Reunited by the Tycoon's Twins

by Ellie Darkins

  Not being a reality TV star or other such worthy, Finn’s story hadn’t made it to her desk at work. And thank God no one at the website had known about the childhood connection between her and Finn, otherwise they would have been harassing her for details that she didn’t have.

  It might have saved her job, she thought for a second, if she could have dished some dirt on her brother’s friend. But she had none to dish. Jake had told her nothing, and Finn was hardly likely to tell her anything either. He knew that she was a journalist. To be honest, she was surprised that he had let her into his home at all. She couldn’t imagine that he was going to start spilling his guts to her.

  If only he knew that she didn’t have the least interest in his personal life. She’d never wanted a career in celebrity gossip. But she’d left university without the double honours in politics and journalism she’d worked so hard for, and had found herself having to take any job she was offered. She’d thought the blog would be a stepping stone towards what she really wanted to be doing, serious political investigative journalism. But instead she’d found herself pigeonholed. Doors slammed in her face and job applications unanswered. So she’d written clickbait, filed her copy and gone home at night with the sensation that somehow she’d found herself living someone else’s life.

  When the last round of redundancies had been announced, she’d been relieved as much as she had been concerned. A redundancy would give her a chance to make a change in her career. In her life. That was until her landlord had given her an eviction notice the following week, and she’d realised that she wasn’t going to be able to get a new flat without a regular source of income. If she decided to go freelance—scrabbling around for the same work as all her colleagues who had also just been let go—it would be years before she had enough of an accounting history to pass a credit check. When she had called her brother and whined on the phone to him, he’d told her he’d call her back with an idea—and he had.

  Which was how she had found herself in Finn Holton’s kitchen with a baby on her knee, wondering about the details of his personal life.

  I mean, she shouldn’t be curious. It was none of her business how one of the country’s leading technology moguls, and wealthiest men, had found himself a divorced single dad. If he had been a single mum, no one would have given a second thought to the fact that he was the one raising the babies. But he wasn’t a woman. And his situation was unusual. Which made her wonder.

  Her career might have focused more on celebs falling out of nightclubs than on the business pages, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a journalist’s instincts at all.

  ‘Jake was right, though. You’re good at this,’ Finn said as he put the baby down in the Moses basket in the corner. ‘My children might be younger than his, but you’ve got the knack.’

  ‘Must be an auntie thing,’ Madeleine said. ‘I’ve had enough practice with his brood. Who has four kids, really?’

  ‘They are great kids, though.’

  She smiled but could feel her eyebrows pulling together even as she did so. Finn was not what she had been expecting. At all. When she thought back to the kid she had seen occasionally in her kitchen at home, demolishing a loaf of bread’s worth of toast with her brother as they messed about on her family’s computer, there hadn’t seemed much remarkable about him at all. She was pretty sure that she’d never paid him more than fleeting attention. I mean, who did, to their snotty little brother’s mates?

  If she’d known then the success that he was going to achieve, the enigmatic figure that he was going to become, would she have paid more attention?

  Probably not, she admitted, letting her smile spread to her eyes. Teenage boys were unbearable. It didn’t matter who they were going to grow up to be. She wondered if Finn remembered her as a teenager. Trying to swamp her emerging curves in giant T-shirts and baggy jeans. Whether he’d been one of the boys at school who had taken bets on whether they could sneak into the changing rooms while she was in PE and steal one of her bras.

  No. Jake would have known. And he would never have allowed Finn in the house if that had been the case.

  He looked nothing like the spotty, awkward-looking kid in worn-out trainers he had been then. She sneaked another glance at him while he was distracted by the baby, her journalist’s eye taking a quick inventory, hitting the important points. Designer jeans, discreet but expensive watch, crisp white T-shirt, showing no sign of doing battle with two babies. Really, that wasn’t fair. She was pretty sure her shirt had milk on it already and she’d only been here for an hour. But the clothes were all window-dressing, really.

  It was the face that interested her. Because you could change your clothes. You could drag yourself out of poverty and change your life and wear a new wardrobe. But you couldn’t change your face. And when she looked at Finn, she could see him. The lost little boy who had spent more time in her family’s kitchen than his own. Who had turned up starving, and had left stuffed to the gills with food by her mum, who’d known that he was probably going back to a cold house and an empty fridge. Who’d been packed off with clothes that Mum had just happened to find at the charity shop next door to her work, that wouldn’t fit Jake and couldn’t be returned.

  He’d been a part of her family for years. But those years had happened to coincide with her later teenage ones, when she had spent as much time as humanly possible hidden in her room, avoiding her family. And anyone else for that matter.

  Her teenage years hadn’t exactly been a happy time, and being forced to revisit them, by virtue of the constant reminder that was Finn, hadn’t been a part of her plan. But, as she had nowhere else to go, she was stuck with him, and the memories.

  Finn was still making goofy faces at the baby, so she took another minute to look at him. To see the man, rather than the boy. There was no hiding from the fact that somewhere along the line he had become...beautiful. There was no other word for it. High cheekbones sloped down into a strong, stubble-covered jaw. Wide green eyes under dark brows, and a full mouth curved into a smile as he chatted gibberish to his son. It was a pretty picture. If you liked that sort of thing. And the warmth low in her belly was all the proof—if proof were needed—that Madeleine absolutely did like that sort of thing.

