by Dani Collins
He swore softly.
“Yeah.” She flattened her lips. “The people in the café didn’t know that’s what happened, but she was super pregnant—a couple of weeks from being due. There was a private clinic nearby, one of those places for Europe’s elite to dry out or get plastic surgery on the down-low. She was rushed there for treatment. My sister has this vivid memory of sitting in the café holding my brother’s hand, terrified and confused. A man brought them cheese and crackers and hot chocolate. He asked where they were from. He was trying to find out how to get hold of Dad, I guess, because Dad showed up a while later. He took them to the clinic, where they got the bad news that Mom was gone. They were all crying until a nurse brought me out and put me in Dad’s arms. Then they all stopped crying and smiled.”
Nina had to take a drink to keep her throat from closing. Her chest was scoured with emotion, her eyes hot. “I’ve always felt loved because of that part of the story. Always.”
A muscle in Reve’s cheek twitched, and his gaze dropped into his glass.
He had never told her much about his childhood. He played his cards close to his chest, never spoke fondly of a brother or sister or a father or mother. He never, ever spoke about love.
“Your father didn’t ask for blood samples or anything?” He was a man of facts and computation, and had a natural skepticism of any information presented to him. He would never take on faith that the baby placed in his arms was his own.
“Dad was completely distraught. We shipped home and Abuela moved in with us. Dad was absent a lot until he was discharged, but he was home permanently by the time I was going to school. I graduated, saved for college, got my degree, then came here to work.” She shrugged. “It was all pretty normal.”
“Until you learned there was a model who looked just like you.”
“Yes, but then I met you and didn’t think about much else.” She tossed him a flat smile before she turned away to check everything on the stove. He had consumed her. Had he realized that?
“Do you believe you were sent home with the wrong family?” he asked quietly.
“No,” she said without hesitation. “They are the most loving people in the world. I’m very lucky to have them.” Her eyes welled, and she had to use the back of her wrist to clear her vision.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.” She brought the dough from the fridge and floured the surface of the counter. “People used to ask me if I was adopted. It upset me, but Abuela said I took after her sister. She told me that was why I struggled in school, that it was a family thing to have dyslexia. She didn’t use that word, but that’s what she meant.”
“I didn’t know that about you.”
“It doesn’t matter.” It did. It mattered a lot. It had impacted her self-esteem, but she had developed strategies to pass her assignments and graduate. Her fine arts degree majoring in fashion was one of her proudest achievements.
She had gone through life wondering why her brother and sister found basic things like reading and math so much easier than she did, though. It had set her apart from them, and now she felt like a complete idiot for not seeing she’d been different in a far more profound way.
“I never had any reason to question whether my family was related to me by blood, not until I offered to have my sister’s baby.”
He paused in reaching for the bottle to top up his glass. “What do you mean you ‘offered to have’?”
“Carry it. As a surrogate.” She found one of the wide-mouthed glasses she liked to use to cut circles in the dough.
“Why the hell would you do that?” His eyes flashed with astounded disbelief.
“She’s my sister.” It was all the reason she needed. “She and her husband have had fertility struggles for years. That’s one of the reasons I went home. Dad told me over dinner that Angela had miscarried again. She was heartbroken.”
“You never told me that about her.”
“Because it’s none of your business. I’m only telling you now because it’s relevant.” She filled a few pockets of dough and sealed them, then set them into the frying pan to begin cooking while she filled the rest.
“They’ve talked about using a surrogate on and off, but aside from the cost, it’s a really personal thing. I offered once before, but I was still in college. Angela said it would be too disruptive to my education. She was so heartbroken this time, I was desperate to help. And I wanted to do something that would make me feel like my life had some sort of meaning or purpose.”
“Nina.” There was admonishment in his tone, but a man like him must know there was a huge difference between pursuing a goal and achieving it.
She crumpled up the scraps of dough and rolled it out again, leaning in hard.
“Surrogacy sounds simple, but it’s a big undertaking. Most agencies won’t let you do it until you’ve had a successful pregnancy of your own. Some people do it in private arrangements, and my doctor wasn’t exactly encouraging about our doing that, but he was willing to at least screen me—”
“Blood tests,” Reve said with dawning understanding.
“Yes. He sat me down with the results and said it wasn’t uncommon for siblings to have different blood types, depending how your body puts your parents’ chromosomes together, but I was enough of an outlier that he suggested I have a chat with my dad.”
“Did you?”
“No. I told Angela I was anemic—which is true. I’m taking iron now.” She gulped a mouthful of wine and turned the empanadillas in the pan. “Then I took one of those ancestry tests. I wanted to prove the doctor wrong.”
“But?”
She released a shaky sigh. “My brother did one a few years ago when his wife didn’t know what else to get him for Christmas. My results should have been in the same ballpark as his, right? If we both come from a Puerto Rican mom and a white American father? Marco’s report said he was Spanish with some African and Taíno, which is the indigenous people in the Caribbean. Plus English and German, which lines up with where Dad’s family is from.”
“And yours?”
