Page 15 of Modern Romance January 2025 1-4

‘Maybe I don’t need to be taken care of,’ Lexy framed, cheeks hot with shame from being called ‘homeless and penniless’ in one sentence, even if it was true.

Staring down at her, Nic was reading everything in her aquamarine eyes. Mortification, resentment, hurt. It shook him inside out to see those feelings in her face because it knocked him right back to their one and only night together. ‘Everyone needs taking care of occasionally,’ he pointed out.

Lexy winced and passed him his coffee. ‘You don’t understand. I’ve been living on handouts and other people’s kindness since even before the babies were born,’ she admitted chokily. ‘My friend Mel and her parents have been unbelievably good to me.’

‘If you marry me, you’ll never have to worry about money or where you live ever again,’ Nic murmured like a snake charmer.

Lexy vented a choking laugh that was a partial sob because she was fighting to hold the tears back. The very last thing she had expected from Nic Diamandis was a marriage proposal. It was so old-fashioned, so wildly unexpected from the man who had ignored her and their babies’ needs while it evidently had suited him to do so. ‘I’m not sure I can believe that you are sincere with this...or that you could suggest that I marry you for your money,’ she muttered. ‘I mean, I would never ever even consider marrying a man for his money. I’m not a gold-digger or a—’

Nic caught one of the hands she was waving dismissively in the air between them and held it to steady her. She was all over the place, like a tree rocking in a storm, and he could see the tears glimmering in her beautiful eyes. He hadn’t intended to upset her. He had intended to soothe her, offer her options, and marriage had not been his first choice of those options, even if it was only matrimony that would satisfy his family, end the drama and give him unalienable rights over their three children.

‘I would be happy for you to marry me for my wealth.’

‘But clearly you’re not talking about a n-normal marriage,’ she stammered, sneaking a questioning look up at him.

‘A marriage on paper, obviously,’ he conceded, while striving not to notice the pert shimmy of her clearly unbound breasts below the tee shirt and monitor his own very, very hungry body. She was dynamite in a tiny package, his personal kryptonite, it seemed. ‘But you’d have to fake being a real bride for my family’s benefit because that will integrate our triplets into the group and make everything smooth again.’

Lexy’s lower lip had long since parted with the upper as sheer disbelief gripped her hard. ‘So, you’re serious about this marriage idea. It seems like you’ve thought it through and you like things...er, smooth.’

‘Call it crisis management. It’s my strength,’ Nic told her in a very businesslike tone. ‘We marry for a while. You acquire a proper home, in this country or wherever else you wish to live. The children get to know their father. All the complications melt away. When we have had enough of the pretence we go for a divorce and co-parent.’

Marryfor a while.That put the proposal in a much clearer perspective, she acknowledged ruefully. It would be a temporary arrangement, not the usual life commitment. And she could see his point. Like whitewashing a dirty wall, the end result would be very visible. She and her children would have recognised importance in his world and evidently that meant a lot to Nic Diamandis. As a wife or even an ex-wife, she would have a position and nobody would pity her or look down on her. Their children would be recognised as family members while all her money worries would go away.

‘Why are you willing to do this? I mean...it’s more of a big thing for you with your lifestyle than it would be for me,’ Lexy pointed out with as much tact as she could employ, because a playboy faking a marriage could hardly engage in his normal pursuits. Unless, of course, and again she was being naïve, his cheating outside marriage could provide the reason for an eventual divorce? She decided not to ask any more awkward questions and was beginning to turn away.

‘I’m willing to do it because my mother was my father’s mistress before he married her. Amarriedman’s mistress.’ Nic spelt out that reluctant admission between compressed lips and Lexy stopped dead in her tracks. ‘I was three years old before my father married my mother after he was widowed by an unfaithful wife. Pulling us forward into his life officially was a face-saving gesture, no more.’

Lexy slowly turned back, cut to the bone by that sudden unexpected confession that sliced away all that Diamandis gloss and revealed the truth of the ordinary humans behind the billionaire façade. ‘Oh...’ was all she felt able to say about such a very personal and private thing.

Nic expelled his breath in a sharp exhalation. ‘And all the years I was growing up I felt that my mother and I were looked down on within the family as being something less than his first wife and my elder brother. I don’t want that happening to my children.’

