ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5) (35 page)

“We’re just going to take a few cells from the inside of their cheeks,” the medical technician explained as she approached Vivienne with a swab in her hand. “It won’t hurt her.”

I glanced at Nicolas. He nodded, a muscle in his jaw popping as he watched.

Vivienne whimpered as the technician pressed the swab into her mouth, but she didn’t wake up. And then it was Cole’s turn. He wasn’t as cooperative, turning his face and screaming when the technician touched him. But in less than a minute, we were done.

“Why?” I asked for the millionth time, as we slid the babies into their car seats under Adam’s protective glare.

“I don’t know,” Nicolas said. “She just told the judge that she thought a DNA test proving the babies are Aurora’s was in order.”

“But no one has ever denied that they’re Aurora’s.”

Nicolas moved up behind me and slid his arms around me. “Let’s just be grateful that this is delaying the custody hearing. The last thing we need the weekend of our wedding is to get bogged down in some ridiculous legal case.”

I turned in his arms and kissed him. “We’re really getting married in two days?”

“We really are.”

I pressed myself up against him and raised my face for a second kiss, but then Adam was pushing us into the SUV as a chorus of shouts surrounded us.

The paparazzi had found us.

They’d been relentless since the news got out. It was unrealistic to think that the press wouldn’t find out about the babies. But Nicolas’ staff—who consisted of a pretty impressive PR lady—managed to keep it all under wraps with sealed court records and protected medical records until someone in the NICU sold our story to a tabloid for ten thousand dollars. If, whoever it was, had just told Nicolas they needed money, he probably would have paid five times that to keep the story quiet a little longer. But that person didn’t, so now the press knew about the babies, about me, about the whole story—at least, the parts they’d bothered to learn about. The rest they just kind of made up.

For that reason, when Nicolas arranged for us to get a marriage license, he didn’t do anything to keep it from the press. It was leaked within twelve hours, and the paparazzi had been relentless ever since, dying to find out when and where the happy day would take place.

And then, of course, there was the whole custody thing with Virginia. Once the press found out about the babies, it didn’t take much for them to find the custody battle that was waging between Virginia and Nicolas. The case was supposed to go in front of the judge today but, instead, the court sent us to the hospital to have the babies DNA tested.

It made little sense to me.

I adjusted Vivienne’s cannula, smiling when she peeked at me from beneath long, dark lashes. I tried to imagine what Aurora looked like as a baby, but I couldn’t. She was a beautiful blonde with striking blue eyes and a perfectly square face. But both babies had round faces, dark eyes and hair. And their hair wasn’t falling out like I had assumed it would. There was nothing of their mother in their faces. But, there was enough of Nicolas to make that understandable.

So why did this little spark of hope insist on sitting deep in my belly? 

***

Saturday dawned sunny and perfect. It was supposed to be warm for a California spring day. I crawled out of bed and peeked in on the babies, pleased to find them both sleeping peacefully. Then, I crawled into the shower, unable to believe that by this time tomorrow, I was going to be Mrs. Nicolas Costa.

Today was our wedding day.

The backyard was decked out with streamers, a lovely arch, and dozens of chairs for our dozens of expected guests. Nicolas wanted to keep the affair intimate, so he only invited two hundred of his closest friends and colleagues. I, of course, only invited Constance and Kelly. Constance’s family, however, would fill out at least fifty of those chairs, and Kelly would be standing up with me, so she didn’t need a chair. But her date—whomever that would be—would.

I stepped out of the shower and wrapped myself in a fluffy towel, thinking about Nicolas doing the same thing down the hall. I so wanted to go down there and see him, to crawl into his arms and never leave them again. Just a few more hours, I reminded myself. Very soon I would have the legal right to never sleep in a bed alone, to never leave him alone, and to never be without him again.

I couldn’t wait.

Kelly was waiting for me in the bedroom when I stepped out. She giggled when she saw me.

“I can’t believe you’re getting married! When all this started, I thought I needed to have you committed. But now…”

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

She lifted my dress off of the hook on the back of the closet door and danced around with it.

“Getting married. Who’d believe it?”

We fell onto the bed in a gale of giggles and reminisced about days gone by, high school and college, all the things we regretted and all the things we wished we could do again.

