she remembered that the girls’ play pals, Judy and Mikey, had again left behind some toys she’d found only after a thorough tidying up. It had become a ritual for Sara, their mother and her neighbor, to come by and collect her children’s articles after she’d put them to bed. They usually ended up having a cup of tea to unwind together after their hectic days.
Rushing to the door, she opened it with a ready smile. “We should establish rules about allowing only in-house toys...”
Air clogged her lungs. All her nerves fired, short-circuiting her every muscle, especially her heart.
Leonid.
Right there. On her doorstep.
She’d visualized this encounter countless times in waking trances and suffocating dreams. The perverse yearning had risen time and again for him to show up, look down at her from his prodigious height with eyes full of all he’d deprived her of, and tell her everything that had happened since his accident had been a terrible dream. She’d hoped for it until hope had turned to ashes.
And now...out of the blue, he was here...
Oh, God! He is really here.
Almost unrecognizable. Yet distressingly the same.
Observations accumulated in the white noise that filled her mind, burying her. The most obvious change was his hair. The silk that had been long enough to wind around her hands in the throes of passion was now severely cropped. It still suited him. It actually suited him better, accentuating the dominance of his bone structure.
The other major difference was his body. It hadn’t been a distortion of the video or his size relative to others. He was bigger. Broader. More heavily muscled. The leanness of the runner had been replaced by the bulk of a supreme fitness athlete.
His every feature and nuance, familiar yet radically different, felt like a knife to the heart.
But on the whole, he looked as if everything human about him had melted away, revealing a creature of polished steel beneath. Even the way he held himself seemed...inhuman. As if he was now a being of pure intellect and purpose, like a cyborg, an animate form of artificial intelligence.
An hour could have passed as she gaped up at him and he stared blankly down at her. He’d always had that power. Time had always distorted when she’d entered his orbit.
“Invite me in, Kassandra.”
His bottomless voice yanked her out of the stupor she’d stumbled in.
“I will do no such thing.”
“Your porch isn’t the place for what I’ve come to say.”
Her mouth dropped open at his audacity. That he could just appear on her doorstep after what he’d done to her, and without even an attempt at apology or even civility, not only demand but expect to be invited in.
“There’s no place where you can say anything to me. We have absolutely nothing to say to each other.”
“After the past two years, we have plenty.”
“The past two years are exactly why there’s nothing to be said. Even if there was, I’m not interested in hearing it.”
His eyes gave her a clinical sweep, as if assessing her response for veracity and judging it to be false. It made her loathe her weakness for him all over again.
“I don’t know what you were thinking coming here like this, what you expected, but if...”
“If you’re still angry, we can discuss that, too.”
If? If?
“Are you sure you broke only your legs in that accident? Sounds as if you’d pulverized way more. Like the components that made you human.”
“I do realize showing up here must have surprised you...”
“Try appalled and outraged.”
He shifted, like the automaton she’d just accused him of becoming, as if moving into a different gear to counter her response. “That’s why I showed up. I gathered if I called ahead, you would have been just as resistant to granting me an audience. So I decided to eliminate unnecessary steps.”
“And this single step turned out to be as pointless. I’m not granting you an audience since we have zero things to discuss, so you might as well save us both the aggravation and go disappear again. Preferably forever this time.”
“If you’re concerned I might be here to exhume the past, rest assured I have no wish to resurrect anything between us. I’m not here for you at all. I’m here for my daughters.”
Every word sank into her mind like a depth mine. Then the last ones exploded.
I’m here for my daughters.
My daughters.
The rage that detonated inside her, that he would dare say this, or even think it, almost rocked her on her feet.
Biting a tongue that had gone numb with fury, she gritted out, “Leave. Right this second.”
Unperturbed, he gave a nonchalant shrug of his daunting shoulder. “I will leave after I’ve said what I came to say and when we’ve come to a preliminary understanding. Whether you approve or not, I am the father of your twin daughters, and I am here to—”
Red smeared her vision. “You won’t be here much longer or I’m calling the police.”
His searing blue gaze remained still, his pupils unmoving, indicating he had no emotional response to her threat and agitation. “I would advise against this. It would disrupt your neighborhood and bring you unneeded speculation and embarrassment. Not to mention you’d have to lie to the police to make them take action against me...”
“I won’t be lying when I say you’re here uninvited, harassing me and making fraudulent claims to my daughters.”
“They’re my daughters, too.”
“Not according to the law, they’re not. Nor to them or to the whole world. Any passing stranger they’ve ever briefly met is more to them than you are.”
His formidable head inclined in agreement. “I know that being their biological father on its own means nothing. That’s why I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere until I say my piece or until you indicate your willingness to negotiate further.”
“What the hell do you mean, negotiate?”
“Over the twins, of course.”
She gaped, unable to voice any of the million violent protests ricocheting in her skull and boiling her blood.
“Before you blast me off the face of the earth, I remind you that as their biological father, I do have a right to—”
“You have absolutely no right to Eva and Zoya. None. You relinquished any right to even think of them as yours way before they were born. You made it clear you didn’t even want them to be born. You may have forgotten this,
