Reunited by the Tycoon's Twins

‘No, I’m here to help,’ she said, drawing her eyebrows together and wondering why he was looking so warily at her. ‘I’m happy to do it. That’s the whole point of me coming to stay.’

‘But...’ He hesitated, and Madeleine knew from the look on his face that he was thinking about what had happened the night before. It wasn’t going away, she realised. They had spent the last hour or two pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but it had been there the whole time, hovering over them, adding pressure to their day.

‘Go on,’ Madeleine said, aware that they were opening a can of worms. ‘Say what you were going to say.’

‘It’s just... I wouldn’t expect you to do the night shift on your own. And I’m worried that if we were to see each other like that—upstairs, in the middle of the night—that it would make you...uncomfortable. And that is the last thing I want.’

She sat up, drawing her knees up to her chest, and tried to fix him with a solid, stern look. ‘You don’t have to tiptoe around me, Finn. I’m not going to swoon or faint or have a panic attack if I see you after ten p.m. I’m really not the swooning type.’

‘I never said you were,’ Finn said, mirroring her body language and sitting upright beside her. ‘But something happened last night, and I don’t want to make you feel that way again.’

‘You won’t,’ she promised, hoping that her voice sounded as sure as she felt. ‘It wasn’t you who made me feel like that anyway. It was me, being irrational.’

‘I don’t know about irrational.’ Finn’s face softened. ‘Seemed like you were in a place where rational or irrational didn’t mean much. You just looked frightened. And you don’t have to tell me why, if you don’t want. But you can’t stop me wanting to do everything in my power to stop you ever feeling like that again.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s not your job.’

‘I never said it was a job. But you’re...we’re... You’re my friend, Madeleine, and I don’t want to see my friend hurting like that.’

‘We’re not friends, Finn,’ she said softly, meeting his gaze. ‘We’ve never been friends.’

She didn’t say it to hurt him, and she didn’t expect the expression on his face—as if she’d struck him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she added quickly. ‘I didn’t mean it as a bad thing. It’s just...true. We aren’t, really. Are we? We’ve never hung out. You don’t call or text for a chat. And that’s fine. You’re Jake’s friend, and you’re a part of the family. But I don’t think we’re friends.’

He stared at her for a long time, and she wished she could crack open that skull and see what he was thinking. What the narrowing of his eyes and the crease of his brow meant.

‘I’d like to be,’ he said at last. ‘If we’re living together, however temporarily, it would be nice if we were friends.’

She sighed. ‘You’re just saying this because I freaked out last night. You don’t have to do this. I’m not some fragile little girl who needs looking after.’

He actually laughed at that. ‘Fragile? You think I think you’re fragile? Last night I thought you might punch me. Or kick me in the balls... I never thought for a second you were fragile. Angry, yes. Frightened, yes. But never fragile.’

‘Really? I looked like that to you?’ She couldn’t help smiling at the thought of that. Because she hadn’t felt it. Hadn’t felt strong. But it turned out she quite liked knowing how Finn saw her. She had felt cornered and vulnerable. But it turned out her reaction to those feelings had been very much in the fight camp, and she gave herself a little mental pat on the back for that. Once upon a time, she’d frozen. And then run. She wished that in the past she’d had that anger, that fire she had now. She could have directed it at the person who’d really deserved it rather than an innocent bystander.

‘I... It wasn’t you I was mad at.’

‘I guessed as much,’ Finn said, dipping his head to meet her gaze when she tried to look away. She followed it back up, determined to be the fighter that he had said he’d seen in her, rather than meekly dropping her head as if she’d been the one in the wrong.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked. And she didn’t. She never had. But...she couldn’t bear the tiptoeing. Couldn’t bear the fact that she’d come to stay to help him out with the kids and now he thought that she couldn’t handle the night shift in case she bumped into him in the dark.

But talking about last night... That was complicated. Because it wasn’t just how she had acted. It was what he had said. He had just come straight out with it. He was attracted to her. He acknowledged the spark and the chemistry between them as if it was the most normal thing in the world. But it didn’t feel normal to her to be having

that conversation. What was she meant to say—yes, you were right, I’m totally hot for you and desperately trying to ignore it because doing anything else would be a spectacularly bad idea? That didn’t sound like a fun conversation. That sounded awkward and painful and suited to somewhere other than a kids’ sandpit.

And if they acknowledged those feelings here in the daylight, out in the real world, then how were they meant to carry on as normal? Sure, he had mentioned it last night. But those were extenuating circumstances. He had said it because she was having a major freak-out and he needed to clear the air for her to feel safe. That didn’t mean that he wanted to talk about it again, that he thought that those feelings meant anything—that they were important in any way.

They weren’t important to her. How could they be? So, he was attracted to her. Big deal: a lot of guys were. Since she’d been a teenager, her life had been a string of guys making a big deal out of how attracted to her they were, whether she was interested in their attention or not. Usually not.

But not this time.

And when she thought back to what he had said, he hadn’t actually said that he was attracted to her. Hadn’t mentioned her boobs or her body, like half the guys who came onto her, thinking that that was what she would want to hear. No, he had talked about connection. About spark. About something mutual between them. And that was dangerous. She wasn’t worried that he thought she was attractive. She was worried about the fact that he could see her attraction to him. That she wasn’t imagining the spark of something between them.

How long had it been there? She couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t there the first time they’d met, when he was a skinny, scrawny eleven-year-old and she was a sullen thirteen. Had it been there at Jake’s wedding five years ago? Thank goodness Jake and his husband had passed on the big traditional do and had listened to her insistence that she didn’t need to be a bridesmaid. For a fleeting second she felt the horror of being matched with Finn as the best man. Except Caro had been there anyway, smiling at Finn’s side for the best part of the day. Madeleine had given them a wide berth and had made polite conversation with Finn only when necessary.

No, she and Finn had never been friends, but now she found herself asking why that was. Why had there always been that distance between them, which had only seemed to get wider when he had married Caro?

Had she known on some level that these feelings had been growing under the surface all along? Had he? After all, he was the one who had called them out into the open now. Was it so difficult to imagine that he had been aware of them before this week?