Reunited by the Tycoon's Twins

Her career might have focused more on celebs falling out of nightclubs than on the business pages, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a journalist’s instincts at all.

‘Jake was right, though. You’re good at this,’ Finn said as he put the baby down in the Moses basket in the corner. ‘My children might be younger than his, but you’ve got the knack.’

‘Must be an auntie thing,’ Madeleine said. ‘I’ve had enough practice with his brood. Who has four kids, really?’

‘They are great kids, though.’

She smiled but could feel her eyebrows pulling together even as she did so. Finn was not what she had been expecting. At all. When she thought back to the kid she had seen occasionally in her kitchen at home, demolishing a loaf of bread’s worth of toast with her brother as they messed about on her family’s computer, there hadn’t seemed much remarkable about him at all. She was pretty sure that she’d never paid him more than fleeting attention. I mean, who did, to their snotty little brother’s mates?

If she’d known then the success that he was going to achieve, the enigmatic figure that he was going to become, would she have paid more attention?

Probably not, she admitted, letting her smile spread to her eyes. Teenage boys were unbearable. It didn’t matter who they were going to grow up to be. She wondered if Finn remembered her as a teenager. Trying to swamp her emerging curves in giant T-shirts and baggy jeans. Whether he’d been one of the boys at school who had taken bets on whether they could sneak into the changing rooms while she was in PE and steal one of her bras.

No. Jake would have known. And he would never have allowed Finn in the house if that had been the case.

He looked nothing like the spotty, awkward-looking kid in worn-out trainers he had been then. She sneaked another glance at him while he was distracted by the baby, her journalist’s eye taking a quick inventory, hitting the important points. Designer jeans, discreet but expensive watch, crisp white T-shirt, showing no sign of doing battle with two babies. Really, that wasn’t fair. She was pretty sure her shirt had milk on it already and she’d only been here for an hour. But the clothes were all window-dressing, really.

It was the face that interested her. Because you could change your clothes. You could drag yourself out of poverty and change your life and wear a new wardrobe. But you couldn’t change your face. And when she looked at Finn, she could see him. The lost little boy who had spent more time in her family’s kitchen than his own. Who had turned up starving, and had left stuffed to the gills with food by her mum, who’d known that he was probably going back to a cold house and an empty fridge. Who’d been packed off with clothes that Mum had just happened to find at the charity shop next door to her work, that wouldn’t fit Jake and couldn’t be returned.

He’d been a part of her family for years. But those years had happened to coincide with her later teenage ones, when she had spent as much time as humanly possible hidden in her room, avoiding her family. And anyone else for that matter.

Her teenage years hadn’t exactly been a happy time, and being forced to revisit them, by virtue of the constant reminder that was Finn, hadn’t been a part of her plan. But, as she had nowhere else to go, she was stuck with him, and the memories.

Finn was still making goofy faces at the baby, so she took another minute to look at him. To see the man, rather than the boy. There was no hiding from the fact that somewhere along the line he had become...beautiful. There was no other word for it. High cheekbones sloped down into a strong, stubble-covered jaw. Wide green eyes under dark brows, and a full mouth curved into a smile as he chatted gibberish to his son. It was a pretty picture. If you liked that sort of thing. And the warmth low in her belly was all the proof—if proof were needed—that Madeleine absolutely did like that sort of thing.

She wondered if it had all changed him. The money. The success. The business. Of course it must have changed him. But how had it changed him? she wondered. Had it made him hard? Had he had to become tough, in order to break the cycle of poverty, finish his education, start his business? If it had, she couldn’t see it now, with the sunshine streaming in through the windows and a baby chuckling goofily up at him. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t lurking somewhere under the surface.

It didn’t matter, she told herself sternly. Because she was staying in his home, she was looking after his children, and what she thought about him personally was completely out of bounds. It didn’t matter if he was beautiful. It wouldn’t matter if he was tough. Because any sort of a relationship—even the shortest of flirtations, the most casual of flings—was completely off the cards.

And flings were the only sort of relationship that Madeleine could tolerate. Get in, have fun, get out before they could disappoint you. That was what ten years of working and dating in London had taught her. So she swiped right and accepted blind dates and chatted to guys in bars, always safe in the knowledge that she was going to cut ties before they had a chance to disappoint her.

And there was no question that she would always be disappointed in the end. She’d learnt that early on in her love life, before she had even left school. When it didn’t matter how sweet the boy was or how interested he pretended to be in her life; all he really wanted was to get a hand in her bra. And ever since she had worked that out, she had been happier. She accepted that no one saw past her body and her face, and all the assumptions that they would make about her. And as long as she didn’t expect more, she could have fun with th

em for a few weeks. Relationships happened on her terms, met her needs and ended when she decided. It had kept her bed warm and her evenings full since she had been in London, and she was happy with that.

Except...that would never lead to this, she thought, watching Finn with Hart. It didn’t lead to marriage and babies and a family of your own.

But she didn’t care about that, Madeleine reminded herself. Single dad of twins wasn’t exactly a nuclear family either. Nor were her brother and his husband and their adopted brood. She had other options if she decided that she wanted a family one day. Options that didn’t include pretending that the guys she hung out with were able to take her seriously enough to be interested in anything more than her body.

And that was before she even got started on her disastrous professional life, which had never recovered from her decision to quit university in her final year. Which had led to her not being able to get the political reporting internships that she had wanted, which had led to her being on the entertainment desk of a second-rate gossip website, which apparently hadn’t been generating enough income from its clickbait to actually continue paying its staff.

She shook herself, physically as well as metaphorically, causing Finn to look over at her.

‘Sorry, we were ignoring you,’ he said with a smile. ‘I got distracted.’

She smiled at the pair, who were really too cute to be real. She’d had no idea what the sight of a beautiful man with his baby could do to a girl’s ovaries, but she was pretty sure she’d just popped out an egg. And just as rapidly shut down those responses. This was just hormones. And stress. And...something of a dry spell. She wasn’t sure what else she should be blaming it on. It didn’t matter what the reasons were; the only thing that mattered now was that she shut it down.

‘It’s fine. I get it. I’m here to help, so just let me know what you want me to do.’

‘Will you watch him again for a few minutes?’ Finn asked, glancing at the clock on the wall. ‘I should really wake Bella. If she goes too far off his schedule then the whole day falls apart. Pick him up if he starts to grizzle.’ Which he started to do the minute that Finn moved away from him.

‘Of course,’ Madeleine said, taking Hart on her shoulder and rubbing his back out of instinct. Finn looked at her for a moment, and she felt herself starting to blush.

‘Jake was right. You really are a natural at this,’ he said, and Madeleine met his eyes, surprised.

‘Yeah, well, I’m the fun auntie. I have the easy job.’

Finn nodded, and Madeleine turned away, uneasy under his gaze. And a little embarrassed. She had assumed that he had been looking at her because, really, it was what she was used to. But of course he had been looking at his son.