In The Tycoon's Bed: One Night, Two Heirs

“Do I look like the kind of man who’s going to visit his kids according to a schedule some lawyer cooks up?” he asked her, keeping his voice low, so his daughters wouldn’t hear him arguing with their mother.

Pulling her arm free of his grasp, she said shortly, “You won’t have a choice. This is how things are done, Rick.”

“Not in my family,” he countered. “In my family, parents and children live together. They love each other. Those girls have a right to grow up on the ranch that will be theirs one day, Sadie. I want them to know it. To love it, like I do.” He waved one hand at the wall behind her. “Look at those pictures, Sadie. That’s family. The twins’ family. They belong here.”

“They will be here,” she said, clearly trying to ap pease him. “But they’re not going to live here with you fulltime, Rick. They’ll be with me. They need their mother.”

“Yeah, they do,” he acknowledged. “But they need me, too.”

He looked into those blue eyes and found himself fighting against his own instincts. Yes, he’d gone to her house to collect the children, not just because he’d wanted to be with them. But because he knew it would be a hard lesson for Sadie. He wasn’t going to be cheated out of his kids’ lives because their mother was too stubborn to do the right thing.

“I won’t be bought off with weekends and part of the summer. I won’t be a part-time visitor to my own children.”

“I didn’t say it would be like that.”

“Yeah? How do you see it going, then?”

She sighed heavily and he only now noticed the signs of weariness about her. Her eyes weren’t as clear as they usually were and there was a decided droop to her shoulders. Looked to him like she’d been getting by on very little sleep lately. Just like him. He didn’t know whether to feel bad about that, or to be pleased knowing that she was as affected by this battle between them as he was.

He went with pleased.

Sagging against the wall, she looked at him for a long minute and finally shook her head. “I came over here ready to skin you alive for taking the girls without so much as telling me what you were up to.”