“And leave bruises.”
He looked at me, his eyes sliding to my throat. “I tried not to hurt her, but sometimes I had no choice.”
I slid closer to him, pressing my forehead to his shoulder. “And the night she died?”
He stiffened a little, but his hands came around me and the tension slowly left his body.
“I went to ask her for a divorce.” He kissed the top of my head. “I kissed you that night, and I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t pretend anymore. I had to get out. But she was belligerent, as usual. Told me she’d agreed to the surrogacy to keep me happy. That she was giving me a family just like I’d wanted when we got married. The least I could do was continue to play along. She said if I waited until the baby was born, she’d consider giving me a divorce then. But if I left before she was ready, she’d make sure I never saw the kid.”
I nodded, almost aware of what he was going to say before the words were out of his mouth. It all made so much sense. Aurora needed Nicolas. She needed his name and his money to be someone in Hollywood. She had a few movies under her belt when she met him, but she never would have become the starlet she was if she hadn’t married him. It was his star that made hers shine brighter. She knew she couldn’t lose that if she had any hope of taking her career any further. So she used everything she could to keep him under control. His sense of decency, his kindness, and his desire for a family.
No wonder she’d been so excited about the babies. She knew how he would respond to any threat against his child.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” He took my face in his hands and lifted it so he could see me. “What do you have to be sorry for?”
“For doubting you, even briefly. I knew this couldn’t be true, that you would never—”
He kissed me, cutting off my words. I moved closer to him, grateful he wasn’t angry with me, that he didn’t just get up and walk away from me. Grateful that we might have a chance to survive all of this. Grateful that Aurora’s schemes and deceit had brought us together.
“I love you,” he whispered against my lips. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all of this before.”
“The pills—”
“No,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“They’re not mine. I thought they were yours.”
He pulled back. “What do you mean?”
“They were in your bathroom, in the false bottom of a drawer.”
He cursed, using words I don’t think I’d ever heard in English before. I’d heard them all my life in Spanish on the lips of the laborers who lived in our neighborhood, but never in English.
“They’re Aurora’s, aren’t they?”
He nodded. “She hid drugs all over the house. I hunted for them constantly, throwing them out whenever I found them. But I never thought to look in the bathroom.”
“I hid them. I was afraid someone would think they were the ones used to kill her.”
He groaned, running his hand over the top of my head. “I’m sorry you were in that position.”
“I’d do anything to protect you.”
“I know.” He kissed me again. And then he was reaching into his pocket and sliding to the floor. I must have paled because he hesitated, his hand reaching up to caress my cheek. “I wanted to do this at a more romantic time, but there never seems to be time for anything with the babies.” He opened his palm and a small, but perfect diamond solitaire on a gold band sparkled in the lamp light. “I looked at all these huge, ostentatious rings, and then I saw this one. And I knew it was perfect for you.”
I pressed a hand to my mouth. “Oh, Nico…”
“Marry me. Be my wife. Be a mother to our children. Help me build our unique version of the American dream.”
I just laughed through my tears, as I fell into his arms.
Chapter 33
“We’re just going to take a few cells from the inside of their cheeks,” the medical technician explained as she approached Vivienne with a swab in her hand. “It won’t hurt her.”
I glanced at Nicolas. He nodded, a muscle in his jaw popping as he watched.
Vivienne whimpered as the technician pressed the swab into her mouth, but she didn’t wake up. And then it was Cole’s turn. He wasn’t as cooperative, turning his face and screaming when the technician touched him. But in less than a minute, we were done.
“Why?” I asked for the millionth time, as we slid the babies into their car seats under Adam’s protective glare.
“I don’t know,” Nicolas said. “She just told the judge that she thought a DNA test proving the babies are Aurora’s was in order.”
“But no one has ever denied that they’re Aurora’s.”
Nicolas moved up behind me and slid his arms around me. “Let’s just be grateful that this is delaying the custody hearing. The last thing we need the weekend of our wedding is to get bogged down in some ridiculous legal case.”
I turned in his arms and kissed him. “We’re really getting married in two days?”
“We really are.”
I pressed myself up against him and raised my face for a second kiss, but then Adam was pushing us into the SUV as a chorus of shouts surrounded us.
The paparazzi had found us.
