Reunited by the Tycoon's Twins

by Ellie Darkins

  He could kick himself. It was his fault that she was so exhausted. As if she didn’t have enough going on in her life right now with losing her job and her flat, he had added sleep deprivation and crying babies onto her list of things to worry about. He should have just given her a place to stay, no questions asked, no strings attached. That was what she needed. That was what she deserved. Except he knew now that she wouldn’t have taken it. Jake must have known too, and he silently thanked his friend for looking out for Madeleine in a way that he hadn’t known how. From the moment that she had walked into his home she had thrown up walls between them so obvious that there hadn’t been any point offering to do this another way.

  But last night she hadn’t shut him out. She had let him in and told him something that he had a sneaking suspicion she hadn’t told anyone else about before. And then she had curled into him and slept and he had held onto her and sworn that he would keep her safe. It didn’t matter that she was already gently snoring by then. It didn’t even matter than she had been doing a pretty good job of keeping herself safe. He was there for her now. Whenever she needed him. Whatever she wanted from him. He would be there.

  Except... Except how could he promise that?

  With his failed marriage and the business that was desperate for him to return. With two babies who would always, absolutely and without exception, always come first. He had let Caro down, had been too distant, too absent, too distracted. What there was of him to share hadn’t been enough for her, and that was even before the twins had come along. Now there was less of him than ever, and he wanted Madeleine to have more than that. She deserved someone who was devoted to her. Who she could rely on. Not someone who was already pulled in more directions than he knew how to handle.

  But that was before he had woken up to her curled against his chest and tucked into his body. Now all his resolve was in very great danger of flying out of the window. What he wanted, more than anything, was to run his hands up the soft jersey covering her legs. To start at the delicate bone on her ankle that he hadn’t been able to leave alone last night. To stroke up over those strong, toned calves that he knew must be aching from their afternoon walking along the South Bank, and then the hours that they had spent pacing last night. He wanted to sweep his hands up over her back. To stop at the nape of her neck and pull her closer, to tip her face up to his and...

  ‘Finn? This is...’

  Delicious? Incredible? Perfect?

  ‘Awkward,’ she finished, pulling herself away and tucking herself into a ball at the other end of the sofa. ‘I’m sorry,’ she carried on, wrapping her arms around her knees.

  And he could see every single barrier that had dropped between them last night go flying back up. And he couldn’t even resent it, because she needed those barriers. They both did, because his own were faltering badly and one of them needed to be doing the sensible thing here: nipping this chemistry in the bud before it could get out of control and hurt one or both of them.

  Since she had first walked in here, they had both known that there was something between them. The way that they had avoided one another over the past few years, he wondered if they had known it longer even than that. But they also knew that it was completely out of bounds. It wasn’t something that either of them was going to be permitted to explore. It was something to avoid. To push into a tiny, tiny space in his mind and ignore until he forgot about it. Simple as that.

  ‘No, don’t be sorry,’ he said, standing and turning to the kettle. Anything for a distraction while he tried to compose himself and stuff his feelings into the tiny box where they belonged. Somehow both the babies were still sleeping. No wonder, he supposed, having been awake half the night. If they could keep it up long enough for him to have his first drink of the day then that would be just perfect.

  When he turned back round with a cup of tea in each hand, Madeleine was perching on the edge of the sofa, cardigan wrapped tight around her. It didn’t take a genius to work out that she was on the defensive. That cardigan, as deliciously soft as it had been against his skin when he had blinked awake a few minutes ago, was now being deployed as armour.

  How could he blame her? If she was feeling anything like as conflicted as he was this morning then she would need it.

  He glanced at his phone and flicked through his email, still not ready to look at Madeleine. Ah. The nanny agency. That was safe ground.

  ‘They’ve sent me a shortlist,’ he said casually, ‘of nannies to interview. Are you still okay to help with that? They’ve said they can send them over tomorrow.’

  ‘Sure. Do you need to go into the office today?’

  ‘Not if I can help it. But I could do with getting a few hours of work in my home office if we can manage it?’

  ‘Sure. Let me know what you need.’

  If they could just stay out of one another’s way today, maybe this awkwardness would wear off and they would find themselves back to normal tomorrow, he told himself. They’d go into his office and interview nannies and pretend that she hadn’t spent the night in his arms, however unusual the circumstances.

  Work was the distraction that he needed this morning. The reminder that his business still owed an unimaginably large amount of money for the new office building they had just taken possession of, and he couldn’t afford another day away from his computer, Sunday or not.

  By tomorrow, Madeleine and the twins would have had a couple of days to get used to one another and he could go into work with a clear conscience. But he couldn’t leave Madeleine completely alone with them after the night that they’d had. Not just the lack of sleep, but Madeleine had opened up to him, made herself vulnerable, and it didn’t feel right walking out and leaving her to deal with the fallout on her own. He had told her last night that he wanted to be here for her, and he’d meant it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, and he was pretty sure he had a handle on this Madeleine thing. They’d managed a whole day of being in the apartment together, caring for the babies, with him in and out of his home office, without a single personal conversation or ankle bone in sight. Even the babies had showed pity on them and had only woken for a quick feed in the night and gone straight back to sleep. Seemed everyone was as keen as he was to get them back on an impersonal footing. Well, good. They were both going to be grown-up about this and pretend that nothing had happened.

