Chapter 4: Not mine

The implication of what she'd called them, and specifically the twins wanting to sue him, hit him. Rafe resisted the urge to punch the wall. He'd stopped doing that in college.

What did she fill their heads with all these years? She was almost through the door, her beautiful shoulders stiff and proud. "You told them I was their father?" He had to force the words out through his clenched teeth.

Lindi paused for a moment. She turned to face him, her mouth opening and closing as if she struggled for words. Then she looked down at the children, bit her trembling lip, and straightened her shoulders again, holding onto their hands. "Let's go, kids," Lindi said, and with that, they all left his office without a backward glance.

Abbey looked as if she wanted to disappear into the wall, and at the same time, she listened avidly.

"Will you still pull our ears, Mommy?" he heard one of the twins ask.

Pull their ears? Ignoring his PA, Rafe walked to the door, watching as Lindi rushed to the elevators. He heard the talkative one mumble, slightly out of breath from trying to keep up with Lindi's angry strides. "At least we know we won't stay short. Indications are we should both grow at least six feet tall." He scratched his head with his free hand. "Probably taller."

Rafe didn't know children, but he was relatively sure no four-year-old would say 'indications are'. It was as if they were four-year-olds while they talked to him and now reverted to little, old men.

"I don't care; I don't wanna look like him, and I don't wanna bounce a stupid ball around anyway," the silent one said sullenly. There was a faint slur to the way he spoke. As if he couldn't quite wrap his tongue around the words. At least he sounded like a four-year-old and not a professor. "Bruce is our father anyway."

"Quiet, both of you. I will deal with you when we get home," Lindi said in a tightly controlled voice. Again, that determined husky sound got to him. What did 'deal with them' entail? he wondered uneasily.

"We only wanted - " Their voices faded as they moved away.

"Silent," she said. "I don't want to hear anything more about Bruce or - "

The elevator door opened, swallowed the small family, and whisked them away from him.

Rafe walked back to his desk. "I don't want to hear it," he said to Abbey.

Who was this Bruce character? Why did they want to sue Rafe if they knew who their father was?

"Should I stop the children from seeing you if they come back?" she asked. She'd worked for him for three years now, and he didn't doubt she'd seen the old gossip online. During the interview, she'd been too nervous to really impress him, but Abbey was fifty-two and married, with two daughters and four grandchildren that kept her too busy to want to chase him for his money.

Rafe hesitated and looked down at his cell phone lying on his desk. "No, let them in if they return. I'll deal with them." The kids were oddly entertaining; that's why he'd let them get past Abby. Sure, it's not because you want to see Lindi again, a voice in his head mocked. This new self-assured Lindi with the sexy body.

"And their pretty mother?" she asked innocently.

He glared at her. "Don't you have work to do?"

She laughed and walked out, and Rafe went to the large wall-to-wall window behind his desk. With his hands balled in his pockets, he stared at the majestic view of Manhattan without seeing it. She'd named her children after him. Rafe shuddered. Apart from the fact that she had no right to do that, Rafe's mother had named him after the teenage mutant ninja turtles. No boy deserved to be named after turtles. He'd had the shit beaten out of him anytime some asshole teacher had called him by his full names.

"Dial the chief of security," he said and listened as the phone dialed the number.

"Rafe," the owner of the security company answered almost immediately. A former basketball player himself, Jose had gone into business and opened his own security firm. The man knew his stuff, and Rafe sometimes wondered if it was because of the fact that he had been arrested several times by the time he was eighteen. Though they never mentioned it, they both knew they had their rough beginnings in life in common.

Rafe said, "A woman and two small children are leaving the building. Have them followed and stay on them and find out what she was doing in this building."

He didn't believe in coincidence. As entertaining as that meeting with the twins was, he couldn't discount the possibility that she'd coached them.