Page 8 of Twins to Tame Him
Baba had been kind, fun, down-to-earth for a distinguished poet, and had showered her, and even her half sister, Nadia, when she’d allow it, with such unconditional love. After losing him, it was Guido, their housekeeper and papa’s childhood friend, who had looked after her while her mother romanced man after unsuitable man, teaching Nadia to prize beauty and wealth and power over everything else.
Without Guido to hold her through the grief of losing her father, Laila might have unraveled completely.
“The picture I have of you is based on the fact that you’d have ruined an innocent man. You used his weakness for gambling to rob him of his home, the only thing he had, threatened him with ruin. All for what, Sebastian?” Laila said, glad for the reminder. “Guido wouldn’t speak of what you wanted from him—”
“Where is this innocent man in all the hardships you faced?” he said, cutting her off. “Was he worth the elaborate farce? Was he worth sleeping with me?”
And there was the anger she’d expected, though only a small ember. Laila almost felt relieved at his silken thrust of a question. The deceit she had pulled on him had never sat well with her. Especially when he was the father of her sons. Especially when her entire life had been about taking care of others. Sometimes at the cost of her own well-being. That woman who had schemed to meet him, with the intention of getting close to him, the woman who had then lost all common sense and followed him to his apartment and slept with him... That was not her. Only desperation to somehow save Guido from his clutches and the genuine connection she had felt with him had driven her that far.
She hadn’t realized until this moment how much she’d craved to explain her actions, how much she needed to hear his own reasons. “Guido died of a heart attack six months to the day after the boys were born. He was the first one to hold both of them. He spent hours on the floor playing with them. He stayed up with me so many nights when I couldn’t get Zayn to settle down, when I’d have broken down and admitted defeat. The boys’ nanny, Paloma, without whom I’d never made it through last year, is his sister. So, yes, the little I did for him, he paid it back a thousand times over, even before the boys, Sebastian. He was the one who watched out for me when I lost Baba, the one who held me steady through grief and pain. Nothing I did would have been enough to pay back the care he showed me and then my sons.”
“It is your own fault that you had to depend on strangers.” His polite mask slipped, and a hardness entered his tone. And yet, Laila had the strange, or delusional, notion that it wasn’t directed at her. “Now, Nikos and Zayn will have my name and everything that comes with it.”
“That’s not possible if we share custody?” Laila asked, knowing that he had neatly sidestepped her question about why he had nearly ruined Guido. She wanted to push and prod until he answered. But right now, she needed him to back off this ridiculous wedding dictate even more.
“I’m not willing to share custody,” he said without missing a beat. “You have admitted that it is hard to manage a career and the boys and all the financial responsibilities. I’m offering a solution that will satisfy both our individual requirements and...their well-being.”
“So, I’d be free to devote myself to my career, with the added advantages this marriage would bring?” Laila said. Despite her best intentions, tendrils of curiosity swept through her. “If I were to be gone for days, or weeks, you would be present full-time for them? You would not use my career against how good of a mother I am?”
“Of course you would be free,” he said, leaning forward. “There are a lifetime’s benefits for you.”
“Now you sound like an insurance salesman,” she said, the very logic she trusted tasting like sawdust when it came out of his mouth.
This close, she could see the lines on his forehead, the thick sweep of his lashes and the lushness of his wide mouth. His very male presence and the heat it evoked in her and the logical offer he made—without a hint of anger or emotion peeking in—her own mind and body felt the cognitive dissonance. “A marriage like that becomes bitter. Nikos and Zayn will suffer.”
“Not if we set clear expectations. What is that you truly want, Laila?” Her name on his lips, after all this time, made her feel dizzy.
“I’ve never dreamed of a partner or a husband or a family or anything remotely traditional. Nikos and Zayn are blessings I didn’t know I’d want. But that’s as far as I can stretch my imagination.”
“Why not?”
“Because those things happen to normal women. Not women like me.”
He cursed and she flushed at how she was painting herself. She’d never been a victim before in her life, and she refused to be one in front of this man. She’d command respect in this relationship, if nothing else. “I’m stating facts, not looking for your sympathy. In fact, that expression in your eyes feels like an itch on my back I can’t get to.”
He laughed and it fanned tiny spiderweb-like crinkles around his eyes and his gorgeous mouth—a sign that he laughed a lot. At himself and at the world, in that sly, self-deprecating tone. That same quality pervaded his paintings, too.
“Maybe a husband would be handy with scratching that itch.”
She pursed her mouth even as a smile wanted to blossom. He was disarming her one smile, one declaration, one question at a time, and they weren’t even really for her.
“Unless the problem is that you already have a man in your life and theirs?” he probed, sounding so smooth that she almost missed the feral undertone to his words.
Laila stared, stunned at how he could change moods and masks.
“I will not play second fiddle to another man in their life.”
“I don’t have enough time to sleep or eat, much less romance some—”
“But you will have extra support now that you have come to me, ne? I don’t think you comprehend how your life will change when it comes out that they are my sons and Skalas heirs. You have set something in motion you cannot control.”
Laila leaned away from him, heart pounding loudly in her chest. “You’re scaring me on purpose.”
“No. I’m showing you reality as I see it coming. From staff you hire to long-standing colleagues, friends you’ve known forever to strangers you meet ahead, people will see you differently, want things from you, will take advantage of your elevated station in life. They will invade your privacy and the boys’ hoping to sell the tiniest tidbit of their lives, your life, my life to some tawdry magazine. The only way to protect the boys from that is to protect you. To make sure no one takes advantage of you with the intention of getting to them or me.”
“You don’t have to clarify that it’s all for the boys. There’s no chance of me misunderstanding it,” she said, sounding miserable and confused to her own ears.
Whatever he saw in hers, something gentled in his expression. “I believe that you didn’t hide them from me with malicious intentions. That you came here today seeking very little for your own benefit.”