Triplets Under the Tree

“Really, Antonio?” Fire flared in her blue eyes, surprising him in its intensity. “Do you have any context for what being a mother means? What it means to me personally?”

Her lips curled into a harsh smile and he couldn’t stop watching her, fascinated by the physical changes in her as she schooled him. Even more surprising, she didn’t pull away but pushed her chin deeper into his grip.

“Leon, Annabelle and Antonio Junior are my children,” she continued, her voice dipping lower with each impassioned word. “Just as much as they’re yours. More so. I carried them in my womb and I’ve raised them. I could do it on an accountant’s salary and would have if the judge hadn’t granted me conservatorship of their inheritance. Keep your money. This is about love.”

Love. A nebulous notion that he should understand but didn’t.

With that one word, the atmosphere in the sunroom shifted, growing heavier with awareness. Her body leaned toward his, bristling with vibrancy. No longer poised to flee but to fight.

It reached out and punched him with a dark thrill. She wasn’t backing down. She was prepared to meet him halfway, taking whatever he dished out. But what would she do with it?

“Hmm.” The sound purred from his throat as he slanted her chin a touch higher. “Let’s examine that. What do you know about love?”

More important, did she know the things he wanted to learn?

“I know enough,” she retorted. “I know when I look at those babies, my heart feels as if it’s about to explode with so many wonderful, terrible emotions. I know what it feels like to lose my sister to an early death and sob for days and days because I can’t ever tell her I love her again.”

Yes, that tightness in his chest when he’d gazed at his own flesh and blood encapsulated in a tiny person for the first time. It was wonderful and terrible. And inexplicably, that decided it. She was telling the truth about her motives, and all interest in grilling her over them evaporated.

Now his agenda included one thing and one thing only—Caitlyn and getting more of her soft skin under his fingers.

Love for a child he understood, but it wasn’t the full extent of the kind of love possible. The kind of love he must have had for Vanessa. That was the concept that stayed maddeningly out of reach. “What about love for a man? Romantically.”

“What, as if you’re going to prove my motives are ugly because I’ve never been in love?” Fiercely, she eyed him. “I know how it feels to want a man to tell you he loves you. You want it so badly that you can’t breathe. You want him to touch you and kiss you. It hurts deep down every second that you don’t get it. And when you do get it, you want it to last forever.”

Electricity arced between them and he ached to close the distance between them, to give her everything on her checklist, right here, right now.

“Is that what you wanted to hear?” she said, her chest rising and falling with quickened breath. “Love is equal parts need and commitment. What do you know about love?”

“Nothing,” he growled, and instantly, the reality of it crushed through his chest.

The love that she’d painted with her impassioned speech—he wanted that. Wanted to know that he could feel like that. But love grew over time, over shared experiences, over shared memories.

He’d been robbed of that when he crashed in the ocean. But he had a chance to start over with someone else, to move on from the past he couldn’t reclaim.

This nighttime interlude had started out as a way to get her to explain her motives, but instead, she’d uncovered his. Everything he wanted was right here, gripped in his hand. So he took it.

Hauling Caitlyn forward, he fused his mouth to hers. Hungrily, desperately, he kissed her, and his body ignited in a firestorm of sensation. Her mouth came alive under his, taking and giving with each stroke, matching him in the power of her appetite. He soared into the heavens in the most intense flight he’d ever experienced.

His eyes slammed shut as he savored the tight, heated pulls in his groin that could only be eased by burying himself in this woman, body and soul. More. He worked her mouth open and her tongue met his in the middle in a perfect, hot clash of flesh. Her eagerness coursed through him, spurring him on, begging him to take her deeper.

His mind drained of everything except her. He felt alive in the most elemental way, as if he’d been snatched from the jaws of hell for this moment, this woman.

Scrabbling for purchase, he slid his arms around her, aligning her with his body and dragging her into the most intimate of embraces. She clung to his shoulders and the contact sparked through his shirt. The contrast of her soft curves sliding against his brutally hardened torso and thighs drove him wild with sharp-edged need.