Double the Trouble. Maureen Child

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СКАЧАТЬ then, they were a match. She didn’t want him here. Didn’t need him here. Penny took a deep breath and braced for the coming storm.

      He stopped at the foot of her hospital bed and met her gaze with a steely stare. “So,” he said. “What’s new?”

      Anger flashed in those cool blue eyes and a muscle in his jaw ticked spasmodically. One glance down to where his hands were closed over the footboard showed that his knuckles were white with the force of his grip.

      “Robert had no right to go to you.” Her fingers tugged at the thin green blanket covering her.

      Her brother had been after her since before the twins were born to go to Colt and tell him the truth. But she’d had her reasons for keeping her secret and nothing had changed. Well, nothing but for the fact that her little brother had turned traitor.

      “Well,” he said on a sharp, short laugh. “You’re right about that, anyway. You should have told me.”

      Ice coated his words as well as his eyes. No doubt he was waiting for her to quiver and shrivel up beneath his hard gaze. Well, Penny refused to back down or to feel guilty about her decision. When she’d first discovered she was pregnant, she’d gone around and around in her mind, trying to figure out the best course of action.

      She had argued with herself for weeks over what was the right thing to do. Yes, she might have had an easier time of it the last couple of years if she had gone to Colt in the beginning. But she also might have spent the last two years tangled up in hard feelings, accusations and arguments. Not to mention a custody battle she wouldn’t have stood a chance in. He was a King, for heaven’s sake, and she didn’t have enough money to buy lunch out!

      So she’d chosen to keep the truth from him and she didn’t regret it. How could she, when she knew she had done what she felt was in the best interests of her children?

      With that thought firmly in mind, she got a grip on her own feelings as anger and frustration began to churn inside. “I understand how you feel but—”

      “You understand nothing.” He cut her off as neatly as if he’d used a knife. “I just found out I’m a father. I have twins and I’ve never seen them.” His white-knuckled grip on the foot rail of the bed tightened further and still his voice remained as cool and detached as the icy glare he had pinned on her. “I don’t even know their names.”

      She flushed. Fine. Yes. She could see how he felt. But that didn’t mean what she’d done was wrong. Naturally, he wouldn’t see it that way, but what Colton King thought of her really didn’t matter, did it?

      He never blinked. He only stared at her, with those ice-blue eyes narrowed as if he were focusing in an attempt to see into her mind and read all of her secrets. Thank heaven he couldn’t.

      “Their names, Penny. I’ve got a right to know the names of my children.”

      She hated this. Hated feeling as though she were setting her babies up to be let down by a father who didn’t really want them. But she couldn’t ignore his demand, either. Now that he knew about the twins, what was the point of trying to protect their anonymity?

      “Okay. Your son’s name is Reid and your daughter is Riley,” she said.

      He swallowed hard, took a deep breath and hissed it out again. “Reid and Riley what?”

      She knew exactly what he meant. “Their last name is Oaks.”

      His mouth flattened into a grim line and it looked to Penny as if he were counting to ten. Slowly. “That’ll change.”

      Panic shot through her, riding a lightning bolt of anger. “You think you can take over and change their names? No. You can’t just walk back into my life and try to decide what’s best for my children.”

      “Why the hell not?” he countered coldly. “You made that decision for me nearly two years ago.”

      “Colt—”

      “Did you bother to list me as the father on their birth certificates?”

      “Of course I did.” Her twins had the right to know who their father was. And she would have told them...eventually.

      “That’s something at least,” he muttered. “I’ll have my lawyers take care of the legal name change.”

      “Excuse me?” She struggled to push herself upright and gasped as another sharp stab of pain hit in her abdomen. Breathless, she dropped back against her pillows.

      He was at the side of the bed in an instant. “Are you all right? Do you need a nurse?”

      “I’m fine,” she lied tightly as the pain began to ebb into a just barely tolerable ache. “And no, I don’t need a nurse.” She needed pain medication. Privacy so she could cry. An eight-ounce glass of wine. “What I need is for you to leave.”

      “Not gonna happen,” he told her.

      She closed her eyes and muttered, “I could kill Robert for this.”

      “Yeah,” Colt countered. “Someone finally being honest with me. There’s a crime.”

      Her gaze snapped back to his. He was studying her as he would a bug under a microscope. Damn it, couldn’t he have gotten fat in the last couple of years? Lost his hair? Something? Why did he still have to be the most gorgeous man she’d ever met? And wouldn’t you just know that she’d have the conversation she had been dreading for nearly two years while trapped in a hospital bed? Wearing a god-awful gown? She was in pain, she was hungry because hospital food was appalling and God knew what her hair looked like.

      Oh, that’s good. Be worried about how you look, Penny.

      Hard not to worry about it though, she told herself glumly. Especially when Colton King was standing right in front of her looking even better than he had two years ago. He’d taken her breath away the first time she’d seen him and apparently he had the same effect on her today.

      “So when do you get out of here?” he asked, shattering her thoughts.

      “Tomorrow probably.” And she couldn’t wait. Yes, she was in pain but she hated being in the hospital. She missed her babies. Plus, Penny didn’t like having to ask Robert and Maria to watch her children. They had enough going on, with their wedding only a few weeks away.

      In hindsight, she should have known that Robert would go to Colt. Should have guessed that her brother, thinking he was doing the right thing, would betray her secrets to the one man who should never have found out the truth. Oh, she was going to have plenty to say to her little brother once she was released from this antiseptic prison.

      “Fine, then,” Colt said flatly. “We’ll continue this discussion once you’re home.”

      Well, that caught her attention.

      “No, we won’t. This conversation is over, Colt.”

      “Not by a long shot.” He stared down at her until Penny twitched uneasily, and then he warned, “You’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do.”

      “I don’t owe you anything.” СКАЧАТЬ