Beauty and the Wolf / Their Miracle Twins (40 page)

Was this what being dragged back into the real world did to her relationship with Flynn? Had everything she’d felt been built on an illusion? Something fragile and false? Some kind of extended holiday romance? If so, she had no one but herself to blame. She’d chosen to lower her barriers in the first place. He hadn’t made her a single promise. It was totally unreasonable to punish him for that.

She took a deep breath and let her lashes drop briefly. ‘Flynn, I’m sorry … I just …’

‘You’re tired.’

Frustration hissed out of her. ‘This is not about resting. This is about wondering, and worrying.’ She lifted her eyes and hoped they weren’t as bleak as his. ‘What are we going to do?’

Finally, someone had said it. Acknowledged the honking great elephant in the room.

His brows drew together and he watched the last dregs of watery milk disappear from Andy’s bottle. ‘We don’t need to talk about this now, Bel …’

‘We’ve been not talking about it for days, Flynn.
Months.
But now it’s here. Any day now, we’re going to get a decree that determines whether these boys will grow up Australian or British. And I don’t think I’m ready for it, whichever way it goes.’

He couldn’t even meet her eyes. He shifted Andy in his arms and awkwardly patted his back. ‘Bel …’

‘Don’t patronise me, Flynn. We need to talk about this. Rationally.’ As if that was possible. ‘Work out a survival strategy. Because what I thought I wanted on arriving in Australia was very different to what I want now.’ The woman she now was. Everything had changed.

Having children.

Marrying Flynn.

Loving
Flynn.

All in the space of a few months. No wonder she’d had her head in the sand all this time. Denial was a wonderfully safe place to spend time.

His face grew guarded. ‘What do you want now?’

She’d done this her whole life … held her tongue when she should have asked for what she wanted. Found the courage. For better or worse. Well, it was time to find some courage. For her boys’ sake, if not her own. ‘It’s more a case of what I don’t want …’

His eyes automatically followed hers to the twins.

‘I don’t think I can raise them alone, Flynn.’ Her voice cracked on that and she swallowed twice to clear it. ‘What if I’m not good enough?’

His face hardened. ‘You’ll be a great mother.’

‘When?’ she despaired. ‘Everything is so hard.’

‘Everyone has to learn some time. You can’t leave them behind without trying. You’ll hate yourself.’

Bel stared at him, mouth open. ‘I’m not saying I’ll leave them behind. I’m saying I want to stay here … with them.’ She took a deep breath and found his eyes. ‘With you.’

Tension locked his expression into a shield. He didn’t speak, though she could see his mind working feverishly in the depths of his grey eyes and his voice box lurching up and down. Her heart pounded painfully. ‘Boys should grow up on the land, not in a crowded inner city suburb. And we’ve been … You and I … Things have been good between us.’ Though her confidence slipped at his continuing silence. ‘Okay, anyway …’

If you could define ‘okay’ as companionable days and exciting, exploratory nights. ‘We can call the lawyers off. Work something else out …’

God, Flynn,
speak!

But, when he did, his voice was so cautious. She recognised the tone immediately. ‘You’re talking about forever, Bel.’ He
didn’t trust her. He didn’t believe her. Or did he just not want her? ‘Not just a year, not just short-term.
Forever.
With me.’

But there was no going back now. She met his eyes. ‘I know.’

‘What if you meet someone later on? Fall in love.’ A muscle pulsed, high in his jaw. ‘You’ll be stuck with me.’

‘I won’t.’ Not now that she knew what love should feel like. She wouldn’t find this … rightness … again. ‘I know what I’m asking.’

His face lost some of its colour. ‘Do you, Bel? Or are you just panicking about being a single parent and this seems the path of least resistance?’

‘You think it wouldn’t be easier for me to just take the babies and get on a plane than to risk … Telling you …’ She took a deep breath. ‘We’ve had this discussion before. I know what I’m asking.’ She stared at him intently. ‘But do you know what I’m saying?’

He didn’t want to. It was written clearly in his expression. Discomfort. Dread. ‘You’re saying you want to live on Bunyip’s Reach. You’re saying you want to make our marriage real. Permanent. For the boys.’

‘I do.’ So help me God. ‘And for me.’

‘Because …?’

