Beauty and the Wolf / Their Miracle Twins

by Faye Dyer, Lois, Logan, Nikki

  He didn’t want to. It was written clearly in his expression. Discomfort. Dread. ‘You’re saying you want to live on Bunyip’s Reach. You’re saying you want to make our marriage real. Permanent. For the boys.’

  ‘I do.’ So help me God. ‘And for me.’

  ‘Because …?’

  He needed to hear it. Almost as much as she feared saying it. God, how she wanted to say it. To finally tell someone. To shout it from the hospital rooftop. ‘Because I want you. Because I love you.’

  His nostrils flared and his jaw clenched. But he didn’t move. Not one inch. ‘How do you know?’

  That threw her. She wasn’t naïve enough to hope for immediate reciprocation but she certainly wasn’t expecting to have to qualify her feelings.

  ‘I’m sleeping with you.’ In a manner of speaking.

  ‘Not that big a deal these days.’

  ‘It is for me. A huge deal.’ It was everything.

  ‘My point exactly. You could be confusing lust with love.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘How would you know? You have no point of reference. Unless you count Drew.’

  Suddenly the insinuation and inquisition grew too much and her throat tightened. ‘If you don’t want me to stay, just say it. Don’t drag this out. And don’t cower behind your brother.’

  She sat, as composed as a woman in a hospital gown with two ballooning breasts beneath it could, on the edge of the bed, stiff with misery.

  He stared at her, assessing. ‘You understand what staying would mean? We’d be husband and wife … in every sense of the word.’

  ‘Matching towels. I get it.’

  He stepped in close to her thighs. ‘No more annulment to protect …’

  ‘Are you saying chivalry is now dead?’ She stared up at him, throwing provocation into the very short list of tools she had at her disposal. Necessity was the mother of invention.

  His left hand came up to brush away the stray hairs from her face. The cool of his wedding band kissed along her skin. He seemed almost as surprised by the move as she was. ‘Chivalry might have to be banished to the barn.’

  Her pulse skyrocketed. ‘Shame,’ she whispered. ‘I was hoping to do it in the barn at some point.’

  His head literally reeled back and he let out a hiss. ‘This isn’t a game, Bel. It’s life-changing. For both of us. What if we just have the mother of all chemistry going on?’

  Why? Was that all he felt? Serious doubt bit for the first time.

  ‘I can’t speak for your feelings.’ Or lack of. ‘I can only speak for mine.’

  ‘Maybe you’d say anything to guarantee you get to keep the babies. Or do anything.’

  Like sleep with him? That stung but, in fairness, she’d given him plenty of reason to make that presumption. Every decision she’d made since he’d met her was linked to the unborn children. ‘Do you believe that?’

  Yes, he did. It was written in the twisted angle of his frown.

  ‘I think you’d even believe it,’ he murmured.

  Deep sorrow washed through her. ‘You don’t feel it.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Oh, God …

  His nostrils flared. ‘Bel, my feelings for you are …’ He shook his head. ‘I’m thirty-five years old, and I barely understand how I feel when I’m with you. Can you appreciate why I might question yours? A twenty-three-year-old with very little life experience.’

  ‘Are you saying you want me to go out and get some … experience … first? With someone else?’

  His eyes darkened. ‘I’m saying you don’t have to commit to forever to explore the rest of what it is between us. Physically. I’d be open to continuing our …’

  ‘Our what, Flynn?’ Her chest clenched into a fist. She sucked in a tight breath. ‘Exactly what is it that you’ve been doing while I’ve been falling in love with you? Enjoying the free and convenient—’

  His lips thinned. ‘I made you no promises, Bel.’

  ‘I’m so aware of that, Flynn. I guess I really am that naïve twenty-three-year-old, after all. I thought that maybe you’d be willing to explore an unconventional marriage for the sake of the children. That maybe love could grow between us like it did with your grandparents. But you have your heart too tightly tethered down to even do that, haven’t you?’

