And came face-to-face with Mia, who’d been watching them from the kitchen doorway.

  She handed him two ice-cream bars without a word and headed back in the direction of her office.

  What she thought of him, of the whole situation, he had no idea.

  And he wasn’t going to ask.

  * * *

  “They didn’t finish them.”

  Mia had just entered the spare bedroom with the boxes, having been summoned by a text from Jordon, and stood in her denim shorts, red tank and flip-flops, feeling like a ranch hand, rather than a successful owner as she faced Jordon in his dark dress pants and white shirt. Even with dust on his shoes, they looked expensive. “I don’t care if they did,” she said, more in answer to his defensive tone than to the words themselves.

  “I didn’t want you to think I’d resort to letting them make themselves sick just to get over a tantrum.”

  “I wouldn’t have handed them to you if I thought they’d get sick off them,” she pointed out. With as much of the treat as had been falling on the ground and getting all over the twins’ hands, faces and clothes, she didn’t figure they each got one whole bar inside of them.

  She didn’t tell him that, though. Didn’t want him to know she’d come back out of the office to watch the second go-round, too.

  She’d missed all of their first experiences growing from baby to toddler. And would likely miss most of their future ones, as well.

  But at least she had first ice-cream bars. Via voyeurism.

  “Their dirty clothes hamper is getting full,” he said then, referring to the basket she’d pointed out to him the first night he’d taken over bath time. “I’ll take it with me in the morning and drop it off at the hotel laundry.”

  Almost ready to nod, to make certain, with her brother’s late night phone call still ringing in her ears, that she wasn’t letting Jordon use her, Mia shook her head, instead. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll throw them in with mine.”

  Not for Jordon. Or to make his life easier.

  But because she might not have other opportunities to do her daughters’ laundry. If hoarding the memories she was making turned out to be a bad thing for her emotionally, she’d deal with the fallout.

  To her way of thinking, those memories were going to be the only comfort she’d have in the years ahead if the court chose not to let her see the twins again once Jordon took them away. Because no matter what the law said, no matter what rights were given to whom, she was a mother who had two little girls who owned her heart whether they ever knew it or not.

  It wasn’t a law thing. Or even an earthly thing.

  Those babies had come from her body.

  Nothing anyone said was going to change that. Now that she’d met Ruby and Violet, nothing was going to sever the bond she felt to them.

  Love was greater than people.

  And choices.

  Even her own.

  Chapter Ten

  It made sense for Mia to do the girls’ laundry. So why was it an effort for him to just nod and accept her offer?

  He wanted to take the dirty clothes back and have the hotel laundry do it for him. He had to do his own, anyway, too.

  But it made sense that the clothes stay where the girls were. And he didn’t want to rock Mia’s boat.

  Not sure what was going on with him, Jordon brushed aside his uneasiness and pulled picture frames out of the box he’d opened.

  “I think we should casually introduce one of these to wherever the girls sleep, you know, just put it on the dresser or nightstand without making a big deal of it. And make it a constant for them, wherever they sleep, at least while they transition,” Mia said, taking a picture of Keith and Madeline sitting on a rock by the ocean, with Ruby and Violet on a smaller rock right in front of them. “This is a good one because it’s away from home. On vacation. Time out of time.”

  She’d read Mariah O’Connell’s report, too. He’d known that. And liked how she’d taken it in enough to be quoting the child life specialist’s words almost verbatim. References to Keith and Madeline would serve the girls better if they could be done in time out of time. Keep the people alive, not the life the girls would never be able to go back to.

  He took the photo she handed back to him, set it aside. “Good call. Thank you.” Relief flooded him. He was busy considering the huge decisions pressing on him and had forgotten that part of Mariah O’Connell’s report until she mentioned it.

  Which was why he needed Mia.

  He focused on details, numbers, with an eye always on the future. Mia lived life with her heart. Making the most out of every moment she was in.

  Why hadn’t he seen that difference in them before?

  Glancing up, his chest tight, Jordon was ready to apologize once more, for not seeing more clearly who she’d been, when the words clogged in his throat.

  The picture in her hand was one he’d just handed her. A framed eight-by-ten of Madeline and Keith in the hospital, right after the girls were born. They were sitting together on the hospital bed, each holding a baby with a little pink cap.

  Madeline, whose face was sweaty, hair askew and had an IV line hooked up to her arm, had clearly just given birth.

  Mia just kept staring, looking like she might cry, her eyes slightly glassy and her lips trembling. Because she hadn’t been the one to birth her own babies? Because she never got the ones she’d thought she’d have when the time was right? Because a happy couple was gone, just four short years after that picture had been taken?

  Because two little girls were orphans?

  Seeming to come back to the present, Mia glanced up with a jerk, her expression smoothing out to bland, as she set the photo in the pack away in storage to give to the girls when they were older pile. “She’d just gone through what I hear is the worst pain ever, twice, and her smile. She looked so happy...”

