Reunited by the Tycoon's Twins

‘Oh, no, Madeleine. I see how it looks and I promise it’s not like that. Not at all. I just wanted to help and you were so excited about university and this way you could be sure you had the finances in place. Please, please will you stick around until I’ve got the kids to sleep and we can talk about it properly?’

He couldn’t do this in a stage whisper, waiting for a cry from the twins. He just needed her to wait one hour and they could sort all this out.

She glanced at her watch and then at the front door, and for a second he thought that he’d lost her. But she dropped the bag and his heart started beating again, a tattoo of relief.

‘I’ll wait in the kitchen until seven-thirty,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘But after that I’m going and I’m not coming back, Finn.’

‘I’ll be down before then, I promise you, and we will sort this out.’

* * *

Madeleine sat in the kitchen nursing a cup of tea and texting Jake while she waited for Finn to get the babies to sleep. She’d dropped him a text asking if she could stay the night, and he’d texted straight back asking what had happened with Finn. And so it begins, she thought. Suddenly she could see endless questions about ‘What happened with Finn?’ in her future and had no idea how to answer them.

And if she didn’t tell, then Jake was only going to ask Finn, and she didn’t even want to think about what he would tell her brother. Surely he wouldn’t be so base as to tell him what had happened. But then before today she hadn’t thought that he would chuck a big lump of cash in her bank account after they had spent the night together either. Turned out she didn’t know Finn as well as she’d thought that she did.

Which shouldn’t have been a surprise, really, considering that they had only spent a handful of days together since she had left her childhood home for university. But in those few days he had really convinced her that he understood her. That he knew her. She had told him things that she had never told anyone else. And he hadn’t listened at all. Not really listened, not if he thought that he could treat her the way that he had today and that she would be fine with that.

She thought about the explanations that he had given her: that he wanted her to have certainty about her university finances, as if she were some eighteen-year-old schoolgirl who needed someone to help her navigate the world of student loans, rather than a woman the other side of thirty who had been handling her overdraft for nearly half her life and was perfectly capable of finding a scholarship for herself.

He didn’t think she could do it.

If the money wasn’t payment for services rendered, then it was something else. It was a tacit acknowledgement that he didn’t think that she would be able to do it by herself. He was rescuing her before she even needed it, so sure was he that she was going to fail. By the time that he walked into the room at seven twenty-five, she was halfway decided that she was just going to walk without hearing him out. What could he possibly say that would make up for his utter lack of faith in or respect for her?

‘Madeleine, if you’ll hear me out, I’d like to explain.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything you can say, Finn,’ she said, crossing her arms across her body and making it clear she was putting firm boundaries in place. As far as she was concerned, the intimacies of last night had never happened. ‘I stayed because I didn’t want to do this in front of the twins, and they needed to go to sleep. But you can’t undo what you did, so I think it’s best if I go. I’ll return the money, of course. It’s best if we keep out of each other’s way for a while.’

He shook his head and came to lean on the kitchen island opposite her. She couldn’t look him in the eyes, not if she wanted to remember that she was keeping her distance, emotionally as well as physically.

‘You don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘I realise now what it must look like, and I’m sorry. But I was always going to give you the money for university. It had nothing to do with last night.’

‘It had nothing to do with what I actually wanted either,’ Madeleine said, finding in her anger that she could look at him directly. ‘I know you expect me to be grateful, but I didn’t ask for your money. I didn’t want it when you offered it to me. I can do this myself, and I have every intention of doing so.’

‘But you don’t need to,’ he countered, looking genuinely confused that she might want to do this on her own. ‘Why won’t you accept a little help?’

‘Why won’t you accept that I don’t need your help?’ she said, sliding off her stool and standing opposite him. ‘Yes, you did me a favour by letting me stay here, but I want to get back on my own feet. I’ve never wanted to be dependent on you. Not before last night, and definitely not after.’

He frowned at her, and she wondered if he was being dense on purpose. ‘Would that be so awful, having to depend on another person?’ Finn asked.

‘Do you depend on anyone?’ she asked. ‘Do you look to someone else to pay your bills?’ She planted her hands on her hips, trying to ground herself and stay rational. But he was so infuriating it was becoming an impossible task. ‘No. You did it all yourself, but you don’t believe that I can. If you believed in me, you wouldn’t have to sneak money into my bank account like that.’

Finn threw his hands in the air, and she could tell he was as frustrated as she was. ‘Of course I believe that you can do it yourself. I just don’t think you should have to. This way you can be certain that you’ve got a place to stay. I don’t see why that’s a bad thing.’

‘I was sure that I could find another way. You’re the only one who wasn’t.’

‘But why risk the uncertainty?’ he asked, and she could hear his frustration in the strain of his voice. ‘Why risk finding yourself with nowhere to live? Again.’

She talked low and slow, so he couldn’t be in any doubt about how angry she was

with him. ‘I can risk it because I believe in myself. It’s called confidence, Finn. Faith. Something you seem to be lacking in me.’

His hands had dropped to the countertop now, and he was leaning heavily on it.

‘I don’t think you understand. If something went wrong...’

‘You don’t think I understand? I turned up on your doorstep with nowhere else to go, with no job and no idea of what I was going to do next. And you think I don’t understand? If something went wrong, I would try again,’ she said, still speaking slowly. ‘And I would keep trying until I’d done it. Isn’t that how you got to where you are?’

‘Yes, but...’