“Nick…”
“And I brought you this.” He pulled a small, sealed envelope out of his back pocket and handed it over. “It’s from your friend Mary Curran. She was upset when she found out that you’d left the ship.”
Jenna winced. She hadn’t even thought of saying goodbye to the friend she’d made, and a twinge of guilt tugged at her.
“She said this is her telephone number and her e-mail address.” He stared at her. “She wants you to keep in touch.”
“I, uh, thanks.” She took the envelope.
He looked at her, hard and cold. His pale eyes were icy and his jaw was clenched so tightly it was a wonder his teeth weren’t powder. “Where are they?” he demanded.
Her mouth snapped closed, but she shot a look at the boys, jiggling in their bouncy seats. Nick followed her gaze and slowly turned. She watched as the expression on his face shifted, going from cool disinterest to uncertainty. Jenna couldn’t remember ever seeing Nick Falco anything less than supremely confident.
Yet it appeared that meeting his children for the first time was enough to shake even his equilibrium.
Walking toward them slowly, he approached the twins as he would have a live grenade. Jenna held her breath as she watched him gingerly drop to his knees in front of the bouncy seats and let his gaze move from one baby boy to the other. His eyes held a world of emotions that she’d never thought to see. Usually he guarded what he was thinking as diligently as a pit bull on a short chain. But now…Jenna’s heart ached a little in reaction to Nick’s response to the babies.
“Which one is which?” he whispered, as if he didn’t completely trust his voice.
“Um—” She walked a little closer, her sneakers squeaking a bit as she stepped off the rug onto the floor.
“No, wait,” he said, never looking at her, never taking his gaze off the twins, “let me.” Tentatively, Nick reached out one hand and gently cupped Jacob’s face in his big palm. “This one’s Jake, right?”
“Yes,” she said, coming up beside him, looking down at the faces of her sons who were both looking at Nick in fascination. As usual, though, Jacob’s mouth was open in a grin and Cooper had tipped his little head to one side as if he really needed to study the situation a bit longer before deciding how he felt about it.
“So then, you’re Cooper,” Nick said and with his free hand, stroked that baby’s rounded cheek.
Jenna’s breath hitched in her chest and tears gathered in her eyes. God, over the past several months, she’d imagined telling Nick about the boys, but she’d never allowed herself to think about him actually meeting them.
She’d never for a moment thought that he would be interested in seeing them. And now, watching his gentle care with her boys made her heart weep and every gentle emotion inside her come rushing to the surface. There was just something so tender, so poignant about this moment, that Jenna’s throat felt too tight to let air pass. When she thought she could speak again without hearing her voice break, she said, “You really were listening when I told you about them.”
“Of course,” he acknowledged, still not looking at her, still not tearing his gaze from the two tiny boys who had him so enthralled. “They’re just as you described them. They look so much alike, and yet, their personalities are so obvious when you’re looking for the differences. And you were right about something else, too. They’re beautiful.”
“Yeah, they are,” she said, her heart warming as it always did when someone complimented her children. “Nick,” she asked a moment later, because this was definitely something she needed to know, “why have you come here?”
He stood up, faced her, then glanced again at his sons, a bemused expression on his face. “To see them. To talk to you. After you left, I did a lot of thinking. I was angry at you for leaving.”
“I know. But I had to go.”
He didn’t address that. Instead he said, “I came here to tell you I’d come up with a plan for dealing with this situation. A way for each of us to win.”
“Win?” she repeated. “What do you mean ‘win’?”
Shifting his pale blue gaze back to hers, his features tightened, his mouth firming into a straight, grim line. A small thread of worry began to unspool inside of her, and Jenna had to fight to keep from grabbing up her kids and clutching them to her chest.
Only a moment ago she’d been touched by Nick’s first sight of his sons. Now the look on his face told her she wasn’t going to be happy with his “plan.”
“Look,” he said, shaking his head, sparing another quick glance for the babies watching them through wide, interested eyes, “it came to me last night that there was an easy solution to all of this.”
“I didn’t come to you needing a solution. All I wanted from you is child support.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll get that.” He waved one hand as if brushing aside something that didn’t really matter. “But I want more.”
That thread of worry thickened and became a ribbon that kept unwinding, spreading a dark chill through her bloodstream that nearly had her shivering as she asked, “How much more?”
“I’m getting to that,” he said. “Like I said, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since you left the ship. And finally, last night on the flight up here, it occurred to me that twins are a lot of work for any one parent.”
What was he getting at? Why was he suddenly shifting his gaze from hers, avoiding looking at her directly? And why had she ever gone to him? “Yes, it is, but—”
“So my plan was simple,” he said, interrupting her before she could really get going. “We split them up, each of us taking one of the twins.”
“What?”
Nine
Nick couldn’t blame her for the outrage.
She jumped in front of the babies and held her arms up and extended as if to fight him off should he try to grab the twins and run. “Are you insane? You can’t split them up,” she said, keeping her voice low and hard. “They aren’t puppies. You don’t get the pick of the litter. They’re little boys, Nick. Twins. They need each other. They need me. And you can’t take either of them away from me.”
He’d already come to the same conclusion. All it had taken was one look at the boys, sitting in their little seats, so close that they could reach out and touch each other. But he hadn’t known until he’d seen them.