  So she was feeling for the new mother who’d struggled for so long to have children and only got four short years?

  Or was her grief more personal?

  In the past he hadn’t even have had the wherewithal to wonder. Anytime she’d been emotional, his job had been to lighten her moment.

  Or so he’d thought.

  “You didn’t get the children you’d planned to have by the time you were thirty.” Regret ripped through him. Not because of his choice to leave; he’d do it again, every time. But because that choice had hurt her so badly.

  “Nope.”

  He regretted that, too. Along with the fact that he’d been too...unaware...to see what he’d been doing to her. To realize that the woman he wanted her to be, the woman he saw her as, hadn’t been who Mia Jones was.

  Was he doing it again? Bringing the girls to her...he’d been thinking of them. Of himself, yes, but because of his fear that he’d make mistakes with them.

  But what about Mia?

  “I shouldn’t have brought them to you.” He’d had no right to rip open her heart again.

  Her glance was instant that time, too. But was sharp. Certain. And lingered. “Oh, yes, you should have, Jordon. I deserved to know they’d been orphaned, just like you did.”

  He’d thought so, too.

  And then her gaze softened on his. For a second there, he was twenty-one again, happy to be with the woman he was certain he would spend the rest of his life with. “Even if I never see them again after this week...I will cherish these days forever,” she told him.

  And he knew, if he did end up keeping the girls—something he wasn’t ready to discuss with himself yet—but if he did end up keeping them, Mia would always have the right to see them. To be in contact with them. No matter what the court decided.

  “All these years, I’ve pictured you with a husband and the houseful of kids you wanted.”

  “I only wanted two.”

  To him, living in an apartment in New York, two was a houseful.

  And he had to know...

  “You been in any serious relationships over the years?” Please let it be so. If he’d hurt her so badly that he’d turned her off love...

  “Yeah.”

  Relief came again, a sweet headiness that left as quickly as it came. Turned out, he didn’t like knowing that some other man had held his place in Mia’s life.

  He was really losing it.

  He didn’t want the woman she was, but he didn’t want anyone else to have her? He’d been ignorant, hadn’t seen what was right in front of him, but he wasn’t a selfish jerk.

  He also never wasted time wanting what he couldn’t have.

  “I haven’t,” he told her, needed her to know that. “After hurting you, I’ve made certain that any woman I’m with knows that my career, being in Manhattan, comes first.”

  Complete truth.

  That hit him upside the head. How could he even think about keeping Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes, bringing them into his home, unless he could put them first?

  Was he doing to those girls what he’d done to Mia? Building some imaginary picture in his head, thinking he could have people like he had things?

  Without considering that people had needs and things didn’t?

  Going cold, feeling himself pale, Jordon glanced at the picture he held, a younger version of Ruby and Violet, and felt a deep pang. He wasn’t going to let them down.

  Mia, in shorts that left too much of her long, tanned legs showing and a tank top that reminded him of how those breasts felt in his hands, was watching him.

  Seeing too much?

  “Who?” he blurted, an immediate diversion from himself. “What happened?” And then, at her startled expression, added, “Your serious relationship. Were you married?”

  Had the guy died? Was her grief more than he’d even considered?

  Was he just screwing up everywhere?

  That was why he stuck with the numbers. The trades. The place where he could channel his adrenaline overload and count on himself to get it right most of the time.

  “I was engaged.”

  Jordon had asked her to marry him their sophomore year. She’d said yes on the spot and had thrown herself across his body, kissing him with a passion he’d never known since her.

  “To an economist,” she added, drawing a picture he was pretty sure he didn’t want to see. An economist. A man who studied the distribution of wealth. Who studied finance.

  A man who’d need to be in the thick of things.

  Just like Jordon.

  “I met him through Lincoln,” she said. “He was in Phoenix, studying the rapid growth of the city, which is now the fifth biggest city in the United States,” she said. “He worked for a national development company. Had studied New York’s and Los Angeles’s growth patterns, was helping them determine where and how to build communities to fit the area...”

  Was she trying to show him she could do as well or better than him? He’d never, for one second, doubted that.

  “What happened?” he asked but didn’t really want to hear the ending to the story. He knew it already. Had lived it.

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Because he wanted you to leave Shelter Valley?”

  “To the contrary,” Mia said, pulling a photo album out of the box they were taking far too long to get through. “He’s still here. He loves Shelter Valley. He has his doctorate degree. Had written some pretty impressive papers on macroeconomics, and when I introduced him to Will Parsons—who’s still president of Montford University by the way—Will knew who he was. Offered him a job. My ex is now head of the economics department. We’re still good friends.”

  Well, wasn’t that something. The man was right there, a professor at their alma mater.

