We’ll still be us. We might need to make some changes.” He saw her smooth brow knit and her teeth catch her lip. “But in the end everything will work out. We’ll get married, have our trip. It just might be a few weeks—months—later than we planned.”

“But we’d have the twins.”

“Yes.”

“Before our honeymoon or after?”

He felt a surge of irritation. “Does it matter?” And then he saw from her expression that it did.

He straightened a little, a strange coldness forming in the middle of his chest. “You don’t want the girls?”

She held her breath a moment before answering. “They’re charming girls. Delightful children. But I’ve always hoped to be a bride before a mother.”

He didn’t say anything and she calmly continued. “I’m happy to help Payton however I can, but I think we have to be careful. I think we have to remember our goals. We’ve always talked about us starting a family together. Having babies of our own.”

But the twins were his own. They were a huge part of his heart. Of his life. They were his daughters.

Marilena turned on the sofa and placed a hand on his sleeve. “I’m happy to be a stepmother. I have no problem watching them on holidays and weekends, but Marco, think about it. Becoming a full-time mother to children that are not my own, and American! It isn’t practical. It doesn’t make sense.”

Marco reached for his keys. “I need to get back.”

“Marco.” She pressed a swift kiss to his cheek. “I want to get married. I want to be your wife. We have a plan, si?”

But the plan, he thought numbly heading for his car, might just be the wrong one.

Marco returned to the villa and headed into the house. He discovered Payton and the girls in the dining room still eating breakfast.

The heavy drapes had been drawn. The morning sun gleamed on the polished table. Cheery daisies spilled from a watering can. It was incongruous, the weedlike flowers in the watering can on his seventeenth-century dining table, and yet somehow it was right from the trio of heads sitting at the table, three heads of ringlets, Payton’s dark auburn and the girls glossy black.

And Marilena’s words came back to him as he stood in the doorway, “They’re not my own and they’re American.”

Payton looked up, caught sight of him there and her mouth curved, blue eyes a little red from what he guessed had been a sleepless night, and yet there was more warmth in her expression than twenty average women put together.

He rather liked his Americans, he thought, as he entered the large formal room.

He was glad his daughters were half-American. Half-Payton.