  She wondered if it had all changed him. The money. The success. The business. Of course it must have changed him. But how had it changed him? she wondered. Had it made him hard? Had he had to become tough, in order to break the cycle of poverty, finish his education, start his business? If it had, she couldn’t see it now, with the sunshine streaming in through the windows and a baby chuckling goofily up at him. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t lurking somewhere under the surface.

  It didn’t matter, she told herself sternly. Because she was staying in his home, she was looking after his children, and what she thought about him personally was completely out of bounds. It didn’t matter if he was beautiful. It wouldn’t matter if he was tough. Because any sort of a relationship—even the shortest of flirtations, the most casual of flings—was completely off the cards.

  And flings were the only sort of relationship that Madeleine could tolerate. Get in, have fun, get out before they could disappoint you. That was what ten years of working and dating in London had taught her. So she swiped right and accepted blind dates and chatted to guys in bars, always safe in the knowledge that she was going to cut ties before they had a chance to disappoint her.

  And there was no question that she would always be disappointed in the end. She’d learnt that early on in her love life, before she had even left school. When it didn’t matter how sweet the boy was or how interested he pretended to be in her life; all he really wanted was to get a hand in her bra. And ever since she had worked that out, she had been happier. She accepted that no one saw past her body and her face, and all the assumptions that they would make about her. And as long as she didn’t expect more, she could have fun with th
em for a few weeks. Relationships happened on her terms, met her needs and ended when she decided. It had kept her bed warm and her evenings full since she had been in London, and she was happy with that.

  Except...that would never lead to this, she thought, watching Finn with Hart. It didn’t lead to marriage and babies and a family of your own.

  But she didn’t care about that, Madeleine reminded herself. Single dad of twins wasn’t exactly a nuclear family either. Nor were her brother and his husband and their adopted brood. She had other options if she decided that she wanted a family one day. Options that didn’t include pretending that the guys she hung out with were able to take her seriously enough to be interested in anything more than her body.

  And that was before she even got started on her disastrous professional life, which had never recovered from her decision to quit university in her final year. Which had led to her not being able to get the political reporting internships that she had wanted, which had led to her being on the entertainment desk of a second-rate gossip website, which apparently hadn’t been generating enough income from its clickbait to actually continue paying its staff.

  She shook herself, physically as well as metaphorically, causing Finn to look over at her.

  ‘Sorry, we were ignoring you,’ he said with a smile. ‘I got distracted.’

  She smiled at the pair, who were really too cute to be real. She’d had no idea what the sight of a beautiful man with his baby could do to a girl’s ovaries, but she was pretty sure she’d just popped out an egg. And just as rapidly shut down those responses. This was just hormones. And stress. And...something of a dry spell. She wasn’t sure what else she should be blaming it on. It didn’t matter what the reasons were; the only thing that mattered now was that she shut it down.

  ‘It’s fine. I get it. I’m here to help, so just let me know what you want me to do.’

  ‘Will you watch him again for a few minutes?’ Finn asked, glancing at the clock on the wall. ‘I should really wake Bella. If she goes too far off his schedule then the whole day falls apart. Pick him up if he starts to grizzle.’ Which he started to do the minute that Finn moved away from him.

  ‘Of course,’ Madeleine said, taking Hart on her shoulder and rubbing his back out of instinct. Finn looked at her for a moment, and she felt herself starting to blush.

  ‘Jake was right. You really are a natural at this,’ he said, and Madeleine met his eyes, surprised.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m the fun auntie. I have the easy job.’

  Finn nodded, and Madeleine turned away, uneasy under his gaze. And a little embarrassed. She had assumed that he had been looking at her because, really, it was what she was used to. But of course he had been looking at his son.

  Maybe Finn wasn’t attracted to her. That would certainly make life easier. Make the spark of attraction that she had felt for him a little less inconvenient too. Except...she had seen the way he had occasionally looked at her since she had arrived. It definitely wasn’t as brotherly as would be convenient for her right now.

  She tried to think back to the times that their paths had crossed in her childhood home, long since sold so that her parents could pursue their adventures abroad. Had Finn ever looked at her with adolescent heat in his eyes? Had she ever thought of him as something other than her pain-in-the-butt brother’s pain-in-the-butt friend?

  Of course not. Thinking back to her teenage years, it was unlikely that she’d peeled her eyes away from the floor for long enough to even get a proper look at him.

  It had taken a long time for her to work out that the way to stop people looking at her was to stare them down rather than avoid their gaze. She had an expression that she knew could shame even the most hardened of voyeurs from fifty paces. It had taken time and practice to perfect, but she’d had no shortage of opportunities.

  The pad of footsteps behind her made her spin on her stool, and Finn reappeared with another baby on his shoulder, the white of her Baby-gro as fresh and clean as the cotton of Finn’s T-shirt.

