by Cindy Gerard
“Oh, darling boy, how funny you should ask. Best sit down for this, I’ve got news that’s going to shock you.”
Shock had been the right word, Daniel thought later that morning when he caught up with his sister Claudia right where his mother said she’d be, at the Ritz-Carlton, schmoozing money for one of her favorite causes.
He momentarily tabled his mother’s startling news as he nursed a soda and watched Claudia covertly from the bar while she charmed—or, depending on your viewpoint, steamrollered—a couple of movers and shakers out of a substantial contribution for an inner-city day-care center. Animated as ever, her blue eyes danced as she tossed her fine blond hair over her shoulder and dimpled prettily for her marks. No one could work a room like Claudia, he thought with pride.
He didn’t approach her until the men had left, considerably lighter in the wallet. She was stuffing facts and figures into her briefcase when she spotted him.
“Daniel,” she squealed and flew into his arms. “Where did you come from? How long have you been here? My God! It’s great to see you. Sit. Sit and talk to me.”
“Well,” he said after they’d caught up on the basics, “now that I know what you’re working on, care to tell me whom you’ve targeted for your latest personal fix-up project?”
Claudia threw him a haughty look. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Okay. So she didn’t want to talk about whom she was dating or even if she was dating, which told him he’d hit the nail on the head. Claudia had a tendency lately to become involved with men who needed something fixed in their lives. It worried him that maybe she’d been seriously damaged by her breakup with Jonathan Norman two years ago and that she’d rather deal with anyone’s problems but her own.
“So have you been to see the folks?” she asked, making it clear that her love life was off-limits.
Fine, he thought, and they launched into a discussion of the bombshell his mother had dropped.
“I want to make sure I’ve got this straight,” he said, then restated what his mother had told him. “We have a long-lost and recently discovered cousin.”
“Karen Rawlins,” Claudia said with a confirming nod. “At least that’s her birth name. But the fact is that her father, who went by the name of Timothy Rawlins, was actually Dad’s twin brother.”
“And our uncle Luke,” he mused aloud, still struggling with the news. “You know, he was lost so long ago that I rarely think about him.” Their father’s twin brother had been kidnapped from the hospital shortly after the twins’ birth. He’d never been seen or heard from since. Until now. “Since we never knew him, he was more like this storybook character that Dad mentions when he’s feeling melancholy.”
“Well, he was real,” Claudia supplied. “Evidently, the people who abducted him raised him by the name Timothy Rawlins. Uncle Luke—sorry, Tim Rawlins—married at some point and Karen was born. It wasn’t until both Karen’s parents were killed in a car accident a year ago that she started questioning the truth about her father’s identity.”
Daniel leaned back, slinging his arm over the chair back. “Mom said Karen had found her grandmother’s diary and that had raised her questions.”
Claudia pushed her hair back from her face. “That’s what got her going, but since Karen’s grandparents are also deceased she had no one to ask about her past. She let it go for a while but then, well, remember the family picture we had taken at the reunion last month? Right before the skirts walloped the shirts in volleyball?” she reminded him with a needling grin. “Well, some wire service picked up the picture, Karen saw it and did a double take when she saw Dad because he was a dead ringer for her father.”
“I’d forgotten that Dad and Uncle Luke were identical twins,” Daniel mused aloud, thinking of his own fraternal twin, Derrick, who was as different from him as night from day.
Claudia nodded. “Karen started digging again. Between the diary and researching old newspaper accounts of Uncle Luke’s kidnapping, she pieced it all together that she was related to this bunch of gelato Barones.”
“This is too wild.”
“It’s kind of cool, actually. When you meet her, you’ll see that she’s a Barone. The genes show. She’s also very nice. And a little lost right now, I think. She’s searching for something to hold on to. Dad’s been pretty emotional about the whole thing, as well.”
“So Mom said. While he’s sad because now he knows for a fact that Luke is dead, he’s also very happy to have some small piece of his twin back.”
“Mom told you about the big welcome-to-the-family party planned for Karen?”
“Oh yeah. She was very clear that my presence is required. Don’t worry. I’ll stick around.” The party was a couple of weeks away. He hadn’t originally planned on hanging around that long. For a lot of reasons. One reason he hadn’t counted on was a silly little turtle with beguiling pink cheeks.
“Speaking of twins, have you seen Derrick yet?”
No. Daniel hadn’t seen his brother yet and that was why, after he left Claudia, he drove straight to the Baronessa Gelati manufacturing plant in Brookline. He always made the rounds when he came home, and since his other sister Emily and Derrick both worked in Quality Management—Derrick as VP and Emily as Derrick’s secretary—he’d kill two birds with one stone.
“I can’t believe Derrick’s got you working on a Saturday.” Daniel grinned as Emily looked up from her desk and spotted him. It was like an instant replay of the scene with Claudia. She flew up and into his arms with a squeal. “What does your fireman have to say about that?”
