Triplets Under The Tree. Kat Cantrell

ponytail flipping over her shoulder. “Over a year ago.”

      All at once, he wanted to mourn for this wife he couldn’t remember. Because it would mean he could still experience emotions that stayed maddeningly out of reach, emotions with clinical definitions—love, peace, happiness, fulfillment, the list went on and on—but which had no real context. He wanted to feel something other than discouraged and adrift.

      His head ached, but he pressed on, determined to unearth more clues to how he’d started out on a plane from Thailand and ended up in a fishing village in Indonesia. Alone. “But I was on the plane. And I’m not dead. Maybe Vanessa is still alive, too.”

      Her name produced a small ping in his heart, but he couldn’t be certain if the feeling lingered from before the crash or if he’d manufactured it out of his intense need to remember.

      Hand to her mouth, Caitlyn bowed her head. “No. They recovered her...body,” she murmured, her voice thick. “They found the majority of the fuselage in the water. Most of the forty-seven people on board were still in their seats.”

      Vivid, gory images spilled into his mind as he imagined the horrors his wife—and the rest of the passengers—must have gone through before succumbing to the death he’d escaped.

      “Except me.”

      For the first time, his reality felt a bit like a miracle instead of a punishment. How had he escaped? Had he unbuckled himself in time to avoid drowning or had he been thrown free of the wreckage?

      “Except you,” she agreed, though apparently it had taken the revelation of his strange falcon tattoo to convince her. “And two other passengers, who were sitting across the aisle from you in first class. You were all in the first row, including Vanessa. They searched for survivors for a week, but there was no trace.”

      “They were looking in the wrong place,” he growled. “I washed up on the beach in Indonesia. On the south side of Batam Island.”

      “I don’t know my geography, but the plane crashed into the ocean near the coast of Malaysia. That’s where they focused the search.”

      No wonder no one had found him. They’d been hundreds of miles off.

      “After a month,” she continued, “they declared all three of you dead.”

      But he wasn’t dead.

      The other two passengers might have survived, as well. Look for them. They might be suffering from memory loss or ghastly injuries. They might be frightened and alone, having clawed their way out of a watery crypt, only to face a fully awake nightmare. As he had.

      He had to find them. But he had no money, no resources—not at this moment anyway. He must have money, or at least he must have had some once. The sum he’d paid for this house popped into his head out of nowhere: fifteen point eight million dollars. That had been eight years ago.

      Groaning, he rubbed his temples as the headache grew uncontrollable.

      “Are you okay?” Caitlyn asked.

      Ensuring the comfort of others seemed to come naturally to this woman he’d found living in his house. His sister-in-law. Had she always been so nurturing?

      “Fine,” he said between clenched teeth. “Is this still my house?”

      He could sell it and use the proceeds to live on while he combed the South China Sea.

      Caitlyn chose that moment to sit next to him on the couch, overwhelming him with the light scent of coconut, which, strangely, made him want to bury his nose in her hair.

      “Technically, no. When you were declared dead, it passed to your heirs.”

      “You mean Vanessa’s?” Seemed as if his wife’s sister had made out pretty well after the plane crash. “Are you the only heir? Because I’m not dead and I want my money back.”

      It was the only way he could launch a search for the other two missing passengers.

      “Oh.” She stared at him, her sea-glass-blue eyes wide with guilt and a myriad of other emotions he suddenly wished to understand.

      Because looking into her eyes made him feel something. Something good and beautiful and he didn’t want to stop drowning in her gaze.

      “You don’t remember, do you?” she asked. “Oh, my gosh. I’ve been rambling and you don’t even know about the babies.”

      Blood rushed from his head so fast, his ears popped.

      “Babies?” he croaked. Surely she didn’t mean babies, plural, as in more than one? As in his babies?

      “Triplets.” She shot him a misty smile that heightened her ethereal beauty. Which he wished he could appreciate, but there was no way, not with the bomb she’d just dropped. “And by some miracle, they still have a father. You. Would you like to meet them?”

      “I...” A father. He had children? Three of them, apparently. “They’re really mine?” Stupid question, but this was beyond—he shook his head. “How old are they? Do they remember me?”

      “Oh, no, they weren’t born yet when you went to Thailand.”

      He frowned. “But you said Vanessa died in the plane crash. Is she not their mother?”

      Had he cheated on his wife with another woman? Catholic-school lessons from his youth blasted through his mind instantly. Infidelity was wrong.

      “She’s not,” Caitlyn refuted definitively. “I am.”

      Guilt and shame cramped his gut as he eyed Caitlyn. He’d cheated on his wife with his sister-in-law? The thought was reprehensible.

      But it explained the instant visceral reaction he had to her.

      Her delicate, refined beauty didn’t match the obvious lushness of the redhead he’d married. Maybe that was the point. He really preferred a dark-haired, more classically attractive woman like Caitlyn if he’d fathered children with her.

      “Were we having an affair?” he asked bluntly. And would he have a serious fight to regain control of his money now that his mistress had her hooks into it?

      Pink spread across her cheeks in a gorgeous blush, and a foreign heaviness filled his chest, spreading to heat his lower half. Though he couldn’t recall having made love to her before, he had no trouble recognizing the raw, carnal attraction to Caitlyn. Obviously, she was precisely the woman he preferred, judging by his body’s unfiltered reaction.

      “Of course not!” She wouldn’t meet his gaze, and her blush deepened. “You were married to my sister and I would never—well, I mean, I did meet you first and, okay, maybe I thought about...but then I introduced you to Vanessa. That was that. You were hers. Not that I blame you—”

      “Caitlyn.”

      Her name alone caused that strange fullness in his chest. He’d like to say it again. Whisper it to her as he learned what she tasted like.

      She glanced up, finally silenced, and he would very much like to understand why her self-conscious babbling had caused the corners of his mouth to turn up. It was evident from the way she nervously twisted her fingers together that she had no concept of how to lie. They’d never been involved. He’d stake his life on it.

      He cleared his raspy throat. “How did the children come to be, then?”

      “Oh. I was your surrogate. Yours and Vanessa’s. The children are a hundred percent your DNA, grown in my womb.” She wrinkled her nose. “That sounds so scientific. Vanessa couldn’t conceive, so I volunteered to carry the baby. Granted, I didn’t know three eggs were going to take.”

      She laughed and he somehow found the energy to be charmed by her light spirit. “So Vanessa and I, we were happy?”

      If only he could remember her. Remember if they’d laughed together as he vaguely sensed that lovers should.