“Guess what?” she finally asked.

“What?”

“I think I might be getting serious about someone.”

I looked at her, surprised by the lack of amusement in her voice. In fact, rather than amusement, there was something like amazement lacing her words.

That’s how I knew just how genuine she was.

“Who?”

She looked at me for a long minute. “Don’t get mad when I tell you.”

“I won’t.”

She bit her lip for a long second and then spit it out on one, long breath.

“Daniel Davis.”

I gasped and then laughed, as I threw my arms around her. “That’s great, Kelly.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He’s a great guy.”

“But he’s Virginia’s stepson.”

“Yes. But he’s not her.”

Kelly nodded. “He really is a good guy, Ana. And he treats me like I’m a queen. And, you know what else?”

“What?”

“We haven’t had sex yet.”

That was the real shocker. Kelly once had sex with a guy within ten minutes of meeting him. It wasn’t her usual behavior, but it wasn’t that far off, either. For her to not have sex with Daniel was a really big deal. I was quite impressed.

“It must be love.”

She laughed. “It just might be.”

***

I stood in front of a full length mirror in my wedding dress. It was a mermaid style that hugged all my curves with less than subtle ruffles flowing down the back. Kelly stood back and shook her head.

“If I didn’t know you’d just had twins three months ago, I would never guess it.”

I touched my belly, grateful for the stairs and the pacing with fussy babies that took the place of the treadmill these past few months. And for Nicolas. I could hear his voice in the back of my mind as my eyes found just the subtlest imperfections in my appearance:

How can I dislike the body that made my children?

This body made two perfect babies. It might not have been my eggs, but it was my uterus and my breasts that nourished them. I couldn’t find fault with that.

Someone tapped on the door. I glanced at the clock.

“We still have ten minutes.”

“I’ll see who it is,” Kelly said.

A second later, she was standing at the partially open door explaining that, “The bride isn’t supposed to see the groom before the ceremony. It’s bad luck.”

“Just give her this,” Nicolas’ voice said.

Kelly walked over to me a second later, a worried look on her face. She held up a plain envelope. “From Nicolas.”

An irrational fear burst through me, turning my vision dark for a second. But then I remembered that this was Nicolas, not some flighty douche bag I might have dated in college.

I grabbed the envelope out of her hand and pulled out the thin piece of paper inside.

“It’s the DNA test results,” I said.

“Already?” Kelly asked, already up-to-date on everything because, well, she was my best friend. Nothing happened in my world that I didn’t text her about. “What does it say?”

I shook my head as I read over the sheet of paper. “I don’t know. I think it says that the babies are Aurora’s. But we knew that.”

Kelly moved up beside me and read the paper over my shoulder. “No,” she said, gesturing at a column at the top of the page. “It says that Aurora Parker is not the mother.”

Sure enough, those words were typed at the top of the page. And next to that it said that a second DNA sample was a perfect match.

“I don’t understand. I thought they were only testing Aurora’s DNA against the babies.”

“Who else would they test?” Kelly asked.

I shrugged. I had no idea.

“How could they not be Aurora’s? She told me about the process, how much it hurt when they extracted the eggs from her fallopian tubes.”

Kelly shook her head. “This says she’s not related to the babies.”

“But it’s not possible.”

I went to the door and wrenched it open. Virginia was standing there, an uncharacteristically anxious look on her face.

“When you came to my house, I told you I knew who my daughter was. Nothing she did or said ever surprised me.” She studied me for a long minute. “But, the first time I saw those perfect babies, I knew Aurora had finally stooped to a new low. Low enough that she surprised even me.”

She took me in, standing there in my wedding dress. “You were just trying to protect Nicolas, and I was hurting so much that I wanted to punish everyone but myself for the child I raised and lost. But I think it’s time I finally accept who Aurora was and stop hurting people she already crushed.”

“Mrs. Davis,” I began, not sure where I was going with my words. However, she stopped me, placing a hand on my arm.

“Aurora set you up. She never intended to be a mother to those beautiful babies. She was going to use them to ruin Nicolas, and to hurt you in the process, an innocent young woman who only wanted to help her mother.” Virginia looked away, tears of shame filling her eyes. “She never donated eggs. Those babies…they’re yours, child.”

