Maureen Child - Baby Bonanza

He was a man who deliberately kept himself at a distance from most people. He liked having that comfort zone that prevented anyone from getting too close. Now, though, that was going to change. It had to change.

Jenna thought she knew him. Thought he’d be content to remain a stranger to his sons. Thought he’d go on with his life, putting her and Jacob and Cooper aside. Knowing her, she thought he’d be satisfied to be nothing more than a fat wallet to his sons.

“She’s wrong,” he muttered thickly, and his hand on the glass fisted. “I may not know anything about being a father, but those boys are mine. And I’ll be damned if I let anyone keep me from them.”

Turning around, he hit a button on the intercom and ground out, “Teresa?”

“Yes, boss?”

He folded the DNA report, tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt and said, “Call the airport. Hire a private jet. I’m going back to California.”

By the following morning, it was almost as if Jenna had never been gone. She’d stopped on the way home from the airport the night before to pick up the boys at Maxie’s house. She hadn’t been able to bear the thought of being away from them another minute. With the twins safely in their rooms and her suitcase unpacked, Jenna was almost able to convince herself that she’d never left. That the short-lived cruise hadn’t happened. That she hadn’t slept with Nick again. That she hadn’t left him with a naked redhead in his bedroom.

The pain of that slid down deep inside, where she carefully buried it. After all, none of that had anything to do with reality. The cruise-Nick-had been a short jaunt to the other side of the fence. Now she was back where she belonged.

She’d been awake for hours already. The twins didn’t take into consideration the fact that Mom hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. They still wanted breakfast at six o’clock in the morning. Now she was sitting on the floor in the middle of her small living room, working while she watched her boys.

“I missed you guys,” she said, looking over at her sons as they each sat in a little jumper seat. The slightest motion they made had the seat moving and shaking, which delighted them and brought on bright, toothless grins.

Jake waved one fist and bounced impatiently while Cooper stared at his mother as if half-afraid to take his eyes off her again for fear she might disappear.

“Your aunt Maxie said you were good boys,” she said, talking to them as she always did. Folding the first load of laundry for the day, Jenna paused to inhale the soft, clean scent of their pajamas before stacking them one on top of the other. “So because I missed you so much and you were so good, how about we walk to the park this afternoon?”

This was what Jenna wanted out of her life, she thought. Routine. Her kids. Her small but cozy house. A world that was filled with, if not excitement, then lots of love. And if her heart hurt a little because Nick wasn’t there and would never know what it was to be a part of his sons’ lives, well, she figured she’d get over it. Eventually. Shouldn’t take more than twenty or thirty years.

The doorbell had her looking up, frowning. Then she glanced at the twins. “You weren’t expecting anyone, were you?”

Naturally, she didn’t get an answer, so she grinned, pushed herself to her feet and stepped around them as she walked the short distance to her front door. Glancing over her shoulder, she gave the living room a quick look to make sure everything was in order.

The couch was old but comfortable, the two arm chairs were flowered, with bright throw pillows tucked into their corners. The tables were small, and the rag rug on the scarred but polished wooden floors were handmade by her grandmother. Her home was just as she liked it. Cozy. Welcoming.

She was still smiling when she opened the front door to find Nick standing there. His dark hair was ruffled by the wind, his jeans were worn and faded, and the long-sleeved white shirt he wore tucked into those jeans was open at the throat. He looked way too good for her self-control. So she shifted her gaze briefly to the black SUV parked at the curb in front of her house. That explained how he’d gotten there. Now the only thing to figure out was why he was there.

Looking back up into his face, she watched as he pulled off his dark glasses, tucked an arm into the vee of his shirt and looked into her eyes. “Morning, Jenna.”

Morning? “What?”

“Good to see you, too,” he said, giving her a nod as he stepped past her into the house.

“Hey! You can’t just-” Her gaze swept over him and landed on the black duffle bag he was carrying. “What are you doing here? Why’re you here? How did you find me?”

He stopped just inside the living room, dropped his duffel bag to the floor and shoved both hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “I came to see my sons,” he said tightly. “And trust me when I say it wasn’t hard to find you.”

“Nick…”

“And I brought you this.” He pulled a small, sealed envelope out of his back pocket and handed it over. “It’s from your friend Mary Curran. She was upset when she found out that you’d left the ship.”

Jenna winced. She hadn’t even thought of saying goodbye to the friend she’d made, and a twinge of guilt tugged at her.

“She said this is her telephone number and her e-mail address.” He stared at her. “She wants you to keep in touch.”

“I, uh, thanks.” She took the envelope.

He looked at her, hard and cold. His pale eyes were icy and his jaw was clenched so tightly it was a wonder his teeth weren’t powder. “Where are they?” he demanded.

Her mouth snapped closed, but she shot a look at the boys, jiggling in their bouncy seats. Nick followed her gaze and slowly turned. She watched as the expression on his face shifted, going from cool disinterest to uncertainty. Jenna couldn’t remember ever seeing Nick Falco anything less than supremely confident.

Yet it appeared that meeting his children for the first time was enough to shake even his equilibrium.

Walking toward them slowly, he approached the twins as he would have a live grenade. Jenna held her breath as she watched him gingerly drop to his knees in front of the bouncy seats and let his gaze move from one baby boy to the other. His eyes held a world of emotions that she’d never thought to see. Usually he guarded what he was thinking as diligently as a pit bull on a short chain. But now…Jenna’s heart ached a little in reaction to Nick’s response to the babies.

