Triplets Under The Tree

He wanted to tell them not to be afraid. But he knew he was more than a strange Westerner in an Asian village full of simple people. More than a man with dangerous fists.

Nearly four seasons ago, a fisherman had found Falco floating in the water, unconscious, with horrific injuries. At least that was what he’d pieced together from the doctor’s halting, limited English.

He should have died before he’d washed ashore in Indonesia and he certainly should have died at some point during the six-month coma his body had required to heal.

But he’d lived.

And when he finally awoke, it was to a nightmare of physical rehabilitation and confusion. His memories were fleeting. Insubstantial. Incomplete. He was the man with no past, no home, no idea who he was other than angry and lost.

The only clue to his identity lay inked across his left pectoral muscle—a fierce, bold falcon tattoo with a scarlet banner clutched in his talons, emblazoned with the word Falco. That was what his saviors called him since he didn’t remember his name, though it chafed to be addressed as such.

Why? It must be a part of his identity. But when he pushed his memory, it only resulted in his fists primed to punch something and a blinding headache. Every waking moment—and even some of those dedicated to sleep—he heard an urgent soul-deep cry to discover why he’d been snatched from the teeth of a cruel death. Surely he’d lived for a reason. Surely he’d remember something critical to set him on the path toward who he was. Every day thus far had ended in disappointment.

Only fighting allowed him moments of peace and clarity as he disciplined his mind to focus on something other than the struggle to remember.

Ravi and Wilipo spoke in rapid Bahasa, leaving the Westerner out of it, as always.

Wilipo grunted again.

That meant it was time to stop sparring. Nodding, Falco halted, breathing heavily. Ravi’s reflexes were not as instantaneous and his fist clipped Falco.

Pain exploded in his head. “Che diavolo!”

The curse had spit from his mouth the moment Ravi struck, though Falco had no conscious knowledge of Italian. Or how he knew it was Italian. The intrigue saved Ravi from being pulverized.

Ravi bowed apologetically, dropping his hands to his sides. Rubbing his temples, Falco scowled over the late shot as a flash of memory spilled into his head.

White stucco. Glass. A house perched on a cliff, overlooking the ocean. Malibu. A warm breeze. A woman with red hair.

His house. He had a home, full of his things, his memories, his life.

The address scrolled through his mind as if it had always been there, along with images of street signs and impressions of direction, and he knew he could find it.

Home. He had to get there. Somehow.

One (#ulink_602917e6-2f8d-5740-ae83-f72e8e83bb28)

Los Angeles, California

At precisely 4:47 a.m., Caitlyn bolted awake, as she did every morning. The babies had started sleeping through the night, thank the good Lord, but despite that, their feeding time had ingrained itself into her body in some kind of whacked-out mommy alarm clock.

No one had warned her of that. Just as no one had warned her that triplets weren’t three times the effort and nail-biting worry of one baby, but more like a zillion times.

But they also came with a zillion times the awe and adoration.

Caitlyn picked up the video monitor from her nightstand and watched her darlings sleep in their individual cribs. Antonio Junior sighed and flopped a fist back and forth as if he knew his mother was watching, but Leon and Annabelle slept like rocks. It was a genetic trait they shared with Vanessa, their biological mother, along with her red hair. Antonio had hair the color of a starless night, like his father.

And if he grew up to be half as hypnotically gorgeous as his father, she’d be beating the women off her son with a Louisville Slugger.

No matter how hard she tried, Caitlyn couldn’t go back to sleep. Exhaustion was a condition she’d learned to live with and, maddeningly, it had nothing to do with how much sleep she got. Having fatherless eight-month-old triplets wreaked havoc on her sanity, and in the hours before dawn, all the questions and doubts and fears crowded into her mind.

Should she be doing more to meet an eligible man? Like what? Hang out in bars wearing a vomit-stained shirt, where she could chat up a few victims. “Hey, baby, have you ever fantasized about going all night long with triplets? Because I’ve got a proposition for you!”

No, the eligible men of Los Angeles were pretty safe from Caitlyn Hopewell, that was for sure. Even without the ready-made family, her relationship rules scared away most men: you didn’t sleep with a man unless you were in love and there was a ring on your finger. Period. It was an absolute that had carried her through college and into adulthood, especially as she’d witnessed what passed for her sister Vanessa’s criteria for getting naked with someone—he’d bought her jewelry or could get her further in her career. Caitlyn didn’t want that for herself. And that pretty much guaranteed she’d stay single.

