Sadie’s gaze locked with his and he read her guilt in her eyes. Her regret. Well, it was a damned sight late for regret. She’d kept his daughters from him their whole lives.
There would be payment made.
For now though, he dropped to one knee and looked at the girls. Their brown hair curled around their heads, their cheeks were pink and their brown eyes sparkled with life. Love. His heart clenched hard in his chest. One of the girls looked at him warily, and then slowly gave him a smile that tore up his insides.
“Girls,” Sadie said, laughing as the twins continued to chatter a mile a minute.
“Birds, Mommy.”
“Lots.”
“I know,” Sadie said, giving first one of her daughters then the other a big kiss. “I saw them.”
“Pretty.”
“Yes, they are pretty,” Sadie agreed.
“Who him?”
Who him. Rick swallowed back the tight ball of anger lodged in his throat. His daughters didn’t know him. He was a damn stranger to his own flesh and blood. That knowledge hurt more than he would have thought possible.
“This is your daddy,” Sadie said, watching him as she spoke the words that made all of this a reality.
He sat down, drew one knee up and rested his forearm on it. He wasn’t going to crowd the little girls. But he wanted more than anything to hold them. Instead, he smiled. “You are the prettiest girls I have ever seen.”
The one closest to him gave him a sly smile and looked up at him from beneath lowered lashes that lay like black velvet on her cheeks. Oh, this one was going to be a heartbreaker when she grew up.
“Daddy?” she said and pushed away from Sadie to walk to him.
Rick’s heart stopped as she approached him. He was afraid to move. He worried that anything he did now might shatter the moment. And he didn’t want to risk it. When she was close enough, the little girl reached out and patted his cheek. Her small hand was feather-soft against his skin and she smelled like shampoo and apple juice.
“Daddy?” She leaned in to give him a hug and Rick held her as carefully as he would have a live grenade. This tiny girl, so perfect, so beautiful, had accepted him without reservation and he’d never been more grateful.
“Daddy!” The second twin rushed him, cuddling up to him just as her sister had and Rick closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around them. He held them close, feeling the warmth of their bodies, the fluttering of their heartbeats. And in one all-encompassing instant had his life, his world, altered forever.
Opening his eyes, he looked at Sadie and saw that she was crying. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she watched him with their children and he asked himself what she was crying for. Was she pleased that he was finally meeting his daughters? Or was she regretting telling him at all?
“Story!” One of the girls blurted the word and pushed away from him, running to a bookcase beneath the window. Meanwhile, her twin settled in on Rick’s lap and played with his hat.
“How old are they?” he asked tightly.
“You know exactly how old they are,” Sadie whispered.
“What are their names?” That question cost him. He didn’t know the names of his children. His heart was being ripped into pieces in his chest and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it.
Sadie scooted closer to them, reaching out to fix a sliding pink barrette in one of the twins’ soft, wispy hair.
“This one is Wendy,” she said, dropping a kiss on the girl’s nose.
“Wenne!” the toddler repeated with a gleeful shriek. She put her father’s hat on and the Stetson completely swallowed her head. Her giggle was as soft as a summer wind.
“Wendy has freckles on her nose.”
“Nose!”
Smiling, Sadie captured the returning twin and swooped her up into her lap. She kissed the top of the child’s head and met Rick’s eyes when she said, “This one is Gail.”
Another surprise in a morning full of them.
His heart, which he would have sworn had already been ripped in two, shredded even further as he looked down at the smiling child on Sadie’s lap. He actually felt a sharp sting of tears in his eyes and swiped one hand across his face to rid himself of them. Only then did he trust himself to look at Sadie again. “You named her for my mother.”
“Yes,” she said as the little girl opened the storybook and started “reading” to herself.
“Doggie and a bug and running and …”
Her commentary went on, but Rick hardly heard the mumble of disjointed words and phrases. He was caught in the moment. Struggling hard for the rigid self-control he had always been able to count on.
But he would challenge any man to walk into a situation like this one and not be shaken right down to the bone.
“Gail has a dimple in her left cheek that Wendy doesn’t have.” She smoothed one hand over her daughter’s hair. “And Gail’s hair is straighter than Wendy’s. When you get to know them, you’ll see other differences, too. Their personalities are wildly different.”
“Sadie …”
“Wendy is the adventurer. She was getting into things the minute she could crawl,” Sadie said, her words coming faster and faster, as if she didn’t want to give Rick a chance to say anything. “Gail is the cuddler. Nothing she likes better than curling up on your lap with a book. But she’s no pushover, either. She holds her own with her sister and, honestly, the two of them are so stubborn that sometimes …”
“Sadie,” he said, his voice deeper, more commanding.
She blew out a breath and slowly lifted her eyes to his. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Oh, I don’t think you can even guess what I want to say,” he told her, anger rippling just beneath the surface of his voice.
“Let me explain, all right?”
“Can’t wait to hear it,” he assured her, though Rick knew there was absolutely nothing she could say that would make what she had done okay.
He’d been cheated out of his daughter’s lives.
Wendy pushed his hat off her head and left him for her mother. Both girls were in Sadie’s lap as she read them a story. Their laughter filled his heart even as he struggled with the fury he felt toward their mother.
As he watched her with them, he saw a completely different Sadie than the one he knew. He’d always seen her as an untouchable princess. Born and raised to be the perfect southern lady. Until their one night together, he would have been willing to bet that Sadie Price had never done a damn thing that was even remotely undignified.
Yet here she was now, on the floor, cuddling with two babies like she didn’t have a care in the world.
“Daddy! Story!” Wendy reached out a tiny hand to him and Rick’s aching heart did a flip-flop in his chest. He would have his answers, he promised himself. But for now, he wanted to make up for lost time. He wanted to be with his children.
And the woman who had kept them from him.
He moved in closer, taking Wendy onto his lap and the four of them became a unit while Sadie’s voice wove threads of family around them.
An hour later, the girls were asleep and Sadie and Rick stepped into the hall. She was so tense she was half afraid her spine might snap.
“You just leave them alone up here?” Rick asked as Sadie quietly closed the door