Читать книгу The Tycoon's Tots - Stella Bagwell - Страница 11

Now was not the time for Chloe to panic or lose her temper. She had to show this man he didn’t scare her. The twins were hers! He couldn’t simply walk in and take them away from her!

Her gaze didn’t waver as she met his cool gray eyes. “The twins are home, Mr. Sanders. Like I said earlier, they’re Murdocks, and the Bar M has been our home for more than thirty years.”

She’d already told him her intention of adopting the twins, so it hardly surprised Wyatt to hear her calling this ranch their rightful home. But he had other ideas. The quicker Ms. Chloe Murdock realized that the better off they’d all be.

“I think you’re forgetting the babies are half Sanders.”

Like a mammy dog guarding her litter, Chloe stood her ground. “Excuse me, but your sister’s name was Waller, not Sanders.”

He grimaced as though Chloe’s point had little consequence on the matter. “She was married and divorced several years ago. But by any name, her babies are my niece and nephew.”

“And they’re my half brother and sister. I think even you can admit that.”

Groaning, Kitty reached for a nearby chair and wilted into it.

Wyatt turned his gaze back to the twins who were busily concentrating on eating graham crackers. Soggy crumbs dotted their bibs and cheeks and clung to their fingers in gooey clumps. They seemed perfectly contented and their sweet, intelligent faces went straight to Wyatt’s heart.

“How old are they?” he asked.

“Ten months,” she answered, then volunteered. “They can crawl and pull up now.”

Fascinated by the sight of them, Wyatt walked over and hunkered down to their level. The babies weren’t exactly identical, but close to it. They both had green eyes, chubby round faces and dimpled cheeks. The girl’s hair was a bright red cap of curls while the boy’s was the very same dark auburn as Chloe Murdock’s.

Even to him, it was plain to see they were her brother and sister. Wyatt couldn’t deny that. Yet they were a part of him, too. He couldn’t forget or dismiss that fact.

“Hello, you two,” he said, suddenly feeling awkward and foolishly emotional. “I’m your Uncle Wyatt.”

The sound of his voice caught the twins’ attention and both children stopped their chewing to give him a closer look.

“We named them Adam and Anna,” Chloe said as she came up behind the three of them.

He looked over his shoulder at her. “That isn’t what my sister named them?”

“No. For a long time we had no idea who they belonged to or what their names were. So we named them ourselves.”

One dark brow arched at her. “Don’t you think you were being rather presumptuous?”

Fury washed through Chloe but she tried her best to squash it down. “And don’t you think these two little darlings deserved something better than Baby Boy or Baby Girl? Don’t you think they deserved better than to be left in a laundry basket on a porch? There was no one around when your sister dumped them and to this day we still don’t know how long they had been there before my sister Justine found them. Apparently Belinda had no idea that a coyote or anything could have dragged them off and killed them. Or maybe she did,” Chloe couldn’t help adding.

Wyatt straightened to his full height and looked at her through narrow gray eyes. “Whatever my sister was, she wasn’t a murderer.”

“I don’t think you really know what your sister was,” she said flatly. “But that’s beside the point now. The babies are mine. You’ll not take them from this ranch.”

“Chloe, perhaps—” Kitty began only to have her niece wave a quieting hand at her.

“What makes you think you have a right to them?” Wyatt asked coolly.

“What makes you think you do?” she countered.

Wyatt glanced down at the babies, then turned his attention to the room they were in. It wasn’t anything like the spotless kitchen in his Houston condominium. There were pots and pans hanging on one wall, plants lining every available windowsill, and dirty dishes stacked on the table and cabinet counter. Something resembling pinto beans had boiled over on the cookstove and dripped down over the control knobs. In one corner an ironing board was piled with clothes. Whether they were clean or not, Wyatt couldn’t tell.

“I think the twins deserve a better life than this,” he said bluntly.

Ladies didn’t resort to physical violence be damned, Chloe thought, as she stepped up and jabbed her finger hard in the middle of Wyatt Sanders’s chest.

“And I think you wouldn’t know a better life if it reached up and bit you in the butt!”

Momentarily stunned by her unexpected response, Wyatt could only stare at her. She wasn’t only sexy, she was the wildest little thing he’d ever come across.

“And if you think this place is so bad,” she went on, “I suggest you leave. Now! Before I call the sheriff.”

Kitty gasped. “Chloe! There’s no need to call Roy. Mr. Sanders is—”

“Who’s Roy?” Wyatt asked, seemingly unruffled by her threat.

“The sheriff.”

“My brother-in-law.”

The two women spoke at once, but Wyatt managed to decipher the message. It irked him that she wanted to drag the law into this, even if the sheriff was her family. But it didn’t surprise him. Chloe Murdock didn’t appear to be a woman who’d give up or give in without a fight.

Before he could say anything, Anna began to whine and fuss. Wyatt instinctively turned toward the baby, but Chloe instantly leapt between them.

“Don’t you dare touch her!” she hissed at him, then lifted the little girl into her arms.

With a glare as cold as gray granite, Wyatt pulled a pen and small business card from a pocket inside his jacket, then quickly wrote something across the back.

“This is where I’ll be staying,” he said flatly. “When you decide to calm down, maybe we can talk about this sensibly.”

Calm down? She wanted to leave her handprint along the side of his face!

“I really doubt I’ll ever get the urge to talk to you, Mr. Sanders, so you might as well go back to Houston and play oilman.”

“We’ll see, Ms. Murdock,” he said, then turned and walked out the same door she’d brought him through earlier.

Once he was truly out of sight, Chloe glanced at her stricken aunt, then still holding Anna, raced out of the kitchen.

“Chloe!”

Kitty jumped from her chair and grabbing Adam hurried after her niece. She found her in the living room peering out the long paned windows which overlooked the front yard.