He needed to hear it. Almost as much as she feared saying it. God, how she wanted to say it. To finally tell
someone
. To shout it from the hospital rooftop. ‘Because I want you. Because I love you.’

His nostrils flared and his jaw clenched. But he didn’t move. Not one inch. ‘How do you know?’

That threw her. She wasn’t naïve enough to hope for immediate reciprocation but she certainly wasn’t expecting to have to qualify her feelings.

‘I’m sleeping with you.’ In a manner of speaking.

‘Not that big a deal these days.’

‘It is for me. A huge deal.’ It was everything.

‘My point exactly. You could be confusing lust with love.’

‘I’m not.’

‘How would you know? You have no point of reference. Unless you count Drew.’

Suddenly the insinuation and inquisition grew too much and her throat tightened. ‘If you don’t want me to stay, just say it. Don’t drag this out. And don’t cower behind your brother.’

She sat, as composed as a woman in a hospital gown with two ballooning breasts beneath it could, on the edge of the bed, stiff with misery.

He stared at her, assessing. ‘You understand what staying would mean? We’d be husband and wife … in every sense of the word.’

‘Matching towels. I get it.’

He stepped in close to her thighs. ‘No more annulment to protect …’

‘Are you saying chivalry is now dead?’ She stared up at him, throwing provocation into the very short list of tools she had at her disposal. Necessity was the mother of invention.

His left hand came up to brush away the stray hairs from her face. The cool of his wedding band kissed along her skin. He seemed almost as surprised by the move as she was. ‘Chivalry might have to be banished to the barn.’

Her pulse skyrocketed. ‘Shame,’ she whispered. ‘I was hoping to do it in the barn at some point.’

His head literally reeled back and he let out a hiss. ‘This isn’t a game, Bel. It’s life-changing. For both of us. What if we just have the mother of all chemistry going on?’

Why? Was that all he felt? Serious doubt bit for the first time.

‘I can’t speak for your feelings.’ Or lack of. ‘I can only speak for mine.’

‘Maybe you’d say anything to guarantee you get to keep the babies. Or do anything.’

Like sleep with him? That stung but, in fairness, she’d given him plenty of reason to make that presumption. Every decision
she’d made since he’d met her was linked to the unborn children. ‘Do you believe that?’

Yes, he did. It was written in the twisted angle of his frown.

‘I think you’d even believe it,’ he murmured.

Deep sorrow washed through her. ‘You don’t feel it.’ It wasn’t a question.

Oh, God …

His nostrils flared. ‘Bel, my feelings for you are …’ He shook his head. ‘I’m thirty-five years old, and I barely understand how I feel when I’m with you. Can you appreciate why I might question yours? A twenty-three-year-old with very little life experience.’

‘Are you saying you want me to go out and get some … experience … first? With someone else?’

His eyes darkened. ‘I’m saying you don’t have to commit to forever to explore the rest of what it is between us. Physically. I’d be open to continuing our …’

‘Our what, Flynn?’ Her chest clenched into a fist. She sucked in a tight breath. ‘Exactly what is it that you’ve been doing while I’ve been falling in love with you? Enjoying the free and convenient—’

His lips thinned. ‘I made you no promises, Bel.’

‘I’m
so
aware of that, Flynn. I guess I really am that naïve twenty-three-year-old, after all. I thought that maybe you’d be willing to explore an unconventional marriage for the sake of the children. That maybe love could grow between us like it did with your grandparents. But you have your heart too tightly tethered down to even do that, haven’t you?’

‘This isn’t about me …’

‘No. Of course not,’ she ranted. ‘I’d fall in love with any passing man if I thought it would guarantee me custody of these boys. I’m surprised I didn’t fall for the magistrates …’

He hissed, ‘Can you look me in the eye and tell me the boys are not a factor? That if they didn’t exist you would still be sitting here pouring your heart out?’

The dismissal in his tone bit almost as hard as the fact that she knew, deep down, that the children were part of the complicated mass of feelings she had for him. ‘If they didn’t exist I wouldn’t even have met you.’ That seemed so inconceivable now. She sighed past the tight wad of reality balling in her sternum. ‘What do you want to do? Wait for the decree to come in and then have this conversation again? Is that what it will take for you to believe my feelings—for me to get custody and still tell you I love you?’

