, had dressed them and herded them outside, all the while allowing Max to sleep. Total consideration, that was what she had delivered to him.
She had then forced herself to drive his enormous car to the nearest reasonably sized town, despite her trepidation at getting behind the wheel of something so intimidatingly large. With almost the last of her own dwindling funds, she had bought the boys’ breakfast and stocked up on a few necessities. All of this to help out, but would Max think about that now? She doubted it.
Phoebe didn’t want to admit that she might have wanted, even slightly, to gain Max’s approval for her extra efforts. What would be the point of that?
She kicked the toe of one booted foot against the brake pedal in frustration. ‘It’s his fault anyway, for letting the foodstuffs run out that way. No cereal in the cupboards. Barely any milk, no bread, no fruit. What was he thinking?’
She refused to acknowledge any other feelings. Like dread, anxiety or guilt. Those were for the past, for an uneasy teenager who hadn’t felt at home with herself, let alone with anyone else, and especially not here, under Max’s ever watchful eye.
‘Katherine’s friendship was worth it,’ she muttered. Meanwhile, there was only one thing for it, she decided. She had to get to Max before he got to her.
