CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
N IC SHOOK HER AWAKE , hauled up her pillows, physically lifted her up to rest back on them and murmured, ‘Good morning...’
Lexy blinked before the unfamiliar surroundings locked into place and then centred on him: tall, dark, even more good-looking in harsh daylight than he had been in semi-darkness and the warmth of flickering flames. And she smiled, her heartbeat quickening as he slotted a tray onto her lap with the air of a man who had achieved something important to him.
‘Breakfast in bed?’ she gasped, not having to work at her stunned reaction at that much attention.
‘To prove that I’m not only not high maintenance but also a reasonable cook,’ he shot back at her with amusement glimmering in his honey-gold eyes, which were not quite as dark in bright light. Not quite so dark but still beautiful, quite spectacular in truth, framed with those outrageously lavish long black lashes. He still took her breath away.
Lexy examined her beautifully cooked omelette and toast and tea and grinned. ‘I’m sensing that that expression “high maintenance” rankled last night. You do know that I’ve never had breakfast served to me in bed in my entire life?’
Nic frowned and sank down on the side of the bed beside her. ‘Surely for a treat when you were a child at least?’
Lexy shook her head. ‘Not once. If you weren’t at the table on the dot of the hour, you didn’t eat.’
‘Sounds like I’m likely to be spoiling you rotten,’ Nic said wryly of that strict childhood regime.
Lexy laughed as she tucked into her excellent omelette. ‘You’re not likely to get any objections from me.’
It was only as she finished actually eating and sipped her tea that she removed her mesmerised gaze from Nic and noticed that the snow had vanished from the trees outside. They were no longer white skeletons of winter trees clad in snow. ‘The snow stopped, I see,’ she muttered in surprise.
‘Yes, it started raining in the middle of the night and it’s mostly gone now.’
Pushing away the tray, she snatched up his discarded tee shirt again even though her brain told her that it was silly to be that modest with a guy she had spent the whole night in bed with. Cheeks pink, she emerged from its enveloping folds, catching the amusement in his gaze and lifting her chin in defiance of it because she couldn’t change her inclinations in the matter of a few hours of an intimacy that was entirely new to her. She scrambled out of bed to stand at the tall windows and in the distance she could see the black ribbon of the road, clear of snow. In reality, her heart sank at that view because she knew she wanted to stay with him for the rest of the weekend, but she also knew that she could not stay.
‘Can you drop me at the nearest railway station?’ she asked him uncomfortably.
‘Why on earth would I do that? I assumed you were staying on here with me,’ he intoned tautly.
‘I’m sorry. I would love to, but I can’t. I’ve got to be in London by tonight because I’m being picked up very early to attend a christening tomorrow in Cornwall.’
‘I’m sure your friends will understand that the vagaries of the weather have intervened,’ Nic countered drily.
Lexy spun back to him, read the tension in his lean, darkly handsome face and almost bottled out. ‘No, they won’t. I’ve been chosen as a godmother and I agreed,’ she pushed herself to declare.
‘Is this for a very close friend?’
‘I don’t think that comes into it.’ Lexy squared her slight shoulders and gazed back at him with a faint hint of reproach in her bearing. ‘I said I’d do it and just because it doesn’t suit me quite so much now isn’t an excuse to let them down.’
His ebony brows flared. ‘You didn’t know that you would be stuck in the wilds of Yorkshire when you agreed.’
‘A reasonable point, but I’m not stuck any more. I can see the road and it’s clear.’ Lexy could feel his annoyance and frustration with her and the irony was that she would have given almost anything to cave in and say that she would stay and forget her christening obligation. ‘But the truth is that when I make a promise, I keep it and I don’t let people down at the last minute. And, Nic? That’s not a bad trait to have, so don’t make me feel bad about it.’
‘I’m not trying to do...hell, pack up and I’ll get the car warmed up,’ he breathed curtly and she could literally see him accepting her argument and stifling his disappointment for her benefit and she relaxed again, as much as she was capable of relaxing when she was going against her own nature.
Clad in his tee shirt, she gathered up her discarded clothes in the room next door and hurried back downstairs to shower and pack as quickly as she could manage it. Was she crazy? she asked herself as she dried her hair. To leave a man whom she had just met but who had become outrageously important to her within a few hours? But that was life and if he wasn’t interested in an ongoing relationship of any kind, staying on with him for one more day and night wouldn’t be a guarantee either, she reminded herself doggedly. Either he was interested or he wasn’t: it was that simple.
As she arrived back in the hall with her case and bag, Nic stepped forward, his overcoat and boots on now. ‘You don’t even have a coat!’
‘It’s still in the hire car,’ she recalled belatedly.
‘We’ll stop on the way. I’m sure the car will still be there,’ he said grimly.
‘I can’t ask you.’
