Triplets Under The Tree. Kat Cantrell
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was the last thing she should be thinking about for a hundred reasons, but Antonio Junior, Leon and Annabelle were the top three and she needed to get a few things straight with their father. No naked masculine chests required for that conversation.
“You look...different,” she squawked.
Nice. Tip him off that you’re thinking naughty thoughts.
“You kept my clothes?” He pointed to the jeans slung low on his lean hips. “And my shaving equipment?”
All of which he apparently remembered just fine as he’d slipped back into his precrash look easily. Antonio had always been gorgeous as sin, built like a lost Michelangelo sculpture with a side of raw, masculine power. And she was still salivating over him. A year in Indonesia hadn’t changed that, apparently.
She shrugged and tried to make herself stop staring at him, which didn’t exactly work. “I kept meaning to go through that room, but I thought maybe there would be something the babies would want. So I left it.”
“I’m glad you did. Thank you.” His small smile tripped a long liquid pull inside and she tamped it down. Or she almost did. It was too delicious to fully let it go.
Serious. Talk. Now, she told herself sternly.
“I had a gym,” he said before she could work up the courage to bring up item one on her long list of issues. “Did you leave it alone, too?”
“It’s untouched.”
“I need to see it. Will you come with me?”
Surprised, she nodded. “Of course.”
Was it wrong to be thrilled he’d asked her to be with him as he delved into his past?
Well, if that was wrong, it was probably just as wrong to still have a thing for him all these years later. If only she hadn’t given up so easily when she’d first met him—it was still one of her biggest regrets.
But then, her relationship rules didn’t afford much hope unless a man was interested enough to hang around for the long haul. She’d thought maybe Antonio might have been, once upon a time. The way he’d flirted with her when they’d met, as though he thought she was beautiful, had floored her...and then Vanessa had entered stage left, which had dried up his interest in the chaste sister.
She followed him as he strolled directly to the gym, mystified how he remembered the way, and halted next to him as he quietly took in the posters advertising his many fights, his championship belts and publicity shots of himself clad in shorts and striking a fierce pose.
There was something wicked about staring at a photo of Antonio half clothed while standing next to the fully dressed version, knowing that falcon tattoo sat under his shirt, waiting to be discovered by a woman’s fingers. Her fingers. What would it feel like?
Sometimes she dreamed about that.
“Do you remember any of this?” she asked as the silence stretched. She couldn’t keep thinking about Antonio’s naked chest. Which became more difficult the longer they stood there, his heat nearly palpable. He even smelled like sin.
“Bits and pieces,” he finally said. “I didn’t know I had martial arts training. I thought I was remembering a movie, because I wasn’t always in the ring. Sometimes I was outside the ring, watching.”
“Oh, like watching other fighters? Maybe you’re remembering Falco,” she offered. “The fight club.”
He shook his head as if to clear it. “I feel as if I should know what that is.”
He didn’t remember Falco, either? Antonio had lived and breathed that place, much to Vanessa’s dismay on many occasions. Her sister had hoped to see her husband more often once his time in the ring was up, but the opposite had proved true.
Caitlyn led him to a picture on the wall, the one of him standing with two fighters about to enter the ring. “Falco is your MMA promotional venue. You founded it once your career ended. That’s where you made all your money.”
“When did I stop fighting?”
“It wasn’t long after you and Vanessa got married. You don’t remember that, either?” When he shook his head, she told him what little she knew about his last fight. “Brian Kerr nearly killed you. Illegal punch to the back of your head and you hit the floor at a bad angle. Knocked you out. You were in the hospital unconscious for two days. That’s probably why your amnesia is so pronounced. Your brain has sustained quite a bit of trauma.”
Really, he should have already been checked out by a competent doctor, but he’d refused when she’d mentioned it earlier. It wasn’t as if she could make him. Caitlyn had no experience with amnesia or a powerful man who wouldn’t admit to weakness.
Deep down, she had an undeniable desire to gain some experience, especially since it came wrapped in an Antonio package.
He stared at the picture for a moment. “Falco is the name of my company,” he announced cautiously as if testing it out. “It’s not my name.”
Her heart ached over his obvious confusion. She wanted to help him, to erase that small bit of helplessness she would never have associated with confident, solid Antonio Cavallari if she hadn’t seen it firsthand.
“Falco was your nickname when you were fighting. You transferred it to your promotional company because I guess it had some sentimental value.” Not that he’d ever discussed it with her. It was an assumption everyone had made, regardless.
“What happened to my company while I was missing?”
Missing—was that how he’d thought of himself? She tried to put herself in his place, waking up with few memories, in a strange place, with strange people who spoke a different language, all while recuperating from a plane crash and near drowning. The picture was not pretty, which tugged at her heart anew.
“I, um, have control over it.” And it had languished like the bedroom and his gym.
What did she know about running an MMA promotional company? But she couldn’t have sold it or tried to step into his shoes. In many ways, his place in the world had been on accidental hold, as if a higher power had stilled her hand from dismantling Antonio’s life. It had been here, waiting for him to slip back into it.
His expression hardened and the glimpse of vulnerability vanished. “I want control of my estate. And my company. Do whatever you have to do to make that happen.”
The rasp in his voice, which hadn’t been there before he got on that plane, laced his statement with a menacing undertone. He seemed more like a stranger in that moment than he had when he’d first appeared on her doorstep, unkempt and unrecognizable.
It was a brutal reminder that he wasn’t the same man. He wasn’t a safe fantasy come to life. And she wasn’t her sister, a woman who could easily handle a man like Antonio—worse, she wasn’t the woman he’d picked.
“It’s a lot to process, I realize,” she said slowly as her pulse skittered out of control. This harder, hooded Antonio was impossible to read, and she had no idea how to handle this unprecedented situation. “But you just got back to the States. You don’t even remember Falco, let alone how to run it. Why don’t you take a few days, get your bearings? I’ll help you.”
The offer was genuine. But it also kept her in his proximity so she could figure out his plans. If she got a hint that he was thinking about fighting her for custody of the triplets, she’d be ready. She was their mother, and this man—who was still very much a ghost of his former self—was not taking away her children.
Antonio shifted his iron-hard gaze from the pictures on the wall to evaluate Caitlyn coolly, which did not help her pulse. Nothing in her limited experience had prepared her to face down