  ‘How about this for a plan for today?’ he suggested as they both sipped a coffee with their breakfast on Monday morning. ‘We both take the babies into the office. They’re treated like minor celebrities, so all you’ll have to do is try and keep track of which one has been taken to which department to be passed around for cuddles. I’ll make sure someone brings you a steady supply of coffee, and you can call me in for nappy emergencies. We’ll do the interviews there after lunch. Does that sound manageable?’

  ‘If that’s what nannying for you is like then I want the job permanently,’ she said with a slightly forced polite smile. ‘Baby snuggles, no nappies, endless lattes. Sign me up.’

  He reflected her creaky grin, wondering where the ease that he had felt before had gone. And then remembered where that ease had led them, and was grateful that they were both back to tiptoeing. ‘That deal is just for you. If you tell our interviewees then the deal’s off the table.’

  ‘Fine, fine. What time do you need to go in?’

  ‘Can you be ready by half seven?’ he asked. ‘It’d be good to be at my desk by eight.’

  She glanced at the clock on the wall and nodded. ‘How do you want to handle the babies? Take one each—divide and conquer? Or assembly line?’

  ‘God, right now I just want to leave them to sleep. If you can give me a hand to get their bags packed we can stick a clean nappy on them the minute before we need to walk out the door. They can party in their pyjamas this morning.’

  His kids could go out in their
PJs. He could forgo breakfast. But the one thing that he absolutely, definitely could not skip this morning was the cold shower he seemed to be permanently in need of these days.

  * * *

  He watched Madeleine closely as they walked through the lobby of his office building and couldn’t help the swell of pride that he felt when he saw the evidence of all he had achieved over the past few years. Seeing Madeleine had reminded him of where he had built all of this from in a way that never seemed to happen during his weekly drinks with Jake. His best friend had been there for him all along. He’d seen the first tiny office space that he had rented. And the larger building when the first investments started coming through. And then he had pored over the plans for this building when his company had outgrown its space again, and he had decided that he needed somewhere bespoke. Something that would help to create the vision he had of his company as somewhere creative and innovative and exciting.

  Except that wasn’t all he saw when he looked at his place. He also saw the scary number of zeros on his mortgage statement. The one that he wouldn’t have needed if he’d managed to hold his marriage together. This was everything that he had worked for, and everything that he stood to lose if he lost control of his personal life a second time. Everything that he stood to lose if he forgot how vital it was to hold Madeleine at a distance and stop himself getting too close.

  There were glass open-plan areas, private offices. Different spaces to suit different personalities and moods. A building full of employees relying on him to keep this company afloat, to keep their wages and their own homes safe and secure.

  He chatted with the security guard as he got Madeleine signed in, and nearly lost a twin out of the pushchair before they had even left the lobby. This was always the problem when he brought the babies into work. They were whisked away to be showed off and he could hardly keep track of where they were. He had sold it to Madeleine as an easy morning out, but it was harder to keep track of the babies when they were here than it would be once they were toddling around a busy park by themselves.

  ‘The babies stay in the pushchair until we are upstairs,’ Finn said to the guy with a beard and a lumberjack shirt from the design floor who was swooping in to coo at them. ‘I promised Madeleine coffee and a comfortable seat before she started having to shepherd them.’

  He placed a hand on the small of her back as they crossed the lobby towards the lifts, but pulled it away when he felt her stiffen. So, normal service resumed, he confirmed with a small smile. Good. That was what they both needed. Something had happened between them that night on the sofa. Barriers had come down that he had feared would be impossible to rebuild. She had shared so much with him that he’d thought he had felt the substance of their friendship shift, but it seemed he had been wrong.

  This wasn’t beyond saving. They could get themselves back somewhere safe, where they could be friends who saw each other occasionally at Jake’s family events. Finding the right nanny, and helping Madeleine decide what she wanted to do next, would make that happen even faster.

  Madeleine’s eyes widened further when he opened the door into his private office, and was it really so terrible to feel such a swell of pride at the expression on her face? It was only as he was hovering at the open glass door into his corner office that he realised how desperate he was for her approval. He stood back and waited while she took a step into the office and then abandoned the pushchair to cross over to the window and look out across the panorama of the London skyline.

  ‘We didn’t need to queue for the Eye at all,’ she said as her eyes scanned first one way and then the other across the capital. ‘We could have just come up here,’ Madeleine said with a raised eyebrow and a wry smile.

  He laughed and shrugged as he walked over to join her. ‘Ah, but you were so keen to do the tourist thing.’

  She bumped his shoulder in a friendly way that made him think that their intimacy maybe hadn’t disappeared completely with the passage of a too-polite day.