“What are you doing?”

Clutching Anna even tighter, Chloe watched the expensive dark blue car pull away from the house and head down the drive. “Making sure that—man is gone!”

“He’ll be back, Chloe,” Kitty said grimly. “You might as well get ready for it. Didn’t you notice how cool he was? I got the impression he’s here for the long haul.”

Chloe turned away from the windows, and for the first time since Wyatt Sanders had announced his intentions, she allowed the fear she was feeling to show on her face. “Dear God, what are we going to do, Aunt Kitty? There isn’t any way Wyatt Sanders can take the babies, is there?”

In a weary daze, Kitty sank onto the couch and wiped a hand across her forehead. “I have no idea, Chloe. Custody rights are very unpredictable nowadays.”

Chloe looked down at Anna’s sweet face. She couldn’t imagine her life without the babies. She refused to even try.

“Maybe you should call the lawyer who’s handling your adoption proceedings.”

Chloe set Anna on the tiled floor and the little girl immediately crawled over to the couch and pulled up beside her aunt’s knee.

“I’ll call him right now.” She snatched up the phone book, quickly searched for the number, then punched it through. After a few brief words with a secretary, she hung up. “He’s out of town and won’t be back for another week or more.”

“Just our luck. Maybe you could discuss it with his associate.”

“If I have to, I will. But right now, I’m going to finish the chores at the stable, then drive over to Justine’s. She and Rose need to know someone is trying to take our brother and sister!”

Two hours later and several miles north on the Pardee ranch, Chloe paced around her sister’s living room.

“Chloe, you’re going to have to calm down,” Justine insisted from her seat on the couch. “It’s not like the man tried to physically carry the twins out of the house.”

Chloe looked over at her very pregnant sister. It probably wasn’t good to dump this sort of stress on her. Even though the baby wasn’t due for another eight or ten weeks, Justine had already been suffering false labor pains.

“I guess I shouldn’t have come over here bothering you with this,” Chloe mumbled regretfully. “But I didn’t know what else to do.”

Justine waved away her words. “Chloe, honey, Adam and Anna are my brother and sister, too. I was going to have to know about Wyatt sooner or later. I just find it incredible that Belinda Waller had a brother. Why hadn’t we heard from him before now?”

Chloe threw up her arms in a gesture of helplessness. “I got the impression he didn’t know much about Belinda, or what she’d been up to lately. At least, not the way we knew her,” Chloe added with a shudder. Neither she, Justine, nor their older sister Rose, who’d very nearly been injured by Belinda’s arson, would ever forget the woman.

“Do you think he’s on the up-and-up? Maybe he’s no better than Belinda,” Justine mused aloud. “If that’s the case, there’s no court in the country that would consider giving him custody of the twins.”

With a weary shake of her head, Chloe sat down beside her sister on the couch. “Wyatt Sanders doesn’t appear to be anything like Belinda. He says he’s an oilman. And I tell you, Justine, the man has money. If he doesn’t, he’s doing a good job of faking it.”

Justine glanced at her wristwatch. “Roy is testifying in court now. But he should be through by late this evening. I’ll call and let him know what’s going on. He’ll run a check on Mr. Wyatt Sanders and then we’ll have a better idea what to do.”

Chloe gave her a crooked grin. “You know, it’s rather nice having the sheriff of Lincoln County in the family.”

Justine chuckled and patted her protruding belly. “I definitely think so.”

There was no doubt that Justine was happy now. She and Roy Pardee had married back in July a few weeks after the twins first showed up on the ranch’s front porch. They loved each other passionately. So much so that Chloe sometimes looked at the two of them with awe and envy.

At twenty-four, Chloe was only two years younger than Justine, and four younger than Rose. But she felt she was a lifetime away from having a family of her own—the sort of family that both her sisters had now.

“Maybe you should go to him,” Justine suggested after a stretch of silence. “Tell the man how it is with you and why you want the babies so badly.”

The look Chloe shot Justine said she must be losing her mind. “Never! There’s no way I’d tell that arrogant bast…” She caught herself before the whole word burst from her mouth. “That arrogant man such an intimate detail about myself. Besides, I really doubt he could or would sympathize with my sterile condition. Especially when he looks like he could produce all the babies he wanted!”

Sighing, Justine reached for the cup of decaffeinated coffee sitting on the end table by her elbow. “Chloe, you’re much too sensitive about your condition. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It wasn’t your fault you had an infection and it left you too scarred to have children.”

Chloe frowned at her sister. “Sure. That’s easy for you to say. You’re about to give your husband his second child. I can’t give a man anything.”

Justine rolled her eyes. “That’s ridiculous of you to think such a thing!”

Dropping her head, Chloe looked away from her sister. “Ridiculous or not, I don’t want any man, friend or foe, to know that I’m sterile. You know what happened the last time I tried to be honest and open with a man!”

Her expression full of concern, Justine said, “Richard was a selfish fool. I’m sure he’s realized a thousand times what he lost when he broke your engagement.”

Chloe groaned. “Justine, that was four years ago. You don’t see the man knocking down my door to beg me to come back to him, do you?”

Frowning, Justine waved away her words. “I, for one, thank God, he hasn’t. He wasn’t nearly good enough for you.”

Chloe looked at her sister. “Well, you don’t have to worry about Richard or any man walking me down the aisle. No man wants a woman who is barren.”

Justine shook her head. “You’re wrong, Chloe. Children are a wonderful addition, but they don’t make a marriage.”

Maybe her sister truly believed that, but Chloe knew better. She’d been rejected by a man she’d hoped to marry, culled like a cow that couldn’t calf. She never wanted to go through that sort of pain and humiliation again.

As for Wyatt Sanders, she would never tell the man she couldn’t have children. She’d fight for the twins any way she could, but not that way.