But how could she ever be enough for three children when, no matter how much she loved them, she wasn’t supposed to be their mother? When she’d agreed to be Vanessa’s surrogate, Caitlyn had planned on a nine-month commitment, not a lifetime. But fate had had different plans.

Caitlyn rolled from the king-size bed she still hadn’t grown used to despite sleeping in it for over a year. Might as well get started on the day at—she squinted at her phone—6:05 a.m. Threading her dark mess of curls through a ponytail holder, she threw on some yoga pants and a top, determined to get in at least twenty minutes of Pilates before Leon awoke.

She spread out her mat on the hardwood floor close to the glass wall overlooking the Malibu coastline, her favorite spot for tranquility. There was a full gym on the first floor of Antonio and Vanessa’s mansion, but she couldn’t bear to use it. Not yet. It had too much of Antonio stamped all over it, what with the mixed martial arts memorabilia hanging from the walls and the regulation ring in the center.

One day she’d clean it out, but as much as she hated the reminders of Antonio, she couldn’t lose the priceless link to him. She hadn’t removed any of Vanessa’s things from the house, either, but had put a good bit away, where she couldn’t see it every day.

Fifteen minutes later, her firstborn yowled through the monitor and Caitlyn dashed to the nursery across the hall from her bedroom before he woke up his brother and sister.

“There’s my precious,” she crooned and scooped up the gorgeous little bundle from his crib.

Like clockwork, he was always the first of the three to demand breakfast, and Caitlyn tried to spend alone time with each of her kids while feeding them. Brigitte, the babies’ au pair, thought she was certifiable for breast-feeding triplets, but Caitlyn didn’t mind. She loved bonding with the babies, and nobody ever saw her naked anyway; it was worth the potential hit to her figure to give the babies a leg up in the nutrition department.

The morning passed in a blur of babies and baths, and just as Caitlyn was about to return a phone call to her lawyer that she’d missed somewhere along the way, someone pounded on the front door.

Delivery guy, she hoped. She’d had to order a new car seat and it could not get here fast enough. Annabelle had christened hers in such a way that no bleach in existence could make it usable again and, honestly, Caitlyn had given up trying. There had to be some benefits to having custodial control of her children’s billion-dollar inheritance.

“Brigitte? Can you get that?” Caitlyn called, but the girl didn’t respond. Probably dealing with one of the kids, which was what she got paid well to do.

With a shrug, Caitlyn pocketed her phone and padded to the door, swinging it wide in full anticipation of a brown uniform–clad man.

It wasn’t UPS. The unshaven man on her doorstep loomed over her, his dark gaze searching and familiar. There was something about the way he tilted his head—

“Antonio!” The strangled word barely made it past her throat as it seized up.

No! It couldn’t be. Antonio had died in the same plane crash as Vanessa, over a year ago. Her brain fuzzed with disappointment, even as her heart latched on to the idea of her children’s father standing before her in the flesh. Lack of sleep was catching up with her.

“Antonio,” the man repeated and his eyes widened. “Do I know you?”

His raspy voice washed over her, turning inside her chest warmly, and tears pricked her eyelids. He even sounded like Antonio. She’d always loved his voice. “No, I don’t think so. For a moment, I thought you were—”

A ghost. She choked it back.

His blank stare shouldn’t have tripped her senses, but all at once, even with a full beard and weighing twenty pounds less, he looked so much like Antonio she couldn’t stop greedily drinking him in.

“This is my house,” he insisted firmly with a hint of wonderment as he glanced around the foyer beyond the open door. “I recognize it. But the Christmas tree is in the wrong place.”

Automatically, she glanced behind her to note the location of the twelve-foot-high blue spruce she’d painstakingly arranged in the living room near the floor-to-ceiling glass wall facing the ocean.

“No, it’s not,” Caitlyn retorted.

Vanessa had always put the tree in the foyer so people could see it when they came in, but Caitlyn liked it by the sea. Then, every time you looked at the tree, you saw the water, too. Seemed logical to her, and this was her house now.