  ‘Seriously, Finn. This is amazing. I hope you’re proud, because I am.’ She glanced up at him. ‘Does that sound really condescending? I’m not sure I care if it does because I mean it. I’m really proud of you. You built all this from scratch while I was writing terrible copy I don’t even want to put my name to.’

  She must have caught the look that he aimed in her direction at that self-deprecating remark and stopped herself short. Good. He hated that she talked herself down like that. After everything that she had told him over the past few days he wanted to destroy people and places and generally rage out on her behalf. But he couldn’t. The only thing that he could do was support her and protect her, even from herself.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, sincerity giving his voice a gravelly edge that surprised him. ‘It means a lot that you think that.’

  They stood in silence for a few moments more, transfixed by the sight of the city below.

  ‘When we were up in the Eye,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘you couldn’t take your eyes off the Houses of Parliament. That’s what you wanted when you were at university, right? Before you had to leave. You wanted to work there.’

  He saw surprise on her face, indecision cross her features as she considered him and he prayed to whoever would listen that she would take the leap and trust him with the truth. If she could only be honest with him in the dimmed light of the early hours when they were half delirious with fatigue then this wasn’t a friendship. It wasn’t anything, really.

  She looked him dead in the eye and he held his breath.

  ‘Yes. I wanted to work there. Desperately. As far back as I can remember.’

  ‘And after...’

  ‘After I dropped out of uni I had to accept that it was never going to happen. I missed my chance.’

  She took a few long breaths and Finn kept his eyes on the city, giving her the privacy he knew she needed to compose herself. He sensed her straighten her spine, push her shoulders back and he finally glanced over at her.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ he told her. ‘If you want to go back. You could finish your degree.’

  She shook her head, her expression fixed and fierce. ‘That ship has sailed. It’s sunk. It was in flames as it went down. There’s no way that I’m going back into that world. Not if it means explaining what happened.’

  He laid a hand on her shoulder, wishing he could offer more comfort than that. That he could take her in his arms and protect her as every muscle in his body was urging him to do. But their lives were more complicated than following base urges. There was too much at stake to ignore all the reasons why she needed protecting from him as much as from anyone. What she needed was support, and the only way he could really give her that was by absolutely indisputably refusing to fall in love with her.

  ‘But you still want it,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have to tell anyone what happened if you don’t want to. Lots of people go back to university.’

  She whipped round to look at him. ‘And how would I pay for it? It costs ten times what it did when I was there before. Even just repeating the final year is beyond what I can imagine being able to afford. I don’t know if the credits from the earlier semesters are even valid any more so I might have to repeat those too. That’s before I even get to the question of where I would live and what I would eat. It’s impossible, Finn, so please just leave it.’

  ‘Of course it’s not impossible. I’ll pay for it.’

  The look of horror that she shot him hit him straight in the gut, and he recoiled at the anger on her face. He couldn’t believe that he had just offered that. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it. His personal finances had been incredibly rocky around the time of his divorce, but some judicious investments had paid off, so that he could breathe easy again at night rather than lying awake, worried that he was bringing two babies into a world that was too precarious for him to be able to guarantee that they w
ould always be well fed and warm.

  ‘God. No, Finn. Absolutely not. That’s never going to happen.’

  ‘Why not?’ He had helped hundreds, maybe thousands of people go to university by now with his scholarship funds and early intervention programmes he had started early in his career, wanting to see other kids like him follow him up that ladder. Of course he would pay her tuition. Her housing. Whatever she needed.

  ‘Because it would be weird,’ Madeleine said. ‘And inappropriate. And uncomfortable.’

  ‘Weirder or more uncomfortable than me eating breakfast at your house every day for seven years? Uncomfortable like me wearing Jake’s hand-me-down school uniforms? Weird like that time I came on a family holiday with you?’

  ‘That’s different,’ she said, though they both knew it wasn’t. He let it slide this time. ‘Anyway, what would we tell Jake?’

  ‘How about to mind his own business?’ Finn offered. ‘Or we don’t tell him anything. Or, um, I don’t know, something outrageous like I’m helping you out because you’re family and because I want to and I’m in a position to.’

  God, there were a lot of ‘I’s in that sentence, he realised as he stopped speaking. This wasn’t about him. It was about her. If he didn’t think that it was what she wanted, he wouldn’t be pushing this. But there was something about the way that she had looked out the window that made him think that she hadn’t given up on this dream just yet. That she still wanted it. That if he could help with the practicalities, clear obstacles from her way, she could go back to it.

  ‘He’d ask awkward questions.’

  ‘Like what? It’s not like there’s anything going on between us. We have nothing to hide from him. He can ask what he likes.’

  His words seemed to freeze out the rest of the world, because he had never in his life heard something that was so completely true and such an enormous lie at the same time. They hadn’t slept together, hadn’t even kissed. They had both sworn that nothing like that was ever going to happen between them. And yet they were stupid if either of them truly believed that there was nothing going on. Because he was fighting the urge to kiss her every minute they were together. And the urge to fall in love with her every second.