Numb with disbelief, Diana slid into her car and started it, leaving the parking lot and heading toward home. She didn’t even bother wondering if her mother or sister would be home, or what David would think of her house. Would any of that matter?
Twins.
Parking in front of the single car garage, Diana left the car and waited for David’s Escalade to pull up behind her. When it did, David hopped out, using his long, muscular legs to eat up the distance between them. At her door, she fumbled with the keys, suddenly overwhelmed. Finally getting the door unlocked, Diana stepped through the doorway and into the tiny foyer. Linoleum squeaked beneath her sneakers.
Diana cleared her throat. “Come on in. What is it you’d like to talk about.” She sat on the couch and patted the seat next to her, offering a small showing of hospitality. After all, he did put two babies in her, offering him a seat was the least she could do.
Fighting the urge to roll her eyes, she waited.
“I think that until the children are born, you should remain close,” David announced just as he stepped inside the small living room off the tiny foyer.
Diana stared up at him, her body tense, her heart pounding. “Close?” Was he asking her to move in with him?
“Of course. Keeping an eye on you and making sure you are abiding by a healthy pregnancy lifestyle would be much easier if you weren’t living in Edison.” He said the name of the New Jersey town as if it were a curse word.
She opened her mouth to snap at him—his snide tone souring the high she’d felt seconds before. But, before she could speak, he slapped her with an invisible hand.
“You will stay in my suite at the Incantata. There you will have all you could need, and you will be available to me, and I will be available to you. Rodney will return here in two days to retrieve you and whatever you feel you will need for the next several months.”
“Available?” It was one of the words that shattered the haze around her brain.
“Yes.”
Like…a two-way booty call? God! The audacity of the man.
“I can see the wheels turning in your head, and they are steering you off a cliff. I do not intend to spend another moment in your bed. I will not be staying in the room with you, I have my own dwelling in the city. This is simply a way for me to keep an eye on my investment.”
She hissed. “Investment?”
“Of course. You expect me to pay for these babies, and I expect to make sure my investment isn’t wasted on things like expensive clothes, shoes, bags, manicures…”
Diana gagged on the bile that shot into her throat. “Fuck you, David.”
He sneered, his steel eyes flickering with destructive malice. “You already did.”
Before she could gather the saliva to spit at him, he turned and left the room, effectively cutting off any other argument.
Fuck him! He expected her to fall in line, to be a bird in a cage, roosting on his eggs.
Grabbing a pillow from the couch she screamed into it, letting loose all the frustration, anger, terror, and bitterness that had been festering, rising, splintering through her over the last two months. Once her energy was spent, she fell onto the couch, her body limp, her heart racing, her thoughts as hazy as ever. But one thing was certain… David had left her with no choice.
Yes, over the last two weeks, she’d been determined to be all the baby would need. The baby wouldn’t wear designer clothes or rock a thousand-dollar stroller, but he or she would have been clothed, fed, and cared for. Now, though… Twins. The investigation into her behavior at work resulted in—how shocking!—her termination, so going back to work for Ayers would never happen. How the hell could she afford to care for two babies, especially without a job? With one baby, she could get a job at Walmart for minimum wage and save up enough for the basics, but basics for two babies?
It felt impossible. Tears burned the backs of her eyes, searing their promise of pain into her flesh. She rubbed her face, the heels of her palms providing a little added pressure she needed to help clear away the cobwebs.
David was an asshole, but he was the father of her babies, and he had the money to provide what two new lives would need. She had to suck it up, push aside the hurt and the resentment and the humiliation and do what needed to be done for her children.
Children.
She sucked in a breath and squeezed her eyes shut.
She was having twins. Two babies at once.
Would they both be boys? Girls? One of each? Dr. Monroe had said they were fraternal twins, which meant two babies, two amniotic sacs, two sperm.
Diana chuckled at the irony. For a man who claimed to be sterile, his sperm had certainly proved him wrong. Twice over.
Struggling to stand while her legs refused to support her, Diana forced herself to move. She only had two days, forty-eight hours, to gather her clothes and her wits.
Why did it feel like she was headed into battle instead of into Manhattan?
Chapter 19
David stood in the doorway of one of the smaller rooms in his penthouse apartment. One wall was tinted floor to ceiling windows, the carpet was plush and still had the lines in it from the vacuuming after installation, and there was a small bathroom off of it. All in all, it was a practical space, a blank slate that could be decorated to reflect its future occupant.
Occupants. Plural.
This would be a perfect nursery, his thoughts whispered. But would it fit two cribs, two dressers, two rocking chairs? Was it close enough to the master suite so that he or Diana could tend to the babies when they cried?
Startled from his