They’d been relentless since the news got out. It was unrealistic to think that the press wouldn’t find out about the babies. But Nicolas’ staff—who consisted of a pretty impressive PR lady—managed to keep it all under wraps with sealed court records and protected medical records until someone in the NICU sold our story to a tabloid for ten thousand dollars. If, whoever it was, had just told Nicolas they needed money, he probably would have paid five times that to keep the story quiet a little longer. But that person didn’t, so now the press knew about the babies, about me, about the whole story—at least, the parts they’d bothered to learn about. The rest they just kind of made up.
For that reason, when Nicolas arranged for us to get a marriage license, he didn’t do anything to keep it from the press. It was leaked within twelve hours, and the paparazzi had been relentless ever since, dying to find out when and where the happy day would take place.
And then, of course, there was the whole custody thing with Virginia. Once the press found out about the babies, it didn’t take much for them to find the custody battle that was waging between Virginia and Nicolas. The case was supposed to go in front of the judge today but, instead, the court sent us to the hospital to have the babies DNA tested.
It made little sense to me.
I adjusted Vivienne’s cannula, smiling when she peeked at me from beneath long, dark lashes. I tried to imagine what Aurora looked like as a baby, but I couldn’t. She was a beautiful blonde with striking blue eyes and a perfectly square face. But both babies had round faces, dark eyes and hair. And their hair wasn’t falling out like I had assumed it would. There was nothing of their mother in their faces. But, there was enough of Nicolas to make that understandable.
So why did this little spark of hope insist on sitting deep in my belly?
***
Saturday dawned sunny and perfect. It was supposed to be warm for a California spring day. I crawled out of bed and peeked in on the babies, pleased to find them both sleeping peacefully. Then, I crawled into the shower, unable to believe that by this time tomorrow, I was going to be Mrs. Nicolas Costa.
Today was our wedding day.
The backyard was decked out with streamers, a lovely arch, and dozens of chairs for our dozens of expected guests. Nicolas wanted to keep the affair intimate, so he only invited two hundred of his closest friends and colleagues. I, of course, only invited Constance and Kelly. Constance’s family, however, would fill out at least fifty of those chairs, and Kelly would be standing up with me, so she didn’t need a chair. But her date—whomever that would be—would.
I stepped out of the shower and wrapped myself in a fluffy towel, thinking about Nicolas doing the
same thing down the hall. I so wanted to go down there and see him, to crawl into his arms and never leave them again. Just a few more hours, I reminded myself. Very soon I would have the legal right to never sleep in a bed alone, to never leave him alone, and to never be without him again.
I couldn’t wait.
Kelly was waiting for me in the bedroom when I stepped out. She giggled when she saw me.
“I can’t believe you’re getting married! When all this started, I thought I needed to have you committed. But now…”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
She lifted my dress off of the hook on the back of the closet door and danced around with it.
“Getting married. Who’d believe it?”
We fell onto the bed in a gale of giggles and reminisced about days gone by, high school and college, all the things we regretted and all the things we wished we could do again.
“Guess what?” she finally asked.
“What?”
“I think I might be getting serious about someone.”
I looked at her, surprised by the lack of amusement in her voice. In fact, rather than amusement, there was something like amazement lacing her words.
That’s how I knew just how genuine she was.
“Who?”
She looked at me for a long minute. “Don’t get mad when I tell you.”
“I won’t.”
She bit her lip for a long second and then spit it out on one, long breath.
“Daniel Davis.”
I gasped and then laughed, as I threw my arms around her. “That’s great, Kelly.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He’s a great guy.”
“But he’s Virginia’s stepson.”
“Yes. But he’s not her.”
Kelly nodded. “He really is a good guy, Ana. And he treats me like I’m a queen. And, you know what else?”
“What?”
“We haven’t had sex yet.”
That was the real shocker. Kelly once had sex with a guy within ten minutes of meeting him. It wasn’t her usual behavior, but it wasn’t that far off, either. For her to not have sex with Daniel was a really big deal. I was quite impressed.
“It must be love.”
She laughed. “It just might be.”
***
I stood in front of a full length mirror in my wedding dress. It was a mermaid style that hugged all my curves with less than subtle ruffles flowing down the back. Kelly stood back and shook her head.
“If I didn’t know you’d just had twins three months ago, I would never guess it.”
I touched my belly, grateful for the stairs and the pacing with fussy babies that took the place of the treadmill these past few months. And for Nicolas. I could hear his voice in the back of my mind as my eyes found just the subtlest imperfections in my appearance:
How can I dislike the body that made my children?
