Page 9 of Twins for the Enemy

As I approach her room, it takes me longer to notice than it should have.

I see the first wood chip near the leg of a console table.

It occurs to me that it’s odd because my cleaning staff is impeccable, and it’s a long way for the wood to travel from the den—the only place we’ve had any stove fires.

But my brain discards the oddity in my determination to get to Farah.

It’s not until I see two more wood chips in the hallway that it registers as an ominous sign.

I pick up my pace, but it only takes a few more feet before I see the scattering of wood chips in front of Farah’s room and the hole in the door, nearly four feet in diameter. The lamp with the stone base and one of the bed frame’s side rails lies in the center of the explosion of wood.

It’s a taunt. She wants me to know exactly how she broke through the door and how I could have stopped her—because I saw her dismantling her bed.

I should be pissed, but the willpower and persistence she exhibited are the kind of qualities I’d kill for in my corporation.

For all the extra space in my thoughts where the anger should expand, it’s taken over by concern. The weather reports broadcast plunging temperatures, and there’s a significantly higher chance she runs into danger in the city than she would have in the small town she’d been hiding in.

I’ll get ahold of Craig. As the Superintendent of Police, he’ll be reluctant to jump into a search for an adult woman who could have disappeared a half hour ago, but with the way he grovels during charity events, he’ll yank out his own teeth to make me happy .

I quickly move down the steps, pulling out my phone. I listen to it ring as I walk into the kitchen.

I stop.

Sitting at the kitchen island, legs crossed and eating applesauce, is Farah.

I cancel the call as I hear Craig’s voice answer. I slide my phone back into my pocket. Farah looks back at me, unfazed, with the hint of a mischievous flicker in her eyes.

“What on God’s earth did you do to my door?” I ask.

“Opened up the space a bit,” she says, licking the spoon. I look over at the refrigerator, ignoring my cock stirring. “You don’t like it?”

“If the interior design theme is a crack house, it’s perfect. Was that your intention?”

“It seems fitting to me.” She sets down her spoon. “Wouldn’t a crack house keep pregnant women captive? ”

“You make this hypothetical woman sound innocent.” I take a few steps closer to her, not breaking eye contact. She doesn’t react. The men I’ve faced off in litigation were more unnerved than she is. “Did you expect better accommodations? Would you like me to supply you with gasoline and a lighter?”

“I’d like you to supply me with a basic level of respect,” she says. “I know I’m… I’ve done immoral things. I’m not a great person.”

The way her lip twitches tells me that she’s being honest. It should vindicate me, but it scrapes inside my chest.

She swallows and raises her chin up. “But I’m not going to lie down and let you mistreat me. Maybe a few months ago, I would’ve, but now that I’m going to be a mother, I know I wouldn’t want anyone to treat my children that way.”

It sounds rehearsed. It also sounds sincere.

“You want me to treat you with respect? Then explain to me how burning a woman and leaving her to die in a fire is showing respect.” I take her face in my hands. She flinches, but she stares back at me, her lips tightening together. “Do you know what those flames did to her? The way it burned her?”

My thumb etches along the sides of her face, curving into her hairline.

“Her hair burned right here. Have you smelled burning hair before? It barely missed her eye. It kept burning down. She never said how much it hurt, but it must have been unimaginable.”

My thumb continues to trace around her cheek and to the corner of her lips. Her mouth slightly opens, almost inviting me in.

She slowly pulls away. While she’d seemed dazed as I was talking, now pain cuts through her expression.

“I know you see yourself as judge, jury, and executioner,” she says. “But using a woman’s tragedy to hurt me is low. I wasn’t the one who started the fire, and I didn’t know anyone was in the building, so—”

“Explain that one to me,” I say.

“What?”

“You were fired from the business that was set on fire. Motive. You were spotted there by your boss. A witness. You were seen on nearby businesses’ surveillance cameras. Physical evidence. But you weren’t the arsonist? That would be an unprecedented number of coincidences.”

“It’s… there’s more to it than that.”

“Explain it.”

She stares at me. “You wouldn’t understand. You wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“I don’t believe you now, so that wouldn’t be a change.”

She turns away from me, her elbow hitting against the spoon in her applesauce container. The container topples over, empty.

“The twins can’t survive on you eating only applesauce,” I say. “You need to consider what they need. ”

“I’ll eat again when I’m hungry,” she says. “Do you enjoy making women feel sick all of the time?”

“My chef has the day off, but I’ll make an omelet.” I stand up and walk over to the refrigerator. “If you have to choke it down, you’ll choke it down.”

Because I’m afraid she may decide to bolt after all, but it’s also the way she looks from across the kitchen island. Like she doesn’t know she’s the kind of trouble that gets a man hooked before he sees it coming.

I whisk the eggs as the pan sizzles from the butter. I pour the mixture into the pan. After I chop up part of a pepper, I curve the spatula around the edges of the pan. The outside is cooking much faster than the inside.

“Move over,” Farah says, bouncing off her stool and striding over to my side. “You should have heated up the pan before you started cooking. It’s also better to add a bit of milk. I’d also cook the peppers first before starting the omelet, but we can just add it in. ”

I hand her the spatula. Under most circumstances, I’d have fought against someone taking over, but being that close to her, I can smell the shampoo and soap I left in her bathroom.

I’d tried to get the same jasmine scent she’d had when we met, but this one is slightly less sweet.