  ‘This isn’t about me …’

  ‘No. Of course not,’ she ranted. ‘I’d fall in love with any passing man if I thought it would guarantee me custody of these boys. I’m surprised I didn’t fall for the magistrates …’

  He hissed, ‘Can you look me in the eye and tell me the boys are not a factor? That if they didn’t exist you would still be sitting here pouring your heart out?’

  The dismissal in his tone bit almost as hard as the fact that she knew, deep down, that the children were part of the complicated mass of feelings she had for him. ‘If they didn’t exist I wouldn’t even have met you.’ That seemed so inconceivable now. She sighed past the tight wad of reality balling in her sternum. ‘What do you want to do? Wait for the decree to come in and then have this conversation again? Is that what it will take for you to believe my feelings—for me to get custody and still tell you I love you?’

  His eyes sparkled dangerously and he shrugged his arm free of her. He found her focus and held it, uncertainty in their grey depths. But then his shoulders rose and fell again and the doubt hardened to grief. And then to … nothing. A flat kind of resignation.

  ‘The decree is in.’

  She stared at him, a block of fear wedging in her gut. ‘What? When?’

  ‘The day the boys were born.’

  ‘How did they know—?’

  ‘It had nothing to do with the birth. That was when the emails and voice messages came through. When I went to town.’

  Her mouth dried up completely and her sharp mind raced ahead. He’d kept the findings to himself. Which meant he didn’t want to hurt her. Which meant …

  All but the tiniest shard of air sucked out of the room. Her eyes darted frantically between Andrew and Liam. Her babies. She’d lost them. And she’d only had them such a short time. The panic of being out of time and options descended and her breathing grew choppy. ‘No—’

  The hardness in Flynn’s eyes wavered and he took a halfstep towards her before stilling his feet. ‘Breathe, Bel. You haven’t lost them.’

  That brought her desperate gaze back to his. Her head spun as her emotional bungee yanked her back from the depths of despair and flung her up into the blue, blue sky of relief. But then she slowed and tipped and started to free fall again. If she’d won, that meant Flynn had lost. She was going to take the twins from Bunyip’s Reach and leave him with nothing. Nothing but a heartbroken family that had already been through so much. Her happiness meant desolation for him and all the people who’d shown her such love and kindness since she’d arrived.

  Hurting him generated physical pain in her own body. She wrapped her arms around her torso to keep it contained. ‘Oh, Flynn …’

  Both his hands shot up between them. ‘The decree was clear that in the event of only one of the two babies surviving, that custody was to go to you.’

  God, just the thought of one of the boys not making it made her wince. But she supposed the court had to cover their bases. Wait … Something about the look in his eyes. The hint of reservation amidst the hate. She took a shallow breath.

  ‘But …?’

  His eyes held hers steadily. Almost like two hands supporting her. ‘But if both survived, then custody was to be split.’

  She blinked at him, trying to make sense of the words. ‘The courts want us to ship the boys back and forth across the globe?’

  ‘No, Bel, not shared. Split.’

  The room swirled around her as every drop of blood pooled instantly in her vital organs. Flynn’s voice, when it came, was distorted and choked.

  ‘We’ve been granted one child each.’

  ‘No …’

  Bel shook her pale, pinched face an
d lurched off her tilt-up bed, crossing to the crib where the boys slept peacefully. She turned her eyes back to him. ‘Flynn, no … How could they?’

  She looked exactly as he’d felt on the drive home from Bathurst. Incredulous. Appalled. Dead inside. He cleared his thick throat. ‘I gather they reached a legal stalemate. This was the most expedient solution.’

  ‘Expedient?’ she croaked. ‘They’re children. Not a DVD collection!’

  He shook his head. ‘It has something to do with the embryos being authorised for donation by Drew and Gwen. It opened the door for the embryos to be treated as property under the law, not …’

  Not people.

  Bel sagged back onto her bed and her words when they came were like a lance deep into his chest cavity. A mini moment of history repeating itself. ‘But they’re not embryos now, they’re brothers. All they’ve known is each other.’

