Читать книгу Because Of The Twins... - Carole Halston, Carole Halston - Страница 9

“Hello. Is anyone here?” called a woman’s voice from the outer office. Then, in a more irritable tone she said, “No, Jennifer! Don’t sit on the floor! Justin, hold on to Aunt Lena’s hand!”

These instructions were met with childish whimpers of resistance, leading Graham to surmise that his visitor had a couple of small kids in tow. He got hurriedly to his feet and headed for the door. It was noon and his secretary, Angela, had gone to lunch. She was the mother of three and an expert on kids, so Graham relied on her to protect the premises from being trashed on those occasions—rare, but memorable—when a client brought his or her offspring along.

Graham was at a total loss when it came to dealing with children—an understandable deficiency, since he hadn’t spent much time in the company of small fry. The younger of two boys, he’d grown up with virtually no contact with infants or toddlers. It was silly, but Graham regarded the whole notion of fatherhood as extremely intimidating, feelings he always owned up to when questioned on the subject by women he dated.

As he headed down the hall to the outer offices, he reflected on his unmarried state and wondered whether his candor on the subject of children had acted as a roadblock, preventing any of his romantic involvements from leading to marriage. He’d been thinking about this more and more since he’d turned thirty recently.

Only once had he proposed, more than four years ago. The words “Will you marry me?” had popped out in a moment of passion during his most intimate relationship.

He never dwelled on that memory, which still twinged.

“Can I help you?” he asked from the doorway to the outer office.

His unexpected visitor was a stranger, an attractive blond woman in her fifties who looked as harried as she’d sounded. Dressed smartly in a suit, she definitely wasn’t your stereotypical doting aunt, but he assumed, since she’d referred to herself as Aunt Lena, that the two preschool children with her must be her niece and nephew. Or, more likely, her great-niece and great-nephew. Both of them appeared to be unhappy campers, tugging to pull free of her firm grip on their small hands.

“Are you Graham Knight, the architect?” she inquired.

“Yes, I am—”

She’d turned her attention to the children. “Justin and Jennifer, will you please stand still? If you’ll behave yourselves for five minutes, Aunt Lena will buy you an ice cream.”

“I don’t want an ice cream,” Justin whined, tugging harder.

“Me, neither.” Jennifer sank down on the carpet and proceeded to throw a tantrum, kicking the floor with her patent-leather shoes.

Graham didn’t budge from the doorway. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the little girl’s loud wailing. “Would you care to make an appointment?”

“What a fiasco!” His prospective client sighed. “I should have called you in advance or written a letter, I suppose. I’m Lena Booth.” She had to shout, too, over the racket Jennifer was making. “Heather Booth’s aunt. I believe you and Heather dated four or five years ago. You remember her?”

“Why, yes, I remember Heather well.” She was the woman he’d proposed to, the woman who’d turned him down and broken off with him shortly afterward.

“Jennifer and Justin are Heather’s children. They’re twins.”

Heather’s children? Graham regarded the small girl and boy with new perspective, adjusting to their identity. Justin, brown-haired with brown eyes, didn’t resemble his mother, but Jennifer had Heather’s blond hair and blue eyes. She would probably be a pretty little girl if her face weren’t contorted with the fit she was throwing.

“If I let you go, will you promise to behave for a few minutes while Aunt Lena has a conversation with Mr. Knight?” Lena Booth said, addressing her charges. “You can watch the pretty fish in the aquarium.”

Jennifer promptly quieted, nodding.

“I’ll be good,” Justin mumbled sulkily.

When she had released their hands, the little boy walked over toward the aquarium, as prompted, but his sister sidled in the opposite direction, toward Angela’s workstation. Graham watched her nervously.

“Heather never mentioned having an aunt who lived on the North Shore,” he said to Lena Booth, taking for granted she would understand that he was referring to the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

“I don’t live in Louisiana. I live in Jackson, Mississippi. I drove here today specifically to meet you and introduce you to the twins.”

Graham frowned at her in puzzlement. Why the dickens did she think he would want to meet Heather’s children? “Heather told you about me?”

“Oh, yes. I threatened to contact you much sooner, when she came back to Jackson pregnant and pleased as punch with herself. But I didn’t. Now I wish I had. I regretted my mistake even more when I had you investigated recently and confirmed what a decent man you are. Justin, stop doing that! You’ll scare the fish!”

Justin was slapping his palms on the glass front of the aquarium, making loud smacking sounds.

“Why contact me? And why on earth did you have me investigated?” Graham asked in bafflement.

