Triple the Fun

by Maureen Child

  “Ireland?”

  Seven

  Dina was being treated like a princess.

  And she felt like a fraud.

  For heaven’s sake, she’d been whooshed through security, bypassing the thousands of people lined up at the other terminals, in favor of the charter jet area that was practically empty in comparison. That’s when she discovered that flying on a KingJet was a far different experience than flying coach on a regular airliner.

  The KingJet boasted comfy leather seats, a full bar and three cribs bolted to the floor to accommodate sleeping triplets. There was room to wander around and a bathroom—complete with shower—that was as luxurious as the rest of the plane. During the long flight to Ireland she’d relaxed by watching movies on a big-screen TV while Connor buried himself in work.

  Once they landed, they were all once again hustled through customs without having to wait like every other human being on the planet and ushered to a limousine complete with a liveried driver. The ride from Shannon airport to Ashford Castle took an hour and a half, but Dina was so busy with the triplets and admiring the view out the windows, she hardly noticed time passing.

  Just the day before, she had been at home, scrambling for work—and now she was in Europe. Sadly, she hadn’t had to do much in preparation for this trip. She had no immediate jobs lined up and so no reason to tell Connor she couldn’t go with him. And now, as the beautiful countryside streamed past the car windows, she was glad for that.

  Connor had been in Ireland before and enjoyed playing tour guide. “In a day or two, we’ll drive over to Cong and take the kids for a walk through the village.”

  “Okay,” she said, smiling. “What’s Cong?”

  He laughed. “Just a really beautiful village in Ireland, but they filmed The Quiet Man there. You know, the John Wayne movie?”

  “I love that old movie,” Dina said.

  “Yeah, me, too. They’ve got a statue in the village commemorating the film, too. Plus, you can visit a perfect replica of the cottage they used. There’s nice shops, some good restaurants and great pubs. You’ll like it.”

  She was sure she would. What she wasn’t sure of was why Connor cared if she was having a good time or not. But that question went unanswered as the limousine turned in to a long, graveled drive at the end of which the castle waited.

  Once the car stopped, Dina stepped out and right into a fairy tale.

  The castle was amazing. Weathered gray stone, trailing ivy, glorious flower beds in vivid colors, forests and a long, winding drive. There was a fountain in the center of the yard and a lake spread out in front of the castle, where sunlight glinted off the surface like handfuls of diamonds.

  Dina stood in one spot and did a slow turn, trying to take everything in and failing. It would take months to appreciate the whole picture. She had never seen so many different shades of green, though. Standing there, it was like being inside an emerald and watching sunlight play among the shadows—cool and warm at the same time.

  “It’s a rare day for Ireland in June,” Connor was saying. “Usually the skies are gray and the wind is cold and generally it’s raining. The sun must be shining today just for you.”

  She laughed, delighted at the thought, even though it was ridiculous. Then she shook her head and, speechless, stared at the castle itself, from the ground all the way up to the battlements, where she guessed ghosts still walked.

  “You like it?”

  “Oh, I really do,” she admitted.

  “It’s the oldest castle in Ireland,” he said, “and that’s saying something. I think it dates back to twelve hundred something.”

  “And it’s still here,” she mused, and her fingers itched to touch the gray stone, to feel it hum with history and the memories of everyone who’d ever been here. Smiling to herself at the silly thought, she turned to look at Connor. “It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

  He stared at her for a second or two then said, “Yeah. Just what I was thinking.”

  Dina didn’t even know how to respond to that and thankfully, she didn’t have to. A small crowd of people rushed from the castle down the drive to the car. A short man in a sharp black suit and carefully tended hair walked directly to Connor and held his hand out.

  “Mr. King,” he said, in a voice brushed with a lovely accent. “So good to have you back again. We’ve your usual suite prepared for you.”

  “Thank you, Sean,” Connor said, shaking the man’s hand. “Dina, this is Sean Flannery, the castle manager.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “And you, madam,” Sean said, taking her hand in a firm grip before turning back to Connor. “We’ve also taken care of your special requirements. The extra bedroom is equipped for your triplets, and may I add my congratulations to you and your lovely wife.”

  Dina blinked, surprised. Then she realized she shouldn’t have been. Why wouldn’t the hotel staff assume she and Connor were married? They were traveling with triplets, after all.

  “Oh, thank you, but—”

  Connor dropped one arm around her shoulders. “My wife’s tired from the flight, Sean, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to get us checked in right away.”

  “Certainly.” He waved a hand and suddenly the throng of hotel employees with him descended on the limo, taking luggage out of the trunk and hurrying toward the arched stone doorway.

  Dina gave Connor a look, but he shook his head as if to say later, so she let it go. Instead, she turned back to the limo and leaned inside. She unhooked the babies from their car seats and one at a time, she handed the kids out to Connor, who corralled them on the pristine lawn. But the triplets had been trapped for too long and refused to stand still. The three of them took off in different directions, toddling unsteadily across the grass, squealing and babbling as they went.

