‘CONGRATULATIONS, CLAUDIA. You’re having twins!’
Claudia Monticello’s deep brown eyes, inherited from her Italian father, widened like dollhouse-sized plates against her alabaster skin, a present from her Irish mother. In a rush of panic and disbelief, her gaze darted from the gel-covered bump of her stomach to the grainy black-and-white images on the screen, then to the pleased as punch radiologist’s face before finally looking up to the ceiling to where she imagined heaven might be. Not that she thought her parents would be smiling down at her after what she had done.
Suddenly the room became very hot and she struggled a little to breathe. The clammy fingers of one hand reached for the sides of the examination table to steady herself. Two babies. Her mouth had dropped open slightly, but her lips had not curved to anything close to a smile. In denial, she shook her head from side to side and nervously chewed on the nails of the other hand. There had to be a mistake. The radiologist, still smiling at the screen and apparently unaware of the panic blanketing her patient, gently moved the hand piece over Claudia’s stomach to capture additional images.
She must have zoomed in too quickly, Claudia mused.
Double imaged.
Misread the data.
Be new at her job.
But Claudia knew without doubt, as she slowly and purposefully focused on the screen, there was no mistake. There were two tiny babies with two distinct heartbeats. The radiologist was using her finger to point to them. Her excitement was palpable. A reaction juxtaposed to Claudia’s. At twenty-nine years of age, Claudia Monticello was anything but excited to be the single mother of twins. For many reasons... The first was her living five thousand miles from home...and the second was the fact her children would never meet their father.
* * *
Twenty weeks had passed since Claudia discovered she was to be the mother of two and, as she dropped her chin and looked down at her ample midsection while waiting for the elevator, she was pleased to see they were healthy-sized babies. Her waist was somewhere hidden underneath her forty-five-inch circumference and she hadn’t seen her ankles for weeks. Her mood was one of anticipation as she waited for the doors to open on her floor. Her final obstetric visit was imminent and she was thinking about little else than her flight home to London the next day. It couldn’t come quickly enough for her. She couldn’t wait to farewell Los Angeles.
And turn her back on the disappointment and heartache the city had brought.
Or, more correctly, that she had invited into her life.
The day was warm and she was wearing a sleeveless floral maternity dress, one of three she’d picked up on the sale rack in Macy’s when she rapidly outgrew all her other clothes, flat white sandals and her oversized camel-coloured handbag that she took everywhere. Her deep chocolate curls were short and framed her pretty face, but her eyes were filled with sadness. She pictured her suitcases, packed and waiting just inside the door of her apartment. She was finally leaving the place she had called home for almost a year. The fully furnished apartment was in a prime high-rise gated community on Wilshire Boulevard and in demand. The home would have new tenants within days. It had only been temporary, like so much in that town, and she wondered who would be sleeping in the king-sized bed later that week and what the future held for them. She hoped for their sake they hadn’t rushed into something they would live to regret.
The way she had.
* * *
Patrick Spencer waited inside the elevator for the doors to open. It had only managed to travel down one floor and was already stopping. A sigh escaped from his lips. He prayed it wouldn’t stop on every floor on the way to street level. His patience was already tested. He was having another one of those days. A day when he felt frustrated with life and struggled with a cocktail of resentment mixed with equal parts of doubt and disappointment and a dash of boredom with his new reality. Not that his reality was devoid of life’s luxuries, but it was missing the passion he’d once felt. It was another day when he felt cheated out of what he had planned and wanted for his future, even though he was the one who’d walked away from everything. A day when he almost didn’t give a damn. And whenever he had those days he always put on his sunglasses and tried to block out the world in which he lived. He had been cornered into this new life. That was how he saw it.
If things had not gone so terribly wrong, he would be living in London instead of calling Los Angeles home.
* * *
With melancholy colouring her mood, Claudia paid little attention to the tall, darkly dressed figure when she stepped into the elevator. But she noticed the affected way he was wearing wraparound sunglasses with his suit. It was more of the same pretentious LA behaviour.
Sunglasses inside an elevator? In Claudia’s sadly tainted opinion, all men were hiding something; perhaps this one was nursing a hangover. She rolled her eyes, confident in the fact he couldn’t see anything from behind the dark lenses and even more sure he wouldn’t be looking in her direction anyway. Probably obsessed with his own thoughts and problems. Just like so many in this town. A town full of actors, many with an inflated sense of self-worth and a complete lack of morals. Perhaps this man filled that same bill, she surmised. She felt sick to her stomach even thinking about the man who had wooed her with lies and then walked out of her life as shamelessly as he had walked into it.
She patted her stomach protectively and, not caring a damn what he thought, she whispered, ‘You may have been a surprise, boys, but I love you both to the moon and back already.’ Then she silently added, And I will make sure you don’t run away from your responsibilities...or wear sunglasses in a lift!
‘They’re very lucky little boys.’ Patrick said it matter-of-factly. It surprised even him that he had made a comment but hearing the woman speak so genuinely to her unborn children in an accent once so familiar struck a chord with him. In a town so devoid of anything genuine, Patrick felt compelled to comment.
Claudia thought for a fleeting moment his words had been delivered with genuine sentiment. But her body stiffened as she reminded herself there was little or no sentiment in that town. Maternal hormones, she assumed, had temporarily dressed her vision with rose-coloured glasses. His English accent, for some reason, made her drop her guard just a little. Against her better judgement, she looked over to see the man remove his sunglasses. His lips were curved slightly. Not to a full smile, not even a half smile, but she could see his teeth just a little. They were almost perfect but not veneer flawless.
He was tall, six foot one or two, she guessed, as she was five foot nine in bare feet or the flat shoes she was wearing that day. He was broad-shouldered and, she imagined from the way his shirt fell, buff, but he wasn’t overly tanned. His hair was short and light brown in colour and it was matched with a light covering of stubble on his face. His grooming was impeccable but, aside from the stubble, quite conservative. While his looks, she conceded, were worthy of a billboard, his styling was more professional than the usual LA playboy slash actor type. Or, in his case, an English ex-pat playing the LA field.
‘I’m sorry?’ she finally said after her assessment. She was hoping he would shrug his shoulders, put his sunglasses back on and return to thoughts of himself or his most recent conquest.
But he didn’t.
‘I said that your babies
