CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Y OU ’ VE GOT A huge problem here,’ Jace Diamandis mused as he strolled across his sunlit office. ‘No offence, but you’ve really screwed this up.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’ Nic slung back at his older brother in a temper. ‘Lexy has my kids and I doubt that she’ll even let me see them!’
‘Is it these kids or her you’re really into?’ Jace enquired lazily, watching his brother pace back and forth like a tiger in a too small cage.
‘I can’t be into children I’ve never even met,’ Nic intoned grittily. ‘But I was into her... Well, I was until she slammed that door in my face.’
‘Nothing like an angry woman to knock you back to earth,’ Jace opined unhelpfully, making Nic wonder why he had approached his elder brother for advice. ‘But if you want to ace this, you’re going to have to borrow a trait or two from our dear old, unlamented dad, Argus.’
Nic shot back a question for clarity in guttural Greek.
‘You’ve got no rights as an unmarried father under British law. If she says it’s detrimental to their interests to be in contact with you, her vote as their mother counts more than yours. What the hell did you do to her to make her that hostile?’
‘I haven’t done anything!’ Nic proclaimed with pride.
‘Doesn’t sound like it,’ Jace remarked gently. ‘But if you want access to those babies, you’re bound to bring in the big guns. It’s your duty as their father. You need to marry her and then you’ll have rights.’
Marriage! The concept was like a punch in the gut to Nic.
‘Our father didn’t think that way,’ Nic breathed stiffly, striving not to feel uncomfortable about the reality that his path into the Diamandis family had not been as smooth or, indeed, as pristine as Jace’s. He was the son of the mistress, raised in status only after his father was widowed and had rejected his firstborn son. He had always felt a little like a consolation prize, only brought into his father’s public life to ease the stinging humiliation of an unfaithful first wife. And he knew that his mother, Bianca, had always felt the same...like an afterthought, a pretender to the Diamandis throne.
‘No, but, sad to say, threats and intimidation work and you may need them to access those children.’
‘I’m not that kind of man.’
‘Just saying. Clean and upfront may not work but it is your job to bring those babies into our family, however low you may have to sink to achieve that,’ Jace completed without apology. ‘I’ll put my legal team on it for you.’
‘I have a lawyer of my own,’ Nic protested.
‘You need the big guns now,’ his brother asserted. ‘And family is family, Nic.’
‘You certainly don’t view Angeliki in that light,’ Nic commented.
Jace grimaced. ‘Our half-sister has an unpleasant reputation and she’s not the nicest woman around. I’m in no hurry to claim her and that’s why. How you can count her as a close friend escapes me. I know you grew up together but—’
‘Nobody’s twisting your arm to acknowledge her,’ Nic broke in with the loyalty that was innate in him. ‘But she’s honestly not as mean as you seem to think or I wouldn’t spend any time with her.’
Jace laughed. ‘Because she plays nice with you. I suspect she still has plans to get you to the altar and you’re the guy that still won’t tell her what she needs to know to back off!’
Exasperated by his brother’s sense of humour, Nic went to see his lawyer, Aubrey, only to discover that the Diamandis legal team had already been in touch with advice, none of which Nic wished to follow. Yes, he could play hardball with the best of them but not with the mother of his children, he reasoned grimly.
Coming to see you around eleven.
That was what the text announced at eight a.m.
Lexy worked through a mess of emotional reactions. No, she didn’t owe Nic Diamandis the time of day but, at the same time, he was the father of her kids and simply ignoring him as he had long ignored her wasn’t a good idea. Sooner or later, the triplets would inevitably decide that they wanted to know him. What was so very attractive about a billionaire? Well, inevitable was the exact right word, she had decided. He would be in a position to offer adventurous days out that were only a dream on her horizon. She couldn’t shut him out of their lives, even if she wanted to in retribution. He deserved to be shut out of their lives but possibly his children would have a very different take on that outlook.
