Chapter 3
ROMAN
The next day, after I rocked Henry to sleep and set him in the borrowed bassinet, I glanced at Emily. Just when I’d get started thinking that Henry was tricking me into believing he’d be the “easy” one, she’d get cranky. And back and forth.
All. Night. Long.
I wasn’t sure how all the others did it.
No wonder they all look like zombies.
I helped—a lot—but I’d never been in charge like this.
“What do you have?” I asked Vinny, who’d just arrived with Andre. He’d offered to help investigate the sudden arrival of two babies to the family. Lorne hadn’t left yet, helping me. Mikhail and Claire were there, too.
“We used the dates on the birth certificates to trace back to when they would’ve been conceived. Surveillance shows that you had stayed at the hotel within the week of possible conception.” Andre showed me his phone that played the footage. Sure enough, there I was, walking out with a woman who—
“Oh…” I nodded and cringed. “Yeah. I—” Still nodding, I pointed at her. “I slept with her. Just a stranger I met in a bar.” I shrugged. “And I know we used protection.”
“Au contraire…” Andre said, gesturing at the sleeping twins.
I gave him a stony expression.
Vinny cleared his throat. “Rebecca York reserved one room for the night at that hotel.”
“Yeah. She said she had a room, I mentioned that I owned the hotel, and I asked if she wanted me to walk her to her room. Then that was it.”
They all stared at me, deadpan.
“That wasn’t it.” Obviously. “But she was just a one-night stand. Just sex. The usual.”
Except, something unusual had happened. Like two sleeping babies in my penthouse. I sighed. “Well, where is she?”
“Dead,” Lorne said.
I recalled what that note said, but I wasn’t following just yet.
“We tracked her down, which brought us to Linda Smith, the woman who’d been going there and looking for you,” Andre explained.
“Rebecca killed herself several days after the babies were born. She walked the babies to Linda’s and told her to look for the man who owned the hotel.
She showed her a picture that she must have screenshot of you, and that’s why she wasn’t interested in talking to Vinny or anyone else.
Rebecca asked Linda to deliver the babies to their father, then went home and committed suicide. ”
I blinked, stunned.
“Looking into her situation a little further, it seems that she was depressed for a long while. Her husband passed away the week before she slept with you. The night you found her was the night after her husband’s funeral.”
I cringed at my cousin. I barely remembered her. I had been drinking. So had she. But if I had to pry at my memories, she had seemed distracted. Or down. That might have been why I hit on her, trying to preoccupy her from what had been bothering her. A pity fuck, I supposed.
“She was probably looking to get drunk and numb the pain of her loss,” Lorne said.
“Well, she seemed to have found out she was pregnant very shortly afterward,” Claire said, going on to add that she’d accessed the woman’s medical records and the maternity records.
I highly doubted that was done legally, but I wasn’t going to whine about it.
“Rebecca went to her first doctor appointment a week afterward. And then she continued to go to all her standard checkups all through the pregnancy until she had the twins. A normal, healthy pregnancy and births.”
“Then why did she…” I massaged a knot between my neck and my shoulder.
“One of the men searched her home and found a diary. Rebecca was depressed, even before her husband died. She wrote a suicide note that indicated she was going to do it the night of his funeral, but it looks like…” Andre gestured at me. “It looks like you convinced her to change her mind.”
I opened and closed my mouth. I wasn’t saying anything. I’d been told I was the best fuck ever, but that was just… whatever.
“In her diary, she wrote that she couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t kill herself and the babies.
She feared dying with too much guilt on her conscience, so she decided to carry them to term and make sure they could have a better life with someone strong enough to want to live.
She missed her husband. She wrote nine months of missing him in her diary.
Then once the babies were born… she followed through. ”
“Fuck.” It escaped me as a punch of air.
“And they are yours,” Claire added gently. “It’s not a trick or a scam or anything like that. The DNA results came back this morning.”
Nodding absentmindedly, I let it all sink in. I’d felt the connection between us since the second I saw them. I already knew that they were my children. But hearing about their mother was brutal.
After a long moment of accepting this news, I lifted my head and faced them all.
“I’m a father.”
I said it matter-of-factly, a blunt observation that didn’t even need to be said.
“Congratulations?” Andre raised his brows as if he wasn’t sure whether I’d be happy or not.
