wound down and in the sudden silence, Dina said quickly, “Right. I’ll give you a call in a day or two and we’ll set up that meeting. Okay, great. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”
She hung up and her fingers rested lightly on the back of the receiver. Naturally, as soon as she was off the phone, the babies got quiet. Smiling, she looked at them, two boys and a girl, and felt a hard, swift tug at her heart. She loved her niece and nephews, but being a single mother wasn’t something she had planned for.
But then, Jackie and Elena hadn’t planned to die, had they? Tears stung the backs of her eyes and she blinked them away. She looked at those shining, smiling faces watching her, and Dina felt such sorrow for her sister. She and Elena had been close, joined together against the chaos their mother had created. With their grandmother, the two sisters had formed a unit that had been shattered when Elena died.
Heart aching, Dina thought about her big sister and wished desperately that things were different. Elena had wanted nothing more, for most of her life, than to be a mother. She’d dreamed of having her own family.
Then she and her wife, Jackie, had finally succeeded in having the children that completed them, only to die before their triplets were a year old. The unfairness of it ripped at Dina and lodged a hard knot of pain in the center of her chest. But crying wouldn’t help. She should know. Dina had cried an ocean of tears in the first couple of weeks after her sister and her wife died unexpectedly. So she was done with tears, but not panic.
Panic wasn’t going anywhere. It came to haunt her in the middle of the night when she lay awake trying to figure out how to care for three babies all on her own. It walked beside her when she took the kids for a walk in their triple stroller. It whispered in her ear every time she bid on a catering job and didn’t get it.
Which was one of the reasons she had decided to sue Connor King. He had money. Besides, he had been a big part of Jackie and Elena’s lives. He had been prepared to be a part of the kids’ lives. He owed it to his children to help pay for their support. With fewer financial worries, she could hire a part-time nanny to assist her in taking care of the triplets. Not that she was looking to bail out of caring for them—she wasn’t. But she had to work and leaving them with a babysitter—even a great one like Jamie, the teenage girl who lived next door—just wasn’t a permanent solution.
Sadie, Sage and Sam were all looking to her for protection. For safety. For love. She wouldn’t fail them. Smiling down as the boys wrestled and Sadie slapped her teddy bear, Dina promised, “You’ll know who your mommies were, sweet babies. I’ll make sure of it. They loved you so much.”
Sadie chewed on her bear’s ear and Dina huffed out a sigh. Raising three babies alone wouldn’t be easy, but she would do it. The triplets were what was important now, and Dina would do whatever she had to do to protect them. And on that thought, she stood up and announced, “You guys ready for a treat?”
Three heads spun toward her with identical expressions of eager anticipation. She laughed a little as Sadie pulled herself to her feet and demanded, “Up!”
“After your snack, okay, sweet girl?” The sweet girl in question’s bottom lip quivered and Dina had to steel her heart against giving in. If she got Sadie up, then Sage and Sam would want out, too, and instead of a snack, she’d spend the next half hour chasing the three of them through her house. And, since it was closing in on their bedtime, she didn’t want them getting all worked up anyway.
Before any of them could start complaining—loudly—Dina hustled to the counter to slice up a couple of bananas and pour milk into three sippy cups. Thank heaven Elena and Jackie had weaned them off bottles early. As soon as the kids were settled, gnawing happily on bananas and laughing together, the doorbell rang.
“You guys be good,” she said and headed down the hall to the front door. She took a quick peek out the side window at the man on her porch and gasped. Connor King. The image of him was so clear and sharp in her memory, it was almost weird to see him standing on her porch.
Panic swam through her veins and she wasn’t even surprised. She was becoming used to that out-of-control sensation, and she was pretty sure that wasn’t a good thing. Somehow, Dina hadn’t expected this meeting to happen so quickly. Maybe she should have. He was a King and he’d just found out he was the father of three children. Of course he would show up. Of course he would start pushing his metaphorical weight around. She knew enough about him and his family to know that he was going to be a formidable opponent, no matter what.
And since there was no ignoring him, she squared her shoulders, lifted her chin and yanked the door open. “Connor King,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“You should have been,” he ground out tightly, then pushed past her into the house. “Where are my kids?”
Connor had come for his kids, but now couldn’t take his eyes off the woman who’d opened the door. Lust surged through him, grabbed him at the base of his throat and held on tight. All he could do was try to breathe through it.
The woman currently glaring at him had huge, chocolate-brown eyes, thick black hair hanging loose around her shoulders and long, gorgeous legs displayed by the white shorts she wore. Her short-sleeved red T-shirt clung to her body, showing off breasts that were just the right size to fill a man’s hands.
Con couldn’t understand how he hadn’t noticed her at Jackie and Elena’s wedding two years ago. Or how he’d managed to forget her. This was not a forgettable woman.
“Dina Cortez?” he asked, though he knew damn well who she was.
“Yes. And you’re Connor King.”
He nodded. Lust was still there, clawing at him, but he breathed through it and got back on track. “Now that the formalities are over, where are the kids?”
She folded her arms beneath her breasts, lifted her chin and said, “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah,” Con told her. “That’s what my lawyer said, too.”
In fact, he hadn’t needed his lawyer to tell him to stay clear until they had more answers. Con knew he shouldn’t have come, but there was no way he could stay away, either. He was a father. Of triplets. How the hell was a man supposed to ignore that?
He’d had to come, see the kids and find out what he could for himself, minus lawyerspeak. His twin had understood, though Penny had argued against it. But then, a couple of years ago, Colt had barged right in, too, to get a look at his twins and to confront the woman who’d given birth to them and then kept them a secret.
Well, Con couldn’t face down Jackie or Elena, but the triplets were here, which explained, at least to him, why he was.
“Lawyers can still do their legal dance,” he said, silently congratulating himself on keeping the temper still frothing inside him at a low boil. “For now, I had to come.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He choked out a short laugh and shook his head. “Because I just found out I’m a father by hearing that I’m being sued for child support.”
“Maybe if you had kept in contact with Jackie and Elena you would have known earlier,” she pointed out.
“Seriously? You really want to go there? Maybe if my best friend hadn’t lied to me about those kids, this wouldn’t be an issue,” he argued and took a step closer. “And your sister was in on those lies,” he reminded her tightly.
She blew out a breath and seemed to release some of the anger he could still see churning in her eyes. “Fine. You’re right. They didn’t tell me, either, you know. About you, I mean. They didn’t tell me who the babies’ father was.”
His breath exploded in a rush. He was angry and had nowhere to focus it. He and Dina had been caught