Page 12 of Contracted and Claimed By The Boss

What did you do at lunch?

Did you learn anything interesting?

What do you have on tomorrow?

Amanda, for her part, had made an artform out of the almost non-existent response.

Good.

Walked around.

Not really.

Nothing.

The whole routine took about forty-seven seconds and then silence returned, except for the scraping of their plates. Once they were finished, Amanda pierced him with her blue eyes then stood. ‘May I be excused?’ He couldn’t tell if it was hostility or something else that was making her voice shake but he nodded curtly.

‘Clear the table and then you can go get ready for bed.’

‘But I cleared it last night!’

‘Amanda.’ His voice held a warning, but inside, he felt an unfamiliar emotion—lack of control. The same feeling he’d been grappling with for months as his daughter morphed into a stranger. Worse, transformed into parts of Lauren that Max had thought he’d never see again. It was all made worse by Paige’s presence, by how she made Max feel, and by the certainty that he really didn’t want her witnessing his abject failure as a parent. ‘Now.’

‘Fine,’ she snapped but with a withering glance at Paige that crossed about ten lines. He glanced at her to see if she’d noticed and of course she had. But unlike his interactions with Paige, which had been defined by emotion, she was now watching with an almost serene expression on her face. Hadn’t he thought, when he’d made the decision to hire a nanny, that he needed someone with more patience than he had? Evidently, that was true of Paige.

‘Would you like a hand, Amanda?’ Paige asked, reasonably.

‘No.’

‘No, thank you,’ Max corrected, knowing it wasn’t fair or right to be embarrassed by his daughter, even when that was exactly how he felt.

‘No, thank you,’ she mimicked, rolling her eyes and carrying the plates into the kitchen, dropping them on the bench with enough force to break them—though they didn’t.

‘Go upstairs,’ he ground out, already at breaking point.

‘I’m going. Jeez.’ Amanda stomped from the room and all the way up the stairs, slamming the door shut behind her.

Max turned to Paige and felt...deflated. Defeated. Emotions he wouldn’t have said were in his wheelhouse until recently. But there was something about Paige’s expression, even just her presence, that offered a hint—just a very small hint—of respite, at least in so much as dealing with Amanda. There were, for the moment, two grown-ups. Two adults. The scales were tipping in his favour, even just by Paige’s presence.

He reached for his wine and took a long drink, wished it were something stronger, like a double shot of whisky. Even when he’d been married to Lauren, he’d never felt as though he had another adult in the house. Lauren had been worse than a child, worse than a hormonal adolescent. Her mood swings and unpredictability, always a force to be reckoned with, had grown out of control after Amanda’s birth. He’d tried to make her better, encouraged her to get help, halfway dragged her to appointments with the world’s best psychologists and psychiatrists, convinced there was a form of postnatal depression at play, but Lauren had refused to give anything a try.

He ground his teeth, turning to Paige, then standing slowly, moving to the kitchen, uncharacteristically lost for words. Ordinarily, he tidied the kitchen after dinner with a sagging sense of relief to have such a boring ritual to lose himself in, but tonight he felt Paige’s watchful gaze and the air had taken on the same strange quality it had been exhibiting all day.

‘Do you mind if I make an observation?’ Her voice was soft and pretty, her accent hard to place. He knew she was American, but perhaps her time in Dubai had softened the edges of it. Learning another language could do that, he’d heard, as if your palate reshaped itself to accommodate a whole new raft of sounds.

‘It’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’

She tilted her head to the side. ‘You’re different from what I expected.’

It wasn’t exactly what he’d thought she’d say. He had been waiting for some indictment of his parenting or some insight into Amanda, and yet the personal observation wasn’t unwelcome. ‘Am I?’

She gestured to him, standing in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. ‘You have way less staff.’

‘Staff?’

She made a noise of agreement from low in her throat. It shouldn’t have been sexy but, given Max’s gasoline situation, he felt that sound reverberate all the way through his body. ‘To cook for you. To clean up after you.’

‘I have a housekeeper—Reg’s wife.’ He shrugged. ‘She comes in for a few hours a day, cooks a meal, does some cleaning and laundry.’

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