Page 14 of Modern Romance January 2025 1-4

‘I’ll leave you to feed them,’ Nic said levelly. ‘I’ll come back tonight at eight and we’ll talk then.’

‘Fight, you mean.’

‘I have no intention of fighting with you,’ Nic asserted with glacial bite. ‘You are the mother of my children and I respect that status even if I’m a little dubious about you as a person.’

‘Thanks, but no, thanks,’ Lexy muttered as he vanished out of the front door and she shut it firmly behind him.

‘Well, how did it go?’ Mel demanded on the phone an hour later.

‘Not very well. We argued through it as best we could with the triplets there and he’s coming back this evening to argue some more. Nic really doesn’t like being told that he fell down on his responsibilities.’

‘And that’s catnip for you at the minute,’ her friend guessed. ‘But maybe give the aggro a rest until you can get some kind of adult arrangement ironed out between you.’

‘I was hoping he would just pay up and go away.’

‘I don’t think you know him well enough to decide how he may react to being a father,’ Mel countered with tact.

Unwelcome though they were, Mel’s shrewd comments cooled Lexy’s anger with Nic. Did she really want to drive him away so totally that her babies lost out on the possibility of a father figure? And the answer to that was...no, she didn’t. In other words, she couldn’t afford to be short-sighted. Literally and figuratively, she reflected wryly as she studied her little trio striving to feed themselves and dropping food everywhere round their battered mismatched highchairs. If Nic was capable of loving her babies, his interest in them would be invaluable.

Right now, Lexy was broke, totally broke, and it was like that every week, stretching the pennies to go further, adding up the groceries at the supermarket before she went to pay, getting in first at the charity shop to search the rails. She was poor, she was so poor she had given up make-up and all sorts of stuff she had once naively taken for granted. And that was the world she lived in when her kids deserved so much better from their rich father. If he could offer more, then it was her duty to accept it and be polite about it. Taking potshots at him wasn’t going to fill the kitty or put food on the table.

Unaware of Lexy’s resolve to be less incendiary, Nic was brooding. He was angry, so angry with her for subjecting them both and their children to what promised to be chaos and bad publicity. But for all he knew, Lexy would enjoy that kind of attention because she wasn’t the woman he remembered. Yes, she was still attractive to him to the most annoying degree but everything that he had admired inside her seemed to have vanished. There was nothing sweet or gentle about that waspish tongue of hers or the angry dislike flashing in her eyes.

In truth, Nic had never dealt with an angry woman in his life. Jace had seemed much more seasoned in that line. Nic had handled Angeliki’s angry flouncing and dirty glares but she had never got verbal with him or insulted him and he did not think their friendship would have survived had she done so. Why? Nic had a low threshold for insults because he reckoned that every day from birth until his demise, his father, Argus, had hurt, humiliated or outraged him in some way. Even adult status hadn’t protected him. Argus had liked to get on the phone to critique his business choices, his performance, his choice of friends. In fact, Argus had been his horrible abusive self, right up until the very day he died. To both Nicandhis unhappy, derided mother.

Lexy had to change before Nic’s second visit. A dressy shirt did not long survive triplet proximity. She didn’t have many clothes. When she was pregnant, she had traded in good stuff in return for anything that could fit a small woman with a physically large pregnant belly. All she had left were the items nobody had wanted and she knew it was time to get on with the lawn again, a never-ending duty in summer time, so on went her denim shorts and a tee. Probably the same tee he had once takenoffher all too willing body, she reflected morosely as she brushed her hair and left it loose.

The ride-on mower was an unpredictable horror that didn’t always work and visits from the local mechanic were a regular feature. As soon as the triplets were down, she went out to tackle the mower and when, glory of glories, it worked, nothing would have removed her bottom from that seat until she had done the whole lawn. She was near the end of the back lawn when she saw Nic standing below the rear porch watching her and looking a bit like the Grim Reaper in a dark suit, faithfully cut to make the most of every line and muscle in his long, lean physique. He looked maddeningly stupendous, and she was stricken that she had lost sight of time and hadn’t contrived to get indoors again and change into something more appropriate for his benefit. Even so, mindful of her new attitude, she lifted her hand in as friendly a wave of acknowledgement as she could fake and pointed at the corner to let him know she would be stopping when she finished the grass. One last strip to go.

The ear-splitting decibels of the mower stopped and Lexy removed the headphones she had been using and manoeuvred off the machine with all the awkwardness of her unfortunately short legs. Tugging self-consciously at the hem of the denim shorts, she hurried up the slope and onto the rear patio to greet him.

‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting but once I get the mower going, I stay on it until I’m finished,’ she confided, anxiously fixing her gaze on his lean, strong, utterly expressionless face.

‘Why are you not angry any more?’ Nic enquired disconcertingly.

Lexy grimaced, feeling more uncomfortable than ever as she led the way indoors through the kitchen into the living room. ‘It’s not that I’m not angry, just that anger isn’t a good idea right now with you only just meeting the triplets. I need to stop letting it get in the way,’ she muttered.

Nic was astonished that she had done exactly what he had been hoping she would do to ponder and reach the same conclusions he had. There was no profit in an angry resentment that kept them at daggers drawn. Together they were parents to three children and the children were what mattered most.

‘Coffee? A drink?’ Lexy proffered.

Nic was studying her legs, very shapely legs, he had to admit. ‘Coffee...black, no sugar.’

‘I remember.’

‘The less we remember now from our first meeting, the better,’ Nic startled her by proclaiming. ‘The situation has changed radically and time has moved on without...well, without me. I want to correct that.’

‘And how do you think it best to do that?’ Lexy called out from the kitchen as she poured the coffee she had brewed in readiness, grateful that the larder was so well stocked, although she had rarely used anything from her hosts’ cupboards for the food was not hers.

‘I think we should get married,’ Nic drawled, almost in a chatty tone, as if what he was saying were not anything like as shocking as it was.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she murmured, the hand holding the jug shaking.

Nic sprang upright and walked back to the doorway to look at her with grave dark brown eyes. ‘Marriage will fix everything—’

‘Nothing’s broken,’ she just about whispered in her disbelief.

‘It is in my world,’ Nic contradicted. ‘My children are illegitimate, which will very much upset my whole family and make it almost impossible for them to inherit anything from us. I owe themandyou more than some paltry monthly payment towards their support. You’re homeless and penniless and none of you should be living like that. If we were to marry, you would all be properly taken care of.’

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