Triplets Under The Tree

She blinked and refocused on his face. The sight of his cut, athletic torso—sun browned and more enthralling than she’d ever have expected—wouldn’t fade from her mind.

That tattoo had always been an electrifying aspect of his dangerous appeal. And, oh, my—it still was.

“It means that’s proof enough for me to know you’re Antonio.” She shut her eyes, unable to process the relief flooding through his gaze. Unable to process the sharp thrill in her midsection that was wholly erotic...and felt an awful lot like trouble. Stunning, resplendent, forbidden Antonio Cavallari was alive. “And we have a lot of hurdles in front of us.”

Everything in her world had just slid off a cliff.

The long, legal nightmare of the past year as she’d fought for her right to the babies had been for nothing. Nearly two years ago, she’d signed a surrogacy agreement, but then a year ago Vanessa and Antonio had crashed into the South China Sea. After months of court appearances, a judge had finally overturned the rights she’d signed away and given her full custody of her children.

Oh, dear Lord. This was Antonio’s home. It was his money. Her children were his. And he had every right to take them away from her.

Two

Antonio—he rolled the name around on his tongue, and it didn’t feel wrong like Falco had. Before Indonesia, he’d been called both Antonio and Falco by blurry-faced people, some with cameras, some with serious expressions as they spoke to him about important matters. A crowd had chanted Falco like a tribal drum, bouncing off the ceiling of a huge, cavernous arena.

The headache nearly flattened him again, as it always did when he tried too hard to force open his mind.

Instead, he contemplated the blushing, dark-haired and very attractive woman who seemed vaguely familiar but not enough to place her. She didn’t belong in his house. She shouldn’t be living here, but he had no clue where that sense came from. “What is your name?”

“Caitlyn. Hopewell,” she added in what appeared to be an afterthought. “Vanessa is—was—my sister.” She eyed him. “You remember Vanessa but not me?”

“The redhead?” At Caitlyn’s nod, he frowned.

No, he didn’t remember Vanessa, not the way he remembered his house. A woman with flame-colored hair haunted his dreams. Bits and pieces floated through his mind. The images were laced with flashes of her flesh as if he’d often seen her naked, but her face wouldn’t quite clarify, as though he’d created an impressionist painting of this woman whose name he couldn’t recall.

Frustration rose again. Because how was it fair that he knew exactly what an impressionist painting was but not who he was?

After Ravi had knocked loose the memories of his house, Antonio had left Indonesia the next morning, hopping fishing boats and stowing away amidst heavy cargo containers for days and days, all to reach Los Angeles in hopes of regaining more precious links with his past.

This delicate, ethereally beautiful woman—Caitlyn—held a few of these keys, and he needed her to provide them. “Who is Vanessa to me?”

“Your wife,” she announced softly. “You didn’t know that?”

He shook his head. Married. He was married to Vanessa? It was an entire piece of his life, his persona, he’d had no idea existed. Had he been in love with her? Had his wife looked for him at all, distraught over his fate, or just written him off when he went missing?

Would he even recognize Vanessa if she stood before him?

Glancing around the living room for which he’d instantly and distinctly recalled purchasing the furnishings—without the help of anyone, let alone the red-haired woman teasing the edges of his memory—he asked, “Where is she?”

“She died.” Grief welled up across her classical features. The sisters must have been close, which was probably why Caitlyn seemed familiar. “You were both involved in the same plane crash shortly after leaving Thailand.”

“Plane crash?” The wispy images of the red-haired woman vanished as he zeroed in on Caitlyn. “Is that what happened?”

Thailand. He’d visited Thailand—but never made it home. Until now.

Eyes bright with unshed tears, she nodded, dark ponytail flipping over her shoulder. “Over a year ago.”

All at once, he wanted to mourn for this wife he couldn’t remember. Because it would mean he could still experience emotions that stayed maddeningly out of reach, emotions with clinical definitions—love, peace, happiness, fulfillment, the list went on and on—but which had no real context. He wanted to feel something other than discouraged and adrift.

His head ached, but he pressed on, determined to unearth more clues to how he’d started out on a plane from Thailand and ended up in a fishing village in Indonesia. Alone. “But I was on the plane. And I’m not dead. Maybe Vanessa is still alive, too.”