His eyes sparkled dangerously and he shrugged his arm free of her. He found her focus and held it, uncertainty in their grey depths. But then his shoulders rose and fell again and the doubt hardened to grief. And then to … nothing. A flat kind of resignation.

‘The decree is in.’

She stared at him, a block of fear wedging in her gut. ‘What? When?’

‘The day the boys were born.’

‘How did they know—?’

‘It had nothing to do with the birth. That was when the emails and voice messages came through. When I went to town.’

Her mouth dried up completely and her sharp mind raced ahead. He’d kept the findings to himself. Which meant he didn’t want to hurt her. Which meant …

All but the tiniest shard of air sucked out of the room. Her eyes darted frantically between Andrew and Liam. Her babies. She’d lost them. And she’d only had them such a short time. The panic of being out of time and options descended and her breathing grew choppy. ‘No—’

The hardness in Flynn’s eyes wavered and he took a halfstep towards her before stilling his feet. ‘Breathe, Bel. You haven’t lost them.’

That brought her desperate gaze back to his. Her head spun as her emotional bungee yanked her back from the depths
of despair and flung her up into the blue, blue sky of relief. But then she slowed and tipped and started to free fall again. If she’d won, that meant Flynn had lost. She was going to take the twins from Bunyip’s Reach and leave him with nothing. Nothing but a heartbroken family that had already been through so much. Her happiness meant desolation for him and all the people who’d shown her such love and kindness since she’d arrived.

Hurting him generated physical pain in her own body. She wrapped her arms around her torso to keep it contained. ‘Oh, Flynn …’

Both his hands shot up between them. ‘The decree was clear that in the event of only one of the two babies surviving, that custody was to go to you.’

God, just the thought of one of the boys not making it made her wince. But she supposed the court had to cover their bases.
Wait …
Something about the look in his eyes. The hint of reservation amidst the hate. She took a shallow breath.

‘But …?’

His eyes held hers steadily. Almost like two hands supporting her. ‘But if both survived, then custody was to be split.’

She blinked at him, trying to make sense of the words. ‘The courts want us to ship the boys back and forth across the globe?’

‘No, Bel, not shared.
Split.
’

The room swirled around her as every drop of blood pooled instantly in her vital organs. Flynn’s voice, when it came, was distorted and choked.

‘We’ve been granted one child each.’

‘No …’

Bel shook her pale, pinched face and lurched off her tilt-up bed, crossing to the crib where the boys slept peacefully. She turned her eyes back to him. ‘Flynn, no … How could they?’

She looked exactly as he’d felt on the drive home from
Bathurst. Incredulous. Appalled. Dead inside. He cleared his thick throat. ‘I gather they reached a legal stalemate. This was the most expedient solution.’

‘Expedient?’ she croaked. ‘They’re children. Not a DVD collection!’

He shook his head. ‘It has something to do with the embryos being authorised for donation by Drew and Gwen. It opened the door for the embryos to be treated as property under the law, not …’

Not people.

Bel sagged back onto her bed and her words when they came were like a lance deep into his chest cavity. A mini moment of history repeating itself. ‘But they’re not embryos now, they’re brothers. All they’ve known is each other.’

What could he say? His solicitors had already talked him through the complex web of negotiations and legislation that had tangled things up so badly. He barely understood it but he knew they’d tried all options. ‘This case has challenged the course of family law—’

‘Off-course! Horribly, horribly off-course, Flynn. This whole thing was to keep the family together …’ She shook her head numbly, then lifted agonised eyes. ‘Even knowing this—’ she looked at him desperately, going impossibly paler ‘—you would still let them be separated rather than be tied to me for real?’

He pushed his fingers through his hair painfully, watching her tormented eyes fill with tears.

‘Do you despise me that much, Flynn?’

Compassion clawed its way out of the dark place inside him. The place that didn’t trust. Didn’t believe. ‘Bel—’

‘How are the happy parents?’

Both their heads snapped around towards the door, where Alice and Arthur stood with a matching pair of furry blue teddy bears, Denise and Bill behind them, oblivious to the raging tension in the room.

Bel took one look at the cheerful matching bears and burst into floods of tears, rushing into the en suite bathroom.

Everyone froze. But, as always, it was his nan who greased the awkward social situation. ‘Hormones,’ she announced simply and turned to the others. ‘How about we give her some space and go grab a bite to eat in the hospital cafeteria?’