‘You’re not asking. I’m telling you that you’re not leaving in weather like this without a coat,’ Nic told her fiercely as he opened the front door.
She felt as though a lifetime had passed since she last climbed into his SUV. This time she was noticing that it was the very last word in opulence. She breathed in deep and slow to steady herself. ‘I really am sorry that I have to leave.’
‘My number is in your phone,’ he told her, sharply disconcerting her. ‘I put it in last night. What are you thinking of, not even having a password on your phone? I was so surprised that it opened for me that I just went ahead and added myself to your contacts.’
‘That’s okay.’ Lexy bent her head but she was smiling like mad below her tumbling hair as he parked the car on the verge. Seconds later, she watched him break through the hedge and stride with innate impatience across the still snow-covered field towards the car she had crashed.
She wasn’t falling for him, she assured herself, because nobody fell in love in a matter of eighteen hours, nobody normal or sensible anyway. It was just that she liked him, liked him an awful lot, she reasoned, and it wasn’t only the sex, although that had been pretty spectacular. He was clever, he was kind, he was thoughtful and even though she suspected that it would come naturally to him to rap out orders like a domineering boss, he was controlling that tendency for her benefit. She laughed at herself as he reappeared at her side of the car and got her out to help her into her sensible winter coat. A full-bodied shiver ran through her as he carefully tugged her hair out from below the collar. He had yet to show her one thing about himself that she didn’t like or appreciate.
He insisted on driving her all the way into Manchester, paid for the ticket when they arrived and he stayed with her until it was time for her to leave him. When he buttoned up her coat for her as though she were a child before she went through the barrier onto the platform, her eyes prickled with tears because nobody had taken that much care of her in more years than she cared to count. Armed with enough magazines to take on a world tour, she got on the train, still struggling to catch a last view of him, still struggling to credit that the whole encounter had not been some insane, wondrous dream...
Eighteen months later
Nic strode into his lawyer’s office. Aubrey Harrison, a thin, sharp-featured man in his thirties, sprang upright to greet him.
‘Sorry about this,’ he said wryly. ‘But I thought you should look at this paternity claim before it goes down the inevitable DNA route. It’s a rather odd one.’
‘Not another one,’ Nic groaned in exasperation, because it seemed that no matter how careful he was, the false claims still came in.
Yet in years he had never had anything more than a one-night stand or, at most, a couple of nights with a woman. Obviously, he knew that accidental conception could occur and that such matters had to be checked out, but even so, they put him in a bad mood, regardless of how hard he tried to take them in his stride. It wasn’t as though he had ever been a real playboy like his older brother, Jace. And in recent times, he pondered, his innate reserve locking down his lean, hard bone structure, there had been no play time included in his driven schedule. He had always been more into work than casual sex and only one woman had ever bucked that trend with him. As for her, she was long gone, lost in the wind along with her phone number.
Yes, he had made an elementary mistake and paid for it. Her number had simply vanished from his phone as though it had never been and at the same time as he had tried to check that mystery out, he had found a suspicious app on his phone that was tracking his calls and texts. That and the security concerns aroused by it had proved a major headache, he recalled grimly. Even so, in spite of the investigation he had had done, he had yet to discover the culprit.
‘This claimant seems fanciful at the very least and the timing is all off. Why would she wait this long to claim child support?’ Aubrey wondered, passing a document to Nic.
Nic took one cursory glance at the name and froze, not a muscle moving on his taut dark features while disbelief assailed him in a blinding surge. ‘Lexy...’ he almost whispered. Lexy Montgomery. Now that surname would have been very welcome had he known it, had he even thought to ask for it eighteen months earlier, only he hadn’t. And he had had no success trying to find a Korean interpreter called Lexy in London.
‘I take it that you actually know this woman,’ Aubrey remarked in some surprise.
‘Yes.’ Nic had to clear his throat before he could speak. ‘I know her but a lot of time has passed since we were together.’
‘Our investigator wasn’t able to discover a link between you and Miss Montgomery and she has no social media, which is strange in this day and age.’
Shaking his head as though to clear it, Nic forced his attention back to the document in his hold. ‘There are three children,’ he registered on an incredulous note.
‘Triplets. Two boys and a girl. Even more unlikely, I surmised. The stats say only one in ten thousand births is a triplet one,’ the lawyer maintained. ‘And the chances of having triplets by a chance-met billionaire in the tech industry have to be even poorer.’
Nic was pale below his golden skin. ‘My mother’s mother was a triplet, one of three girls, and my mother is a twin. There have also been multiple births on my father’s side of the family tree. It’s not as unusual as you might think,’ he commented flatly, thinking of how downright irresponsible he had been with Lexy that night and of how very possible it would be for her to have fallen pregnant. Guilt engulfed him in a crashing wave.
‘What I don’t understand is why she didn’t phone me, when she had my number,’ he confessed out loud.
