Reunited by the Tycoon's Twins

by Ellie Darkins

  All seemed quiet, he noted as he turned his key in the lock and opened the door. From the hallway he followed the sound of babies laughing right up the stairs until he found Bella, Hart and Madeleine all lying on the play mat in the nursery, staring up at the stars projected on the ceiling. The babies were in pyjamas, looking freshly bathed and content, and there were two empty bottles on the dresser beside the glider chair. He’d tried to get home for their bedtime, but had been waylaid on his way out and was back half an hour after they’d usually be asleep. But Madeleine had known, it seemed, that he’d want to say goodnight to them. His heart throbbed at her understanding that. And then he saw her spot him standing by the door.

  She sat straight up and the playful look on her face was replaced immediately with pure fury. He took a reflexive step back as she walked towards him and scrambled to keep up with the abrupt change of atmosphere.

  ‘They’re ready to go to sleep,’ she all but hissed at him as she approached the door. ‘Hart will go sooner than Bella, I think. Trudy left dinner in the oven.’

  He frowned as he watched her walk down the corridor, grab a bag from her room and head for the stairs. ‘Wait!’ he called, jogging after her. ‘What’s going on, Madeleine? I know things are a bit awkward after last night, but you don’t have to—’

  ‘A bit awkward? A bit awkward?’ Madeleine whisper-shouted, anger radiating. ‘This morning in the kitchen was a bit awkward, Finn. Now...now we are so far past awkward that I actually kind of miss it. We left it behind when you decided to pay me for my services.’

  ‘Services? I don’t know what—’

  And then he did know. Saw how it must have looked to Madeleine and wanted to bang his head against the nearest wall to knock the stupidity out.

  He’d deposited thousands of pounds into her bank account the morning after they had slept together. Of course it didn’t look great. But that wasn’t what he had meant by it—not at all, but it didn’t look as if Madeleine was planning on sticking round long enough to hear him out on it. And how could he blame her for that?

  ‘Oh, no, Madeleine. I see how it looks and I promise it’s not like that. Not at all. I just wanted to help and you were so excited about university and this way you could be sure you had the finances in place. Please, please will you stick around until I’ve got the kids to sleep and we can talk about it properly?’

  He couldn’t do this in a stage whisper, waiting for a cry from the twins. He just needed her to wait one hour and they could sort all this out.

  She glanced at her watch and then at the front door, and for a second he thought that he’d lost her. But she dropped the bag and his heart started beating again, a tattoo of relief.

  ‘I’ll wait in the kitchen until seven-thirty,’ she said, glancing at her watch. ‘But after that I’m going and I’m not coming back, Finn.’

  ‘I’ll be down before then, I promise you, and we will sort this out.’

  * * *

  Madeleine sat in the kitchen nursing a cup of tea and texting Jake while she waited for Finn to get the babies to sleep. She’d dropped him a text asking if she could stay the night, and he’d texted straight back asking what had happened with Finn. And so it begins, she thought. Suddenly she could see endless questions about ‘What happened with Finn?’ in her future and had no idea how to answer them.

  And if she didn’t tell, then Jake was only going to ask Finn, and she didn’t even want to think about what he would tell her brother. Surely he wouldn’t be so base as to tell him what had happened. But then before today she hadn’t thought that he would chuck a big lump of cash in her bank account after they had spent the night together either. Turned out she didn’t know Finn as well as she’d thought that she did.

  Which shouldn’t have been a surprise, really, considering that they had only spent a handful of days together since she had left her childhood home for university. But in those few days he had really convinced her that he understood her. That he knew her. She had told him things that she had never told anyone else. And he hadn’t listened at all. Not really listened, not if he thought that he could treat her the way that he had today and that she would be fine with that.

  She thought about the explanations that he had given her: that he wanted her to have certainty about her university finances, as if she were some eighteen-year-old schoolgirl who needed someone to help her navigate the world of student loans, rather than a woman the other side of thirty who had been handling her overdraft for nearly half her life and was perfectly capable of finding a scholarship for herself.

  He didn’t think she could do it.

  If the money wasn’t payment for services rendered, then it was something else. It was a tacit acknowledgement that he didn’t think that she would be able to do it by herself. He was rescuing her before she even needed it, so sure was he that she was going to fail. By the time that he walked into the room at seven twenty-five, she was halfway decided that she was just going to walk without hearing him out. What could he possibly say that would make up for his utter lack of faith in or respect for her?

  ‘Madeleine, if you’ll hear me out, I’d like to explain.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything you can say, Finn,’ she said, crossing her arms across her body and making it clear she was putting firm boundaries in place. As far as she was concerned, the intimacies of last night had never happened. ‘I stayed because I didn’t want to do this in front of the twins, and they needed to go to sleep. But you can’t undo what you did, so I think it’s best if I go. I’ll return the money, of course. It’s best if we keep out of each other’s way for a while.’

  He shook his head and came to lean on the kitchen island opposite her. She couldn’t look him in the eyes, not if she wanted to remember that she was keeping her distance, emotionally as well as physically.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘I realise now what it must look like, and I’m sorry. But I was always going to give you the money for university. It had nothing to do with last night.’