  What could he say? His solicitors had already talked him through the complex web of negotiations and legislation that had tangled things up so badly. He barely understood it but he knew they’d tried all options. ‘This case has challenged the course of family law—’

  ‘Off-course! Horribly, horribly off-course, Flynn. This whole thing was to keep the family together …’ She shook her head numbly, then lifted agonised eyes. ‘Even knowing this—’ she looked at him desperately, going impossibly paler ‘—you would still let them be separated rather than be tied to me for real?’

  He pushed his fingers through his hair painfully, watching her tormented eyes fill with tears.

  ‘Do you despise me that much, Flynn?’

  Compassion clawed its way out of the dark place inside him. The place that didn’t trust. Didn’t believe. ‘Bel—’

  ‘How are the happy parents?’

  Both their heads snapped around towards the door, where Alice and Arthur stood with a matching pair of furry blue teddy bears, Denise and Bill behind them, oblivious to the raging tension in the room.

  Bel took one look at the cheerful matching bears and burst into floods of tears, rushing into the en suite bathroom.

  Everyone froze. But, as always, it was his nan who greased the awkward social situation. ‘Hormones,’ she announced simply and turned to the others. ‘How about we give her some space and go grab a bite to eat in the hospital cafeteria?’

  The men vacated gratefully but Denise took a little prodding, her eyes stretching wistfully towards the sleeping babies. Eventually, though, she backed out of the door.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ she said to her mother-in-law.

  ‘I’ll be right along. Order me a soup, there’s a dear.’

  The door closed under her heavy hand and Flynn braced himself for his nan’s inquisition. But she turned, leaned on the door and looked at him with such compassion and understanding he felt like bursting into tears.

  ‘Give her a moment,’ she said quietly, ‘and then the two of you are going to tell me what on earth is going on.’

  His heart sank. He couldn’t lie to his nan.

  And so that meant it was over.

  All of it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  EITHER you agree to tell them under your own speed or I’ll ask you outright at the very next family dinner.

  Short of never attending another meal with the people who loved him, Bel knew Flynn really didn’t have a lot of choice. There was no question Alice would be as good as her threat and, given what the courts had decreed, Bel really couldn’t see how things could get any worse, anyway. What was worse than breaking up a family?

  None of it mattered now. Not the lies. Not the false name. Not what she wanted, least of all what she needed. Only one thing mattered. The future of their boys.

  Because they were theirs. Every single person in the room had a stake in them.

  Both older women fussed around the babies now—Alice most particularly—and saw that they were settled into the old-fashioned crib that Arthur had pulled out of storage and restored while Bel was in hospital. They knew that Flynn had called a family meeting, but not much more. Though all of them threw concerned glances in the direction of Bel and her ashen face.

  She felt like death; she couldn’t imagine she looked any better.

  This day had always been coming. Regardless of what Flynn had asked her to tell them, there was never any way she was going to whisk their grandchildren back to England with them believing she’d just … changed her mind about her marriage to Flynn. That would have been too low a blow. Too much a betrayal of her own feelings for him. But she’d never let herself fully imagine what it would be like to sit across the table and confess everything—everything—to the people who’d been so good to her.

  The eldest Bradley most especially. Arthur and his quiet acceptance, his unconditional, non-judgemental support of her. Watching his disappointment was going to hurt almost as much as betraying Flynn.

  She pulled the sleeves of her jumper down over her icy fingers and swallowed past the lump that had been resident low in her throat since she’d emerged from the en suite bathroom at the hospital and seen two pairs of Bradley eyes staring back at her.

  Now all eyes flicked nervously between her and Flynn. His own were fixed firmly on a spot on the far wall.

  She pressed her fingers hard into her palms and focused on the bite of her nails. The tiny pain. It didn’t centre her the way it always had; it barely registered through the thick fog of agony she’d been living with since Flynn had thrown her love back in her face. Since he’d told her about the verdict. She braved a glance at him. Impotent seconds ticked by as he impaled her with his dead regard.