  ‘This sleepyhead here,’ Finn said, half spinning on the spot so that Madeleine could see the baby’s face, ‘is Bella. Bella, say hi to Madeleine.’

  Madeleine smiled at the baby, because who could resist a six-month-old, with their chubby cheeks and their chunky limbs, all energy stored up for crawling and walking and the chaos that was to come? But, for a little while longer, she would still be this gorgeous little chunk of babbling perfection, personality shining out of her, even when she was still half asleep.

  ‘They’re both so gorgeous. I don’t know how you get anything done,’ Madeleine said with a smile.

  ‘I don’t.’ Finn laughed, though it sounded a little strained. ‘That’s why you’re here. I think it would be a good idea if we all spent some time together over the weekend, get them settled in. Then next week I’ll work from home but start building in a bit of time at the office. Get them used to it. Does that work for you?’

  ‘I work for you,’ Madeleine reminded him. ‘It works how you want it to work.’

  Finn narrowed his eyes at her. ‘I’m not thinking of it that way. You’re not an employee, Madeleine. I don’t want this to be weird.’

  ‘It’s not weird.’ She shook off the suggestion, tried to pretend that she was completely comfortable around Finn. Not unsettled at all by the attraction she was feeling for him.

  ‘Good, because I thought we were just friends helping each other out. I’m really grateful for what you’re doing.’

  ‘And I’m grateful too, for the place to stay.’

  ‘Good. You know that Jake is like family to me, right. Which means you’re family too. Which means I want to help you out. Okay? The fact that you’re able to take care of the kids for a few weeks, and I’m able to make sure that you are fairly compensated for that, that doesn’t change how I see this, okay? If there’s anything you’re not happy with, if you change your mind or you find a new flat next week and you don’t want to stay, you just tell me, right?’

  She nodded, forced a smile, but it didn’t matter what he said; this was already more complicated than he realised.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SHE LOOKED TRAPPED, and he hated that look on her face. Her expression when she said that she worked for him, he hated that too. He wasn’t sure what it was, that haunted, distrustful look that told him that not everyone she had worked for had treated her fairly. It reminded him of how she had looked when he had opened the door to her earlier, when she had been harassed by the driver of a van.

  ‘So...dinner tonight,’ Finn said, changing the subject. ‘My housekeeper, Trudy, has gone for the weekend, and I usually fend for myself.’

  ‘My goodness, such a modern man,’ Madeleine said with an eye roll. ‘I’m sure I’m very impressed.’

  ‘Save it for the stand-up routine,’ Finn said, grinning. ‘Fending for myself usually involves ordering pizza. If you’re nice to me, I’ll let you share.’

  ‘Wow. Those millions sure have made you generous.’ She smiled, but then felt awkward, seeing the look on his face when she mentioned money.

  ‘I’m still just me,’ he said, his voice low and serious.

  ‘I know,’ she said and smiled, reassuring him. Even though, to be honest, she didn’t really know him at all. But she knew entitled, privileged jerks when she saw them, and so far he didn’t seem to be one. ‘However fancy your kitchen gadgets. I like the apartment, by the way. How long have you been here?’

  He produced a smile that didn’t look quite natural. ‘Since just before the babies were born. We sold the house when Caro and I...’

  ‘Right, of course.’ Madeleine tried to cover the awkward pause that inevitably followed accidentally bringing up someone’s fairly recent divorce, not wanting to pry. But, at the same time, she was living with this man—albeit temporarily—and couldn’t deny that she was curious about what had happened.
I mean, she was only human.

  ‘It was all very amicable,’ he said, though a line had appeared between his eyebrows. ‘We’re still friends, of course. The twins, you know.’

  Madeleine narrowed her eyes as she watched Finn. That all sounded too easy, and none of it explained the slightly pinched expression that he had assumed. The look of someone who had had too little sleep and too much worry in recent months, if she had to guess.

  ‘It sounds like you were very grown-up about the split.’

  Finn shrugged and gave a half-smile that came nowhere close to convincing her. ‘We were, really. What choice did we have? She wanted to go; I couldn’t make her stay. Squabbling over how we divided things up wasn’t going to change that. I just needed it to be over. To concentrate on getting back on track.’

  ‘And the babies?’ Madeleine asked, surprised that Finn was opening up to her. And more than a little intrigued about what exactly it was that Caro had hated so much about her life with Finn. From where Madeleine was sitting, it had quite a lot going for it. And she wasn’t thinking about the perfect espresso she’d just downed in two gulps.

  ‘She didn’t find out that she was pregnant until quite late on,’ Finn said, and once again Madeleine was struck by his honesty. She couldn’t believe that he was trusting her with the details of his marriage. Wasn’t he worried that she was going to sell him out? ‘By then our marriage was already over, and she had accepted a job doing emergency aid work abroad. She wanted the kids raised here, where it was safer. We both did. And she didn’t want to turn down a job where she knew she could save thousands of lives.’

  So their marriage was already over. That was interesting. She’d assumed that their breakup was a recent thing, with the babies and all, but it sounded as if it must have happened more than a year ago. And all of a sudden, sleeping in his home, with this spark of attraction she was finding hard to ignore, was seeming like a less and less good idea.