I shook my head. “There were embryos. Aurora and Nicolas were there when they implanted them…”

“No, child. My attorneys spoke to the doctor in question. He admitted that he didn’t do anything he told you he was doing. He simply put you on a course of fertility drugs and then introduced Nicolas’ sperm to your system. You got pregnant quite naturally—if a little clinically. And those DNA tests prove it.”

I shook my head, but she wasn’t finished.

“I arranged for a test on blood leftover from tests you submitted to when you first agreed to this process. The tests are undeniable.”

“They’re mine?”

“They’re yours.” She smiled softly at the wonder on my face. “Congratulations. They’re perfect.”

She turned and began to walk down the hall.

“Mrs. Davis?”

She paused then turned to look at me.

“My mom is gone,” I said softly, “and Nicolas’ mom is gone, too. Those babies could really use a grandmother.”

She stared at me like she couldn’t quite believe what I was saying. And then she smiled, the first smile I’d seen that actually touched her eyes.

“I’d be honored.”

***

Nicolas and I spoke our vows fifteen minutes later, Vivienne asleep in my arms and Cole nestled restlessly in Kelly’s. They woke and wanted to be a part of the ceremony, and we couldn’t say no.

Nicolas brushed a piece of hair out of my face as he bent to kiss me.

“I love you,” he whispered, “Mrs. Costa.”

Tears filled my eyes as I stared at him. All the choices I’d made these past few months flowing through my mind. If
mi mami
hadn’t gotten sick, if I hadn’t volunteered to be Aurora’s surrogate, if I hadn’t opened that door on that hot Texas summer night….

Thank God for random choice.

~ End ~

The world swung and tipped in a way that felt both fun and scary as I swirled the last of the beer in the bottle, the glass clinking heavily against my teeth. A burst of laughter made me turn slowly, ponderously, to see just what was so funny. Was it me? Was it the bottle against my teeth? Even as I could still taste the crisp carbonation of the beverage in my mouth, I wanted another.

I felt like I could drink all night. It made it easy to forget about how stupid my parents had been. There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with a cold beer—especially when I was enjoying it in the company of good friends.

“I’m gonna slap that look off your face if I see it again,” Caro warned me, shaking her finger so vigorously it made me a little dizzy to try and follow it.

“What look?” I asked, belligerent. I knew exactly what look she meant. It was the look that knitted my features together when I thought about things that pissed me off. Tonight’s subject was definitely my parents denying me the right to attend the very party I found myself so drunk at.

“That one,” she insisted, poking me hard enough on the nose that I felt the cartilage pop. “And if you don’t stop it right this minute, Amanda Beauty Hart, I’ll tell your parents myself what a party pooper you are.”

“Stop!” I hissed, glancing quickly around, trying to see if anyone had heard her. “Don’t say that stupid name.”

“It’s your name, Amanda,” Caro sighed. “Aren’t you ever going to get over it?”

Amanda I could deal with. And Hart wasn’t bad either. But sandwich Beauty right in between those two and it equaled the most ridiculous name in the history of the world. I hated it with a passion and did all that I could to keep my peers from knowing my middle name.

I’d gotten up the courage exactly once to ask my parents what they’d been thinking when they inflicted such a name on me, but their answer had done little to satisfy my angst.

“I guess that means Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder,” my dad had joked, earning him a sigh from my mom.

“You’re already beautiful on the outside, sweetheart,” my mom had explained. “We just wanted to remind you that it’s important to be beautiful on the inside, too.”

They didn’t have to remind me by giving me that name. I didn’t know how to feel beautiful on the inside, and I certainly didn’t feel beautiful on the outside. I felt most comfortable in a t-shirt, my brown hair was almost always in a messy ponytail, and I was hopeless at makeup.

“That’s it!” Caro declared, whirling away and yanking me from my angry ruminations. “I’m calling your parents!”

“Don’t you dare!” I cried, chasing her across the messy kitchen, bumping into the counter, a chair, and a fellow partygoer. I couldn’t plot my course correctly, and my legs seemed to have minds of their own. “Caro! My parents will murder me if they find out I’m here!”