This body made two perfect babies. It might not have been my eggs, but it was my uterus and my breasts that nourished them. I couldn’t find fault with that.
Someone tapped on the door. I glanced at the clock.
“We still have ten minutes.”
“I’ll see who it is,” Kelly said.
A second later, she was standing at the partially open door explaining that, “The bride isn’t supposed to see the groom before the ceremony. It’s bad luck.”
“Just give her this,” Nicolas’ voice said.
Kelly walked over to me a second later, a worried look on her face. She held up a plain envelope. “From Nicolas.”
An irrational fear burst through me, turning my vision dark for a second. But then I remembered that this was Nicolas, not some flighty douche bag I might have dated in college.
I grabbed the envelope out of her hand and pulled out the thin piece of paper inside.
“It’s the DNA test results,” I said.
“Already?” Kelly asked, already up-to-date on everything because, well, she was my best friend. Nothing happened in my world that I didn’t text her about. “What does it say?”
I shook my head as I read over the sheet of paper. “I don’t know. I think it says that the babies are Aurora’s. But we knew that.”
Kelly moved up beside me and read the paper over my shoulder. “No,” she said, gesturing at a column at the top of the page. “It says that Aurora Parker is not the mother.”
Sure enough, those words were typed at the top of the page. And next to that it said that a second DNA sample was a perfect match.
“I don’t understand. I thought they were only testing Aurora’s DNA against the babies.”
“Who else would they test?” Kelly asked.
I shrugged. I had no idea.
“How could they not be Aurora’s? She told me about the process, how much it hurt when they extracted the eggs from her fallopian tubes.”
Kelly shook her head. “This says she’s not related to the babies.”
“But it’s not possible.”
I went to the door and wrenched it open. Virginia was standing there, an uncharacteristically anxious look on her face.
“When you came to my house, I told you I knew who my daughter was. Nothing she did or said ever surprised me.” She studied me for a long minute. “But, the first time I saw those perfect babies, I knew Aurora had finally stooped to a new low. Low enough that she surprised even me.”
She took me in, standing there in my wedding dress. “You were just trying to protect Nicolas, and I was hurting so much that I wanted to punish everyone but myself for the child I raised and lost. But I think it’s time I finally accept who Aurora was and stop hurting people she already crushed.”
“Mrs. Davis,” I began, not sure where I was going with my words. However, she stopped me, placing a hand on my arm.
“Aurora set you up. She never intended to be a mother to those beautiful babies. She was going to use them to ruin Nicolas, and to hurt you in the process, an innocent young woman who only wanted to help her mother.” Virginia looked away, tears of shame filling her eyes. “She never donated eggs. Those babies…they’re yours, child.”
I shook my head. “There were embryos. Aurora and Nicolas were there when they implanted them…”
“No, child. My attorneys spoke to the doctor in question. He admitted that he didn’t do anything he told you he was doing. He simply put you on a course of fertility drugs and then introduced Nicolas’ sperm to your system. You got pregnant quite naturally—if a little clinically. And those DNA tests prove it.”
I shook my head, but she wasn’t finished.
“I arranged for a test on blood leftover from tests you submitted to when you first agreed to this process. The tests are undeniable.”
“They’re mine?”
“They’re yours.” She smiled softly at the wonder on my face. “Congratulations. They’re perfect.”
She turned and began to walk down the hall.
“Mrs. Davis?”
She paused then turned to look at me.
“My mom is gone,” I said softly, “and Nicolas’ mom is gone, too. Those babies could really use a grandmother.”
She stared at me like she couldn’t quite believe what I was saying. And then she smiled, the first smile I’d seen that actually touched her eyes.
“I’d be honored.”
***
Nicolas and I spoke our vows fifteen minutes later, Vivienne asleep in my arms and Cole nestled restlessly in Kelly’s. They woke and wanted to be a part of the ceremony, and we couldn’t say no.
Nicolas brushed a piece of hair out of my face as he bent to kiss me.
“I love you,” he whispered, “Mrs. Costa.”
Tears filled my eyes as I stared at him. All the choices I’d made these past few months flowing through my mind. If mi mami hadn’t gotten sick, if I hadn’t volunteered to be Aurora’s surrogate, if I hadn’t opened that door on that hot Texas summer night….
Thank God for random choice.
~ End ~
COLE (Dragon Security Book 1) Page 65