  ‘It had nothing to do with what I actually wanted either,’ Madeleine said, finding in her anger that she could look at him directly. ‘I know you expect me to be grateful, but I didn’t ask for your money. I didn’t want it when you offered it to me. I can do this myself, and I have every intention of doing so.’

  ‘But you don’t need to,’ he countered, looking genuinely confused that she might want to do this on her own. ‘Why won’t you accept a little help?’

  ‘Why won’t you accept that I don’t need your help?’ she said, sliding off her stool and standing opposite him. ‘Yes, you did me a favour by letting me stay here, but I want to get back on my own feet. I’ve never wanted to be dependent on you. Not before last night, and definitely not after.’

  He frowned at her, and she wondered if he was being dense on purpose. ‘Would that be so awful, having to depend on another person?’ Finn asked.

  ‘Do you depend on anyone?’ she asked. ‘Do you look to someone else to pay your bills?’ She planted her hands on her hips, trying to ground herself and stay rational. But he was so infuriating it was becoming an impossible task. ‘No. You did it all yourself, but you don’t believe that I can. If you believed in me, you wouldn’t have to sneak money into my bank account like that.’

  Finn threw his hands in the air, and she could tell he was as frustrated as she was. ‘Of course I believe that you can do it yourself. I just don’t think you should have to. This way you can be certain that you’ve got a place to stay. I don’t see why that’s a bad thing.’

  ‘I was sure that I could find another way. You’re the only one who wasn’t.’

  ‘But why risk the uncertainty?’ he asked, and she could hear his frustration in the strain of his voice. ‘Why risk finding yourself with nowhere to live? Again.’

  She talked low and slow, so he couldn’t be in any doubt about how angry she was
with him. ‘I can risk it because I believe in myself. It’s called confidence, Finn. Faith. Something you seem to be lacking in me.’

  His hands had dropped to the countertop now, and he was leaning heavily on it.

  ‘I don’t think you understand. If something went wrong...’

  ‘You don’t think I understand? I turned up on your doorstep with nowhere else to go, with no job and no idea of what I was going to do next. And you think I don’t understand? If something went wrong, I would try again,’ she said, still speaking slowly. ‘And I would keep trying until I’d done it. Isn’t that how you got to where you are?’

  ‘Yes, but...’

  She paused, looked at him, at the way the colour had drained from his face.

  ‘You’ve never failed, have you?’ she said, realisation crashing over her. ‘You’ve gone from one piece of good luck to another and never had to live with the consequences when it’s all gone wrong.’

  ‘Ha!’ Finn said with a laugh that didn’t sound at all genuine. ‘You don’t understand what you’re talking about, Madeleine.’

  ‘Sure I do. You’re the head of a huge company, in beautiful new offices. You have two beautiful children and this gorgeous home. You’ve got everything that you ever wanted. You can’t even imagine how I would survive if my plans didn’t work out first time. I mean, look at everything you’ve achieved.’ She watched him closely, trying to read his body language, his face. She had spilled more secrets to him than she’d ever thought she could, and now it was time to even the score.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said again, his voice lower, more dangerous. ‘You look around and see an apartment. I see failure. I see the house I should have been bringing my children up in, sold in the divorce because I couldn’t make my marriage work. It was gone. I didn’t even know—still don’t know—how my marriage disintegrated so fast. And my home was gone, and the business holding on by a thread. And I could so easily have lost everything. I still could.’

  ‘You’re terrified,’ she realised, looking at him, really seeing his life for the first time. Suddenly it all made sense. The drive, the ambition. ‘You’re terrified that all this is going to fail and you’ll lose everything.’ And he had been projecting all his worst fears onto her rather than face up to them. ‘You’re so afraid of failure that you can’t bear the thought that my plans might not work out, so you pumped my bank account full of money to make sure that won’t happen.’

  ‘That’s not it,’ Finn said. But she could read his face. His heart wasn’t even in the denial. That was exactly it.

  ‘Why are you so scared?’ she asked. ‘You have this apartment. You have your business. You could walk away now a rich man.’

  ‘I could, and then there could be another financial crisis and I could lose everything and the apartment would be gone and the kids... What would we do? I thought I was set for life. I thought the business was good and my home life was good and I thought I could see how the future was going to unfold. And then Caro told me that she was unhappy, that she was leaving, and it all fell away. I thought it was all secure, and it wasn’t. Not a single part of my life made it out of the divorce unscathed. And I can’t risk that again. I won’t.’

  And there it was. This was what he was really afraid of—finding himself a hungry little boy again. Seeing his children live the same childhood that he had. She was hit by a wave of sympathy, taking the edge off her anger.

  ‘Your mother coped with worse,’ she reminded him, ‘and you turned out okay.’ Because, really, the huge chunk of money she hadn’t asked for aside, Finn was a decent guy and she knew his mother was proud of him.

  ‘She did. She coped. Every single day she worked two jobs, sometimes more, to keep barely enough food in the cupboard for me, and she coped. And that’s all she did. So that by the time that I had enough money for her not to have to work any more she was too worn out and tired to enjoy the benefits.’

