That was fine with him. When he asked if there were any other messages, she gave him a list that included Shannon White’s name. The more it kept cropping up, the more he shoved it to the back of his mind.
Right now, it was her sister—her unknown sister—who dominated his world. He wouldn’t rest until he’d found her.
It didn’t take him long to locate the partially erected six-floor office building in a fashionable suburb of Portland. David was pleased to discover that it displayed the extensive use of wood, joists and exposed joinery, as well as the wide floor-to-ceiling windows he’d come to think of as unique to the firm of Casey & Associates. He pulled his Mercedes to the work fence, grabbed his briefcase and headed for the trailer.
A workman in the distance noticed David and called to him. “Looking for somebody?”
“The architect. I have an appointment.”
“Up there.” The guy pointed to a figure in a hard hat walking around on one of the steel girders. “You can wait in the trailer or grab a hard hat and ride in the cage.”
“Thanks.”
“You bet!”
Curious to see a building at this stage of development, David donned a hat and hurried toward the makeshift elevator.
He leased his current office space, so he was excited about building a permanent facility on twenty acres of wooded property he’d purchased six months ago. The land was situated a couple of miles outside Portland, close enough to the city for convenience, far enough to provide a measure of silence and serenity.
He had a few basic ideas for the kind of design he wanted. But when he’d seen the Crompton warehouse makeover, he’d recognized real genius and found himself looking forward to meeting its creator.
A couple of workmen went up in the cage with him. The sun had come to Portland, at last, and the afternoon heat felt good on David’s face. He removed his suit jacket, tossing it over his shoulder.
A fear of heights had never been one of his problems, yet he couldn’t help admiring the men who worked on much taller buildings. This might not be a skyscraper or anything close to it, but six floors up was still six floors up.
“Hey, CC?” one of the men shouted. “You’ve got company!”
“Be right there!”
The person in the hard hat making his way off the girder didn’t look anything like the architect David had imagined. For one thing, he didn’t walk like a man.
The woman—unmistakably a woman, wearing a white T-shirt and slim blue jeans—moved toward him at a fast pace.
“Hello! I’m Catherine Casey,” she called to him, from a distance. “Thanks for meeting me here, but you didn’t have to come all the way up. When I saw you get out of your car, I realized you must be my client and I was about to go down to the trailer.”
Only a few feet from him, she extended her hand. “My secretary must have told me your name, but I confess I don’t remember it.” She lifted her head to smile at him, exactly as she’d done at the speedway.
His heart knocked violently against his chest.
THE STRANGER from the track! Her breath caught in her throat. She felt his fingers tighten around hers, almost as if he couldn’t believe the coincidence, either.
“I’m David Britton.”
Britton? She gasped. “Then it was—”
“Mitch,” he interrupted her. “My younger brother.” She felt his tension when he asked, “Is Jack Casey your husband?”
“No!” she cried, then blushed because she knew she’d sounded too eager to clarify the point. “He’s my younger brother.”
The coincidences were mounting.
They seemed to comprehend each other’s worlds without having to speak another word. She’d never communicated on this level with anyone else.
A smile broke the corners of his mouth. His dark-fringed eyes lit up. They weren’t midnight blue, as she’d originally thought. If anything, their color rivaled the waters of Capri’s Blue Grotto. She saw no displeasure in them.
“Do I still remind you of the person named Shannon?” It was vital she get an honest answer to that question right away.
“Only superficially.” His hand squeezed hers before letting go.
“Would you rather talk in the trailer?”
“No.” The answer came swiftly. “The view is fine up here.”
She tried to breathe normally. “My secretary said you’re thinking of building a new office complex.”
“I got past the thinking stage when I saw what you did with the Crompton warehouse.”
Warmth crept through her body. “That was a fun project.”
“Fun.” His lips twitched. “Which do you prefer? A virgin piece of ground or a condemned wreck?”
“Both of the above.”
“Ask a foolish question,” he muttered before smiling again. “Are you through here for today?”
That depended on who wanted to know, and for what reason. If she was wrong about his…
Her heart pounded in her ears. “I am.”
“Good. I’d like you to see the property. It’s about a twenty-minute drive from here.”
“In which direction?”
“West. Near Cedar Hills.”
The other side of town. “I’ll follow you in my truck.”
He seemed about to say something, then apparently thought the better of it. In a few strides he reached the cage and opened the door. He gave her a long, assessing glance as she stepped past him. They started their descent.
“I heard about the accident at the speedway. How bad were your brother’s injuries?”
“He escaped with bruised ribs. By now, I’d say Mitch has used up seven of his nine lives.”
“Jack has already started on a new cat!”
He started to laugh, and she joined him. “We drove to the hospital that evening to see if the drivers involved were going to be all right. To our relief, the ER nurse told us everyone had been released.”