Lexy nodded jerkily, finally fully understanding that motivation and trying not to be touched that he had confided in her. After all, that motive was absolutely understandable in his position, considering his own more humble beginnings. Nic hadn’t started out as a Diamandis with a silver spoon in his mouth. No, he had been the son of his father’s lover on the side and disregarded while his father was still married to another woman. That knowledge shook her rigid, taught her afresh that appearances were often misleading and that she too had judged Nic to be an absolute four-letter word of a man because of his privilege in life and his treatment of her.

For the first time, as well, it occurred to her that his treatment of her did not line up with the man wishing to marry her to prevent his children from enduring that sense of insecurity that he had suffered as a young boy. He was more sensitive than she had appreciated, under that surface gloss, that flaring, oh, so attractive confidence.

Amazingly, it took very little thought at all for her to decide that, yes, now that he had talked the talk, she would give him her trust and marry him. Ethan, Ezra and Lily would profit from that move in every way possible. She understood why he was making the offer and she understood that it would not be a real marriage. And really, what did she have to lose? Homeless, penniless. Those weren’t only words. They didn’t express the daily fears and anxieties that grabbed her and strangled her with stress. She put on a front for Mel, who had already done so much for them, but the concept of being no longer poor shone like a brilliant, inviting sun on Lexy’s horizon.

She wanted to buy her babies decent clothes, feed them the best food, put them to bed in comfortable cots. And she wanted to feel that they were safe. It crossed her mind that she would be willing to marry the devil himself to achieve those ends. Tears burned the backs of her eyes because she knew that, over the past eighteen months, she had sunk so very low in her expectations of life. If Nic was willing to sacrifice so much for his children’s benefit, then it was highly probable that he would also be able to love them. And that mattered, mattered so much more than the material benefits because Lexy knew what it was like to grow up without a father’s love.

‘Okay,’ she said stiffly. ‘I’ll marry you.’

CHAPTER FIVE

‘GOODHEAVENS...’ Mel hissed when the cars that had met them off the helicopter drove them along a paved lane towards the giant villa studded with fancy pillars. It towered like a monolith on the heights of the hill on the island of Faros. It was Nic’s home on the island, not the even larger house at the other end of it, which belonged to his elder half-brother, Jace, and their grandmother. The house Nic had inherited had only been built in the first place because their father, Argus, had fallen out with his mother, Electra.

‘Prepare yourself for a very extravagant setting,’ Nic had advised humorously on the phone. ‘It’s my house now but it’s all grand Roman splendour. My father didn’t do good taste.’

The two cars came to a halt. Yes,twocars. Nic had hired three nannies,three, he explained because he didn’t want any nanny to feel overworked taking care of their children and he wanted every one of their babies to receive the very best care. Lexy’s head was still spinning at all the changes that had taken place in her world over the past two weeks. Yes, only two weeks, not only to refill her skeletal wardrobe and buy all the bridal finery, but also to organise what had sounded like a very big wedding. Luckily her input had not been much required aside from a couple of phone calls to establish the food she liked and the colours and flowers she preferred.

‘It’s like being on another planet,’ Mel had said at one point of Lexy’s rags-to-riches transformation.

Even better, she had told herself often, Nic had achieved all the arrangements with her by phone. A much safer way to maintain their tenuous at best relationship, she reasoned, keeping it like a straightforward business arrangement, an agreement, adeal. His money in exchange for what he deemed to be respectability, which was marriage and fakery. He had warned her on that score too that she would have to pretend that they were keen on each other.

And how difficult could that possibly be when he looked the way he did and she was challenged to take her attention off him when he was in the same room? Nor did it take into account the number of times when, purely for reference purposes, she had looked up some of those photos of Nic online and learned stuff about him that she hadn’t bothered to access when he had ghosted her eighteen months earlier. Like his name at birth had been the Italian Domenico and his mother, Bianca, had been a minor socialite in Rome when she’d first met his father. Little stuff, she consoled herself in explanation, that she had needed to know for the wedding and the people she would meet.

As the car drew up, she glimpsed an entire group of people waiting and her backbone melted like snow in summer. All those people, all those rich, important people, who had to believe that she was something she was not in Nic’s eyes. She smoothed damp palms down over her designer dress, a muted shade of green teamed with wedge heels, and began to climb out as the door opened. And then she glanced up and realised that it was Nic opening the door and her sense of relief at seeing him was so intense after so many days that it left her dizzy.

‘Nic...’ she muttered as she stepped away from the door.

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