Page 10 of Twins to Tame Him
He shrugged. “Yes. It is that simple.”
Something about his confidence was heady and invigorating and so damned sexy. Something about the way he played with her, flirted with her, taunted her...was invigorating.
Laila wanted to bite that lower lip, and then kiss him. Only to find out if he truly wanted her, in this plain incarnation of hers. “Fine, I agree,” she said, feeling a lightheartedness she hadn’t known in years.
He walked away, leaving Laila feeling as if she was suspended upside down in a pool of honey, even as every inch of her thrummed with anticipation, with a new energy, just like last time. Except somehow it felt like, this time, he was the one casting the lure, and openly inviting her to walk into it.
And Laila was going to walk in with her eyes wide open.
CHAPTER THREE
SEBASTIAN HAD ASSUMED he was prepared—mentally and emotionally—by the time the chauffeur-driven car pulled into the courtyard, as close as it could get to the wide steps, where he and Laila were waiting. But his heart—lodged in his throat—made it impossible to lie to himself.
He was excited and terrified in equal measures. For a man who’d fought so hard to not be molded into a template of his perfect twin, he found himself wishing Ani and Alexandros hadn’t given him privacy to face his sons for the first time.
As some sort of buffer to guard them from him—what if he reacted wrong? What if, like all the times Konstantin had mocked and torn into him, something was wrong with him? What if he felt nothing for these two innocent children that were his responsibility?
The what-ifs were endless, but fear was not new to him, and Sebastian refused to let it cow him now when he hadn’t let it when he had been a powerless, innocent child.
He wrapped his hand around Laila’s wrist, right at the moment when she’d have flown off the steps to meet them, to anchor himself rather than to stop her. An instinctive weakness he couldn’t hide.
Her entire body stilled, and her head tilted down to look at his fingers. Then, as if they’d done this very ritual countless times, she laced her fingers around his. Her fingers were soft against his but there was also strength in them.
Without turning to look at him, she said, “For almost a month, after they were born, I was terrified every time I had to hold them. It’s normal.”
He simply nodded, unable to parse his feelings, wondering at how easily she offered reassurance when she had had none for the very same situation. Or rather, she’d had support, in the form of the very old man he’d been intent on destroying.
A woman, in her sixties, was the first one to step out of the car. She bent and time seemed to move inexorably slow as she plucked out a boy from the car and set him on his feet.
Smiling and stooped, she held his shoulders as his fat legs in shorts stumbled for a second like a newborn calf. Then, with a sudden whoop at the sight of his mother, he shrugged the nanny’s hands off and ran full steam toward Laila.
From the wide smile and eager, inane chatter he kept spewing, Sebastian realized this was Nikos. His firstborn. His easy, affectionate, well-adjusted son.
Laila had been right about their physical resemblance, too—his son had the jet-black hair and the sharp nose of the Skalas family. But his eyes were like his mother’s—a warm amber that practically glowed and changed the very landscape of the toddler’s face, as if in defiance of the mighty Skalas genes that his father had been so proud of.
When Laila folded her legs to sit on the lowest step so that she was face-to-face with Nikos, Sebastian followed suit gladly, his legs nearly folding under him like they were made of matchsticks. He felt hollowed out with fear and something more, as if his insides were held together by strings outside his own body, as if this little boy or his brother could pull them as if he were a puppet and Sebastian would move and act as they bid him to.
Nikos reached them with eager cheer and easy smiles and wrapped his arms around his Mama’s knees. For all his exuberant personality, it was his tiny size that struck Sebastian like a fist to his chest.
“Mama, Mama...on the way, I see horsey. Can I pet? Can I ride? Please, Mama. I be good boy for Granny.”
Laila pressed her mouth to his temple and laughed, her hands moving over his tiny frame. The sound was full of such pure, incandescent love that it sounded alien to his ears. Sebastian had to swallow so that the strange, husky cadence of it didn’t cling to his throat.
“Hmm... We’ll have to make sure it’s safe first, yeah, baby?” Laila said, running her fingers through his wind-ruffled hair. “Because horses are big and wild.”
Dutifully, Nikos nodded. “Safe, yeah.” Then he pinned those amber eyes on Sebastian, quite like how his mother had done that very morning, and Sebastian thought something he hadn’t known inside him had been cracked open, never to be patched up or closed again. Like a vast abyss full of prickly things like vulnerability and joy and love and pain. An abyss that seemed to spring out of himself, one he’d avoided looking into for so long.
A gap-toothed grin appeared as Nikos said, “Hi.”
Sebastian croaked out a “Hello, Nikos,” as if he was the one who didn’t know how to form words yet.
“You know horsey?”
Sebastian laughed. The sound seemed to come thrashing out from below his chest, through his diaphragm in an action his body was unaware it could perform until now. “Yes, Nikos. I might know horsey.”
His good cheer growing, Nikos turned to his mother. “Friend, Mama? Not stranger?”
Hands squeezing Nikos’s shoulders compulsively enough that the little boy bristled against his mother’s hold, Laila trembled. But she met Sebastian’s gaze over his head, ever the brave one. Then she gathered Nikos closer to her chest, kissed his temple again, before she said, “Nikos, this is your papa.”