Page 93 of Boss from Hell

I laughed. “Your mom told me you ate the last one a few days ago.”

“Yeah, but Mom said, you got them from Uncle Max. Can we have some Uncle Max?” she insisted.

Max looked at me, puzzled and laughing.

“I gave them the box of cookies that Elizabeth brought for you. Remember? You didn’t want them so I gave them to the girls. My sister called them the hundred-dollar cookies because the packaging looked so expensive.”

“What?” he thundered suddenly.

His expression had changed to one of such serious intensity, I was shocked. “You wanted me to bin them,” I blurted out defensively. “You didn’t say I couldn’t give them to my nieces and...”

He raised his hand to stop me from speaking. “Just a minute. Let me think.”

I stared at him, astonished by the change in him.

He began to pace the floor, then stopped suddenly, and turned to me. “Who put the cookies in my office? Was it you?”

“No, she did.”

“Did you go in with her?”

“No, she appeared to know her way around. I thought she was one of your girlfriends.”

He came striding up to me, cupped my face with his palms, and kissed me on the lips. “You are a genius, Lillian Hudson.”

“So can we have the cookies then?” Phoebe asked plaintively.

He turned to Phoebe. “You can have ten boxes.”

Her eyes almost popped out of her face. She spread the fingers of both her hands out. “Ten boxes or ten cookies?”

“Ten boxes.”

Both girls screamed with joy.

“Hang on a minute,” I cautioned, confused, but happy because it appeared as if Max had made some sort of breakthrough. “Rose might have something to say about this.”

“Look, I got to go to the office for a bit. Don’t leave here until I get back,” he said excitedly and sprinted up the stairs.

The kids fell asleep on the couch a couple of hours later and I covered them with soft blankets.

Rose and Dylan came back just as I finished cooking.

“Come in,” I said, ushering them into the house.

“Where’s Max?” Rose asked.

“He had to rush off to the office.”

“Thank you so much for minding the girls,” Rose said, taking in the sight of the girls sprawled out on the couch. “They must have had loads of fun to conk out like that,” she added with a laugh.

“They did,” I said. “They negotiated ten boxes of hundred-dollar cookies out of Max.”

My sister’s eyebrows flew upwards. “Right, that’s it. I’m enrolling them in business school.”

I laughed, not knowing that in a few hours, I would be crying my heart out.

Chapter 54