Her name produced a small ping in his heart, but he couldn’t be certain if the feeling lingered from before the crash or if he’d manufactured it out of his intense need to remember.

Hand to her mouth, Caitlyn bowed her head. “No. They recovered her...body,” she murmured, her voice thick. “They found the majority of the fuselage in the water. Most of the forty-seven people on board were still in their seats.”

Vivid, gory images spilled into his mind as he imagined the horrors his wife—and the rest of the passengers—must have gone through before succumbing to the death he’d escaped.

“Except me.”

For the first time, his reality felt a bit like a miracle instead of a punishment. How had he escaped? Had he unbuckled himself in time to avoid drowning or had he been thrown free of the wreckage?

“Except you,” she agreed, though apparently it had taken the revelation of his strange falcon tattoo to convince her. “And two other passengers, who were sitting across the aisle from you in first class. You were all in the first row, including Vanessa. They searched for survivors for a week, but there was no trace.”

“They were looking in the wrong place,” he growled. “I washed up on the beach in Indonesia. On the south side of Batam Island.”

“I don’t know my geography, but the plane crashed into the ocean near the coast of Malaysia. That’s where they focused the search.”

No wonder no one had found him. They’d been hundreds of miles off.

“After a month,” she continued, “they declared all three of you dead.”

But he wasn’t dead.

The other two passengers might have survived, as well. Look for them. They might be suffering from memory loss or ghastly injuries. They might be frightened and alone, having clawed their way out of a watery crypt, only to face a fully awake nightmare. As he had.

He had to find them. But he had no money, no resources—not at this moment anyway. He must have money, or at least he must have had some once. The sum he’d paid for this house popped into his head out of nowhere: fifteen point eight million dollars. That had been eight years ago.

Groaning, he rubbed his temples as the headache grew uncontrollable.

“Are you okay?” Caitlyn asked.

Ensuring the comfort of others seemed to come naturally to this woman he’d found living in his house. His sister-in-law. Had she always been so nurturing?

“Fine,” he said between clenched teeth. “Is this still my house?”

He could sell it and use the proceeds to live on while he combed the South China Sea.

Caitlyn chose that moment to sit next to him on the couch, overwhelming him with the light scent of coconut, which, strangely, made him want to bury his nose in her hair.

“Technically, no. When you were declared dead, it passed to your heirs.”

“You mean Vanessa’s?” Seemed as if his wife’s sister had made out pretty well after the plane crash. “Are you the only heir? Because I’m not dead and I want my money back.”

It was the only way he could launch a search for the other two missing passengers.

“Oh.” She stared at him, her sea-glass-blue eyes wide with guilt and a myriad of other emotions he suddenly wished to understand.

Because looking into her eyes made him feel something. Something good and beautiful and he didn’t want to stop drowning in her gaze.

“You don’t remember, do you?” she asked. “Oh, my gosh. I’ve been rambling and you don’t even know about the babies.”

Blood rushed from his head so fast, his ears popped.

“Babies?” he croaked. Surely she didn’t mean babies, plural, as in more than one? As in his babies?

“Triplets.” She shot him a misty smile that heightened her ethereal beauty. Which he wished he could appreciate, but there was no way, not with the bomb she’d just dropped. “And by some miracle, they still have a father. You. Would you like to meet them?”

“I...” A father. He had children? Three of them, apparently. “They’re really mine?” Stupid question, but this was beyond—he shook his head. “How old are they? Do they remember me?”

“Oh, no, they weren’t born yet when you went to Thailand.”

He frowned. “But you said Vanessa died in the plane crash. Is she not their mother?”

Had he cheated on his wife with another woman? Catholic-school lessons from his youth blasted through his mind instantly. Infidelity was wrong.

“She’s not,” Caitlyn refuted definitively. “I am.”

Guilt and shame cramped his gut as he eyed Caitlyn. He’d cheated on his wife with his sister-in-law? The thought was reprehensible.

But it explained the instant visceral reaction he had to her.