So, because he was like an inescapable blight on all their lives, she would accept one visit. She would let him satisfy his curiosity. And hopefully that would be the end of the whole drama. What single, very good-looking billionaire wanted to settle down to having triplet babies on the regular? She was safe. The first messy nappy would see him off, or a spit up or a meltdown. She had seen him on the Internet, with gorgeous, unattainable women clinging to his flawlessly groomed arm like magnets, the most recent a supermodel with the brain of a very tiny bird—proved by the telling interview she had given—but the body and face of a woman so perfect she looked unattainable to ordinary females. Lexy had only qualified for attention because she had been the only option available on a snowy night in the depths of Yorkshire. A man of Nic’s ilk didn’t do babies in the raw and there was nothing rawer than babies, wild and untrammelled and totally unpredictable as they could be.
Nic arrived, well primed for the challenge of babies, for young children had never been on his radar. His brother, however, was an experienced hand, able to fully convey the potential horrors that had enabled Nic to look now at any baby in much the way he might have regarded an unexploded bomb.
Lexy opened the door, confident in the conviction that she was decently dressed this time around.
Nic took one glance at the narrow skirt and shirt and suppressed a sigh. On his last very brief visit, he had never seen anything sexier than the yoga pants and the spectacles on Lexy with her hair all tousled and impossibly sexy, just the way it had looked when she’d got out of his bed following a night he had never forgotten. And then she’d spun round, her exquisite face out of view, to give him a glimpse of how she looked from behind and that fast the yoga pants had vanished from his memory as he’d measured instead the perfection of her slender hips and surprisingly plump derrière in the fine fabric. He had breathed in deep and slow, striving to stave off the swell in his groin, genuinely embarrassed by his own reaction because, Thee mou , he wasn’t a teenager any more when such responses were inevitable.
Lexy was priding herself on her essential decency. She could have let the babies get overtired and treated him to their worst but instead she had let them have that early morning nap as usual and get up again, once more restored to good humour. The trio of babies on the rug all looked up as she reappeared and they, every one of them, smiled. She supposed it was just as well that her kids had no idea whatsoever that their foolish mother had just been slaughtered in the mental stakes by their father. Truth was, Nic was still impossibly pretty. She had rationalised him in photos online, reduced his appeal, fought off the effect of his sexy sizzle.
Only all of that didn’t work in the flesh. Here he was in person, as flamboyantly gorgeous as a tropical sunset and raining all over her parade of indifference. Black designer jeans outlining every powerful line of his narrow waist, lean hips and long, strong legs, a simple tee shirt framing what had to be the muscular chest definition of a pin-up. He was a study in raw masculinity and sensuality.
She wished that Mel were there to bring her down to earth again with a necessary bump and remind her that Nic Diamandis might look like a dream in face and body, but in character he was the very definition of a rat or some far less presentable word. He wasn’t the man she had believed he was the night they had first met. She had been na?ve, and he had been deceptive in everything he said and did with her.
‘So, here they are. The reason I assume that you were so keen to come here in person and finally acknowledge my existence,’ Lexy remarked brittly, unable to resist inserting that last little provocative reminder.
Nic stared down at a rug containing a virtual scrum of babies. The littlest one gave him a huge smile and, that fast, Nic was dropping down on his knees to try and reach their level and not be scary to them. The little one crawled on hands and knees straight over to him with the most charming air of acceptance and clambered up onto his lap.
‘And this is...?’ He had been meaning to pick Lexy up about that crack about his failing to acknowledge her existence, but the approaching baby had trumped that urge.
‘Ezra. That’s Ezra.’ In truth, Lexy was disconcerted by Ezra’s attitude because he was usually the wariest of her trio. ‘Ethan’s twin.’
‘Why’s he so much smaller than his twin?’ Nic asked straight off.
‘He wasn’t thriving in the womb like Ethan and Lily, which is why they all had to be delivered early, and initially he had breathing problems,’ Lexy confided reluctantly. ‘But he’s slowly catching up by growing faster than his big brother.’
‘So kind of you to keep me informed,’ Nic voiced between gritted teeth while smiling because Ethan, the larger twin, was coming his way, but his daughter, Lily, was still staring, undecided, from the other side of the rug.
‘I made every possible effort under the sun to keep you informed but I met with a blank brick wall,’ Lexy framed very politely.