Something flickered in his eyes. “What time did you get there?”
“Around quarter to eight.”
“Mitch and I must have just missed you.”
Catherine averted her gaze. Slow down. Calm down. “I watched your brother at the race. His red car flew around that track driving everyone else crazy, especially my brother. Jack said Mitch would have won the race if the other car hadn’t caught fire and created an accident.”
“I guess we’ll never know for sure, but there’s another race in Eugene this coming weekend.”
She could hardly breathe. “I know. Will your brother be able to drive this soon after being injured?”
“Does night follow day?” They arrived at the ground floor with a bounce. He opened the door. She was still smiling when he said, “Come to the race with me.”
The thing she’d wanted to happen was happening. “Do you think our brothers will mind us consorting with the enemy, so to speak?”
He grinned. “If they don’t approve of our consorting, I can think of any number of other things we could do. Even discuss business.”
“That might work.”
“It might interest you to know that Mitch is being paid handsomely to find a certain blonde who ran away from me at the speedway before I could learn her name.”
His admission thrilled Catherine. It meant she wasn’t the only one affected by their chance meeting.
“That wasn’t very nice of her.” His voice was level, without inflection. “She didn’t even leave a glass slipper. I’ve told my brother to check with every mechanic in Portland who’s ever worked on a vintage-model green MG.” All mirth had disappeared.
Catherine trembled because she sensed he wasn’t joking. In a quiet voice she said, “My brother’s pit crew takes care of my car.”
“I figured that out ten minutes ago.”
Something was going on here. Something beyond her control. It reminded her of the way she felt when a design took on a life of its own. Yet this was different. This was more.
Everything was g
oing too fast, propelling her toward a level of awareness she couldn’t explain. It frightened her. And it excited her.
As she headed for the trailer, he adjusted his long strides to stay abreast of her. “If you’ll give me your hat, I’ll put it away,” she told him.
When he pulled it off, she tried not to stare at the varying shades of wavy brown illuminated by the sun. He had healthy hair defined by a slight widow’s peak. The arrangement of strong masculine features, the lines of experience around his nose and mouth, made him an exceptionally attractive man.
Careful to keep her eyes down, she removed her hard hat and tossed both hats in the bin beside the door. The foreman on the project looked up from his desk.
“You’re leaving?”
“That’s right. I’ll come around again on Monday, Sol. If anybody needs to get hold of me, I can be reached on the cell phone. I’m driving out to look at a new building site and should be home in a couple of hours.”
How many times in her career had she said those exact words to a foreman or workman? Yet this afternoon they meant something entirely different.
This day wasn’t like any other.
This client wasn’t like any other.
“Shall we go in one car?” David enquired.
“It might be better if I followed you. I have an appointment downtown after our meeting. But thank you for offering.”
He nodded, then walked her to her truck. He opened the door and helped her inside.
What was perhaps most surprising was the fact that she let him. It had been years since she’d lowered her guard to this degree, years since she’d allowed anyone to treat her as anything other than a boss or one of the guys. Was it because he’d taken up residence in her mind? She’d been dreaming about him, and she remembered her dream images clearly—although that had hardly ever happened in the past.
As she sat behind the wheel of the truck, her eyes were almost even with his.
His expression sobered. “Drive carefully.”
Coming from anyone else, the warning might not have carried the same weight. But Catherine understood. Those were the same words the family told Jack before he left for a race.
Life was always precious, but never more so than now.
“You, too,” she whispered.
CHAPTER THREE
RELIEVED TO DISCOVER that she didn’t drive with her brother’s unconscious death wish, David reached for his cell phone and punched in his brother’s number.
“Hello?”
“Mitch?”
“Hey—give a guy a break! I haven’t had time to visit more than two garages since you dropped me off!”
“That’s why I’m calling. The woman in question has been found. Since I haven’t paid you for the hours you’ve put in, and you’ll never pay me for the psychiatric visit, why don’t we call it even?”
“It’s a deal. Hey…you sound happy!”
“That’s the understatement of a lifetime.”
“A lifetime? Those are strong words. What did you do, crash into her or something?” He laughed.
“Remember Crompton’s warehouse?”
“Not that again…”
“She designed its makeover. I’ll get back to you later.”
“Wait—”
David shut off the phone. He wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about this yet, not even Mitch.
It might be rude to stare at her through the rearview mirror, but he didn’t care. After finding her, he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight.
The daughter, not the father, had turned out to be CC Casey, architect extraordinaire.
And the other daughter? The unknown sister?
No matter how much David didn’t want to think about Shannon, she insisted upon intruding on his consciousness.
Would she have become an architect instead of a nurse if she’d been reared by Catherine’s architect father, too?
How much of a role did environment play in their behavior?
Or did the fact that Shannon was a nurse prove what the gene studies at his lab were suggesting—that identical twins were rarely truly identical?