“They will not,” she scoffed, waving her phone at me.

“Well, they’ll ground me for the rest of my life,” I said. That was much more feasible.

“You’re going to college at the end of the summer, stupid,” Caro said. “They might say you’re grounded, but they can’t actually do anything to you once you go away to school.”

She had a point, but it still made me cringe to imagine my parents showing up to the party to drag me home. They’d denied me permission to come here, and I’d promised them I’d stay home. But the siren’s song of a house party full of the friends I’d made in high school—complete with beer and missing all parental supervision—was too strong to resist. I wanted to see everyone in one place one last time before I went away to college. And when my parents decided to go out to dinner and a movie, I stayed home just long enough to see their car roll out of the driveway.

“Just don’t call them,” I begged Caro.

“I wouldn’t actually call your parents,” she said, rolling her eyes at me as she shoved her phone back in her pocket. “I just want you to have a good time and not be all mopey.”

“I’m not mopey,” I protested.

“Then prove it on the dance floor,” Caro said, grabbing me by my hand and pulling me into the living room.

All the furniture had been shoved to one end, clearing the wooden floor of obstacles, and the music boomed so loud that it rattled the windows. Dancing felt ethereal, like I was weightless, buoyed up only by the beat and the crush of people around me. It was easy to forget that anything was wrong as long as I was dancing, whipping my hair to the rhythm of the song, taking the first cold bottle of beer I was offered, not caring who it came from or why.

There was only the beer. There was only the music.

And then, there were the flashing red and blue lights of the police outside.

“Shit! The cops!” Caro yelped, grabbing my hand. “Let’s go!”

There was a mad scramble at the loud knocking on the door, the music still blaring, the beer still cool in my mouth. I let my friend drag me through the house, fleeing through a back door into the humid Texas night.

“Stay where you are!” a voice over a bullhorn commanded, but then the rest of our friends who’d followed us in our escape congealed briefly around us and then scattered.

“Run for it!” Caro urged, and it was all I could do to get my legs to obey, in danger at every second of tripping and falling over myself. If the cops decided to give chase, they couldn’t catch us all, but I didn’t want to be the weakest link in the pack.

We dashed several unsteady blocks in a blind panic then cut down a side street and started to double back cautiously to assess the situation. By the time we returned to the scene of the party, the house was dark, as if nothing had ever happened there. The cops had left, either satisfied they’d scared all of us kids straight or with a couple of us in the backseat of the patrol car, about to learn a hard lesson about underage drinking.

“Dammit,” Caro complained, as we shuffled down to her parked car. “I don’t want this night to end.”

I was still high on the adrenaline of the chase, the endorphins of our successful escape, and, of course, all the beer I’d imbibed.

“I’m going to miss you so much when we go to college,” I said, waxing suddenly sentimental and looping an arm around Caro’s shoulders. She was my best friend, and we’d somehow managed to enroll in colleges hundreds of miles away from each other.

“We have to do something to salvage this night,” she declared, hugging me back. “I’m not ready to accept defeat!”

“Let’s just drive,” I suggested. We’d escaped the cops. We were invincible. “If we just drive, the universe will show us what to do.”

The wind whistling in the open windows was cool bliss to the pressing thickness of the night, lifting the tendrils of hair that had escaped the ponytail off of my neck. It was better than Caro’s faulty air conditioning and felt purer than any box fan I’d stood in front of, seeking relief.

We turned the radio up, sang as loud as we could to the songs we knew, and faked it to the songs we didn’t, choosing our course at random, careening through the streets until we were outside of the city, on the country roads that we knew some of our classmates liked to race each other down. It was thrilling to witness the rows of crops whip by in dizzying patterns, to be the only set of headlights on the roadway, for the curves in the road to move the contents of my stomach, to stick my hand out the window and cup the air as it whooshed by.

Caro muttered something out of rhythm of the song we were listening to, and I glanced over at her. She was a better singer than I was, so I was always eager to point out if she missed lyrics or her voice broke.

She didn’t glance back. Her eyes were fixed on the road, her mouth set in a grim line.

I felt, more than heard, the tires slip into a skid, my gaze still fixated on Caro’s face, watching her eyes get wider and wider and then nothing.