Her delicate, refined beauty didn’t match the obvious lushness of the redhead he’d married. Maybe that was the point. He really preferred a dark-haired, more classically attractive woman like Caitlyn if he’d fathered children with her.

“Were we having an affair?” he asked bluntly. And would he have a serious fight to regain control of his money now that his mistress had her hooks into it?

Pink spread across her cheeks in a gorgeous blush, and a foreign heaviness filled his chest, spreading to heat his lower half. Though he couldn’t recall having made love to her before, he had no trouble recognizing the raw, carnal attraction to Caitlyn. Obviously, she was precisely the woman he preferred, judging by his body’s unfiltered reaction.

“Of course not!” She wouldn’t meet his gaze, and her blush deepened. “You were married to my sister and I would never—well, I mean, I did meet you first and, okay, maybe I thought about...but then I introduced you to Vanessa. That was that. You were hers. Not that I blame you—”

“Caitlyn.”

Her name alone caused that strange fullness in his chest. He’d like to say it again. Whisper it to her as he learned what she tasted like.

She glanced up, finally silenced, and he would very much like to understand why her self-conscious babbling had caused the corners of his mouth to turn up. It was evident from the way she nervously twisted her fingers together that she had no concept of how to lie. They’d never been involved. He’d stake his life on it.

He cleared his raspy throat. “How did the children come to be, then?”

“Oh. I was your surrogate. Yours and Vanessa’s. The children are a hundred percent your DNA, grown in my womb.” She wrinkled her nose. “That sounds so scientific. Vanessa couldn’t conceive, so I volunteered to carry the baby. Granted, I didn’t know three eggs were going to take.”

She laughed and he somehow found the energy to be charmed by her light spirit. “So Vanessa and I, we were happy?”

If only he could remember her. Remember if they’d laughed together as he vaguely sensed that lovers should. Had they dreamed together of the babies on the way, planning for their family? Had she cried out in her last moments, grief stricken that she’d never hold her children?

“Madly in love.” Caitlyn sighed happily. “It was a grand story. Falco and the Vixen. The media adored you guys. I’ll go ask Brigitte, the au pair, to bring down the babies.”

Reality overwhelmed him.

“Wait.” Panicked all of a sudden, he clamped down on her arm before she could rise. “I can’t... They don’t know me.”

He was a father. But so far from a father, he couldn’t fathom the idea of three helpless infants under his care. What if he broke one? What if he scared them? How did you handle a baby? How did you handle three?

“Five minutes,” she said calmly. “Say hello. See them and count their fingers and toes. Then I’ll have Brigitte take them away. They’ll get used to you, I promise.”

But would he get used to them? “Five minutes. And then I’d like to clean up. Eat.”

Breathe. Get his bearings. Figure out how to be Antonio Cavallari again before he had to figure out how to be Antonio Cavallari plus three.

“Of course. I’m sorry, I should have thought of that.” Dismay curved her mouth downward.

“There is no protocol when the dead come back to life,” he countered drily and smiled. Apparently he’d found a sense of humor along with his home.

His head spun as Caitlyn disappeared upstairs to retrieve the babies and Brigitte, whoever that was. A few minutes later, she returned, followed by a young blonde girl pushing a three-seated carriage. Everything faded away as he saw his children.

Three little heads rested against the cushions, with three sets of eyes and three mouths. Wonder and awe crushed his heart as he drank in the sight of these creatures he’d had a hand in creating.

“They’re really mine?” he whispered.

“Really, really,” Caitlyn confirmed at normal volume, her tone slightly amused.

She picked up the one from the first seat and held him in the crook of her arm, angling the baby to face him. The blue outfit meant this was his son, didn’t it?

“This is Leon.” Her mouth quirked. “He’s named after my father. I guess it’s too late to ask if that’s okay, but I thought it was a nice tribute to Vanessa’s role in his heritage.”

“It’s fine.”

Antonio was still whispering, but his voice caught in his throat and he couldn’t have uttered another sound as his son mewled like a hungry cat, his gaze sharp and bright as he cocked his head as if contemplating the secrets of the universe.

His son. Leon.