“You really don’t have a clue, do you?” She shook her head, her expression oddly pitying. “Do your math. The twins are three and a half years old. Add nine months and then backtrack in time. Jennifer, leave the computer alone!”

Graham glanced blindly over at the little girl, who was busy punching keys on Angela’s keyboard. “Now wait just a minute!” he exclaimed, wagging his hand at Lena Booth. “You’re not trying to tell me—”

“I’m afraid so,” she said simply. “Heather had her heart set on being a mom, but she didn’t want the complication of a husband. Nor did she like the idea of using a sperm bank. She wanted to make sure she was getting sound genes for her child. She was planning on having one baby, mind you, not two.”

Graham clutched both sides of the doorframe, shaking his head from side to side in denial. It dawned on him that Heather’s aunt was speaking of her niece with sadness as well as disapproval.

“Good God, has something happened to Heather?” he asked.

Lena nodded. “She was on vacation with the man she was dating. They’d gone to Italy. There was a terrible automobile accident. Neither of them survived.”

Even in his state of shock and horror, Graham realized she’d carefully chosen her words so as not to state in the children’s hearing that their mother had died.

“Poor kids,” he murmured. “They’ve been told?”

“Yes. In euphemistic terms. They miss Heather, of course, but they spent most of their waking hours with a daytime nanny. As you can judge for yourself, they’ve been raised without any discipline.”

Graham looked helplessly over at Jennifer, who was now busily pulling out drawers at Angela’s workstation. Justin had stopped banging on the aquarium but had his face pressed against the glass, mouth open and tongue hanging out.

His kids? No way. There had to be some mistake. Please, God, let me wake up and discover this is a bad dream, Graham implored silently.

“Of course, you’ll want some scientific proof,” Lena stated, as though reading his panicky thoughts. “Especially if you were extremely careful and took precautions yourself during your affair with Heather.”

Graham figured his sick expression told its own tale, but he elaborated, “She told me she was on the Pill. And showed me a recent lab report giving her a clean bill of health. She said she’d just taken out a work disability insurance policy that required her to prove she was disease-free.”

“The part about the insurance policy was true.”

“This is straight out of some bad movie! What the devil am I supposed to do?” Graham answered his own question before she could speak. “Naturally, I’ll take financial responsibility. If it turns out I really was the sperm donor,” he added in an undertone, so the children could not hear.

“Frankly, after seeing you face-to-face, I don’t think there’s much doubt. Have you looked closely at Justin? I’ll bet you looked a lot like he does now when you were his age.” She glanced over at her great-nephew, who’d lost interest in the aquarium and was now busy clearing a low table of the magazines neatly arranged on its surface. “For your mother’s sake, I hope you were better behaved. Justin, don’t throw the magazines on the floor! Just turn the pages gently and look at the pictures!”

“Justin,” Graham said sternly.

Surprisingly the little boy raised his head, seeming to focus attention on Graham for the first time. Graham’s heart sank as he gazed into a boyish face that was probably a replica of his own face when he was a youngster of three years and six months.

Once she saw that Justin was engaged in the task of restocking the magazines and was, like his sister, paying the adults in the room no mind, Lena confirmed in a low voice, “See what I mean?” Her tone held sympathy. “I’m really sorry my niece put you in this bind. In her defense, she never intended for you to be any the wiser.”

“What she did was wrong! It was downright immoral.”

“I agree. And I would have informed you against her wishes that you were a father, but Heather convinced me not to. She insisted she wasn’t cheating you by keeping you ignorant. She said she’d made sure in advance that you weren’t one of those men who wanted a family.”

“God…” Graham put both hands up to his head as though he could jump-start his numbed brain to come up with some magic solution. “Before you go, give me your address and phone number. We’ll talk later, maybe tonight. I’ll start sending you monthly checks.”

Her expression had turned pitying again. She glanced at the children, still busily playing, and said, “Graham, I didn’t come here today to get money for child support. I’m quite a well-to-do woman. Also very busy running a large corporation in Jackson. I can’t take on raising Justin and Jennifer. I’m past the age of becoming a mom, and lack the patience. It wouldn’t be fair to them.”

“Who’s going to raise them? Heather’s parents?”

“Obviously Heather never told you much about them or you wouldn’t even suggest the idea. Mildred and Bill—Bill’s my brother—divorced when Heather was three. She shuttled back and forth between them, poor darling. They’re both on their third or fourth marriage now. It’s hard to keep track. I won’t go into the details except to say that Justin and Jennifer would be far better off in a good foster home than with either of their maternal grandparents.”

“A foster home! Isn’t there another relative?”

