She rinsed her toothbrush and put it away, then glanced in the mirror and sighed. She looked no better now than she had in the hospital that morning except that her hair was clean. She started to walk out of the bathroom, then remembered the little intercom thing around her neck and pressed the button.
“You finished?” Cole asked through the door. She heard the tension in his voice and wondered about it.
“Yes, I am,” she replied. She was barely finished speaking when the door opened and Cole was standing in front of her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked when he scooped her up. She wanted to ask him to put her down but remembered Doc’s orders and refrained.
“It makes me crazy to have you out of sight,” he said. “Either Dillon or me has to be with you all the time. We promised honey, remember?”
She remembered, but she hadn’t meant it quite so literally. If she had them staring at her twenty-four seven she’d lose her mind. “We’re gonna have to talk about that.”
Cole’s arms tightened around her for a moment before he set her back in bed. “We’ll talk,” he agreed. “Later. Right now you’re gonna eat. Dillon’s fixing you a tray.”
“I’d rather eat in the kitchen, if that’s all right,” she said. “I’m gonna get cabin fever in a hurry if I’m stuck in one room all the time.”
“You sure you feel up to it?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Okay,” he said, picking her up again. “But remember, no walking around.”
“Doc said I could walk a little if I went real slow,” she pointed out.
“No, he said you could walk to the bathroom if you go real slow,” Cole corrected as he left the bedroom and began walking up a very long hallway. “He was talking about a short distance, like the one between your bed and the bathroom in your apartment. This is a big house, baby. When we told him how big, he changed those orders a bit.”
Jenna frowned, but Cole continued walking up the hall past door after door, then into the big living room and across a dining room before entering an enormous kitchen. She had to admit that he was right. This was a big house. Just taking a couple of steps in the bathroom had been enough for her to realize how weak she really was. Walking from room to room in this house would be difficult, if not impossible, until she got stronger.
“What’s going on?” Dillon asked as Cole set her carefully on a padded chair at a beautiful oval white oak kitchen table.
“She wanted a change of scenery,” Cole said.
“Good idea,” Dillon said, picking up the tray he’d prepared for her and carrying it to the table. He transferred a steaming bowl of vegetable beef soup to the placemat in front of her along with some hot rolls, butter, and other dishes she didn’t really notice. One whiff of the soup and she was ravenous. She picked up her spoon and dug in.
“Is it hot enough?” Dillon asked.
“Yes, it’s perfect,” she said. “Meg makes the best soup.”
“She does,” Cole agreed, watching her eat with a faint smile. “Slow down baby, there’s more where that came from.”
Jenna went completely still for a long moment. “Sorry,” she said softly, her face red with embarrassment. She slowly returned her spoon to the bowl and released it. Then she folded her hands in her lap and leaned back in her chair, wanting nothing more than to run from the room or crawl under the table. Since she couldn’t do either, she dropped her eyes and remained as motionless as she could.
“You’ve got nothing to apologize for,” Cole said, frowning as he watched her withdraw. “I was just teasing. Now finish your soup.”
“I’ve had enough, thank you,” she said quietly.
Cole looked at Dillon who was scowling at him. Well hell. He grabbed a chair and pulled it around close to Jenna and sat down. “Look at me, baby,” he said gently.
She glanced up at him, then away so quickly he almost missed it. “Yes?”
“You haven’t eaten since breakfast and even then you didn’t eat very much,” he said. “You ate less than that yesterday because of what happened. You’re pregnant with twins, and you’ve lost a lot of weight. Weight you didn’t have room to lose even before you got pregnant. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you with my teasing and I promise not to do it again, but you have to eat. For your sake, and for the babies too.”
“Maybe later,” she said without looking up, her face white now instead of red. “I’m not hungry right now.”
“Okay,” Cole forced himself to agree calmly. Doc had warned them repeatedly against upsetting her. Even if he hadn’t, the way her face had gone from red to white was enough for him to know he’d said enough. “Maybe you could just nibble a bit while you keep us company. Would you mind?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks, baby,” he said. He wanted to kiss her, but after her comment about her right to privacy he’d noticed that it made her uncomfortable, so he didn’t. He just got up, returned his chair to where it belonged and sat down at the table across from Dillon. They started on their own dinners, both of them painfully aware that she didn’t reach for her spoon again.
Cole remembered Meg’s comment that they didn’t know Jenna at all, and he was just starting to understand how right she’d been. They loved her, but there was a lot they didn’t know about her.
“You were very upset earlier today,” Dillon said after a few minutes. “I’m not going to ask you why, but I want you to know that whenever you’re ready to tell us, we’ll listen.”
“All right, thank you,” she said, her voice soft and polite, her eyes fixed on her hands.
“There’s something we want to tell you, if you think you’re up for it,” Cole said. “We don’t wanna upset you again so it’s up to you.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “You can say whatever you like.”
Dillon and Cole exchanged glances, then looked back at her. “Okay,” Dillon said. “We’ll give it a try, but please don’t hesitate to stop us the moment you start to get upset.” Jenna nodded.