‘You’re lying and you know you are,’ Nic murmured softly.
And that fast, in the wake of that toxic exchange, Lexy wanted to kill him stone dead, all her recollections of being pregnant and alone and a mother and alone piling up inside her like a threatening avalanche. ‘I hate you,’ she said equally softly. ‘I hate you so much I can’t stand having you here but I’m trying very hard indeed to be civilised.’
‘Civilised is not always what it appears to be,’ Nic quipped as Ethan clambered onto his lap, trying to stand up, failing, trying again, grabbing at Nic’s hands to show him how to play the game he wanted. Reminded of Jace and his indomitable spirit, Nic smiled down at his son and let him jump up and down happily with the support of his hands. This , he decided, was what was truly important, not her and her poor attitude.
Lily was sidling closer to him, big brown eyes fixed to him as though he might bite and, in her, he saw her mother, more anxious, more scared than any Diamandis had ever been, and it annoyed him. His daughter was afraid of him and that was unmistakeably Lexy’s fault.
He freed Ethan to the toy that was stealing his attention and reached for Lily. She came to him with huge, troubled eyes and he judged Lexy even harder for that distrust. On his lap, she settled and kept on gazing up at him with a growing steadiness that entranced his cynical soul. Then, without the smallest warning, she clawed her way up the front of his tee shirt and wrapped both arms round him. It was unexpected but very welcome and he hugged her close with gratitude that she was still sufficiently trusting to offer a stranger that affection. Even so, Lexy’s outright hostility took him aback. Why was she lying to him? She hadn’t got in touch with him, indeed hadn’t made the smallest attempt to contact him.
Tense silence reigned while Nic engaged the babies with the toys on the rug. Lexy could feel her own face growing stiffer and stiffer because she was so angry with him and she couldn’t express it.
‘Would you like coffee?’ she asked curtly.
‘No, thank you. I won’t be staying much longer,’ Nic murmured flatly.
‘Good. I have to give them lunch soon and that’s a very messy deal,’ she declared, striving to lighten the atmosphere a little for the sake of good manners.
Lexy could not recognise the man in front of her as the man she had met and shared a bed with, which she supposed was her warning that she had mistaken his character from the outset. He was cool and guarded and irredeemably superior, very much a posh, sophisticated Diamandis male. He hadn’t been any of that when they had met, not even at first and not later either, she recalled with lingering pain.
‘We could leave the kitchen door open and have a word in there,’ she proffered, very keen to ensure that he did not have an excuse to make a second visit.
Nic vaulted upright with easy athletic grace and scanned her where she stood in the doorway. ‘Whose house is this?’ he asked.
‘My best friend, Mel’s parents own it,’ Lexy divulged reluctantly. ‘They’re abroad. I’m the house-sitter. I look after their pets, plants and try to keep the lawn down.’
‘You don’t rent or own it, then. You have a home elsewhere?’
Lexy was wondering why he was being so nosy. ‘No, I don’t. Between having three young children and being unable to work full-time for more than a year now, my options are few.’
‘You’re virtually homeless,’ Nic informed her, as if she mightn’t already have grasped that fact.
‘And that could be because the father of my children has paid nothing whatsoever towards their support!’ Lexy fired back at him without hesitation.
‘Skase!’ Nic shot down at her, because she had almost shouted that response.
‘And what does that command mean in English?’
‘Keep quiet,’ Nic translated the politer term frigidly, because all he could see was the three babies who had crawled over to join them, all three faces raised and brimming with curiosity and possibly even a little annoyance that they had been abandoned as the centre of attention. He scolded himself for that fanciful thought, not even convinced that babies that young had much in the way of thought.
And then to his horror all three faces crumpled and they burst into tears. Lexy brushed past him and got down on the floor to comfort them and they swarmed her like little vultures, nestling, clutching, grabbing, howling.
‘It’s my fault. I raised my voice to you and it frightened them,’ Lexy framed as the howling subsided to more manageable levels.
‘I’ll leave you to feed them,’ Nic said levelly. ‘I’ll come back tonight at eight and we’ll talk then.’
‘Fight, you mean.’