She felt a great pressure in her breastbone. “Some English. Mostly South Asian and Scandinavian.”
“Scandinavian?” Reve snorted and searched her features as if looking for the evidence of Nordic blood.
She shrugged and emptied her glass in one gulp, then pushed it toward the bottle.
He refilled it. “Have you tried contacting the clinic?”
“The building has changed hands more than once. It’s a spa resort now.”
She checked the rice and turned it off, then prepared a couple of plates. She left a fresh batch of empanadillas frying in the pan as she took a stool next to Reve.
“The connection to Oriel wasn’t on my radar when I got my results. I mean, there were photos of her with Duke Rhodes in the magazines at my sister’s salon—What’s wrong?”
Reve was staring at the plate she’d set in front of him.
“Nothing,” he mumbled, seeming almost self-conscious. “It smells good.” He shoveled a forkful of rice into his mouth and took a small breath around it because it was hot, but he didn’t cool it with wine. He chewed and swallowed. “It’s good. Thanks. Keep talking.”
He proceeded to eat as though he hadn’t been fed in a week.
She filtered her words carefully as she said them aloud for the first time.
“I wasn’t thinking, I wonder if she’s my sister. Not until her story broke about being Lakshmi’s daughter. Then I read that she was born in Luxembourg the day before me. My time of birth is fourteen minutes after midnight.”
He snapped a look at her. Then he finished chewing, swallowed and asked, “Have you reached out to her?”
“You’re supposed to tell me I’m out of my mind, Reve!” She made herself eat because otherwise she’d have that bottle of wine for din
ner. “You’re supposed to say, Save that imagination for the sewing room. Say, There’s an obvious explanation, then tell me what it is,” she pleaded.
“It is obvious. She’s your twin.”
“Would you stop?”
CHAPTER FOUR
REVE CLEANED HIS plate in record time and rose to help himself to more even though he was already full. He turned the empanadillas over in the frying pan and then leaned on the counter, eating rice while he waited for them to finish browning.
God, this was good. He had never understood people who got nostalgic for certain foods. Eating was better than going hungry, so he ate what was put in front of him, but as the familiar aromas had gathered amid the sizzle and pop of the pan, a nameless tension inside him had eased. His mouth had watered.
Nina’s story was not her usual animated discussion of buttons and weave and where hemline trends were headed, though. She looked miserable as she chased a pea and gathered a few grains of rice with the tines of her fork.
“This is why you were so upset when you got here,” he realized. “It wasn’t because the reporters were chasing you. It was because you couldn’t outrun the truth.”
She lifted her lashes and sent him a morose glare, soft mouth falling down at the corners.
“Suppose you are twins,” he speculated. “Were you split up through incompetence or was it deliberate?”
“I came to New York with a half-baked plan to find out. I thought Oriel was here. Or that I would get that job—any job, but hopefully that one,” she said with a curl of her lip. “I thought if I could get myself stationed in London, I could do some footwork from there. Take a train when I had time off, see if I could find someone who had worked at the clinic. I mean, I could send a few emails from here to... I don’t know. The spa? Or see if I could find the doctor who delivered me. But if mistakes were made, no one is going to admit it. Not to someone whose life was changed because of it.”
“They’ll lawyer up and clam up.”
“Exactly. If I go to Oriel, she’s liable to do the same. Imagine how many people are coming to her with bogus claims right now, trying to get their hands on Lakshmi’s fortune.”
“Those people aren’t wearing her face. You have an edge, Nina. One look at you and she will do a test to prove exactly what you already suspect.”
“Then what?” she challenged with agitation. “Then I have to tell my family that the child they thought survived didn’t. Is their baby out there somewhere? Living with strangers? I don’t know Lakshmi gave birth to me, but if I go public with any of this I’ll have to hire a bodyguard, because people will chase me down the street for the rest of my life.”
She poked at her food again, head hanging over her plate.
He took out the cooked empanadillas and turned off the stove. “What are you going to do then?”
“I don’t know. Tell me what to do because all the options I see are terrible.”
“Tell your father,” he said plainly, not bothering to cushion his words. “Prepare him for the fact that I’m going to tell people it was you, not Oriel, who came here today. Once he sees the photos, he’s liable to have the same thoughts you do. You want to be ahead of that.”
“Do I?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
The anguish and vulnerability in her expression made the hairs stand up on his arms. He unconsciously braced himself, expecting pain for some reason yet not understanding what kind or from where.
“What if he doesn’t want me when he realizes I’m not his?” Her voice was so thin and vulnerable, it arrowed into his chest and left the space there cold and cavernous.
“Do you really think he wouldn’t?” It was a stupid question. His own father hadn’t cared if he’d lived or died.
“How would you react if you found out twenty-five years after the fact that you’d been raising a child who wasn’t yours?” The anguish in her eyes was more than he could bear.
He had never planned to raise any children. If his own father was anything to go by, nurturing didn’t come naturally to his kind, and so Reve had made the decision long ago not to perpetuate feral, junkyard hounds like himself or force anyone else’s children to live with one.