  ‘And you’re frightened of ending up like her. I understand that. But you did it, Finn. You worked hard for her, and yourself, and you’re a million miles away from that life now. You’re not going to wake up one day and find yourself back there.’

  ‘But what’s the difference, really?’ he asked, looking haunted. ‘It’s the figures in my bank accounts. It’s not real money; it’s just numbers. It’s intangible. When Caro and I got divorced, that number halved. The house went. I nearly lost the business too. Anything could happen. The business could still fail. One of the kids could get sick. There are a million things waiting around the corner that will mean that all that work wasn’t enough and I’ll find myself back where I started. Where my mum started.’

  ‘Your marriage ended and that meant you’d failed. That’s what you think, right? You failed, putting everything at risk.’ She so had him sussed, and he was wrong, and she was going to make him see it. Not for herself, she told herself, but as a service to her friend. She had no interest in whether he was relationship material or not, because she absolutely didn’t want one herself. But she couldn’t let him go on with his life scared to start a relationship because he was convinced that he was going to lose everything. That he wouldn’t be able to cope if that happened. He was a good guy, and he deserved better than that.

  ‘Well, we’re divorced,’ Finn said eventually. ‘I don’t think we can call it a roaring success of a marriage.’

  She rested her elbows on the countertop, leaning towards him in a challenge. ‘You could call it two people growing apart and making a positive decision for their future happiness.’

  ‘You could call it that, if you wanted to.’ Finn took a step backwards and she knew that her words had hit home. ‘I just see it for what it was. Something that should have been better. Something that would have been better, if I’d worked a little harder.’

  She laughed, only stopping herself when she saw the hurt on his face. ‘You think your marriage ended because you didn’t work hard enough?’

  ‘That was part of it.’ He nodded.

  ‘And the other parts?’

  ‘What do the other parts matter?’ She was pressed up against the counter now and he had retreated to the other side of the room. He was on the run, but she was going to make him face up to this. He had put her in this position by putting that money into her account when she had specifically told him not to. She wasn’t going to hold off making him as uncomfortable as he had made her.

  ‘I imagine they mattered to Caro.’ He was the one with his arms crossed now. She saw the barriers he had thrown up and ignored them. This was too important. ‘Did you talk about it, when things started to go wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, of course, but by then it was too late. We wanted different things: I wanted to be settled here and she wanted something...more.’

  Madeleine shrugged. ‘Doesn’t sound like there’s a lot you could have done about that.’

  ‘I could have tried to go with her.’

  ‘Was that what you wanted?’

  He hesitated, looked thoughtful. ‘No.’

  ‘Then I can’t imagine it would have made for a fulfilling arrangement for either of you. Sounds like the decision to end the marriage was a pretty successful one for both of you. So why did it feel so scary? Was it the money?’

  He shook his head. ‘We split things fifty-fifty. It was fair.’

  ‘I’m sure it was. What aren’t you telling me, Finn? I know there’s more to this.’

  His eyes snapped up to hers and she realised she’d been thinking out loud. He dropped his head into his hands before he answered, and pressed hard against his eyes. ‘I lost my home, Maddie,’ he said when he looked up. ‘I waited so long to have my own home, with food always in the fridge. With the heating always on. And I married Caro and we bought our house, and I thought that that was it. That I never had to worry again. And then—so quickly—it was all gone. Just...gone
. And at the same time we were building the new business premises, and the numbers weren’t adding up. And for the first time since I was a kid I was scared, Madeleine. I was scared that it wasn’t all going to come good in the end. That I was going to find myself hungry. And cold. And back on Jake’s doorstep, looking for someone to take me in. I couldn’t bear that. I couldn’t bear to lose everything that I had worked so hard for. For it all to come to nothing.’

  She watched as he crossed to the fridge, grabbed a beer and slid a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, and wondered if it was conscious. That need to go and get the food that was always available now.

  ‘No wonder you’re not ready for this,’ she said, and his eyes snapped to her. How could he be ready for a relationship when he was paralysed by his fear of what would happen if it all went wrong? Far safer to sabotage the whole thing before it even got off the ground. ‘But, you know, just because things went wrong once before, that doesn’t mean it would happen again. You lost an awful lot when Caro went, and I’m not talking about the money and the house. Or even your wife. I’m talking about feeling safe, and secure. And loved. But you survived it. And you have the twins and a lot to show for those years you were married. Would you rather you’d never met Caro? Never married her?’

  She saw him think about it, and then the expression on his face softened. ‘No. I wouldn’t have the twins if I’d never met her. I wouldn’t... Everything that has happened in my life has led me here. Tonight. And I’m not sure I can wish that away.’

  When he shot her a particularly intense look she had to look away. It was good that he wasn’t ready for this, she told herself. She wasn’t ready for this. She didn’t want this. Not with her new plans for her life buzzing and sparking in her brain. She didn’t want to be distracted by a man. Least of all one who wouldn’t give her the space or opportunity to make her own mistakes—forge her own path.