Such a simple concept, procreating. People did it every day in all corners of the world. Wilipo had fourteen children and as far as Antonio could tell, never thought it particularly miraculous.

But it was.

This little person with the short baby-fine red hair was his child.

“You can say hello,” Caitlyn reminded him.

“Hello.” His son didn’t acknowledge that Antonio had spoken, preferring to bury his head in Caitlyn’s shoulder. Had he said the wrong thing? Maybe his voice was too scratchy.

“He’ll warm up, I promise.” She slid Leon back into the baby seat and picked up the next one.

The pink outfit filled his vision and stung his eyes. He had a daughter. The heart he could have sworn was already full of his son grew so big, he was shocked it hadn’t burst from his rib cage.

“This is Annabelle. I always wanted to have a daughter named Annabelle,” Caitlyn informed him casually, as if they were discussing the weather instead of this little bundle of perfection.

“She has red hair, too,” he murmured. “Like her brother.”

Her beautiful face turned up at the sound of his voice and he got lost in her blue eyes.

He had a very bad feeling that the word no had just vanished from his vocabulary, and he looked forward to spoiling his daughter to the point of ridiculousness.

“Yes, she and Leon take after Vanessa. Which means Annabelle will be a knockout by the time she’s fourteen. Be warned,” she said wryly with a half laugh.

“I know martial arts,” he muttered. “Any smarmy Romeo with illicit intentions will find himself minus a spleen if he touches my daughter.”

Caitlyn smirked. “I don’t think a male on the planet would come within fifty yards of Annabelle if they knew you were her father. I was warning you about her.”

With that cryptic comment, she spirited away his daughter far too quickly and replaced her with the third baby, clad in blue.

“This is Antonio Junior,” Caitlyn said quietly and moved closer to present his other son. “He looks just like you, don’t you think?”

Dark hair capped a serious face with dark eyes. Antonio studied this third child and his gut lurched with an unnatural sense of recognition, as if the missing pieces of his soul had been snapped into place to form this tiny person.

“Yes,” he whispered.

And suddenly, his new lease on life had a purpose.

When he’d set off from Indonesia to find his past, he’d never dreamed he’d instead find his future. A tragic plane crash had nearly robbed these three innocent lives of both their parents, but against all odds, Antonio had survived.

Now he knew why. So he could be a father.

* * *

As promised, Caitlyn rounded up the babies and sent them upstairs with Brigitte so Antonio could decompress. Brigitte, bless her, didn’t ask any more questions about Antonio’s presence, but Caitlyn could tell her hurried explanation that he’d been ill and unable to travel home hadn’t satisfied the au pair. Neither would it be enough for the hordes of media and legal hounds who would be snapping at their heels soon enough.

The amazing return of Antonio Cavallari would make worldwide headlines, of that she was sure. But first, he needed to rest and then see a discreet doctor. The world didn’t have to know right away. The household staff had signed nondisclosure agreements, and in Hollywood, that was taken so seriously, none of them would ever work again if they broke it. So Caitlyn felt fairly confident the few people who knew about the situation would keep quiet.

She showed him to the master suite, glad now that she’d never cleaned it out, though she’d have to get Rosa to pack up Vanessa’s things. It was too morbid to expect him to use his former bedroom with his late wife’s clothes still in the dresser.

“I’ll send Rosa, the housekeeper, up with something to eat,” she promised and left him to clean up.

She wandered to the sunroom and pretended to read a book about parenting multiples on her e-reader, but she couldn’t clear the jagged emotion from her throat. Antonio’s face when he’d met his children for the first time... It had been amazing to see that much love crowd into his expression instantly. She wished he could have been there in the delivery room, to hold her hand and smile at her like that. Tell her everything would be okay and he’d still think she was beautiful even with a C-section scar.

Except if he had been there, he’d have held Vanessa’s hand, not hers, and the reality squelched Caitlyn’s little daydream.

The babies were his. It wouldn’t take long for a judge to overturn her custody rights, not when she’d signed a surrogacy agreement that stated she’d have no claim over the babies once they were born.

But the babies were hers, too. The hospital had listed her name on their birth certificates as their mother—who else would they have named? She’d been their sole parent for nearly eight months and before that, carried them in her womb for months, knowing they weren’t going home with Vanessa and Antonio as planned, but with her.

