Page 23 of The Baby Behind Their Marriage Merger

‘You should thank God this isn’t Regency England and that you don’t have to provide dowries for all of them.’

‘In the African culture, I’d have to pay lobola to your sisters for allowing me to marry you,’ Jude pointed out. ‘Cattle are damn expensive.’

‘I’m probably only worth about two chickens and a goat,’ Addi quipped.

He laughed. ‘If that.’

She nudged him with her shoulder, but he was happy to see she could take a joke. ‘You mentioned an Aunt Kate before...tell me about her.’

‘By the time we hit our teens, Joelle was finding it very difficult to persuade her lovers to let her, and her two stroppy teenagers, move in. We really bounced around for a few years; it was incredibly stressful. Then Joelle reconnected with her mum’s sister; they’d fallen out years before. We went to stay with her for what was supposed to be a few weeks during the long summer holidays, and Joelle said that she was going out to look for a stable job. We didn’t mind; Aunt Kate was old and strict, but we had three meals a day.’

Addi ran an elegant finger up and down her glass. ‘Joelle didn’t come back. When she finally showed up, two months later, Aunt Kate wouldn’t let us leave. We stayed and have been in her house ever since.’

‘And she paid for you to go to uni?’

Addi nodded. ‘Well, her insurance policy did. After she died, we rented out rooms in the house to other students to help fund our living expenses and Lex picked up a job. The plan was for me to get my degree as quickly as I could, and then I’d help Lex pay for her to go to uni. But then Joelle dropped back into our lives, surprising us with two half-sisters we didn’t know about.’

‘She never told you about them?’

‘Nope. She rocked up with them. She’d been living in Thailand. She asked us to take them for the weekend...’

He connected the dots immediately. ‘And she did a runner.’

‘We couldn’t believe she’d suckered us like she did our aunt Kate. And, like Kate, we took them in. I mean, what else could we do?’

Jude tipped his beer bottle to his mouth. ‘And she’s still in Thailand, right?

‘Mmm...’

‘Why do you think she wants them back? Why now?’ he asked. ‘Do you think she’s had a come-to-the-light, repent-of-her-sins moment?’

‘Joelle?’ Addi’s eyebrows shot up. ‘No way. No, I’m thinking that she’s got a guy on the line, someone who is either very family oriented or someone who thinks that kids belong with their mum. Someone fairly rich, because she wouldn’t be hiring a lawyer unless he was paying.’

Man, her mother sounded like a piece of work.

‘Well, your lawyer will mop the floor with her lawyer,’ Jude told her, covering her hand with his and squeezing it. As she’d told him earlier, she’d engaged a lawyer he’d recommended from a practice that had an excellent reputation in family law, and she’d forwarded all the correspondence from her mother’s lawyers to hers. They’d acknowledged her email and asked for a retainer...

Damn, he’d forgotten to pay them, as per their agreement. This week hadn’t only been difficult for Addi, but he was also slipping up. The hard part was over, he told himself, and they’d soon get used to their new set of circumstances. Within a week or two, they’d go back to normal. Whatever normal was.

Making a mental note to make the payment for the lawyers, Jude looked at Addi and fought the urge to take the fear out of her eyes and promise her that everything would be okay. From the moment he’d met her he hadn’t been able to put her in a box, hadn’t been able to stop himself from feeling more than he should. She’d burrowed under his skin, and he suspected that was where she’d stay. He desperately wanted to reassure her, promise her that everything would work out. The thing was, it frequently didn’t. His mum’s death from an undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy, his father’s depression, Marina... Life had taught him that was a promise he couldn’t make.

Some things, unfortunately, even money and power couldn’t change.

Addi looked a little sick. ‘I couldn’t bear it if we lost them, Jude. I grew up with Joelle, and I know how unsettled life is with her, but they’d also be in a foreign country. Can you imagine how scary that would be for them? And Lex would be devastated. She’s been their rock for the last four years. She adores them.’

He stroked her hair and ran his fingers over the bare, hot skin at the back of her neck. ‘And you, Addi. How would you feel?’

‘I’d miss them intensely and I’d feel gutted. And for the rest of my life I’d have to live with the fact that I failed those kids. That they looked to me to help them, and I couldn’t, that I didn’t.’

He pulled back from her and waited for her to look at him, for their eyes to connect. ‘Addi, that’s a big burden to place on your shoulders, a harsh way of looking at this. You took in those girls, you’ve paid for everything they need, have given them a bed and clothes and stability. You’ve loved them. And—and I’m pretty sure this won’t happen—even if they do go back to their mum, you would’ve done everything possible to keep them here. How would that be a failure?’

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘It just would be.’

He ran his knuckle down her cheek. ‘You are very hard on yourself, sweetheart.’ Because he was so close to kissing her, needing to chase her tears and sadness away with heat and passion, he leaned away from her and changed the subject. It was so easy to get sucked in by passion, to fall into the heat of the moment, and he had to keep his head. If he didn’t, he’d end up dinged and dented again. Life with Addi was turning out to be a constant tug of war, between what he wanted and what he knew he couldn’t have.

‘How do your sisters feel about becoming an aunt?’

Embarrassment flashed in her eyes and she jerked back and folded her arms across her chest, looking a little belligerent. She didn’t answer him and, when he cleared his throat, she lifted her eyebrows at him. ‘What?’

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