Page 5 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“I’m doing this under protest.”

“Duly noted. Shower first, then help me move the rest to the foyer. Lorenzo and Raphael are picking us up.”

I pause. “Raphael?”

Sophia hesitates for exactly half a second, which is how I know the answer is coming with an agenda attached. “His best friend? You’ve met him. Thirty-five, very attractive, very single.”

There it is.

“Sophia.”

“Harper.”

“I’m not⁠—”

“He’s driving us to the airport. That’s it. No one is asking you to elope.” She gives me a look that suggests she would absolutely love it if I eloped. “Just shower. Wear something that isn’t pajamas. And maybe be vaguely human for the next three weeks.” She disappears through the door with my luggage and I stand in the middle of the now mostly empty room feeling like I’ve been smoothly and professionally managed.

I grab the carry-on.

Fine. France. Three weeks. Whatever.

I haul the last of my cases to the foyer, where Sophia’s luggage is already stacked with the organized confidence of someone who has been packed since yesterday. I add mine to the collection and stand there for a moment looking at the assembled pile of our combined lives in transit.

Sophia’s voice carries from down the hall, warm and bright the way it gets when she’s on a call she actually wants to take.

“Hey, get dressed before the guys get here!” she calls. Then a pause, muffled, and her tone shifts into something looser. “Hey, Uncle Mad Max! Yeah, we’re just finishing up…”

Her voice trails off as her bedroom door clicks shut behind her.

I stand in the foyer surrounded by luggage.

Uncle Mad Max.

I turn that over for a second. Sophia has always referred to the men in her dad’s circle as uncles in the casual, non-biological way that people do when someone has been present their whole life without a cleaner word for it. I’ve heard about them in the abstract. Killian’s people. The ones who’ve been around since before Sophia was old enough to remember.

But Uncle Mad Max is a new one.

I head toward the bathroom to shower, already cataloguing what I know, which is essentially nothing, and feeling the specific low-level unease of walking toward something I haven’t had time to research.

Who the hell is Uncle Mad Max?

2

MADDOX

Camille is in Paris right now wearing apparently very little and has excellent taste in photography angles, and I’d like to give her my full attention, but Asher is making it difficult.

Not intentionally. That’s almost the problem.

I set my phone face-down on the leather armrest and watch him from across the FBO lounge. He’s leaning against the bar in his usual way, arms crossed loosely, that big grounded presence he carries everywhere like it’s nothing. Vivian is standing close enough that she’s definitely interested and laughing at something he just said, which means whatever it was, it landed. Asher doesn’t try to be charming. He just is, in the quiet, competent way that women always seem to figure out about thirty seconds after meeting him.

I arranged for Vivian specifically. Called Kyle last week and said make it happen, because the last time Asher had her on a flight she’d laughed at all the right things and touched his arm twice and he’d looked genuinely human for the first time in months. Then Monica had texted him somewhere over the Rockies on our way back from Napa and Asher had gone still the way he does, read whatever she sent, and spent the rest of the flight being perfectly pleasant and completely absent. Vivian had noticed. Anyone paying attention would have noticed.

That was Monica’s superpower. She didn’t need to be in the room.

I’ve watched her do it for years. Asher meets someone promising, Monica surfaces, Asher folds. They’d get back together for a few months, it’d be fine, then it’d be exactly what it always was and they’d end it again and the cycle would reset. They’d even gotten engaged two years ago, which Killian and I had both agreed was either the best or worst development depending on the day you asked us. I’d hoped engagement meant Monica had finally decided to be all the way in. I should’ve known better.

She cheated on him. Winston Michaels. Of all the people in their entire social world, of all the directions she could have blown that up, she chose Winston Michaels. Evelyn Thorne’s brother. As in Killian’s razor-sharp, perpetually dissatisfied ex-wife’s brother, which meant the fallout had tentacles in approximately every direction it possibly could have.