David knew he was oversimplifying things. But he couldn’t help wondering about the disparate traits, the convergence of various individual attitudes, in each of the women. It was hard to define exactly what they were, these qualities, but they’d killed his initial interest in Shannon, yet made Catherine more desirable to him than any woman he’d ever met.
While he pondered those intangible differences, he found himself wondering why the Caseys had given up one of their twins for adoption in the first place. How did they decide which daughter to keep?
Had they kept it a secret from Catherine?
If she didn’t know she had a twin, then David had no legal or moral right to divulge that information, even if Shannon was searching for her.
Since unburdening himself to the doctor, David had been feeling immeasurably better about the past. Now it seemed he was caught in a new moral dilemma. The happiness and welfare of numerous lives were at stake here, including his own.
He certainly hadn’t meant to hurt Shannon by starting and then immediately ending something that wasn’t meant to be. However, he’d hoped that if she did have a twin, she’d be successful in finding him or her.
It had been her dream that her unknown sister or brother would answer the institute’s ad, providing a means by which they’d be united. But if Catherine had been kept in the dark all these years, then there was no way the twin studies project could be the catalyst to bring about a meeting of the two sisters. That wasn’t the institute’s function.
His responsibility to Shannon began and ended with information obtained through their database. Without any involvement on Catherine’s part, there would be no information. In that case, he’d be forced by the precariousness of the situation to close the book on Shannon.
So far, she’d shown no sign of giving up on a romantic relationship with him. If anything, her determination to be with him seemed more intense than ever, evidenced by the message she’d left with his secretary earlier today.
David had never known a woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer. Sometimes he felt Shannon’s behavior bordered on the abnormal, but maybe that was putting it too strongly. She was compulsive, anyway, and oddly insensitive to the desires of other people.
It was inconceivable to him that he could have such diametrically opposing thoughts and feelings about sisters who’d come from the same fertilized egg and been born exact copies of each other.
Yet it was a fact.
Unless, or until, Catherine revealed that she believed or knew she had an identical twin and wanted to find her sibling, David had no choice but to keep any knowledge of Shannon’s relationship to her a secret.
Earlier, when Catherine had asked him about the person named Shannon, he hadn’t sensed anything in her question beyond natural curiosity. Furthermore, she’d seemed happy with his answer. Therefore he was letting the matter go. In his heart he rejoiced that he could.
Since the day she’d bumped into him at the speedway, he’d wrestled with his conscience. But no longer. That was all in the past—unless Catherine indicated some awareness of a twin. He sensed, somehow, that she wouldn’t…. He doubted she had any idea.
Starting now, he was free to discover what there could be between him and the exciting woman driving right behind him. As they took the Skybridge route through Cedar Hills, he vowed that he wouldn’t let anything or anyone get in his way.
CATHERINE WATCHED David approach the truck. She had dreamed about this man, and he seemed uncannily familiar to her, yet the reality of being in his physical presence made it almost impossible to concentrate. She knew she had a job to do, but her legs felt as insubstantial as jelly, and her heart fluttered all over the place.
Designing a new building in the middle of a busy metropolis presented many challenges. But here, nature had already supplied the aesthetic framework, and pictures of the finish
ed product flooded Catherine’s mind. The abundance of evergreens covering David Britton’s twenty acres of land sent out images like a beacon transmitting signals.
He’d helped her from the cab, and they took a leisurely walk. David related nothing more than the dimensions of the twenty-acre lot. Once again, their minds seemed to communicate what was important.
Finally, Catherine said, “This is a choice piece of property. Tell me what’s going to go on inside the building you envision here.”
She listened attentively as he explained, taking deliberate pains not to look at him. It was distracting enough to be standing within touching distance.
When he’d finished talking about a subject that appeared to consume him, she said, “You mentioned earlier that you were impressed with the Crompton warehouse renovation. Does this mean you pictured your institute offices, clinic and lab under one roof?”
“I hadn’t thought that far. The only thing I can tell you is that you achieved something superb with that warehouse.”
The sincerity of his tone thrilled her. “Thank you. Perhaps one of the reasons you liked it so much was because it was meant to invite. I had certain walls removed and replaced by curving glass to make the lines of the building flow, to draw the viewer in. As well, every shop and restaurant inside the edifice provides a particular service to the public. Therefore it required an all-of-a-piece look to say that no one part was more important than the other. To do a good job, the design should enhance the function.
“In the case of your institute, you have several functions going on, most of which are not shared with the general public. For example, the lab houses scientific experimentation, which is off-limits to anyone except authorized personnel and the subjects being tested.
“There’s the main business section, where the staff handles phone, computer and Internet correspondence. That, too, is off-limits. You have meeting and consultation rooms, and a library. Then there’s your own private suite of offices, which ought to be separately maintained.
The Unknown Sister Page 4