“We come from a family of menage relationships, going back five generations,” he began. “We had three fathers, all brothers, and they loved our mother so much it spilled over onto everyone around them. We’d go to school and our friends would talk about their own parents fighting, getting divorced, and having to spend holidays with one while living with another. Things we couldn’t conceive of. Oh, our parents fought sometimes. And how.” He looked down at his bowl, smiling at the memory. “But they never stayed mad for more than a couple hours. We had a happy family, and a happy home life. Then, when we were ten years old, everyone in our family except for us was killed in a plane crash.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jenna said, looking up at them for the first time since she’d stopped eating.
“Thank you, honey,” Cole said. “It was a difficult time for us. We had two older sisters, twins, like us. Their names were Marline and Maxine, but we called ‘em Marli and Maxi. Mom and the Dads promised them a trip to the city for their sixteenth birthday, and they took our grandparents along, too. We had the flu, so we couldn’t go. Marli and Maxi offered to postpone the trip till we got better, but we knew how much they’d been looking forward to it. You can’t imagine how many times over the years we’ve regretted telling them to go on without us.” Cole paused a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was very low, and rough. “Their plane went down in the mountains during a freak storm.”
“I’m sorry,” Jenna said again, her voice soft and sincere. “What happened to you two?”
“Our folks were wealthy,” Dillon said. “And smart. We had a guardian who looked after us, and a whole slew of people who managed our estate until we were eighteen. Then we inherited everything with provisions that prevented us from losing it all until we learned how to manage it properly ourselves.”
“By then we’d already decided that we wanted to have a marriage like our folks had,” Cole said. “But the area we lived in was growing, new people were coming in, and things were
changing. People didn’t much care for the fact that the Howard brothers wanted to take the same girl to the prom, or to the movies. We learned to keep our preferences to ourselves quick enough. Four years of pretending to be other than we were while we were in college was enough for us to know we couldn’t live that way. That’s when we heard about Sparx. We came out here to check it out and decided it was exactly what we wanted. We pulled up stakes and bought land here. Twelve years later we were still looking for that one special woman.”
“What special woman?” Jenna asked, her eyes once again fixed on her hands.
“The one woman who would love both of us, and let us love her in return,” Cole said.
“The one we could have a family with,” Dillon added. “The family we’ve yearned for since we lost our own. You were right about us, Jenna. We want a family more than you can imagine. But it’s got to be with that one special woman, what we call our one. Our one and only. No one else will do.”
She nodded again. They spoke of a dream. A fantasy. She understood the desire. She’d had it herself once. She knew better now.
“Ever since we lost our family, we’ve looked forward to the day we could make a new one for ourselves.” She looked up just as Cole smiled at her, sending a chill down her back. She dropped her eyes to her hands again as he continued speaking. “Things are a bit backwards from what we imagined, but we can live with that. Knowing we’re going to be daddies to those babies you’re carrying makes the order of events a helluva lot less important than it was.”
She nodded slowly but didn’t look up at them. “I get it,” she said coolly. “Maybe this time around it’ll sink in that it’s never safe to trust anyone.” Cole and Dillon frowned at each other, confused by her reaction.
“What does that mean?” Cole asked.
There was nothing about the question that should have made her angry. Jenna knew that. Maybe it was the tone of his voice, or the way he’d smiled at her. And maybe it was that after holding everything in for so long, the pressure just got to be too much. Whatever the reason, the dam broke and when it did, she had neither the power nor the will to stop it.
“I went out on one date with you and you spent one night fucking me,” she said in a low, strained voice. “Then you spent five and a half months avoiding me like I had the plague. Now, all of a sudden, I can’t blink without one of you breathing down my neck, grabbing my hands, carrying me around, bathing me when I’m sedated and can’t protest, and kissing me like you got the right to do whatever you want just because that’s what you want. You run around telling people how much I mean to you, and that you love me. Love me? Really? Did my pregnancy give you amnesia? If so, let me remind you that I’m a slut and damaged goods. Oh, and that you can do a helluva lot better than me. Or are your standards for a brood mare that much lower than your standards for a girlfriend?”
She looked from one of them to the other, her eyes so dry they burned. “I struggled and worried and worked so hard for so long, doing my best for my babies, scared to death every minute of every day that I’d lose them. You didn’t care enough about me to pick up the phone. Not one fucking time. Now all of a sudden you love me?” She laughed, a sharp bark of sound that cut off suddenly. “Then you swoop in out of nowhere and why? Because it suddenly occurred to you after all this time that you care about me? Bullshit. I wondered how it was possible that in a town the size of Sparx you’d never heard I was pregnant, but now I get it. I was insurance, right? Just in case that other woman’s pregnancy didn’t work out the way you hoped, and good thing too, cause nope, no baby there. But that’s okay because you had me on the back burner. That’s why you showed up all of a sudden to apologize. How lucky for you that stupid, gullible, disposable Jenna was just sitting there growing babies for you to take the minute they pop out. Even better, there’s two of ‘em. One for each of you.”