‘I have no intention of fighting with you,’ Nic asserted with glacial bite. ‘You are the mother of my children and I respect that status even if I’m a little dubious about you as a person.’
‘Thanks, but no, thanks,’ Lexy muttered as he vanished out of the front door and she shut it firmly behind him.
‘Well, how did it go?’ Mel demanded on the phone an hour later.
‘Not very well. We argued through it as best we could with the triplets there and he’s coming back this evening to argue some more. Nic really doesn’t like being told that he fell down on his responsibilities.’
‘And that’s catnip for you at the minute,’ her friend guessed. ‘But maybe give the aggro a rest until you can get some kind of adult arrangement ironed out between you.’
‘I was hoping he would just pay up and go away.’
‘I don’t think you know him well enough to decide how he may react to being a father,’ Mel countered with tact.
Unwelcome though they were, Mel’s shrewd comments cooled Lexy’s anger with Nic. Did she really want to drive him away so totally that her babies lost out on the possibility of a father figure? And the answer to that was...no, she didn’t. In other words, she couldn’t afford to be short-sighted. Literally and figuratively, she reflected wryly as she studied her little trio striving to feed themselves and dropping food everywhere round their battered mismatched highchairs. If Nic was capable of loving her babies, his interest in them would be invaluable.
Right now, Lexy was broke, totally broke, and it was like that every week, stretching the pennies to go further, adding up the groceries at the supermarket before she went to pay, getting in first at the charity shop to search the rails. She was poor, she was so poor she had given up make-up and all sorts of stuff she had once naively taken for granted. And that was the world she lived in when her kids deserved so much better from their rich father. If he could offer more, then it was her duty to accept it and be polite about it. Taking potshots at him wasn’t going to fill the kitty or put food on the table.
Unaware of Lexy’s resolve to be less incendiary, Nic was brooding. He was angry, so angry with her for subjecting them both and their children to what promised to be chaos and bad publicity. But for all he knew, Lexy would enjoy that kind of attention because she wasn’t the woman he remembered. Yes, she was still attractive to him to the most annoying degree but everything that he had admired inside her seemed to have vanished. There was nothing sweet or gentle about that waspish tongue of hers or the angry dislike flashing in her eyes.
In truth, Nic had never dealt with an angry woman in his life. Jace had seemed much more seasoned in that line. Nic had handled Angeliki’s angry flouncing and dirty glares but she had never got verbal with him or insulted him and he did not think their friendship would have survived had she done so. Why? Nic had a low threshold for insults because he reckoned that every day from birth until his demise, his father, Argus, had hurt, humiliated or outraged him in some way. Even adult status hadn’t protected him. Argus had liked to get on the phone to critique his business choices, his performance, his choice of friends. In fact, Argus had been his horrible abusive self, right up until the very day he died. To both Nic and his unhappy, derided mother.
Lexy had to change before Nic’s second visit. A dressy shirt did not long survive triplet proximity. She didn’t have many clothes. When she was pregnant, she had traded in good stuff in return for anything that could fit a small woman with a physically large pregnant belly. All she had left were the items nobody had wanted and she knew it was time to get on with the lawn again, a never-ending duty in summer time, so on went her denim shorts and a tee. Probably the same tee he had once taken off her all too willing body, she reflected morosely as she brushed her hair and left it loose.
The ride-on mower was an unpredictable horror that didn’t always work and visits from the local mechanic were a regular feature. As soon as the triplets were down, she went out to tackle the mower and when, glory of glories, it worked, nothing would have removed her bottom from that seat until she had done the whole lawn. She was near the end of the back lawn when she saw Nic standing below the rear porch watching her and looking a bit like the Grim Reaper in a dark suit, faithfully cut to make the most of every line and muscle in his long, lean physique. He looked maddeningly stupendous, and she was stricken that she had lost sight of time and hadn’t contrived to get indoors again and change into something more appropriate for his benefit. Even so, mindful of her new attitude, she lifted her hand in as friendly a wave of acknowledgement as she could fake and pointed at the corner to let him know she would be stopping when she finished the grass. One last strip to go.