It doesn’t change the way it brings me back to that night.

“Did you have some secret culinary degree?” I ask, keeping my voice low.

She turns down the heat under the pan. “No, my brother taught me.”

“It must have been your father’s job to teach you to not commit arson.”

She snorts. “No. My father wasn’t a good person. He didn’t teach me anything.”

I don’t recall much about my biological parents—a tantrum from my father as he knocked down the cradle in a desperate attempt to find his stash and a flash of my mother draped in a chair with a glassy look in her eyes—but the edge in her voice reminds me of some of my foster parents.

But I didn’t leave anyone to burn in a building.

“Daddy issues,” I say. “That fits.”

She glares at me as she flips over the omelet. She sprinkles some cheese and the chopped pepper into it.

The truth is I’ve made hundreds of omelets in my life. Ellie loves them with sautéed mushrooms. But Farah’s making me incompetent. She’s twisted me around so much that even things that should be instinctive are forgotten.

I should be focusing on her cooking, but watching her is sensual in a way that makes me think I’ve never seen sensuality.

Her movements are graceful, swaying between the stove, the cabinet drawers, and the refrigerator.

It’s like her feet barely touch the ground.

The faintest smile tugs at her lips with a subtle pink in her cheeks.

Her brow is furrowed—not in confusion, but in intense concentration.

It’s not like a woman who would smash down a door just to prove a point .

But, if I’m honest with myself, I also find that side provocative.

“I don’t know how you expect to raise the twins together,” she says, drying her hands off. She throws that hand towel at me. “If you’re always going to treat me like an enemy.”

I toss the hand towel on the counter.

“I’d take that more seriously if you hadn’t just broken down my door.”

“I wouldn’t have broken down the door if you hadn’t locked me inside the room.”

“Do you want to remember why I locked you in a room?”

“Because you’re a self-righteous ass.”

She opens the refrigerator. I shut it, twisting her around to pin her against the stainless steel.

It’s not rage at her insult, but the indifferent attitude toward burning Ellie.

Looking straight at her, seeing the coldness in her eyes, should make that rage grow, but it’s not coldness I see.

Defiance, yes, but a gentleness dominates her features.

Even when she’s trying to appear aggressive, it’s like a vicious fawn. My injured, vicious fawn.

Her eyes soften more as she looks at me. It pierces a hook through me—the most transparent bait that I’ve bitten into.

“So, why didn’t you run?” I ask. “Do you plan on continuing to steal from me? Or do you plan to set my house on fire?”

“You’ve made it clear that you have the money and influence to track me down,” she says. “You also made your point by nailing down my windows—every time I escape, my situation gets worse. I’m capable of making a rational decision.”

I narrow my eyes. Her chest is rising and falling, pressing against my chest in a way that’s getting increasingly hard to ignore. But I have to, because she’s a liar.

“You’re also capable of scheming,” I say. “I’d say you’re more capable of that than rational decisions. ”

“I would never scheme,” she scoffs. “You must be thinking of a man who would buy an old house, simply to trap a pregnant woman who works as a cleaner.”

Defiance hardens her expression. I think about how that mouth could be softened—by harsh words or something more rigid than that—her expression changes. The green of her eyes gets brighter as her eyes widen. Fear. Then panic.

The hooks tear through my chest as I consider my place in triggering that fear.

Then, I see the flicker of light in the reflection of her eyes.

Flames.

I spin around. The hand towel was too close to the stove. It’s going up in flames with concerning efficiency.

I snatch the mini fire extinguisher out from under the sink, pulling the pin and squeezing the trigger.

The foam sprays out. I keep sweeping over it until it looks like a dire incident with whipped cream.

I’d had an incident like that once with a singer before her world tour. Her name escapes me now.

I turn back to Farah, expecting some level of relief, but her hands are twisted together, pressed tight against her chest, while her eyes are still wide. She’s shaking.

I set the extinguisher down slowly. I reach forward, taking her hand in mine. I squeeze it gently before my other hand rests on her shoulder, guiding her out of the kitchen and toward the dining room.

I pull out a chair.

She doesn’t sit down.

“Sit down,” I tell her. She looks over at me like I just appeared in the room. Her knees bend slowly, and she sits.

I keep watching her. Her hands aren’t shaking as hard now, but there’s a slight tremor to them. I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t be empathetic toward her. If she has an issue with fire, it’s her own goddamn fault .

“At least now I know you’re not going to run,” I remark. “Considering you escaped from your room and didn’t leave the house.”

She’s not looking at me anymore, staring straight ahead like she can still see the fire instead of a wall.

If there is one thing I’ve found out about her, it’s that her temper can break through any locked door or barrier—even one made by her own brain.

“So, I’m going to take off the door,” I say. “You’re not getting a new one.”

Her head snaps up. “What? What about my privacy? Don’t I deserve that?”

“You smashed my door to pieces. You deserve many things; one of them isn’t privacy.”

She stands up, steadier than she’s been all morning. “You must be compensating for a lot to need this much control over another person.”

“We both know I don’t need to compensate for anything.”

Shoving my shoulder, she moves past me. She turns, so she doesn’t have to walk through the kitchen, but at least the fear that overtook her has gone back into the shadows.

I only wish I could cast my concern for her into the shadows too. This story only ends one way, and it’s not with Ellie praising me for taking care of the woman who left her to die.

It will end with legal justice, followed by unbearable quiet.