Page 124 of I Would Beg For You

I nod at the small fridge in the room. “Bottles in there.”

She smiles back. “Great. I’ll feed them next.”

“Get to Gabriela first,” I tell her. “Or she’ll shout the roof down in her impatience.”

“I still don’t get it how you can tell them apart.”

Our twins are identical. Gabriela has a pair of lungs on her, but when she’s not screaming the place down, you’d be hard pressed to differentiate her from her sister. Yet, to Naomi and me, they’re very different people, already unique and easily identifiable.

“Instinct,” I tell her, half joking. No one knows each one of us met one of them four weeks before they were born.

I return to the master bedroom, my mind at ease knowing the children are being looked after. Ina will be up a soon to commandeer the nursery as she’s been doing ever since the girls came home. I shower, hoping it will wake me up a bit more. After changing into jeans and a soft white T-shirt, I drop a soft kiss on Naomi’s cheek before exiting our bedroom. I’m going to let her sleep. She needs all the rest she can get, seeing how she spends all her waking time with the babies and half of it expressing breast milk so we can feed both at the same time.

Carlito serves me breakfast in the dining room, and I’m downing my third espresso after a plate of bacon and eggs, waiting for the caffeine to clear my mind from a sleep-deprived haze. That’s when Luciano walks into the room.

He guffaws when he sees me and shakes his head.

“I know that look. I sported it for roughly the entire first year of Luka’s life,” he says as he pours himself a coffee.

“You’re saying this is what my life will be like for the coming year?” I grunt.

He sits and takes a sip. “You have twins, so maybe two years? And you have girls, which means probably never?”

“Stronzo,” I curse, narrowing my eyes onto him.

This makes him laugh even more. Finally, after he gathers himself, he says softly, “It’s the best feeling in the world, isn’t it?”

My heart clenches. Whenever my eyes land on my daughters now, I marvel at their perfection, at their fragile beauty, theirresilient strength already visible at so young an age. It’s a miracle they survived everything that was thrown at Naomi, that they came into this world as late as they did given the circumstances.

“It is,” I choke out.

He nods in understanding. “Where are they?”

I nod toward the stairs. “In the nursery.”

“I won’t say no to baby cuddles,” he says.

“You’re sounding like Franco.” I chuckle and almost choke on a sip of coffee. “You’re not going to believe this, but I think Victor was singing to them yesterday.”

Luciano actually sputters his coffee, thankfully not on me. “What?!”

“I know.”

“That big lug, singing?”

“Uh huh. He’s a big softie,” I say. One who can break a man’s neck with a snap of his bare hands, I remind myself. He’s also the one who condoned Naomi’s plan to end Joel Smith. I must not forget who my little brother really is. All of them, actually.

My gaze alights on Luciano, and I narrow my eyes.

“What?” He cocks his head.

“Luka’s not with you?” It’s Saturday. The kid should’ve been around. He was a little ball of excitement on the day he met his baby cousins, keeps pestering his dad to bring him over to see them.

“Trying out a new daycare. They have an open morning just for the kids today.”

I nod. He doesn’t sound worried about his son being in a new place, so we can have this talk I’ve been meaning to put on the table between us for weeks now. Life hasn’t been really conducive to that, first with my recovery from surgery, then Naomi going into labor and the twins being born premature.

“How do you feel about taking on a new job?” I ask him.

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