“Not on Heather’s side. There’s a married cousin, Andy, who’s stable, but he’s currently living in a foreign country.” She raised her eyebrows. “Your parents perhaps?”

Graham immediately rejected that suggestion. “My parents run a hardware store that they own in Picayune, Mississippi. Plus they have their hobbies and interests. No way would I ask them to raise a couple of young kids at their stage in life. My brother is divorced.”

Lena made no reply, but just gazed at him sympathetically. Panic bloomed inside Graham at what she was surely considering as his only option.

“I can’t raise them,” he told her, pointing to himself. “I’m single. And I know nothing about bringing up kids.”

Still she said nothing. The panic strengthened into an emotion more akin to terror.

“I live in a two-bedroom condo and use one of the bedrooms as my home study,” he went on, presenting his case as if it would convince any reasonable person. “There aren’t any children living in the whole complex. It just wouldn’t be a suitable environment. I would be a lousy father.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You might be the best thing that ever happened to Justin and Jennifer and, one would hope, vice versa.”

“Look at Jennifer!” Justin shouted, chortling. Graham had been dimly aware that the little boy had completed his mission of throwing all the copies of Architectural Digest on the floor and had climbed up onto the sofa and was using it like a trampoline, jumping up and down.

“Jennifer, don’t do that!” scolded Lena as she rushed over to Justin’s sister, who’d discovered Angela’s plastic tube of hand cream. The little girl had removed the cap and was holding the tube aloft, upside down, squeezing out a long strand of cream.

The whole scene became surreal for Graham. It was beyond comprehension that he would be expected to deal with these two pint-size vandals. Supporting them financially was one thing, but take them home with him and turn them loose in his condo? “No way,” he murmured in a tone of despair.

Lena wrested the tube from Jennifer’s hands, and Graham braced himself for a howl, but Jennifer seemed satisfied with patting one small patent leather shoe in the blob of pink cream that had fallen to the carpet.

“That was very naughty, Jennifer.”

“I’m not always naughty,” the little girl said. “Mary says I can be a little angel sometimes.”

“Mary was their daytime nanny,” Lena explained to Graham.

“Can we go and have ice cream now?” Justin asked, leaping off the sofa. He ran over to his great-aunt.

“I thought you didn’t want ice cream,” she replied.

“I do! I want strawberry.”

“I want vanilla with chocolate syrup and sprinkles,” said Jennifer.

Graham suppressed a shudder at a vision of the two of them with cups of ice cream at their disposal.

“Have you behaved yourselves well enough to deserve a treat?” Lena asked them.

“Jennifer was badder than me,” Justin pointed out.

“No, I wasn’t!”

Lena took each of them by the hand. “Come over closer to this nice man Aunt Lena has been talking to. He’s someone very important.”

“Who is he?” asked Justin.

“He’s your daddy.”

“Our daddy?” Jennifer questioned skeptically. “We don’t have a daddy. We just have a mommy, but she’s in heaven now.”

Graham had gone as still as a statue. The sense of unreality was more pronounced than ever. Lena, flanked by the two children, approached him.

“Are you really our daddy?” Justin asked when they’d come to a standstill.

Words wouldn’t come out of Graham’s mouth. He had to swallow. “Yes, Justin, I believe I am.”

“We grew in our mommy’s stomach,” Jennifer informed him, obviously still not putting much stock in his paternity claim.

“I was borned first.” Justin stood very straight. “I’m taller than Jennifer.”

“And he has a penis. I don’t.”

“Maybe you children would like to give your daddy a hug or a kiss,” Lena suggested.

“I’m a total stranger to them,” Graham protested.

Jennifer and Justin gazed up into his face. From their expressions they were processing the idea.

“He’s too tall,” the little girl pointed out.

Graham felt like a robot as he lowered himself to a squatting position. Jennifer moved first and Justin followed her lead. They pressed their lips to his cheeks.

“Give them a hug, why don’t you?” Lena prompted, and he complied in a gingerly fashion. “That’s nice.” She sighed with satisfaction. “Now, why don’t the four of us go out for ice cream? Then I’ll be on my way back to Jackson.”

Graham stood up, alarm bells going off at her use of the singular pronoun. “You’re taking the twins back, too, aren’t you? I need some time to make arrangements. And you’ll need to pack up their clothing and toys.”

“I have several big suitcases in the trunk of my car. I’ll send the rest right away. Let’s go, kids.” She clapped her hands briskly. “Aunt Lena needs to be on the road in forty-five minutes.”

Graham accompanied them, leaving his outer office in total shambles. His mind and emotions were in a similar state of disruption. His life had just gone from sane and orderly to crazy and chaotic.