‘Well, thanks,’ she said awkwardly, ‘but I’m sure I’ll get through to someone in the bank eventually.’
Gib grinned at her as he picked up his mug once more. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said.
There was a silence. Phoebe sipped her tea and tried not to feel rattled by the way he was sitting at her table, looking as if he had always sat there. His presence filled the kitchen, which seemed to have shrunk around them alarmingly.
‘I gather from Josh that you’re my landlady,’ said Gib after a while. ‘Thanks for letting me stay.’
When he smiled his eyes looked bluer than ever. Phoebe was more than ever convinced that they couldn’t possibly be real. She looked away from them with an effort.
‘That’s all right,’ she muttered.
‘Are there any rules I should know about?’
Phoebe considered the question. ‘Not really,’ she said at last, ‘but don’t, whatever you do, tell Kate about any stray animal you’ve noticed unless you want to find it sleeping on your bed.’
‘Is that it?’
‘It’s not a good idea to talk to me before I’ve had a cup of coffee in the morning, but that’s advice rather than a rule,’ she admitted. ‘Kate and Bella don’t take any notice of it.’
‘Well, that seems easy enough,’ said Gib. ‘I ought to be able to manage that.’
He produced another of those unnervingly attractive smiles that seemed to linger in the air long after he had stopped, and Phoebe found herself getting to her feet abruptly. ‘Shall I show you to your room?’
‘It’s not very big, I’m afraid,’ she told him, opening a door off the upstairs landing.
‘Not very big’ was something of an understatement, reflected Gib, squeezing into the room behind Phoebe. It was not very big in the way the Sahara was not very wet, or the South Pole was not very hot.
An average cupboard might have been a better description, or possibly a large box. It had a four-foot bed, a built-in wardrobe, and a couple of shelves fixed to the wall. With the two of them standing on the only available floor space, there was absolutely no room for anything else.
‘Out of interest, how long did your last room-mate live here?’ asked Gib dryly.
‘About a year. She was the last to move in, so she got the smallest room.’
Gib was glad to hear it. He would hate to think that anyone was sleeping in anything smaller!
‘Caro didn’t care,’ said Phoebe a little defensively She could tell from his expression that he was less than overwhelmed with the room. ‘She spent most of the time at her boyfriend’s flat. They’ve just got married, which is why we’re looking for someone to take her place.
‘Obviously the rent is lower because you wouldn’t have so much space,’ she went on stiffly, ‘but of course you don’t have to take the room if it’s too small.’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ Gib reassured her, perceiving that he had got off on the wrong foot. ‘I haven’t got much stuff. I travel light.’
Phoebe could believe it. He didn’t look like the kind of man who bothered with baggage in any shape or form.
Part of her envied people like Gib who drifted carelessly through life avoiding commitment and responsibility and leaving others to clear up the broken hearts and disappointment they inevitably left in their wake, but another part was intimidated and more than a little irritated by them too.
‘Yes, well, it’s not as if you’re staying for ever, is it?’ she said briskly, wishing that Gib would move. The room was small enough at the best of times without him standing there vibrating with energy.
Short of climbing on the bed, which risked looking suggestive, let alone ridiculous, there was no way she could get past him without pressing intimately against him. The thought made Phoebe tense and shiver at the same time.
It was a sinful waste from one point of view, because it was a very long time since she had been this close to an attractive man, but there was something about the way he seemed constantly on the verge of exploding into action that made Phoebe nervous and edgy. Touching him, however inadvertently, seemed an action that would be downright rash.
She was just going to have wait until he moved.
Concentrating on breathing shallowly, she stood as close to the window as she could while Gib looked round. Given the size of the room, that didn’t take long, but it felt like hours before he went back out onto the landing.
‘Can I see the rest of the house?’ he asked, and Phoebe was so relieved to be able to breathe properly again that she gave him a guided tour.
‘It’s a nice house,’ said Gib as they went back downstairs. ‘How long have you lived here?’
‘A couple of years. I bought it with my fiancé, as he was then.’ Phoebe was quite proud of the coolness in her voice. ‘We lived here together for a year, and then Ben decided to move back to Bristol with someone he’d met, so I took over the mortgage.’
Gib didn’t need to know about the anguish and the heartache and the long, long months of misery she had endured since Ben had left.
‘I couldn’t afford to live here on my own, so I had to take in lodgers, and it was just lucky that Kate was looking for somewhere at the same time. We were students together, and she knew Bella from school. Caro was a friend of Bella’s, so it all worked out perfectly until Caro decided to get married. We’re not sure where we’re going to find anyone who fits in as well as she did,’ she confessed as they went back into the kitchen.
‘Can’t you advertise?’
‘We could, and that’s probably what I’ll end up doing, but it’s hard to know what to put when you’re really looking for someone who’ll be a friend and not just a tenant.’
Mindful of his bet with Josh, Gib pricked up his ears at the key word. ‘How do you know if someone is a friend?’ he asked casually.
‘That’s just it, you don’t,’ said Phoebe. ‘You can’t tell who’s going to be a good friend and who isn’t. It’s just something that clicks between you.’
Absently, she began piling her papers together to clear the table a bit, while she thought about Gib’s question. ‘I suppose a friend is someone who’s easy to talk to, who laughs at the same things. Someone who’s just going to fit in and be comfortable sitting around and talking all evening without wanting to organise us or worrying about how long it is since anyone got the hoover out.’
It was a bit vague, but Gib reckoned he could do all of that.
‘Perhaps you should put that in your advert,’ he suggested.
‘I don’t know that it would be much help. You could get someone who said they were able to do all those things, but you still might not get on. It’s a funny thing, friendship,’ Phoebe mused. ‘I don’t think you can ever pin down the magic ingredient which makes you really like some people and not others.’
So much for picking up pointers from Phoebe! Gib sighed to himself. She was clearly not including him in her category of those with that special magic ingredient that would make him a friend!
Not yet, anyway.
Phoebe might be more of a challenge than he had anticipated, but challenges were there to be met. Gib wasn’t giving up yet. He had a bet to win!
‘How are you getting on with Gib?’
Josh and Phoebe were sitting on the sofa, while at the other end of the kitchen Bella and Kate busied