She pushed her chair back and stood up, her face white, her lips bloodless, her entire body shaking and trembling so violently it was a surprise she managed to stay on her feet. “You can take my babies and I can’t stop you,” she said. “I know that all too well. You’re rich, I’m not, and there’s no sense in me trying to fight it. But I’m not staying here with the two of you for one more minute. I’m calling Hank right now to come and get me. You’ll have to wait for my babies to actually be born before you can take them away from me. In the meantime I don’t want to lay eyes on either of you.”
Cole and Dillon were shocked speechless as they watched her turn and walk away. Not only by her words, but also by the depth and breadth of the pain and anger she’d kept hidden so well that they’d never suspected it existed. She was out of the kitchen and half way across the dining room before their shock wore off enough for their brains to kick in. They both stood up so fast their chairs fell over but they didn’t even notice as they ran after her. Just before they reached her she turned around, her face more gray than white now, her lips blue.
“Don’t touch me,” she warned tightly. “If either of you touches me I’ll completely lose it and then there won’t be any babies for you to take.”
Cole stared at Jenna, terrified by how bad she looked, especially the blue color of her lips. They should’ve asked Doc more about the damage to her heart and lungs, he realized. Guilt washed through him.
“We have to touch you, Jenna,” Dillon said. “We have to carry you back to your room. Doc said no walking, remember? It’s not good for you or the babies.”
“The babies,” she said, with a bitterness they’d never imagined her capable of. “We wouldn’t want the two of you to be deprived, would we? It’s so damn ironic it’s almost funny. I got raped, ended up pregnant, and he damn near killed me while murdering my child. The second time I have sex I end up pregnant with twins that you’ll do anything to keep. Either way, I pay the price, and I lose everything.”
She turned and started walking again, not even knowing where she was going. Suddenly she found herself sobbing so hard she couldn’t breathe. She barely noticed when she was picked up and cradled against a warm, hard chest. When she did notice it, she could only accept it, too exhausted and too heartbroken to struggle.
“Angel, you’ve got to stop crying,” Dillon said, holding her close. “It’s not good for you, and it’s silly besides. We don’t wanna take your babies from you. We want you and them. We want all of us to be a family.”
Jenna took a deep, shuddering breath of air, his words sinking slowly into her mind. She frowned, wondering if she’d heard right. She opened her eyes to see Dillon looking down at her.
“What?” she asked, her voice a faint rasp.
“Didn’t you listen?” Cole asked, hovering close on her other side. “We waited twelve years for you, Jenna. Hell, more than that. We’ve waited for you since our family died more than twenty years ago. Without you, nothing else matters.”
“You said you got it backwards.”
“I meant we should have married you before we got you pregnant. We love you, Jenna. It wasn’t a lie. I swear to God it wasn’t.”
“We came to town last week to beg you to give us another chance,” Dillon said. “We didn’t see enough of you to notice you were pregnant then. We didn’t find out until yesterday, when you told us in the alley behind your shop. I know it’s hard to believe no one told us before that, but it’s the truth. Everyone in Sparx loves you, Jenna, and they were bound and determined to keep your secret since that’s all they could do to help you.”
She heard water running, then shut off. A moment later Cole was patting her face with a cool cloth.
“Feel better?” he asked, relieved to see that her lips were pink again and her face, while pale, didn’t look gray anymore. She nodded wearily.
“Tired angel?” Dillon asked.
“Yeah,” she replied even though she’d only been awake for an hour. It had been a very emotional and stressful hour though. “It’s been a long day.”
“It has,” Dillon agreed as he carried her into the
bedroom. He set her on the edge of the bed and picked up her hair brush from the bedside table while Cole went to get her a glass of water and her prenatal vitamins. Dillon brushed her hair out, gently untangling a lock that had gotten twisted around the cord holding the intercom remote before slipping it off and setting it on the bedside table. He braided her hair more efficiently than she’d have done herself even without her injured arm, then picked her up again before slipping her into the center of the bed after she took her vitamins. Within moments Dillon and Cole were stripped and in bed beside her, shocking her speechless.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re sleeping with you,” Cole said.
“No,” she said, near tears at the thought of another argument. “Please. This isn’t fair.”
“Why isn’t it fair?” Cole asked, then spoke again before she had a chance to answer. “I’m sorry, Jenna, you’re right. We don’t have any right to be kissing you and touching you as though you’re ours, especially after what we did. But we don’t do it because we feel like we can do whatever we want. We do it because we love you, and we’ve missed you more than you know. I swear we’ll never try to take it any further without your consent. But if you want us to stop altogether, then we will. It’s up to you, Jenna. It’s always up to you.”
“That’s the least true thing you’ve said to me today,” she said. “It was your choice to ask me out, your choice to attack me that morning without giving me a chance to explain, your choice to stay gone for five and a half months, your choice to offer to help me, your choice to bring me here, to your house. If you decide in the morning to toss me out on my ear that’s your choice too and there’s not a single damn thing I can do about it so please don’t tell me any of this is my choice.”
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