“Shane pulled the weekend shift so it’s okay.”
Daniel searched her sparkling brown eyes and liked what he saw. “And life with the fireman? That’s okay, too?”
“More than okay.” Emily beamed, then blushed. “In five more months I’ll be Mrs. Shane Cummings and then it will be even better than okay.”
Daniel touched a finger to her cheek, happy to see her so in love. “I’ll be there,” he answered her un-spoken question. “Nothing could make me miss it.”
He hugged her against him, touching his lips to the top of her head. “Derrick around?”
“Derrick is always around,” his twin said gruffly from behind him. “Unlike you.”
Daniel turned. His brother was standing in his open office doorway, wearing his usual designer suit and dour expression. It was hard sometimes for Daniel to believe they were from the same gene pool, let alone that they were fraternal twins. Sometimes it seemed that the only thing they shared in common was the Barone name and their brown hair. Derrick’s eyes were brown to Daniel’s blue, his manner harsh and grim compared to Daniel’s easygoing nature.
“Well,” Daniel said with an amiable smile, “someone has to be the slacker in the family.”
“You said it, I didn’t,” Derrick said with a sour smile.
“It’s always so good to see you, too, Derrick.” Daniel tucked Emily under his shoulder. “It’s leveling, you know?”
“You guys,” Emily interrupted, squeezing Daniel’s waist and scowling at Derrick. “If anyone walked in on this little exchange and didn’t know you, they’d think you hated each other.”
Yeah, Daniel thought later as he pulled out of the parking lot and replayed his strained conversation with Derrick. Anyone would think that they hated each other, even though they’d both sucked it up and made an effort to be civil for Emily’s benefit.
Things had always been that way between them. Tense—bordering on hostile. Lately it had even been worse, with Derrick’s actions defensive, bitter and on edge. Their strained relationship was one of the reasons Daniel didn’t stick around for long when he came home. It crossed his mind then that Derrick might be one of the reasons he’d left in the first place. And his own frustration with his twin was one of the reasons he found himself looking forward to dinner with a certain librarian.
The honest truth was that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her,
though he still didn’t have a firm handle on why. Maybe, he thought, heading west on Storrow along the Boston side of the Charles River, it had something to do with the way she managed to make him smile for no apparent reason other than the simple fact that she existed.
Five
It was later afternoon, heading toward evening, by the time Daniel had checked in with his dad and a couple of his married buddies. He made a quick pit stop at his apartment to shower, shave and pull on a clean black T-shirt and a pair of tan chinos. Shoving his bare feet into comfortably worn loafers, he snagged his keys and headed for Phoebe’s, still trying to pin down his preoccupation with her.
On the way over, he had a breakthrough.
“Bingo,” he said aloud, slapping the flat of his palm on the steering wheel.
During the past few years, he had wined, dined and bedded some of the most glamorous and sought-after women in the world. Among them were a Swedish model, an American actress and an Austrian princess. All were sophisticated and self-assured, witty and willowy. They’d been big thrills, wild nights and high maintenance. What they hadn’t been was comfortable.
That was what Phoebe gave him. Comfort. She was like comfort food for his soul, he decided, grinning over his analogy. Well, maybe that was going a little overboard, but basically, that was it.
He’d spent, what? A total of an hour, hour and a half with her during two brief encounters? He hardly knew her, yet she made him feel a sort of peace, a pleasant fullness, an ease like he’d never felt before, even with his own family.
His mother was deeply embroiled in her civic projects and bridge marathons. His father was married to his work. Both wanted him to be something he wasn’t, to do something he couldn’t. Claudia, God love her, was single-handedly championing every worthy cause known to man. Emily was so wrapped up in her fireman that she saw nothing but him, which was exactly the way it should be. Then there was Derrick.
That hollow, empty feeling he often felt around his twin only seemed to intensify as the years and the distance between them widened. It frustrated him that they couldn’t find some common ground other than blood to bind them, saddened him that he missed what they should have had together.
And then along came Phoebe. Out of the blue, she popped into his life, made him forget about what was lacking in it and simply made him smile.
“Comfort food,” he mused aloud, warming to the idea as he pulled into her driveway. It would explain a lot of things, like maybe that comfort level she induced was what had drawn him to her in the first place.
He was feeling smug over his conclusion and congratulating himself for recovering his perspective when Phoebe answered his knock at seven-thirty sharp. He took one look at her and any misaligned notion of associating her with chicken soup and apple pie cut and ran like a tight-end sprinting toward the goal line.
So did the power of speech.
She looked incredible.
She looked edible—and he wasn’t talking PBJ’s.
She looked like a long night of self-restraint.
“Hi,” she said when he just stood there, captivated by the sight of her.