‘According to her solicitor innumerable efforts were made to contact you in person and by letter and phone and all of them failed. How do you want to proceed with this?’
Nic vaulted upright. ‘I want to see her,’ he said instantaneously.
‘That’s not on the table, Nic, and I would strongly advise you not to think along those lines before a DNA test establishes that these children are yours.’
‘I’ll do the DNA test immediately, but I’m more interested in knowing where she’s living.’
‘The information given is not current. I checked that out,’ his lawyer informed him.
Resolving to find that out now that he was armed with Lexy’s full name, Nic departed. Three babies, he found himself thinking in astonishment. Was that possible? He knew it was possible from his own family tree and he also knew that he had been reckless with her, reckless with a woman for the first time in his life, he reminded himself. But why hadn’t she contacted him? Got pushy if she ran into some little difficulties? He couldn’t imagine Lexy being pushy, didn’t think she was the type. Not that she lacked backbone, he reasoned, just that she was sort of soft, gentle, not aggressive by nature and he had liked that about her, only not if that lack in her had kept them apart for more than eighteen months. While pondering that he was also working out how to get her address and a background report.
‘It’s the perfect night for a barbecue,’ Angeliki declared, strolling into his office later that day as he sat at his desk, having been determined to work and put Lexy and the three babies he might suddenly have totally out of his mind. Only that hadn’t worked. Two boys and a girl, born only seven months after that night, which meant that something had gone wrong with the pregnancy and the whole lot of them might have died. That horrified him and knocked him straight back into abstraction.
‘I’m afraid I’m not in the mood,’ Nic admitted, forcing a smile for her benefit. ‘Sorry.’
Their estrangement hadn’t lasted for long, he recalled. Angeliki had phoned and then come to see him. She had confessed that the breakdown of yet another of her fleeting relationships and a sense of insecurity had prompted her into that inadvisable straying into his bed. Of course, he had forgiven her, but he still hadn’t told her that she was his half-sister, even though he had told his brother. And Jace? Jace had merely rolled his eyes without much perceptible interest in the news that he had a sister. Why? Probably because Jace was already dug deep into playing happy families with his wife, Gigi, and his little son, Nikolaos. A reformed rake, Jace was so into Gigi and their progeny that Nic was wholly glad to be heart whole and still fancy-free.
Nic, however, was feeling guilty that he still hadn’t told anyone else, but he couldn’t see that being given the news that she was a secret Diamandis would decrease Angeliki’s general discontentment with life. Angeliki was an heiress because his father had made provision for her long ago, only that wealth, supposedly inherited from a distant relative, hadn’t made her any happier. And unfortunately, she was still very much given to referring to that night Nic had rejected her, instead of just leaving that controversial topic alone, even though she had to see that it still made him uncomfortable to think of her in naked, seductive mode.
‘You’re not much fun today.’ Heaving a sigh, Angeliki batted her eyelashes at him in annoyance as she leant back against his desk. ‘What about tomorrow night?’
‘I’m dealing with a bit of a crisis right now,’ Nic told her with perfect truth.
‘You should’ve said that first!’ the beautiful blonde exclaimed in reproof. ‘You can be so secretive about things that it worries me. Are you still seeing Mila Jetson?’
Nic shrugged. ‘No, that’s over.’
He recognised that he no longer confided in his friend as he once had but, having only recently registered her response to the women who passed through his life when Mila had complained, he wasn’t unleashing her on the likes of Lexy. Angeliki could be bitchy and critical and very devious, and Lexy was none of those things, although if those babies were his, and he had to assume within the time frame that they were , she had some explaining to do about why she hadn’t made tracking him down her priority months ago. He was angry about that. He was very angry about that omission, he reminded himself, and it took a great deal to make Nic angry.
‘Good news, I hope,’ Lexy’s solicitor passed on during her first call in weeks. ‘Mr Diamandis has already lodged his DNA sample with a private firm and has requested permission to send one of their lab techs out to your home to speed up this process.’
‘My goodness...’ Lexy murmured in genuine astonishment.
‘I suspect he’s keen to deal quickly and quietly with the claim. Will you agree to me passing on your address and phone number for the collection of your sample?’
‘Of course.’ Lexy knew she didn’t have much choice and would be grateful to avoid the stress and expense of a trip out. She hadn’t worked full-time since she was five months pregnant. Eileen sent her occasional bits of translation work and she put the triplets in daycare one day a week to accomplish it. As she was living with the help of welfare, she received some free childcare, but nothing she was allowed to earn part-time in such circumstances was up to the challenge of keeping a decent roof over their heads.