The ear-splitting decibels of the mower stopped and Lexy removed the headphones she had been using and manoeuvred off the machine with all the awkwardness of her unfortunately short legs. Tugging self-consciously at the hem of the denim shorts, she hurried up the slope and onto the rear patio to greet him.
‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting but once I get the mower going, I stay on it until I’m finished,’ she confided, anxiously fixing her gaze on his lean, strong, utterly expressionless face.
‘Why are you not angry any more?’ Nic enquired disconcertingly.
Lexy grimaced, feeling more uncomfortable than ever as she led the way indoors through the kitchen into the living room. ‘It’s not that I’m not angry, just that anger isn’t a good idea right now with you only just meeting the triplets. I need to stop letting it get in the way,’ she muttered.
Nic was astonished that she had done exactly what he had been hoping she would do to ponder and reach the same conclusions he had. There was no profit in an angry resentment that kept them at daggers drawn. Together they were parents to three children and the children were what mattered most.
‘Coffee? A drink?’ Lexy proffered.
Nic was studying her legs, very shapely legs, he had to admit. ‘Coffee...black, no sugar.’
‘I remember.’
‘The less we remember now from our first meeting, the better,’ Nic startled her by proclaiming. ‘The situation has changed radically and time has moved on without...well, without me. I want to correct that.’
‘And how do you think it best to do that?’ Lexy called out from the kitchen as she poured the coffee she had brewed in readiness, grateful that the larder was so well stocked, although she had rarely used anything from her hosts’ cupboards for the food was not hers.
‘I think we should get married,’ Nic drawled, almost in a chatty tone, as if what he was saying were not anything like as shocking as it was.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she murmured, the hand holding the jug shaking.
Nic sprang upright and walked back to the doorway to look at her with grave dark brown eyes. ‘Marriage will fix everything—’
‘Nothing’s broken,’ she just about whispered in her disbelief.
‘It is in my world,’ Nic contradicted. ‘My children are illegitimate, which will very much upset my whole family and make it almost impossible for them to inherit anything from us. I owe them and you more than some paltry monthly payment towards their support. You’re homeless and penniless and none of you should be living like that. If we were to marry, you would all be properly taken care of.’
‘Maybe I don’t need to be taken care of,’ Lexy framed, cheeks hot with shame from being called ‘homeless and penniless’ in one sentence, even if it was true.
Staring down at her, Nic was reading everything in her aquamarine eyes. Mortification, resentment, hurt. It shook him inside out to see those feelings in her face because it knocked him right back to their one and only night together. ‘Everyone needs taking care of occasionally,’ he pointed out.
Lexy winced and passed him his coffee. ‘You don’t understand. I’ve been living on handouts and other people’s kindness since even before the babies were born,’ she admitted chokily. ‘My friend Mel and her parents have been unbelievably good to me.’
‘If you marry me, you’ll never have to worry about money or where you live ever again,’ Nic murmured like a snake charmer.
Lexy vented a choking laugh that was a partial sob because she was fighting to hold the tears back. The very last thing she had expected from Nic Diamandis was a marriage proposal. It was so old-fashioned, so wildly unexpected from the man who had ignored her and their babies’ needs while it evidently had suited him to do so. ‘I’m not sure I can believe that you are sincere with this...or that you could suggest that I marry you for your money,’ she muttered. ‘I mean, I would never ever even consider marrying a man for his money. I’m not a gold-digger or a—’
Nic caught one of the hands she was waving dismissively in the air between them and held it to steady her. She was all over the place, like a tree rocking in a storm, and he could see the tears glimmering in her beautiful eyes. He hadn’t intended to upset her. He had intended to soothe her, offer her options, and marriage had not been his first choice of those options, even if it was only matrimony that would satisfy his family, end the drama and give him unalienable rights over their three children.
‘I would be happy for you to marry me for my wealth.’
‘But clearly you’re not talking about a n-normal marriage,’ she stammered, sneaking a questioning look up at him.
‘A marriage on paper, obviously,’ he conceded, while striving not to notice the pert shimmy of her clearly unbound breasts below the tee shirt and monitor his own very, very hungry body. She was dynamite in a tiny package, his personal kryptonite, it seemed. ‘But you’d have to fake being a real bride for my family’s benefit because that will integrate our triplets into the group and make everything smooth again.’