It was a mess, and more than anything, she wanted to do what was best for the babies. Not for the first time, she wished her mother was still alive; Caitlyn could use some advice.

An hour later, Antonio reappeared.

He filled the doorway of the sunroom and the late-afternoon rays highlighted his form with an otherworldly glow that revealed the true nature of his return to this realm—as that of an angel.

She gasped, hand flying to her mouth.

Then he moved into the room and became flesh and blood once again. But no less beautiful.

He’d trimmed his full beard, revealing his deep cheekbones and allowing his arresting eyes to become the focal point of his face. He’d swept back his still long midnight-colored hair and dressed in his old clothes, which didn’t fit nearly as well as they once had, but a man as devastatingly handsome as Antonio could make a bedsheet draped over his body work.

Heat swept along her cheeks as she imagined exactly that, and it did not resemble the toga she’d meant to envision. Antonio, spread out on the bed, sheet barely covering his sinewy, drool-worthy fighter’s physique, gaze dark and full of desire...for her... She shook her head. That was the last thing she should be thinking about for a hundred reasons, but Antonio Junior, Leon and Annabelle were the top three and she needed to get a few things straight with their father. No naked masculine chests required for that conversation.

“You look...different,” she squawked.

Nice. Tip him off that you’re thinking naughty thoughts.

“You kept my clothes?” He pointed to the jeans slung low on his lean hips. “And my shaving equipment?”

All of which he apparently remembered just fine as he’d slipped back into his precrash look easily. Antonio had always been gorgeous as sin, built like a lost Michelangelo sculpture with a side of raw, masculine power. And she was still salivating over him. A year in Indonesia hadn’t changed that, apparently.

She shrugged and tried to make herself stop staring at him, which didn’t exactly work. “I kept meaning to go through that room, but I thought maybe there would be something the babies would want. So I left it.”

“I’m glad you did. Thank you.” His small smile tripped a long liquid pull inside and she tamped it down. Or she almost did. It was too delicious to fully let it go.

Serious. Talk. Now, she told herself sternly.

“I had a gym,” he said before she could work up the courage to bring up item one on her long list of issues. “Did you leave it alone, too?”

“It’s untouched.”

“I need to see it. Will you come with me?”

Surprised, she nodded. “Of course.”

Was it wrong to be thrilled he’d asked her to be with him as he delved into his past?

Well, if that was wrong, it was probably just as wrong to still have a thing for him all these years later. If only she hadn’t given up so easily when she’d first met him—it was still one of her biggest regrets.

But then, her relationship rules didn’t afford much hope unless a man was interested enough to hang around for the long haul. She’d thought maybe Antonio might have been, once upon a time. The way he’d flirted with her when they’d met, as though he thought she was beautiful, had floored her...and then Vanessa had entered stage left, which had dried up his interest in the chaste sister.

She followed him as he strolled directly to the gym, mystified how he remembered the way, and halted next to him as he quietly took in the posters advertising his many fights, his championship belts and publicity shots of himself clad in shorts and striking a fierce pose.

There was something wicked about staring at a photo of Antonio half clothed while standing next to the fully dressed version, knowing that falcon tattoo sat under his shirt, waiting to be discovered by a woman’s fingers. Her fingers. What would it feel like?

Sometimes she dreamed about that.

“Do you remember any of this?” she asked as the silence stretched. She couldn’t keep thinking about Antonio’s naked chest. Which became more difficult the longer they stood there, his heat nearly palpable. He even smelled like sin.

“Bits and pieces,” he finally said. “I didn’t know I had martial arts training. I thought I was remembering a movie, because I wasn’t always in the ring. Sometimes I was outside the ring, watching.”

“Oh, like watching other fighters? Maybe you’re remembering Falco,” she offered. “The fight club.”

He shook his head as if to clear it. “I feel as if I should know what that is.”

He didn’t remember Falco, either? Antonio had lived and breathed that place, much to Vanessa’s dismay on many occasions. Her sister had hoped to see her husband more often once his time in the ring was up, but the opposite had proved true.