  “We should catch them before they ruin the flower beds or fall into the fountain—”

  “They’re fine,” Connor said, watching the three of them with a soft smile on his face. “Just exploring.”

  “Uh-huh.” She glanced back at the noble facade of the castle and could only imagine the luxurious furnishings inside. With that thought came the worry of just what three curious babies could do to elegant accommodations. “Maybe we should have found a smaller hotel. Triplets? Here?”

  “If you’ll pardon me, Mrs. King,” Sean said with a smile and a wink, “you’re not to worry about a thing. This is Ireland. Children are welcome everywhere.”

  With those words, she felt more than welcome, and nearly relaxed. Until she saw Sadie pulling flowers up and had to run to catch the little girl before she did too much damage. Connor ran after the boys at the same time and while the Irish wind blew all around them, they worked as a team to gather the babies.

  By the time they were settled in their palatial suite and had ordered room service dinner, the trips were ready for bed. Using teamwork, Connor and Dina got all three of them bathed and tucked in, then Connor poured two glasses of wine and they collapsed into lush green velvet wing-back chairs in the luxurious living room.

  Through the wide windows that overlooked what she’d learned was Lough Corrib, Dina saw the twilight sky and the tips of the trees guarding the castle dancing in the wind. Still watching the magical scene outside, she took a sip of her wine and said, “The manager seems to know you very well. You even have your usual suite.”

  “I stay here when I visit my cousin Jefferson and his family.” He eased back into the cushy armchair. “Maura’s sheep farm is only a half hour away, and the castle is comfortable.”

  She laughed a little. “Comfortable? It’s...I don’t even have a word for it.” Shaking her head, Dina said, “I’ve never been anywhere even remotely like it.”

  He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed his feet at
the ankles. “Wait until you see it at night with the moonlight on the lake. Pretty spectacular. Tomorrow, we can take the triplets down to the lake, let them throw rocks...”

  “Or fall in and go swimming?”

  “We’ll be with them. But that’s a good question. Have they taken swimming lessons yet?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, studying the gold-colored wine in her glass. “Elena was going to take them this summer, but—”

  He frowned, took a small sip of his own wine and said, “We’ll have to do it instead. My cousin Rafe is going to install a fence around my pool, but swimming lessons are pretty much life or death for kids, don’t you think?”

  “I agree.”

  “Good.” He gave her a fast smile that resonated inside her with a heat she really didn’t want to acknowledge. “I’ll arrange for a private instructor to come to the house starting next month.”

  “I don’t know that we’ll still be at your house next month,” she said.

  “Oh, I think we can count on it.” He tipped his head to one side and stared at her for a long moment or two.

  “Connor...” He wasn’t treating their move to his house as if it were temporary, but that was how she had to think of it. No matter what it felt like occasionally, she and Connor and the trips weren’t a family. They were...more like survivors of a shipwreck huddled together in what, at the moment, was a pretty fabulous lifeboat.

  She had to make him see that she couldn’t stay indefinitely at his house. But what could she say? She was too nervous to stay at his place? She didn’t trust herself around him? Oh, a man that sure of himself really didn’t need to hear anything like that. Muttering under her breath, she took a sip of her wine.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “So what are we doing here in Ireland, exactly?”

  His mouth quirked as if he knew she was desperately trying to change the subject. “Well, I told you I’ve stayed here at the castle before, but this time I’ll be talking with management, gathering information about what kind of activities they offer families and in general seeing if Ashford Castle would be a good fit for our family adventure company.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying staying here.”

  “Oh, it’s beautiful,” he agreed, shifting his gaze around the room, “but will it be enough to qualify as a family adventure? We’ll see.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to be so much about adventure as it does a family spending time together in an amazing place,” she said. “I know the castle itself would be enough to capture the imagination of any child. They’d picture themselves as knights and princesses...”

  He nodded. “You might be right about that. My brothers and I would have loved this place when we were kids.”

  Several seconds of silence passed before he asked, “Did you see much of the triplets before they came to live with you?”

  “What?” The change of subject threw her for a moment.

  He stared into his wine, then slowly lifted his gaze to hers. “The babies. Did you see much of them before Jackie and Elena died?”

  “Not a lot, because they were living in San Francisco,” she said quietly, sensing the shift in his mood to contemplative, “but they came to visit and I went to see them a few times.”

  “What were they like?” His voice was so soft, it was almost as if he regretted asking the question at all. “The babies, I mean.”

  Looking at him, Dina felt a twist of sympathy. Over the last week or so, he’d become so involved with the triplets. She’d stopped expecting him to give up and walk away. The man would never turn his back on those children and he was doing more and more to convince Dina that he was actually enjoying being a father.

  Bottom line was, Connor was changing his home, his world, to accommodate them and he had been cheated out of knowing them for the first year of their lives. Yes, cheated, she thought and sent a disgusted thought toward her sister, wherever she might be. Jackie and Elena had been wrong to keep the kids from him. Wrong to leave town and run rather than share the children with the man who had helped to create them. And if Dina had known the truth, she would have told Connor herself.

