Page 11 of Twins to Tame Him

“Papa? My papa?”

Laila nodded, tears spilling out from her eyes.

“Hi, Papa,” Nikos said, as if this was as easy and understandable as the sky was blue and the horse was big and then he made a jump from his mother’s lap toward Sebastian that probably took a decade off Sebastian’s life span.

Shaken to his core, he caught the little body. The scent of baby powder and dust and bananas hit Sebastian as he gathered his son to himself, his hands shaking, his breath a hurried whistle, terrified that he might do something that would spook the small boy.

But Nikos was as courageous as Sebastian himself had been once. Utterly unabashed, he threw his arms around Sebastian’s neck and said, “Hi, Papa.” His heart thundered like a drumbeat as he took in the stubby nose with crust under it and the wide amber eyes and the thick lashes. Now his heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vise, and that, too, was an ache he hadn’t known in such a long time that it was now unfamiliar.

Nikos looked up into Sebastian’s face, one grubby finger tracing his cheekbone, and said, “You take me to horsey?”

And Sebastian was laughing again, but there were tears in his eyes, too, and it was another thing he didn’t know he was capable of—to laugh and cry at the same time—and he didn’t care if Laila saw them. He sniffed like a baby, pressed a kiss to his son’s head and said, “Yes, Nikos. Papa take you to horsey.”

In response to Nikos’s loud cheers, Laila groaned and laughed and told Sebastian in quite the stern voice that their sons would never learn to speak properly if she and Sebastian didn’t speak in complete sentences to them, and Sebastian told her his son spoke perfectly enough for him and to hell with the entire damned world. And in the secret chamber of his heart that had frozen to ice a long time ago, he felt a crack. It felt good to belong to something bigger than himself, something purer than what the Skalas name and family had stood for, something that had this woman looking at him with a strange mixture of reluctant trust and utter openness.

His meeting with his second son was as much an emotional roller coaster as meeting Nikos but more...heart-wrenching, as if he’d been suspended at the scariest part of the ride, to hang upside down, his heart threatening to beat out of his chest.

And that’s how it would be from now on, Sebastian realized. The stupid organ that he had no use for until now was to be wrenched and shaken and played around this way and that by these two little boys.

A few minutes later, Laila had spread a thick blanket right on the acres of perfectly manicured lawn for an impromptu picnic, claiming she wanted to give the boys time to run around after their nap and before bringing them inside to new surroundings. Nikos was drinking water from his bottle, eating crackers she handed him and casting glances at and asking numerous questions of Sebastian—mostly about what the horsey ate and did and played with—when the old nanny brought Zayn, who’d been napping longer, out of the car.

He didn’t run toward Laila like Nikos did. In fact, he seemed to be against the very idea of coming close to his mama, as long as she was sitting near Sebastian.

With a softly murmured, “Please give him space,” and a tremor she couldn’t hide, Laila got up from the blanket and started chasing Nikos across the green lawn, all the while keeping an eye on Zayn and chatting to him about the car ride and his nap.

Sebastian, feeling as if he’d been ordered to sit out his favorite game—which had been an actual punishment Konstantin had meted out to him more than once—took himself off the blanket, hoping Zayn would understand that he posed no threat.

Finally, after a few minutes of watching his mother and twin, a tiny notepad and pencil clutched in his tiny hands as if they were his precious possessions, Zayn approached his mother and hugged her legs. Immediately, Nikos grabbed his hand and dragged his younger brother forward. “Zayn, this Papa. He show horsey to us. You wanna come?”

While his twin’s reassurance was enough to join in on the play and to hug his mother in this new, strange location, it didn’t seem to hit the mark for Zayn when it came to trusting Sebastian. He took a step back to hide behind his twin’s body, his amber eyes far too intensely focused on Sebastian’s face for a two-year-old boy.

“Papa, Mama?” he said, after a long while, having heard his twin bandy about the word with a ferocious sort of pleasure.

Laila nodded, opened her mouth—no doubt to urge him to greet Sebastian—and then decided against it.

Zayn gave a grave nod in return, as if agreeing to process this new material, but promising no more, and then completely avoided Sebastian.

Like a laser pointer creating heat on his skin, he could feel Zayn’s gaze on him from time to time, but the moment he tried to make eye contact, the little boy looked away. Which meant Nikos stayed away, too, because clearly, his first loyalty was to his twin.

Just as Alexandros’s loyalty had been to Sebastian, all those years ago, enough to take on the impossibly powerful Konstantin, even as he threatened Xander’s ruin for that loyalty. Sebastian looked away, the past and the future blurring in front of his eyes and in his head. He pressed his fingers into his temples, feeling the shadow of an ache there.

That won’t be necessary with his boys, he vowed to himself. Nikos wouldn’t have to shield Zayn from anything, much less their own father, because Sebastian would do it for both of them.

While every inch of him urged him to gather Zayn in his arms and cocoon his sensitive son from the very world Itself, Sebastian fought the overpowering instinct. They were both here now, and he felt as if he had been swimming under water for too long, and he would not do a single thing that would upset his sons. He would not be his father, turning everything into ego, twisting what it meant to be a man, claiming they had to act a certain way to be worthy of the Skalas name.

He would not let his sons down. He would not let Laila down.

Suddenly, all the distrust he’d thrown in her face seemed like dust motes amid gratitude for how bravely she’d brought them into his life.

For years after she’d abandoned them to Konstantin’s mercy, Sebastian had wondered where his mother had disappeared to, how she had fared, wondered if she’d thought of him and Xander, wondered if she was well. All he had known was that Guido, who’d worked as their chauffeur for one summer, had helped her escape, had been the only man who had known her whereabouts.

It had taken him years to track down the old chauffeur, a little more to understand his weakness for gambling, then he’d taken his house from him, knowing that shame, if nothing else, would persuade the old man to spill Sebastian’s mother’s whereabouts. He’d been desperate to find his mother as a young teen, but as a grown man, it had become an obsession, in the absence of any real purpose.

In pursuit of that piece of truth from his past, he’d threatened ruin for Guido, the very man who had helped Laila take care of his sons. Until now, that man had been only a step in his pursuit, an obstacle in his goal. But now, thanks to Laila, he couldn’t unsee Guido as a kind old man who had once cradled his sons in his arms with tender care.

Guilt gnawed at Sebastian’s insides. Having heard the affection in her voice when she spoke of Guido now, he understood that she’d done whatever needed to protect a loved one. Just as he or Alexandros would have done.

And she also had every reason to think the worst of him and to stay away.