Page 10 of Modern Romance January 2025 1-4

‘It’s still in the hire car,’ she recalled belatedly.

‘We’ll stop on the way. I’m sure the car will still be there,’ he said grimly.

‘I can’t ask you.’

‘You’re not asking. I’m telling you that you’re not leaving in weather like thiswithouta coat,’ Nic told her fiercely as he opened the front door.

She felt as though a lifetime had passed since she last climbed into his SUV. This time she was noticing that it was the very last word in opulence. She breathed in deep and slow to steady herself. ‘I really am sorry that I have to leave.’

‘My number is in your phone,’ he told her, sharply disconcerting her. ‘I put it in last night. What are you thinking of, not even having a password on your phone? I was so surprised that it opened for me that I just went ahead and added myself to your contacts.’

‘That’s okay.’ Lexy bent her head but she was smiling like mad below her tumbling hair as he parked the car on the verge. Seconds later, she watched him break through the hedge and stride with innate impatience across the still snow-covered field towards the car she had crashed.

She wasn’t falling for him, she assured herself, because nobody fell in love in a matter of eighteen hours, nobody normal or sensible anyway. It was just that she liked him, liked him an awful lot, she reasoned, and it wasn’t only the sex, although that had been pretty spectacular. He was clever, he was kind, he was thoughtful and even though she suspected that it would come naturally to him to rap out orders like a domineering boss, he was controlling that tendency for her benefit. She laughed at herself as he reappeared at her side of the car and got her out to help her into her sensible winter coat. A full-bodied shiver ran through her as he carefully tugged her hair out from below the collar. He had yet to show her one thing about himself that she didn’t like or appreciate.

He insisted on driving her all the way into Manchester, paid for the ticket when they arrived and he stayed with her until it was time for her to leave him. When he buttoned up her coat for her as though she were a child before she went through the barrier onto the platform, her eyes prickled with tears because nobody had taken that much care of her in more years than she cared to count. Armed with enough magazines to take on a world tour, she got on the train, still struggling to catch a last view of him, still struggling to credit that the whole encounter had not been some insane, wondrous dream...

Eighteen months later

Nic strode into his lawyer’s office. Aubrey Harrison, a thin, sharp-featured man in his thirties, sprang upright to greet him.

‘Sorry about this,’ he said wryly. ‘But I thought you should look at this paternity claim before it goes down the inevitable DNA route. It’s a rather odd one.’

‘Not another one,’ Nic groaned in exasperation, because it seemed that no matter how careful he was, the false claims still came in.

Yet in years he had never had anything more than a one-night stand or, at most, a couple of nights with a woman. Obviously, he knew that accidental conception could occur and that such matters had to be checked out, but even so, they put him in a bad mood, regardless of how hard he tried to take them in his stride. It wasn’t as though he had ever been a real playboy like his older brother, Jace. And in recent times, he pondered, his innate reserve locking down his lean, hard bone structure, there had been no play time included in his driven schedule. He had always been more into work than casual sex and only one woman had ever bucked that trend with him. As for her, she was long gone, lost in the wind along with her phone number.

Yes, he had made an elementary mistake and paid for it. Her number had simply vanished from his phone as though it had never been and at the same time as he had tried to check that mystery out, he had found a suspicious app on his phone that was tracking his calls and texts. That and the security concerns aroused by it had proved a major headache, he recalled grimly. Even so, in spite of the investigation he had had done, he had yet to discover the culprit.

‘This claimant seems fanciful at the very least and the timing is all off. Why would she waitthislong to claim child support?’ Aubrey wondered, passing a document to Nic.

Nic took one cursory glance at the name and froze, not a muscle moving on his taut dark features while disbelief assailed him in a blinding surge. ‘Lexy...’ he almost whispered. Lexy Montgomery. Now that surname would have been very welcome had he known it, had he even thought toaskfor it eighteen months earlier, only he hadn’t. And he had had no success trying to find a Korean interpreter called Lexy in London.

‘I take it that you actually know this woman,’ Aubrey remarked in some surprise.

‘Yes.’ Nic had to clear his throat before he could speak. ‘I know her but a lot of time has passed since we were together.’

‘Our investigator wasn’t able to discover a link between you and Miss Montgomery and she has no social media, which is strange in this day and age.’

Shaking his head as though to clear it, Nic forced his attention back to the document in his hold. ‘There arethreechildren,’ he registered on an incredulous note.

‘Triplets. Two boys and a girl. Even more unlikely, I surmised. The stats say only one in ten thousand births is a triplet one,’ the lawyer maintained. ‘And the chances of having triplets by a chance-met billionaire in the tech industry have to be even poorer.’

Nic was pale below his golden skin. ‘My mother’s mother was a triplet, one of three girls, and my mother is a twin. There have also been multiple births on my father’s side of the family tree. It’s not as unusual as you might think,’ he commented flatly, thinking of how downright irresponsible he had been with Lexy that night and of how very possible it would be for her to have fallen pregnant. Guilt engulfed him in a crashing wave.

‘What I don’t understand is why she didn’t phone me, when she had my number,’ he confessed out loud.

‘According to her solicitor innumerable efforts were made to contact you in person and by letter and phone and all of them failed. How do you want to proceed with this?’

Nic vaulted upright. ‘I want to see her,’ he said instantaneously.

‘That’s not on the table, Nic, and I would strongly advise you not to think along those lines before a DNA test establishes that these children are yours.’

‘I’ll do the DNA test immediately, but I’m more interested in knowing where she’s living.’

‘The information given is not current. I checked that out,’ his lawyer informed him.

Resolving to find that out now that he was armed with Lexy’s full name, Nic departed. Three babies, he found himself thinking in astonishment. Was that possible? He knew it was possible from his own family tree and he also knew that he had been reckless with her, reckless with a woman for the first time in his life, he reminded himself. But why hadn’t she contacted him? Got pushy if she ran into some little difficulties? He couldn’t imagine Lexy being pushy, didn’t think she was the type. Not that she lacked backbone, he reasoned, just that she was sort of soft, gentle, not aggressive by nature and he had liked that about her, only not if that lack in her had kept them apart for more than eighteen months. While pondering that he was also working out how to get her address and a background report.

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