Jennie Adams - Parents Of Convenience

“Max, I’m not sure I understand where you’re heading with this.”

“Marriage. The two of us. It would solve everything,” he stated bluntly.

“What?” Phoebe stared at him and wondered if she was dreaming.

“I’m suggesting we marry,” he repeated. “I think it’s a good idea.”

For a second, Phoebe’s heart hoped. She would belong. With Max and Jake and Josh, here in this house, the four of them together. A family. Oh, wow. Max was asking her to form a family with him. He thought she was worthy of that. He’d seen something in her that made him believe….

Then Max started talking and he sounded so businesslike. “I’d have permanent care for my sons and you’d be able to get your credentials eventually, without worrying about money.”

Is that it? Is that all you think marriage means? Phoebe’s excitement sagged and she clamped her lower lip between her teeth, wishing she could clap her hands over her ears and refuse to hear another word. Life never let you off the hook that way though, so she sat there and tried to look as though he hadn’t just offered her the moon and stars, then made her wonder if they were real….

From an early age, Australian author Jennie Adams was most at home perched on a gatepost on the family farm, with her nose in a book. Her love of reading expanded into writing at age eleven, when she began a four-year tenure as a very bad poet.

A gap followed while Jennie pursued a number of careers—bank officer, piano teacher and legal secretary, to name a few. She met and married the love of her life, and had two children who soon became teenagers who knew everything and who are now the two most treasured young adults in her life. She soon realized she wanted to write the romance novels she loved to read. The pursuit of that dream eventually led to the sale of her first Harlequin Romance® novel.

This is Jennie’s debut novel!

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CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EPILOGUE

‘HELLO. One rescue party, delivered to your door and ready to get started.’ Phoebe Gilbert examined the two smaller occupants of the room and her heart took a sentimental dive. Max Saunders’s sons were gorgeous. She registered that much while one screamed at top volume with his hands clamped over his ears and the other did his utmost to kick the side out of the best recliner chair in the room.

It looked as though Max really needed that helping hand. The man in question had his back turned while he did his best to remove his kicking child from the vicinity of the chair. He didn’t hear Phoebe’s announcement.

Given the noise level, Phoebe wasn’t particularly surprised. She stepped around an upended box of crushed breakfast cereal and a denuded potted plant and moved further into the room.

As she took in the familiar if unusually messy surroundings, a sense of homecoming crashed over her. It was immediately followed by a painful jolt to the solar plexus, because the feeling was false. She had never belonged anywhere in her life, Mountain Gem included. Not that she cared one way or the other.

You’re over it, remember? That whole ‘wish I had a family’ thing is done with.

Phoebe had a creed. Don’t wish for what you can’t have. And who would want to make a family with a woman whose mother hadn’t wanted her, whose father hadn’t wanted her, and who was barren into the bargain? Some bargain.

She gave a defiant shrug. Those days in the orphanage were long since gone. The one decent thing her father had done was to buy her way into boarding school when she’d been eleven.

Nowadays, she had her daycare children. A never-ending stream of little ones to enjoy as she moved from job to job. As long as she didn’t get too attached, she survived. Beyond that, she was self-sufficient and proud of it. She didn’t need anything more than she already had.

Perhaps coming back to Mountain Gem today had got to her because this visit was so different. In the past, she had felt like the interloper in Max Saunders’s home. Not a charity case—she couldn’t have stood that—but a visitor. Katherine Saunders’s kooky friend. Tolerated by Kath’s big brother, but barely. It had been easy to keep her own emotional distance that way, too.

Today, she was here at Max’s request. To rescue him. It tipped the scales. Yeah. That must be why these feelings had risen to the surface after she had buried them so well. With a determined sniff she focused her thoughts on the here and now. It was much more interesting, anyway.

‘Hello, Max.’ She pitched her voice louder. ‘I knocked but nobody heard me, so I just came in.’

Even from behind, Max was a commanding presence. Tall. Dark-haired. Broad-shouldered, slim about the hips and with those long, long legs. When he faced her she knew that grey eyes would look directly into hers from beneath winged brows.

Her mouth watered suddenly, and she blinked. This was Max, for heaven’s sake. The long-time antagonist of her life. The man who drove her crazy every time they met. So what was with the isn’t he gorgeous? reaction? That had never happened to her before!

Enough of this, she decided. She primed her lungs and gave it her best bellow across five paddocks effort over the screeching. ‘I see the Saunders men are doing their utmost to show the Blue Mountains a good time. Just fancy, two four-year-old boys making more combined racket than an entire Sydney daycare group put together.’

That did the trick. The boys paused momentarily in their noise. And Max whipped around so fast she barely saw the movement. She reacted, though. Her heart paused for a long moment, then restarted at double time.

A sense of panic washed through her and she told herself to wake up. This wasn’t attraction. It couldn’t be. Her system was just girding up for battle. Yes, that was much more acceptable. ‘Hello, Max. I’m here. I’ll bet you’re pleased I’ve arrived.’

Max didn’t look at all happy to see her, even though he should have been. Instead he stiffened. ‘Phoebe.’

The single word, spoken in gravelly accents, managed to convey his deep displeasure at the sight of her.

What was with him, anyway? Didn’t he remember this had been his idea? It was not as if she would have dropped everything and cadged a lift out of Sydney to get to him if he hadn’t made his need crystal clear. Through Katherine, admittedly, but even so…

She supposed she couldn’t expect Max to go too crazy admitting he needed help. It was, after all, the first time he had ever done so, to her knowledge.

And, from her viewpoint, this was about helping the boys, not about Max. When Katherine had phoned Phoebe from America she hadn’t only mentioned that Max wasn’t coping very well. She had hinted that Max seemed solely focused on getting the boys tidied into some small pocket of his life as quickly as possible.