Accidental Triplets with the Billionaire novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Gold Digger

On her mother's porch Letty answers the press herself, and Nathan covers her shoulders with his coat and proposes a contract marriage.

Hale Street was full of strangers.

Three vans were parked on the curb in front of my mother's white house.

A man with a camera on his shoulder stood in her flower bed, right on top of the tulips my father planted.

"Stay in the car," Nathan said.

"That's my mother."

"Letty."

It was the first time he'd used my first name.

I opened the door anyway.

The questions hit me before my feet touched the pavement.

"Are you the woman who trapped Nathan Corwin?"

"Is it true you're carrying his triplets for money?"

"How much did the clinic pay you to lie?"

I had seen my mother's face at her window.

She was holding the kitchen curtain with both hands, white as paper.

I turned around and walked up the front path.

The reporters followed, still shouting, and I stopped on the porch where I could see all of them.

On a news app somebody had pushed to my phone, I had read the headline in the car.

CORWIN HEIR SCANDAL: SURROGATE SPRINGS THREE-BABY TRAP.

Underneath it was a quote from Warwick Corwin, Nathan's uncle and the chair of his company.

"A young woman of limited means has seen a way to secure herself for life. We are protecting the family."

I took a breath.

"My name is Letty Penhale," I said.

The cameras swung up.

"I'm twenty-seven. I'm a nursing assistant on the oncology floor at a hospital you've all driven past."

Nobody spoke.

"Eight weeks ago I agreed to carry one baby for a couple I'd met twice. This morning the clinic told me the embryos were the wrong ones."

A reporter started to talk and I kept going.

"I didn't pick them. I didn't know whose they were. A woman in a nice office offered me two hundred thousand dollars to end it, and I said no."

The word no came out louder than I meant.

"So if you want to know who got paid, ask the clinic."

I could feel my heart banging in my throat.

"That's my mother's house. She buried my dad last year. Stay off her tulips."

For a second there was only the sound of shutters.

Then a woman near the front shouted, "Ms. Penhale, what's your price?"

A car door closed behind me.

Nathan had gotten out.

He walked up the path with his hands in his coat pockets, not hurrying, and the reporters shifted back to make room.

He climbed the porch steps and stood beside me.

Then he took off his long dark coat and set it over my shoulders.

It was warm from him and it smelled like cedar and something clean.

"I'll answer that one," he said.

The woman's microphone swung toward him.

"Her price," Nathan said, "was refusing two hundred thousand dollars this morning, with no one watching, to protect children she didn't know were mine."

He did not raise his voice.

"The children are mine. Her name is Letty Penhale. The next person who stands on her mother's flowers will be dealing with my lawyers, and I employ a great many."

Somebody at the back lowered a camera.

"Is the child yours?" the woman shouted. "Are you saying it's a clinic mistake?"

"I'm saying leave," said Nathan.

I stood there in his coat and felt my legs finally start to shake.

The front door opened behind us, and my mother came out in her slippers.

She is fifty-eight, five foot two, and she has been on her feet in other people's homes for thirty years.

She looked at Nathan, then at the cameras, then at me.

"Letitia Marie," she said. "Inside. Both of you. Now."

We went in.

The kitchen smelled like coffee and old linoleum and the pot roast she'd started before any of this.

My mother shut the door and slid the bolt, and the shouting went muffled.

She looked Nathan up and down, slowly.

"You're the husband," she said.

"No, ma'am. I'm the father."

"Of what?"

"Three."

My mother grabbed the back of a chair.

I had known her for twenty-seven years and I'd never seen her lose her words.

"Sit down, Ma," I said.

"I'm standing."

"Mrs. Penhale," Nathan said, "I'd like to explain."

"I'd like you to eat first."

She put a plate of pot roast in front of him anyway, because that is who she is.

He stared at it.

Outside, the shutters kept clicking, and somewhere a van door slammed.

Nathan didn't pick up the fork.

He looked at me across her tiny table with the cameras flashing on the curtains behind him.

"Letty," he said quietly. "They'll do this to you every day until you're showing. Then they'll do it to the children."

"I know."

"There is a way to stop it."

I waited.

"Marry me," he said. "A contract. Fourteen months."

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