Lexy’s lower lip had long since parted with the upper as sheer disbelief gripped her hard. ‘So, you’re serious about this marriage idea. It seems like you’ve thought it through and you like things...er, smooth.’
‘Call it crisis management. It’s my strength,’ Nic told her in a very businesslike tone. ‘We marry for a while. You acquire a proper home, in this country or wherever else you wish to live. The children get to know their father. All the complications melt away. When we have had enough of the pretence we go for a divorce and co-parent.’
Marry for a while . That put the proposal in a much clearer perspective, she acknowledged ruefully. It would be a temporary arrangement, not the usual life commitment. And she could see his point. Like whitewashing a dirty wall, the end result would be very visible. She and her children would have recognised importance in his world and evidently that meant a lot to Nic Diamandis. As a wife or even an ex-wife, she would have a position and nobody would pity her or look down on her. Their children would be recognised as family members while all her money worries would go away.
‘Why are you willing to do this? I mean...it’s more of a big thing for you with your lifestyle than it would be for me,’ Lexy pointed out with as much tact as she could employ, because a playboy faking a marriage could hardly engage in his normal pursuits. Unless, of course, and again she was being na?ve, his cheating outside marriage could provide the reason for an eventual divorce? She decided not to ask any more awkward questions and was beginning to turn away.
‘I’m willing to do it because my mother was my father’s mistress before he married her. A married man’s mistress.’ Nic spelt out that reluctant admission between compressed lips and Lexy stopped dead in her tracks. ‘I was three years old before my father married my mother after he was widowed by an unfaithful wife. Pulling us forward into his life officially was a face-saving gesture, no more.’
Lexy slowly turned back, cut to the bone by that sudden unexpected confession that sliced away all that Diamandis gloss and revealed the truth of the ordinary humans behind the billionaire facade. ‘Oh...’ was all she felt able to say about such a very personal and private thing.
Nic expelled his breath in a sharp exhalation. ‘And all the years I was growing up I felt that my mother and I were looked down on within the family as being something less than his first wife and my elder brother. I don’t want that happening to my children.’
Lexy nodded jerkily, finally fully understanding that motivation and trying not to be touched that he had confided in her. After all, that motive was absolutely understandable in his position, considering his own more humble beginnings. Nic hadn’t started out as a Diamandis with a silver spoon in his mouth. No, he had been the son of his father’s lover on the side and disregarded while his father was still married to another woman. That knowledge shook her rigid, taught her afresh that appearances were often misleading and that she too had judged Nic to be an absolute four-letter word of a man because of his privilege in life and his treatment of her.
For the first time, as well, it occurred to her that his treatment of her did not line up with the man wishing to marry her to prevent his children from enduring that sense of insecurity that he had suffered as a young boy. He was more sensitive than she had appreciated, under that surface gloss, that flaring, oh, so attractive confidence.
Amazingly, it took very little thought at all for her to decide that, yes, now that he had talked the talk, she would give him her trust and marry him. Ethan, Ezra and Lily would profit from that move in every way possible. She understood why he was making the offer and she understood that it would not be a real marriage. And really, what did she have to lose? Homeless, penniless. Those weren’t only words. They didn’t express the daily fears and anxieties that grabbed her and strangled her with stress. She put on a front for Mel, who had already done so much for them, but the concept of being no longer poor shone like a brilliant, inviting sun on Lexy’s horizon.
She wanted to buy her babies decent clothes, feed them the best food, put them to bed in comfortable cots. And she wanted to feel that they were safe. It crossed her mind that she would be willing to marry the devil himself to achieve those ends. Tears burned the backs of her eyes because she knew that, over the past eighteen months, she had sunk so very low in her expectations of life. If Nic was willing to sacrifice so much for his children’s benefit, then it was highly probable that he would also be able to love them. And that mattered, mattered so much more than the material benefits because Lexy knew what it was like to grow up without a father’s love.
‘Okay,’ she said stiffly. ‘I’ll marry you.’