That was why, as she moved back into the spacious living room to rejoin her friend Mel and share the contents of that call, she was beaming, because their current home was only a temporary one. She was house-sitting for Mel’s parents while her father took up a year’s placement on the faculty of a New York college. She looked after the family pets, Barney the Labrador and Chica the cat, and the house plants, keeping the lawn cut and the dust down. In return she received the use of their car and the glorious relief of having a comfortable place to live. But time was running out because the Fosters would be returning home in another few weeks and she would soon be homeless again .
‘About time he stepped up to do something other than ignoring you!’ Mel, a tall, lanky brunette exclaimed. ‘Stop acting like your boat’s finally come in. This is only his first move and, of course, he’ll still be hoping the kids aren’t his right now.’
Lexy compressed her lips. ‘Well, I’m choosing to hope that he’s finally come to his senses and accepted that he can’t avoid his responsibilities any longer. I just wish I’d listened to you and gone straight to a solicitor as soon as they were born. I’ve wasted so much time with my phone calls and my letters and visits to that wretched office block of his. He truly is the most hateful man.’
Mel glanced at her watch and stood up. ‘I’ll have to run if I’m hoping to make dinner with Fergus tonight,’ she confided. ‘Sorry I can’t stay longer.’
Lexy hugged her best friend with a lump in her throat because without that friendship, she honestly wasn’t sure she could have made it through the horrendous challenges she had faced over the past eighteen months. Mel had been solid gold right from the start. She had never uttered a word of criticism over Lexy’s very bad decision to spend the night with a gorgeous stranger. Nor had she said anything while, with hindsight, Lexy had waited with such foolish confidence for Nic Diamandis to phone her afterwards and had never heard from him again. And when Lexy had needed support and understanding, Mel had been there for her every time.
She went upstairs to lift her children from their nap. Children! Even when she wasn’t consumed with worry about the future, she still marvelled at the wonder of her three babies. Ethan was already standing in his cot awaiting her arrival, which was par for the course. Ezra, his smaller twin, whose former health problems had meant his survival had been touch and go for a while, was lying back, eyes open but quite relaxed as usual. If Ethan was the boisterous one, Ezra was the quiet, more thoughtful one. And last, but far from being least, came her daughter, Lily, bouncing at the side of the cot in readiness to be lifted.
She grabbed two of them up and hurtled downstairs to place them in the playpen before returning to lift Ezra. He beamed up at her and she cuddled him. It struck her as particularly ironic that not one of her children looked remotely like her. They were a trio with unruly black hair, dark eyes and olive skin.
A call came from the DNA lab that afternoon and she agreed to a lab tech calling with her because it would save her a lot of hassle. Transporting three babies anywhere, even with the use of a car, was exhausting. The tech arrived within an hour of the phone call, which disconcerted her because she had expected to have to wait in at least the next day for the visit. The woman was barely in the house for ten minutes, taking a mouth swab with the minimum of fuss and promising speedy results. Lexy was tempted to say that she was in no doubt of what the results would be, but she said nothing.
She assumed that the triplets’ father would be praying that the results were not a match. After all, he had gone to some trouble to avoid ever seeing her again. She had been informed that her phone calls to his office were unwelcome and once she had even been escorted back onto the street by two very embarrassed and apologetic security guards. Slowly but surely her mortification had become burnished by wounded pride and rage at the level his behaviour had reduced her dignity to. She owed Nic Diamandis nothing. However, she had become ever more determined that he should help to support his own children. She wanted nothing else from him and sincerely hoped that she would never have to actually lay eyes on him again.
That hope was plunged into disappointment two days later when the doorbell rang. Lexy was unprepared for a shock. It was her work day, and her children were at the nursery. She was clad in yoga pants and a tank top, spectacles firmly anchored on her nose and wearing not a scrap of make-up when she went to answer the door, expecting the postman. Only instead she found herself focusing in disbelief on the man she had spent months trying to see or contact, firmly, squarely planted on her doorstep. And she couldn’t believe that Nic Diamandis was finally giving her the time of day, not after all her failed efforts and his established ghosting of her very existence.
‘Nic...’ Her greeting was weak and it swiftly died away, along with her voice.
‘Lexy. We need to talk.’
Lexy tilted her chin. ‘A bit late in the day for that, isn’t it?’ she heard herself quip, incredulity and bitter anger consuming her as he gazed back at her with apparently not even an ounce of decent discomfort.
And without another word, Lexy slammed the door shut in his face again, steaming with the recollection of all the many humiliations he had had heaped on her when he had evidently blocked her calls on the number he had given her and had then refused to recognise her name when she’d tried to see him, or even speak to him, at his precious giant office building in the city of London. No, no regrets, she reflected as she paced away from the door again, her arms folded in a defensive block. What sort of father figure would he be for her children anyway? There was no way that she would allow him to treat her kids the way her father had treated her, making her feel less, making her feel unwanted even within her own home.
Been there, done that, got the lesson in triplicate, not falling for the act again... ever !