  So maybe, she thought, she was wrong to fight him so hard on the kids now. But what choice did she have, really? She couldn’t lose the triplets. Not even to their father. It would be like tearing her own heart out. He was watching her, waiting for to speak, to tell him about the children he hardly knew. She took a breath and said, “The babies were always so cute. But oh, boy, were they tiny when they were born.”

  A wistful smile curved his mouth as he tried to picture it. “I bet Jackie was afraid to pick them up.”

  “She was,” Dina said with a laugh. “For a while, but she got over it because Elena insisted.”

  “What kind of mom was she? Jackie?”

  “A little crazy. Fun.” Dina smiled at the memories and tried to make them feel real for Connor. “Elena was the one with the schedule. She wrote everything down. What time the trips ate, napped, play time, bath time. My sister loved schedules.” Now it was her turn to be wistful. Only three months since she’d lost her big sister and Dina missed her. “But Jackie was fun. As the kids got older, she would dress up to read them bedtime stories. She bought them all miniature baseball bats so they’d be ready to play as soon as they could walk...”

  “Sounds like Jacks. She used to play shortstop. She was really good, too.” His smile faded into a thoughtful frown.

  Twilight crept into the luxuriously appointed room, and shadows lengthened. It felt intimate, sitting here in the half light with Connor, sharing memories with him so that he could hold the images in his mind. But, she realized suddenly, she could do better.

  Reaching to the table beside her, she turned on a lamp that sent shards of light glancing off its carved crystal base. He scowled a little at the sudden brightness, but Dina ignored that and picked up her purse. Pulling her phone free, she turned it on, went to the gallery and asked, “Would you like to see pictures?”

  His eyes flashed with interest and a warm smile curved his mouth. “Are you serious?”

  She answered the smile with one of her own, then held her phone out to him. “I never delete anything,” she said wryly, “so there are photos of them from newborn on.”

  He was already looking at the pictures, swiping his finger across the screen to look at more.

  “Some of them I took, others Elena emailed to me.”

  He laughed.

  “What?”

  Connor looked up at her, a mixture of amusement and regret in his eyes. “This picture. Last Christmas, I guess.”

  Dina knew which photo he was talking about, but she went to him anyway, knelt at his side on the thick rug and looked at the phone screen. Three babies, dressed in candy-cane-striped footie jammies, each of them with a Santa hat on their heads and tiny white beards on their faces.

  Still laughing, Connor asked, “Even Sadie had a beard?”

  Dina smiled at the memory. She’d been at her sister’s house when the two women took that picture to use as their Christmas card. “Jackie didn’t want Sadie to feel left out,” she said quietly.

  “Sounds like her,” he agreed. Slowly, he flipped through the rest of the pictures, not speaking again.

  Dina stayed where she was, watching—his expressions, not the phone screen. Every emotion he felt flickered over his face, shining in his eyes, curving his mouth. On a too-small screen, he watched his children change and grow and it was clear that those pictures touched something inside him. When he’d finally come to the end—she really did need to delete at least some of those pictures—he handed her the phone.

  “I missed so much already.”

  “You didn’t know, Connor.”

  “Doesn’t change anything.” He turned his hea
d to look at her. His eyes shone with sadness, but a glint of determination was there, too, and Dina braced herself for what he might say next.

  “I won’t miss any more time with my children, Dina.”

  Her hand closed around her phone and held it tightly. Wow, just a couple of minutes ago, she’d been feeling bad for him, taking his side against the memory of her own sister. But looking into his eyes now, she saw that this man didn’t need her sympathy. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” he said quietly, “I’ll never get back their first Christmas. They got their first teeth, took their first steps, all without me even knowing of their existence.”

  “I know, Connor and it’s terrible, but—”

  He shifted in his chair, cupped her chin in his palm and lifted her face to his. “You and me, Dina, we’re going to have to come to an understanding.”

  “What kind of understanding?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” he whispered. “I know what kind I’m interested in. I guess all we need is for you to decide for yourself what it is you want here.”

  Oh, she knew what she wanted. Dina just didn’t know if getting what she wanted would make things better...or worse.

  * * *

  Watching Connor with his family was a revelation. Oh, she knew he was close to his twin—why wouldn’t he be? But Jefferson King was a cousin and yet he and Connor seemed as close as brothers. Obviously, family was vastly important not only to Connor but to the Kings in general. That acknowledgement underscored what she’d felt only the night before. As his children, the triplets weren’t something Connor would risk losing.

  “Lovely, aren’t they?”

  Dina glanced at Maura King. The woman was short and gorgeous, in spite of her heavy rubber boots, and the oversize jacket she wore over a thick red knit sweater. June in Ireland, just as Connor had told her, meant clouds, wind, cold and spatters of rain.

  They’d gone shopping in the village of Craic only that morning, buying the triplets warmer clothing, since a California wardrobe didn’t prepare anyone for the damp chill. Ireland was beautiful and wild in a way that California never could be, and Dina loved it already.