  Finally he nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  Bel shifted her eyes to Arthur. Cowardice, perhaps, but she couldn’t face either of Drew’s parents as she started her story. She knew what she was going to see there.

  ‘My name—’ She cut herself off, having started far too loud in the silent, silent room. She took a breath and tried again. ‘My name is not Belinda Cluney.’ Three sets of eyebrows folded around the table. ‘It’s Belinda Rochester. I’m Gwendoline Rochester’s younger sister.’

  Denise paled instantly. Bill froze. Arthur’s face filled with something she’d never seen.

  ‘I didn’t tell you who I was because we …’ She paused. No, this was her sword to fall on. She’d made her own choices. And she was already hurting Flynn enough without destroying his relationship with his family even more. ‘Because I knew how you felt about my sister and I believed I would not be welcome here if you knew.’

  Denise opened her mouth, twisted with hurt, to say something, but her husband silenced her with one hand on hers.

  ‘I understand why you had difficulties with Gwen. But the fact remains, I am a Rochester.’

  ‘You are a Bradley,’ Denise cried. ‘You married our son!’ She turned her hurt to her husband, who was trying to silence her.

  ‘Is the marriage legal?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘It’s legal,’ Flynn interjected flatly. ‘But technically … unconsummated.’ His Adams apple worked up and down hard with the effort of not saying more. How lucky that was now. It would take nothing to end the marriage between them.

  End her life. Her dreams.

  That brought Denise’s swimming eyes back around. ‘But—’

  But you’ve been sleeping together every night.

  Denise did the mental maths and her focus shot straight to the sleeping twins. And then to her son. ‘They’re not yours, Flynn? They’re not ours?’ she croaked.

  Bel pressed her lips together to hold back a sob. Denise’s pain was so raw, and what they were about to say was only going to stick a scorching blade into the open wound. For so long she’d been intently focused on making sure that Gwen and Drew’s babies made it into the world. Into the family. Now she’d give anything for them to be Flynn’s.

  ‘They … they’re …’

  But courage failed her just when she needed it most and Flynn intervened. Quietly. Coldly. ‘They’re Dr
ew’s.’

  Even Arthur paled then, and the tiniest glimmer of moisture flooded into eyes that had never before looked at her with anything but affection. He thought she’d slept with Drew. Just when she thought there was not enough of her heart left to fracture, a tiny shard further sheared off at the accusation in his eyes.

  She took a shaky breath and forced her spine straighter against the chair back.

  ‘And Gwen’s,’ Alice intervened. She looked at Bel and nodded encouragement.

  Bel took another breath. ‘Drew and my sister were on IVF when they died.’

  She persevered over the top of the collective gasp. ‘Liam and Andrew were the product of that and I … I couldn’t bear them to go to strangers, to be …’ The tiniest amount of acid crept up her throat. ‘To be separated from each other. I applied to the courts for permission to raise them as my own.’

  Of all the people, Denise was the one whose head tilted. Whose eyes softened. Just momentarily.

  ‘Without notifying us?’ Bill said.

  ‘The courts tried …’ But in that breath Bel realised she’d been no less judgemental than the Bradleys had. She’d always blamed Drew’s parents and grandparents for ostracizing her sister but she’d made no effort to contact them personally because of how Gwen had felt about them. Because of a bunch of stories. One-sided stories. She had been all too ready to believe that his family wouldn’t want the babies.

  ‘I should have tried harder,’ she admitted. ‘I should have got in touch personally rather than just letting my lawyers send a—’

  ‘There was a mistake,’ Flynn hedged, still eager to protect his mother from realising how close they had come to never knowing about these children at all because of her own inability to deal with Drew’s loss. ‘But I was able to rectify it. While custody was determined.’

  ‘But you married her?’ This from his grandfather. She’d been Belly last week, now she was her. ‘We stood in that damned cave and witnessed your vows.’