I scoffed. “Don’t give me that look. Yes, I’m fucking shocked. I couldn’t have counted on this in a million years. Not like this. But…” I huffed once and smiled, incredulous. “I have a daughter. And a son.”
Mikhail chuckled, coming to hug me. “Welcome to the club.”
“They’re beautiful, healthy babies,” Claire said. “No issues or worries at all. If you want to do any genetic testing to see if there could be any concerns later down the line from the mother’s side, then—”
Emily woke up and wailed, as if hearing about more needles or medical tests bothered her.
“No. That’s not—” I went to pick her up. Sure enough, her wails kicked off Henry’s. Mikhail picked him up and tried to console him. Then Claire stepped in. Andre, too. It was Lorne who calmed him down at last, and I was grateful Emily could relax faster than her brother.
“I need a nanny,” I concluded with defeat. “It’s not even a whole day yet and I’m exhausted. I can’t do this alone.”
“You’re not alone,” Lorne reminded me, still rocking Henry as he paced.
“I know that.” I sighed, making sure Emily was secure as I held her against my chest. “But I am. No mother for them. Wait. Does she have any family or—”
Andre shook his head. “No. We already looked.”
Relief hit me that I wouldn’t have to fight for custody or anything like that. My babies were a hell of a surprise, but there was nothing in this world that would convince me to give them up to anyone.
“I cannot figure out how to be a single parent. Not right now.”
Mikhail set his hand on my shoulder. “Take some time off.”
“I will. But I can’t make this my whole life. I have too many things going on and I can’t just quit.”
“But you can take some time. Adjust. Hire some help,” he advised.
I took him up on that offer. Immediately.
For the rest of the week, I tried to learn how to be a father. I knew a lot about handling a baby from Owen and Rose being born. But it was different. This was all that times two, with twins.
Lorne practically moved in, taking pity on me to help. Anya stayed over one night to assist. Claire too. Daria, a nurse Claire was training at her clinic, helped as well. But it was still a lot.
Two babies at once was hard.
Contacting a nanny service was the first step, but I hadn’t counted on how challenging it would be to find one.
I figured it was no different from any other employee.
We trained recruits as soldiers. We hired maids, drivers, cooks, and all sorts of help.
They came, they showed that they could or couldn’t handle the tasks expected of them, and they had a paycheck in return.
Easy, right?
Nope. It seemed doomed.
The first day of interviewing nannies went horribly.
Half of them seemed scared of me—or maybe that was Mikhail’s fault because he’d sat in on the interviews and looked like the violent Mafia boss he was.
The other half of the candidates seemed too inept.
One almost dropped Emily and I lost my temper at her.
The next day, with more applicants, I had to weed out the ones who were trying to seduce me, the ones who didn’t speak any language I knew, and the few who cringed and seemed so bothered by the babies crying that I told them to forget it.
“Don’t they screen these people?” Natalie asked with an eyeroll. She’d helped me that day. “I wouldn’t even want half of them as a babysitter for Maisie for an hour.”
The third day, Andre joined me with interviews and we picked a nanny.
She ended up quitting in the first hour because Henry peed on her.
We called the backup, the runner-up for the position, and she said she couldn’t imagine hearing Emily cry for one more second without her head exploding from a migraine.
The fourth day, still no success.
By the time Thursday came along, I worried I’d never find anyone. Andre was helping me again, looking as frustrated as I was. “Hey, maybe this one will work.” He nodded as he looked at his phone. “The first company we contacted said they had a new applicant.”
“Does she speak English or Russian?” I asked wearily.
He nodded.
“Is she planning to move in here with her own kids?” That had happened, too.
“No.”
“Any allergies, tendencies for migraines, or sensitivities about the smell of baby shit?” I asked, trying to remember all the various reasons no one was sticking with the job for more than an hour.
“No. Amber Desmond. Twenty-one. Previous experience with child care,” he read. “She’s on her way now.”
I huffed. Those details weren’t telling me jack shit. “Whatever.” I doubted any nanny would fit in like I needed one to.
“If she seems halfway decent and trustworthy, maybe double the pay and make it too good of an offer for her to pass on,” he suggested with a shrug.
I smirked at him. “Wouldn’t that make it look like I’m desperate?”
“For someone who looks like shit for not sleeping more than an hour at a time this week, you are desperate.”