One Night, Two Heirs

“What’s going on, Sadie? In town, you said we had to talk. Then you say I’ve got to see something.” He stepped around her when they reached the second-floor landing and blocked her way until she looked up at him. “Talk to me.”

“I will,” she promised, finally staring up into his eyes, reading his frustration easily. “As soon as I show you something.”

“All right,” he told her, “but I never did care for surprises.”

The thick, patterned floor runner muffled their footsteps as they walked down the long hallway. Every step was more difficult than the last for her. But finally, she came to the last door on the left. She took a breath, turned the knob and opened it to a sunlit room.

Inside were two beds, two dressers, two toy boxes. And sitting on the floor, clearly not sleeping like angels, were her twin daughters.

Rick’s twin daughters.

The girls looked up. Their brown eyes went wide and bright and they smiled as they spotted their mother. Sadie dropped to her knees to swoop them into her arms. With her girls held tightly to her, she turned her gaze on a stupefied Rick and whispered, “Surprise.”

Three

Rick felt like he’d been kicked in the head.

Twin girls.

With his eyes.

They were jabbering nonstop as they climbed over their mother.

Their mother.

Sadie Price was the mother of his daughters.

Shock slowly gave way to an anger that burned inside him with the heat of a thousand suns. He was blistered by it and forced to contain it all because damned if he’d lose his temper in front of his children.

The girls were wearing matching pink overalls with pink-and-white checked shirts. Tiny pink-and-yellow socks were on their impossibly small feet and they laughed and danced in place as Sadie held on to them.

Sadie’s gaze locked with his and he read her guilt in her eyes. Her regret. Well, it was a damned sight late for regret. She’d kept his daughters from him their whole lives.

There would be payment made.

For now though, he dropped to one knee and looked at the girls. Their brown hair curled around their heads, their cheeks were pink and their brown eyes sparkled with life. Love. His heart clenched hard in his chest. One of the girls looked at him warily, and then slowly gave him a smile that tore up his insides.

“Girls,” Sadie said, laughing as the twins continued to chatter a mile a minute.

“Birds, Mommy.”

“Lots.”

“I know,” Sadie said, giving first one of her daughters then the other a big kiss. “I saw them.”

“Pretty.”

“Yes, they are pretty,” Sadie agreed.

“Who him?”

Who him. Rick swallowed back the tight ball of anger lodged in his throat. His daughters didn’t know him. He was a damn stranger to his own flesh and blood. That knowledge hurt more than he would have thought possible.

“This is your daddy,” Sadie said, watching him as she spoke the words that made all of this a reality.

He sat down, drew one knee up and rested his forearm on it. He wasn’t going to crowd the little girls. But he wanted more than anything to hold them. Instead, he smiled. “You are the prettiest girls I have ever seen.”

The one closest to him gave him a sly smile and looked up at him from beneath lowered lashes that lay like black velvet on her cheeks. Oh, this one was going to be a heartbreaker when she grew up.

“Daddy?” she said and pushed away from Sadie to walk to him.

Rick’s heart stopped as she approached him. He was afraid to move. He worried that anything he did now might shatter the moment. And he didn’t want to risk it. When she was close enough, the little girl reached out and patted his cheek. Her small hand was feather-soft against his skin and she smelled like shampoo and apple juice.

“Daddy?” She leaned in to give him a hug and Rick held her as carefully as he would have a live grenade. This tiny girl, so perfect, so beautiful, had accepted him without reservation and he’d never been more grateful.

“Daddy!” The second twin rushed him, cuddling up to him just as her sister had and Rick closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around them. He held them close, feeling the warmth of their bodies, the fluttering of their heartbeats. And in one all-encompassing instant had his life, his world, altered forever.

Opening his eyes, he looked at Sadie and saw that she was crying. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she watched him with their children and he asked himself what she was crying for. Was she pleased that he was finally meeting his daughters? Or was she regretting telling him at all?

“Story!” One of the girls blurted the word and pushed away from him, running to a bookcase beneath the window. Meanwhile, her twin settled in on Rick’s lap and played with his hat.

“How old are they?” he asked tightly.

“You know exactly how old they are,” Sadie whispered.

“What are their names?” That question cost him. He didn’t know the names of his children. His heart was being ripped into pieces in his chest and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it.

Sadie scooted closer to them, reaching out to fix a sliding pink barrette in one of the twins’ soft, wispy hair.

“This one is Wendy,” she said, dropping a kiss on the girl’s nose.

“Wenne!” the toddler repeated with a gleeful shriek. She put her father’s hat on and the Stetson completely swallowed her head. Her giggle was as soft as a summer wind.

“Wendy has freckles on her nose.”

“Nose!”

Smiling, Sadie captured the returning twin and swooped her up into her lap. She kissed the top of the child’s head and met Rick’s eyes when she said, “This one is Gail.”

Another surprise in a morning full of them.

His heart, which he would have sworn had already been ripped in two, shredded even further as he looked down at the smiling child on Sadie’s lap. He actually felt a sharp sting of tears in his eyes and swiped one hand across his face to rid himself of them. Only then did he trust himself to look at Sadie again. “You named her for my mother.”

“Yes,” she said as the little girl opened the storybook and started “reading” to herself.

“Doggie and a bug and running and …”

Her commentary went on, but Rick hardly heard the mumble of disjointed words and phrases. He was caught in the moment. Struggling hard for the rigid self-control he had always been able to count on.