Although, for those seconds in the foyer earlier, when it had struck him that she might be pregnant, his entire view had changed. For one flashing second, he’d seen a completely different future for himself, which had died a quick death when he heard, That’s all I would need.
Obviously, Nina wouldn’t be happy to be carrying his child, and why that left a hollow sensation in his chest was a mystery.
He brushed all of that out of his mind. Nina was begging for him to tell her that calling her dad would turn out fine. The brutal fact was that he was far too cynical to believe it. Based on what he knew of people, there was a very real chance her family could reject her.
And he instinctively knew that would break her. Whatever ulterior motives Nina might have where he was concerned, one thing had always been indisputable. She loved her family. She’d always had complete confidence that they loved her, and now that confidence was shaken.
She pushed her plate away abruptly and stood, her jaw set with decision, before turning toward the living room.
“Nina.” He set down his plate and made sure everything was turned off before he followed her.
She was on the sofa with her phone in her shaking hand, instructing, “Text Dad. Do you have time for a call?”
There was a quaver of dread in her voice. Her phone whooshed and her anxious gaze came up to meet his.
Reve was ruled by logic. If you had a question, you asked it. If you had a goal, you found the quickest route to attain it and chased it until you got there. His head told him this was the right thing to do, but a hot lump formed behind his breastbone. What if he’d steered her straight off a cliff of some kind?
Her phone pinged and she gave a couple of quick voice commands.
How had he not noticed how often she used voice commands? He had, of course, but he hadn’t understood the significance.
The robotic AI voice read aloud, “Dad. On a date. Will call when I’m home.”
She slid her phone onto the coffee table and fell onto her side on the cushions, scowling hard enough a fire should have spontaneously burst forth in the hearth.
“Can you hold off for a few hours on making a statement?” she asked tersely. “I’ll clean the kitchen in a few minutes. I just need to think.”
“Of course.” He went back to the kitchen long enough to put the leftovers into the refrigerator and fetch their wine.
When he set her glass on the coffee table, he saw she was asleep. The creases of tension had finally melted from her face, but dark circles were still smudged beneath her eyes. He wondered exactly how long she’d been living with all of these secrets and doubts, because that sort of exhaustion came from more than a few nights in a flophouse apartment.
When he realized he was staring and had his own brow pulled into a tense wrinkle of consternation, he drew a blanket from inside the ottoman and draped it over her.
Then he sat and picked up his tablet, calling up this twin of hers. He quickly landed on photos of Oriel in bikinis and sexy lingerie.
It was like seeing Nina in the bedroom and made him hot, but not in a titillating way. He was affronted on her behalf. This wasn’t her, but it could be. This woman’s figure was a little bit thinner—not much, but he knew Nina’s curves intimately enough that the difference was obvious to him. Oriel had a polished gleam to her that contrasted with Nina’s natural and very casual beauty, and Oriel posed in ways that accentuated her sexuality. Nina was far less overt.
These photos irritated him. Nina was modest at heart. She was passionate and sensual and uninhibited when she got into sex, but that was something she expressed in private. She wasn’t one to flaunt excess cleavage, or flash
her legs, or flirt and draw attention to herself.
The clear boundary around their sexual lives was one of the things he’d liked most about her. It was why he’d been comfortable letting her stay in his home. She didn’t engage in shock talk or gossip about bedroom escapades.
Even so, from the moment she’d left, he’d been waiting for her to show her true colors, expecting her to exploit their relationship in some glaring tell-all fashion.
She hadn’t.
Obviously, there was still time, but she wasn’t racing to capitalize on the riches and notoriety of her likely association to Lakshmi and Oriel, either.
That left him with an uneasy suspicion he had pigeonholed her, failing to see past his own black-and-white judgments.
He absently played the backs of his fingers against the stubble under his chin as his mind strayed to the night she’d walked out, the move he’d convinced himself was purely a manipulation tactic on her part.
He never let himself replay their argument. When he recalled that night, he always stopped at the good part. They’d had sex when he got home after being away a couple of nights. Their lovemaking had turned into a hedonistic indulgence of their senses. He’d been drunk on her, kissing and suckling everywhere, caressing and licking at her most responsive flesh until she had been a quaking mass of lust.
She was incredible when she was like that, eyes glazed, lips swollen, body twisting without inhibition. Her voice got sexy as hell when she was that turned-on, and she knew it turned him on to hear it. She had told him what she wanted in the bluntest way, and he still got hard recalling it.
When she was aroused to that degree, he could unleash his own restraint. He’d slipped his arms under her legs so she’d been completely open to him. She’d reached to the headboard to brace herself, breasts jiggling under the power of his thrusts. The slap of their flesh and her animalistic moans had been raw and hot and wild.
Holding back to wait for her had been heaven and hell, but her tension had finally snapped in a rush of magnificent, glorious release. Her body had shuddered and her sheath had milked at his shaft. He had lost it. The orgasm that rocked him had been the most exquisitely sharp and sustained climax of his life. He still felt a dull ache thinking of it today.