increasingly difficult the bigger and more vocal they got.
Which was why Eva had decided, rather than giving D’Angelo the opportunity to fob her off in a telephone call, to instead use the last of her savings to fly herself and the twins over to Paris yesterday, so that she might confront the babies’ father face to face with his responsibilities.
Much as Eva might hate having to do it, after much soul-searching, she knew she no longer had any choice but to try and seek D’Angelo’s help from a financial point of view, at least, for the good of the twins.
Michael stood up abruptly as he saw how pale Eva Foster’s face had become, adding to that air of fragility. Her sister’s death, caring for the twins, went some way to explaining those dark shadows beneath those beautiful violet-coloured eyes.
He crossed economically to the drinks cabinet in the seating area of his office to look at the array of bottles, deciding against offering her alcohol and instead choosing to bring her a bottle of water from the small fridge. He very much doubted Eva Foster would have accepted drinking a more reviving whisky, when she had two young babies in her care.
‘Here, let me take Sam, while you sit down over here,’ he rasped abruptly as he saw Eva Foster was swaying slightly on her canvas-shod feet. Not waiting for her reply, he took the baby from her unresisting arms before placing his free hand lightly beneath her elbow to guide her over to the seating area and eased her down onto the black leather sofa.
‘Sorry about that,’ Eva murmured shakily after taking a much-needed sip of the ice-cold water. It was very warm outside, and it had been a long walk to the Archangel gallery from the cheap hotel she had booked into with the twins yesterday. ‘I think I’m doing okay and then suddenly the grief just hits me again when I’m least expecting it.’
Although she should have realised that this meeting with Rachel’s lover was going to be far from easy. Just as coming to Paris at all, seeking out D’Angelo, hadn’t been an easy decision for her to make in the first place. In Eva’s eyes, it almost smacked of defeat.
But she’d had no other choice, she assured herself determinedly; this was for the twins’ benefit, not hers. As it was, she would far rather spit in this man’s eye than so much as have to speak to him, let alone ask him for help!
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ D’Angelo murmured gruffly.
Was he? Considering he had denied all knowledge of Rachel just minutes ago, Eva found that a little hard to believe!
She still couldn’t quite come to terms with Rachel ever having been involved with this austerely cold man at all; Rachel had been outgoing and warm in nature, and this man was anything but. But maybe it had been a case of opposites attracting? D’Angelo was certainly attractive enough, and he possessed an inborn confidence, an arrogance, that Rachel might have found attractive, even challenging. This man’s controlled aloofness would represent a challenge to any red-blooded female.
Even Eva?
The last thing she wanted was to find the man who had fathered the twins in the least attractive!
Eva sat forward to place the bottle of water on the coffee table in front of her. ‘I think you can put him down too now...’ she drawled ruefully as she realised that Sam—the traitor!—had also fallen asleep on one of D’Angelo’s broad and muscled shoulders. All those hours of pacing and walking, a twin on each of her shoulders, and D’Angelo just had to hold them to have the twins instantly fall asleep!
Because they instinctively recognised who he was? Maybe. As Eva had learnt these past few months, babies were far more intuitive than she had ever realised; the twins had both certainly quickly picked up on Eva’s own nervousness in caring for them twenty-four seven, making a battle of their first few weeks together.
Michael turned to look at Eva Foster after he had secured the sleeping Sam in the pushchair beside his sister, relieved to see that, although the shadows beneath her eyes remained, those porcelain cheeks had at least regained a little of their colour, that pallor having been emphasised by straight and glossy ebony hair to just below her shoulders.
He was more than a little troubled himself to learn of the death of this woman’s sister, the mother of the sleeping babies. ‘How old was she...?’
Eva Foster looked at him blankly. ‘Who?’
‘Your sister Rachel.’
Derisive brows rose over those violet-coloured eyes. ‘The two of you were too busy to discuss ages?’
Michael drew in a sharp breath at the obvious derision in her tone. ‘I repeat that, to my knowledge, I didn’t so much as even meet your sister in order to be able to discuss our respective ages, let alone father her twins!’
‘And I repeat, I don’t believe you,’ Eva Foster stated coldly.
‘I can see that.’ Michael nodded grimly.
She drew in a shaky breath. ‘Rachel was just twenty-two when she died, three years younger than me,’ she stated huskily.
‘In childbirth?’
‘No.’ She grimaced. ‘They discovered, during a routine scan partway through the pregnancy, that Rachel had a tumour.’
‘God!’
Eva Foster nodded abruptly. ‘Rachel refused to have the pregnancy terminated, or to have treatment for the tumour, because of the danger of harming the babies. She...died when they were three months old.’ And the pain of that loss, of the consequences of her sister’s decision, was now etched into that creamy brow and in the lines of strain beside those violet eyes and sensuously sculptured mouth...
‘What about your parents...?’ he prompted huskily.
‘They both died in a car crash eighteen months ago.’
Michael folded his lean length down into the armchair opposite the sofa, uncomfortable towering over Eva Foster in the circumstances, at the same time as he recognised she wouldn’t appreciate him sitting down beside her on the sofa. There was currently a defensive aura about Eva Foster, an invisible barrier that was preventing her from breaking down completely.
Not surprising, when first her parents had died and she had now lost her younger sister so tragically. Michael was the eldest of the three D’Angelo brothers, and he couldn’t imagine—didn’t want to imagine—the devastation he would feel if he should ever lose his parents so suddenly, or Gabriel or Rafe before they had all grown old and grey together.
Which still didn’t change the fact that he had absolutely no knowledge of Rachel Foster, or her babies. ‘Where did Rachel and the babies’ father meet?’ he prompted gruffly.
Eva Foster shot him an impatient glance. ‘Right here in the gallery.’
Michael did some mental arithmetic. ‘I wasn’t in Paris, or the gallery here, fifteen months ago.’
‘What...?’ Eva looked at him blankly.
He grimaced. ‘I wasn’t in Paris fifteen months ago, Eva,’ he repeated gently. ‘Until recently, my brothers and I have moved around the three galleries on a rotation basis,’ he added as she still stared at him dazedly. ‘I was at the New York gallery fifteen months ago, organising a gala exhibition of Mayan art.’