“Which one is which?” he whispered, as if he didn’t completely trust his voice.

“Um-” She walked a little closer, her sneakers squeaking a bit as she stepped off the rug onto the floor.

“No, wait,” he said, never looking at her, never taking his gaze off the twins, “let me.” Tentatively, Nick reached out one hand and gently cupped Jacob’s face in his big palm. “This one’s Jake, right?”

“Yes,” she said, coming up beside him, looking down at the faces of her sons who were both looking at Nick in fascination. As usual, though, Jacob’s mouth was open in a grin and Cooper had tipped his little head to one side as if he really needed to study the situation a bit longer before deciding how he felt about it.

“So then, you’re Cooper,” Nick said and with his free hand, stroked that baby’s rounded cheek.

Jenna’s breath hitched in her chest and tears gathered in her eyes. God, over the past several months, she’d imagined telling Nick about the boys, but she’d never allowed herself to think about him actually meeting them.

She’d never for a moment thought that he would be interested in seeing them. And now, watching his gentle care with her boys made her heart weep and every gentle emotion inside her come rushing to the surface. There was just something so tender, so poignant about this moment, that Jenna’s throat felt too tight to let air pass. When she thought she could speak again without hearing her voice break, she said, “You really were listening when I told you about them.”

“Of course,” he acknowledged, still not looking at her, still not tearing his gaze from the two tiny boys who had him so enthralled. “They’re just as you described them. They look so much alike, and yet, their personalities are so obvious when you’re looking for the differences. And you were right about something else, too. They’re beautiful.”

“Yeah, they are,” she said, her heart warming as it always did when someone complimented her children. “Nick,” she asked a moment later, because this was definitely something she needed to know, “why have you come here?”

He stood up, faced her, then glanced again at his sons, a bemused expression on his face. “To see them. To talk to you. After you left, I did a lot of thinking. I was angry at you for leaving.”

“I know. But I had to go.”

He didn’t address that. Instead he said, “I came here to tell you I’d come up with a plan for dealing with this situation. A way for each of us to win.”

“Win?” she repeated. “What do you mean ‘win’?”

Shifting his pale blue gaze back to hers, his features tightened, his mouth firming into a straight, grim line. A small thread of worry began to unspool inside of her, and Jenna had to fight to keep from grabbing up her kids and clutching them to her chest.

Only a moment ago she’d been touched by Nick’s first sight of his sons. Now the look on his face told her she wasn’t going to be happy with his “plan.”

“Look,” he said, shaking his head, sparing another quick glance for the babies watching them through wide, interested eyes, “it came to me last night that there was an easy solution to all of this.”

“I didn’t come to you needing a solution. All I wanted from you is child support.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll get that.” He waved one hand as if brushing aside something that didn’t really matter. “But I want more.”

That thread of worry thickened and became a ribbon that kept unwinding, spreading a dark chill through her bloodstream that nearly had her shivering as she asked, “How much more?”

“I’m getting to that,” he said. “Like I said, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since you left the ship. And finally, last night on the flight up here, it occurred to me that twins are a lot of work for any one parent.”

What was he getting at? Why was he suddenly shifting his gaze from hers, avoiding looking at her directly? And why had she ever gone to him? “Yes, it is, but-”

“So my plan was simple,” he said, interrupting her before she could really get going. “We split them up, each of us taking one of the twins.”

“What?”

Nick couldn’t blame her for the outrage.

She jumped in front of the babies and held her arms up and extended as if to fight him off should he try to grab the twins and run. “Are you insane? You can’t split them up,” she said, keeping her voice low and hard. “They aren’t puppies. You don’t get the pick of the litter. They’re little boys, Nick. Twins. They need each other. They need me. And you can’t take either of them away from me.”

He’d already come to the same conclusion. All it had taken was one look at the boys, sitting in their little seats, so close that they could reach out and touch each other. But he hadn’t known until he’d seen them.

“Relax,” he said, lifting one hand to try to stop her from taking off on another rant. “I said that’s the plan I did have. Things have changed.”

“You’ve been here ten seconds. What could have changed?” She was still defensive, standing in front of her sons like a knight of old. All she really needed was a battle-ax in her hands to complete the picture.

“I saw them,” he said, and something in his voice must have reached her because her shoulders eased down from their rigid stance. “They’re a unit. We can’t split them up. I get that.”

“Good.” She blew out a breath. “That’s good.”

“I’m not finished,” he told her, and watched as her back snapped straight as a board again. “I came here to see my sons, and now that I have, I’m not going anywhere.”

She looked stunned, her mouth dropping open, her big, blue eyes going even wider than usual. “What do you mean?” Then, as she began to understand exactly what he meant, she shook her head fiercely. “You can’t possibly think you’re going to stay here.”

This was turning out to be more fun than he’d thought it would be.

“Yeah, I am.” Nick glanced around the small living room. You could have dropped two entire houses the size of hers into his suite on the ship, and yet there was something here that was lacking in his place, despite the luxury. Here, he told himself, she’d made a home. For her and their sons. A home he had no intention of leaving. At least not for a while. Not until he’d gotten to know his sons. Not until he’d come up with a way that he could be a part of their lives.