Reunited by the Tycoon's Twins

He waited in silence to see where that sentence was going. But it seemed either Madeleine didn’t know or didn’t want to share it with him, because her voice faded out. Her eyes dropped too. To his lips, and then back up again.

Her lower lip slipped between her teeth and she bit down, and he knew that they were thinking the exact same thing. How would it feel to press his mouth against her lips? To feel the slide and the power of them beneath his own? To taste and to test? To press against her until they were stretched out on the grass, the sun hot on their bodies as they explored beneath their clothes?

The cry of a baby behind him brought that stifled groan to life, and Madeleine took a breath as she glanced over at the pushchair.

Maybe it was for the best, he considered as he followed her gaze and saw Hart stirring.

And maybe he was going to spend the rest of the day wondering exactly where that look might have taken them if they hadn’t been interrupted. He had a feeling he knew which way that was going to pan out. And it didn’t look good for his peace of mind.

CHAPTER SEVEN

OH. MY. HAD that been a moment? Had they just had a moment? One second she’d thought she was just picking at some antipasti, and the next Finn was looking at her like he wanted to eat her. In a really, really good way. He had watched her lips until her eyes had been drawn to his mouth too, and just as her body had begged her to find out what it would feel like—

Hart had woken up, and the moment was gone. Because she was not ready to deal with how much she’d wanted that kiss to happen.

Not like this. Not with Finn.

Because she knew what she wanted from her relationships. She wanted predictability, and the balance of power firmly on her side. She wanted to be able to walk away when she decided it was over because that was the only way that she knew how to handle this stuff. To be fair to herself, it was the only way that she had tried. Maybe, if she’d wanted to, she could have had a go at something different and made that work too. But she never had, because that meant opening herself up to getting hurt and she had precisely zero interest in doing that. Not with Finn, or with anyone else.

But when Finn looked at her like that—like he wanted to eat her, to consume her, to make her a part of him—she wanted to find out what that felt like. She wanted to give herself over to it and care precisely nothing about the consequences. Because she was pretty sure that the not knowing was going to kill her. The not knowing, and the being so damn close that she could practically taste him. Which was why she had to get up off this blanket and start walking and stop thinking before she did something she would regret later.

* * *

That night, Madeleine slipped between the cool cotton sheets and stretched out her feet, pointing her toes until she was sure that some part of her foot would just snap completely. After the babies had woken up they had played in the park with them for nearly an hour, pushing swings and taking gentle turns of the roundabout, rocking horses and adventures in diggers.

And then, with the picnic bag empty—and the coffee flask dangerously so—they had headed away from the green oasis in search of sugar and caffeine to keep them fuelled until the babies decided that they’d had enough of exploring and wanted to sleep in the pram. She wished she’d realised before she’d started how many miles you could cover with babies who would only sleep on the move. She couldn’t have been more grateful when they’d woken and informed them—at some considerable volume, that it was time to go home now, please.

Once they were through the doors of the house, it had been a whirlwind of steamed veg and finger food and sterilising bottles. Bathing naked babies and wriggling them into Baby-gros and humming nursery rhymes.

By the time that she and Finn had collapsed in front of the TV she couldn’t have cared less that they might have had a moment back there on the picnic blanket. All she wanted was spadefuls of the mac and cheese that Finn had found in the freezer, and the sweet, sweet oblivion of sleep. Neither of them had managed more than half an hour of the movie they’d stuck on before giving up any pretence that they would be awake later than nine o’clock.

It felt as if her head had barely hit the pillow before the crying began, but a glance at the time on the front of her phone told her that it had been a couple of hours. Turned out midnight really was the witching hour. She could leave Finn to it, she supposed—they were his kids currently screaming the house down. But she was here to help him out and what was even the point of these awkward living arrangements if she wasn’t doing that?

She stumbled out of bed and threw on her cardigan, pulling on socks in anticipation of the tile floors downstairs. She pulled her hair into a ponytail high on her head, opened her door and nearly crashed into Finn, who was holding a wailing Bella on his shoulder and a tear-stained Hart on his hip.

‘Oh, thank God,’ Finn said, shoving Hart in her direction. ‘Would you take him? He’s settled for now but I just can’t get him down.’

‘I don’t—’

But her reply was cut short by the arrival of Hart on her hip and she didn’t have any choice but to hold on. He gave her an uncertain look and his bottom lip wobbled, but no tears were forthcoming for now.

‘Is there something wrong with Bella?’ she asked as she followed him and Bella’s cries down the hall.

‘Teeth? Wind? Existential angst? Your guess is as good as mine at this point.’

‘How long has she been crying?’

‘An hour? Half an hour? A week...?’

‘Do you want me to take her?’

Finn’s face creased as he peered at Bella, and Madeleine could see the ruminations behind his eyes as he tried to work out what was wrong.

‘Maybe she’s sick of me,’ he said with a shrug before completing some sort of superpower twin manoeuvre which resulted in her finding that she was now holding Bella and Finn was bouncing Hart.

‘What do I do?’ Madeleine asked, aware that her eyes were widening in alarm as Bella’s volume picked up a notch and the bouncing and patting that had worked with Hart the night before only seemed to make things worse.

‘This...this is the part where we pace,’ Finn said, heading past her door to the end of the corridor, bouncing and patting as he went. And pace they did. Long past her feet hurting. Long after her back started to ache and her shoulders started to burn. She saw half an hour tick by on her phone. Then an hour. By the time that Bella stopped screaming, they had moved their pacing down to the k