  And Mia was good friends with him.

  But hadn’t married him.

  Because Jordon had blown her ability to trust a man that much. Any man? Or just men from the city who tracked money movement for a living?

  She didn’t say so.

  He didn’t ask.

  But he got her message.

  Loud and clear.

  * * *

  Mia was glad when Jordon called a sudden halt to the unboxing after that first box. She needed him gone.

  “It’s a lot coming at us at once,” she said as she followed him to the door. Trying to make something better that never would be.

  “It’s my problem, Mia. You need to do what’s best for you.”

  Sounded...odd...coming from him. The guy who’d been so certain he knew what was best for everyone. Who, instead of listening to her, or trying to understand, had just kept telling her to trust him. She’d love New York, she’d see. He’d been so jazzed about his perfect job offer, too excited to sleep even, the first night after the opportunity had arrived. Just kept saying he knew her and he knew she’d love it.

  Truth was, he hadn’t known her.

  “I am doing what’s best for me, Jordon,” she said then.

  He studied her for a long moment but didn’t say anything else. Not even good-night. He just quietly let himself out.

  Mia checked on the girls and stood there overflowing as she watched their little bodies, cuddled up together, expand and contract with breathing, almost as one. Pulling her phone out of her pocket she took more than a dozen pictures, none of which were going to turn out well because she’d turned off her flash so she didn’t wake them.

  And then, baby monitor in hand, she poured herself a glass of wine. Set both down on a shelf in her bathroom, made for that purpose. Ran a bubble bath in her garden tub, stripped down and climbed in, crying as she splashed water on her face.

  As though she could hide the tears she could no longer hold back.

  Looking at the picture of Madeline Robinson with the babies she’d just birthed, the look on the other woman’s face...the ethereal joy, excitement and peace mixed perfectly—that was motherhood.

  Madeline was Ruby and Violet’s mother.

  Not Mia.

  What an ironic twist of fate, that the woman who’d fought to have them, who’d agonized birthing them, got such little time with them. And Mia, who’d barely given those eggs a thought once she’d donated them, might get to be in their lives for the next fourteen years.

  Didn’t seem right.

  Or fair.

  And maybe...just maybe...she cried for the young woman inside her who still loved Jordon Lawrence. She didn’t trust him. Didn’t want him in her life.

  But standing there watching him with the girls and their ice cream that evening...she’d remembered so many other times he’d stepped in to help someone who was struggling, coming up with solutions.

  She’d playfully called him the fix-it man. Always thinking he had to solve everyone else’s problems. Always certain that he could solve them.

  And going the extra mile to do so.

  He’d gotten it right with the twins. They’d wanted more ice cream.

  With Mia...he’d been unable to give her the solution she’d needed. But, while he hadn’t known her nearly as well as he’d thought he had, as she’d thought he had—maybe she hadn’t known him well enough, either.

  Because she honestly hadn’t known that he couldn’t be happy making his money transactions from Phoenix, or over the internet at home in Shelter Valley. There were banks everywhere. And not all successful money men were physically on Wall Street doing what they did.

  She’d told him from the beginning, before she’d gone out with him, that she wasn’t ever going to leave Shelter Valley, and he’d said okay.

  And then he’d kissed her.

  And...

  It had happened that way every time she’d mentioned her future in Shelter Valley. Even the night he’d asked her to marry him. She’d said yes, as long as he was happy staying in Shelter Valley.

  He’d said okay. And then he’d kissed her.

  And...she’d thrown her body on top of his and given him every single thing she had to give.

  Reaching for her wine, Mia took a gulp. Trying to swallow back her sobs.

  She wasn’t successful.

  Chapter Eleven

  The girls had been in his custody for four nights and he hadn’t slept even once under the same roof with them.

  Nor had he made any decisions regarding their future.

  While he wallowed in some kind of self-imposed la-la land, the twins were settling into a new sense of normal.

  One that wouldn’t be permanent.

  Meaning he’d have to upend their worlds again.

  Nothing he could do about some of that. Adoptions took time. It could be a while before they were in their forever homes.

  And Mariah O’Connell and Kelly had both said that children adapt.

  Still, as he sat at the desk in his suite before dawn Thursday morning, already signed in to be present electronically when the first bell rang, he made a decision.

  He had to share a roof with the girls.

  Without shipping them back to sad-waif zone.

  He had to know them well enough to know what decisions would be best for them.

  As a plan, there were obvious holes. But at least he’d made a choice on their behalf. Looking around the suite, he imagined a delivery of a roomful of toys and books and gadgets appropriate to four-year-olds.

  Bringing them back to the city would probably be good for them. They were city girls. Were used to riding in car seats with traffic and colorful sights whizzing by them. Sensitizing their imaginations.

  Planting seeds that would grow into ideas for future opportunities, needs, wants.