Unaware of the slow smile playing at the corners of his mouth, he let his gaze linger over her gauzy, lemon-yellow sundress. It was soft and feminine and so whimsically sheer it was almost as transparent as the uncertainty in her eyes.
She had no idea how sexy she looked. No idea that even though the sleeveless dress was cut modestly low above her breasts and draped over slim hips to fall to midcalf, there was something inordinately seductive about it. Something essentially romantic.
A row of delicate shell buttons started at her knees, nipped in at her waist then ascended to that warm, mysterious place between her breasts. Though the possibilities those buttons brought to mind were implied not overt, they brought a very erotic image to his mind. One flick of his finger and those lush breasts that she’d successfully hidden behind a blousy tank top and a cartoon tortoiseshell would spill warm and heavy into his hands. More than fill them.
The surprises didn’t end there. She’d gone to special pains for him, he realized, and along with the pleasure, he experienced a twinge of guilt over her efforts.
She’d curled her hair. Soft, silky wisps lay about her face like glossy, butterscotch taffy. Subtly applied makeup heightened the natural peaches-and-cream color of her cheeks and enhanced the softness of those wide, full lips that he couldn’t look at without associating with rose petals and hot, wet kisses.
“No glasses,” he said as it occurred to him what else was different about her.
“Contacts.” She gave a little shrug and met his gaze with huge, round eyes of the palest, most soulful caramel that were framed by lashes as thick and lush as sable.
She’s so shy, he thought as she averted her gaze and turned back toward the living room.
“I’ll, um, just get my purse.”
He shoved his hands in his pants pockets and was busy catching his breath, regrouping his thoughts and studying the stupid plaster frog sitting on her stoop when she breezed out of the house and closed the door behind her. Her toes caught his attention then. The same hot-red toenails that he’d noticed the first time he’d seen her peeked out from flat, white espadrilles and brought his runaway hormones to heel.
Go figure that it was the siren-red toenail polish that settled him down. It was the toenail polish that reminded him that this was a woman who guarded herself closely. She would never intentionally flaunt her sexuality. Instead, she indulged in little ways. Secret ways.
Like let’s-get-naked red toenail polish that hardly anyone would ever see or even notice.
It made him wonder what else she indulged in. A hundred illicit pictures of what lay beneath that simple yet seductive dress played through his mind like flash cards as he walked her to the car. White lace? Silky and sheer? A teddy or a thong? Or nothing at all.
“All set?” he asked, finding his voice as he settled her into the passenger seat.
She nodded.
“Lookin’ good, Phoebe,” he said belatedly, because she was and because it was suddenly important that she knew it. And because, he realized as his heart thumped him hard in the chest, if he hadn’t said something, he might have hauled her across the console and onto his lap and discovered just how fast he could get those buttons undone.
“Must have been the mud pack,” she said with a little quirk of her lips that sent an arc of arousal shooting through his blood that he tried to cover with a chuckle.
Comfort food? What a joke. A man in his present state of simmering arousal was far from comfortable—especially when he knew there wasn’t going to be any relief from that quarter. Not with her.
So now what, Barone? He’d railroaded her into spending time with him for purely selfish reasons. His reasons were still selfish, but they’d shifted from a simple quest for companionship to something else entirely. And that just couldn’t happen.
It was going to take everything in him to keep his hands off her. And it wasn’t because he’d been out in the Kalahari too long. It was because he wanted her.
Because he could hurt her, though, he wasn’t going to act on that wanting.
He pulled out into traffic, then realized the silence had become awkward. He had to end it if they were going to make it through this night with any semblance of normalcy. “So, what are you hungry for?”
She stared out the window. “Your call.”
As he zipped through the streets, Daniel tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel, aware that she was still uncomfortable around him. Her face, when she’d discovered him at the library had asked, Why? Why are you here?
Well, he’d thought he had it figured out. Until now. Now he knew only one thing: She wore red toenail polish. Convoluted as that leap of logic seemed, it served to remind him that he absolutely could not get involved with her romantically.
Everything about Phoebe added up to long-term commitment, hearth, home, family. You name it, she should have
it. Everything about him subtracted from that package. But damn it, he liked being with her. He wanted to be with her.
No harm, no foul, she’d said last night when he’d left her. Okay. She’d made it clear that she knew there was no romance on the horizon between them. With that kind of sanction, why not just stay the course? Just keep it loose and friendly between them? He knew how to do that. He was a master of no strings, no complications. He could say the right words and make the right noises that would guarantee they kept it casual.
And this libido of his that had stepped front and center and volunteered to take things to a different level didn’t call the shots. It hadn’t in the past, and he wasn’t going to let it now. He wasn’t going to hurt her. And if he took their relationship past platonic, he would.
What he was going to do was simply enjoy her friendship for the little bit of time he was in Boston. In the process, maybe he could figure out a way to help her deal with Jason Collins.
He felt himself level out again. That would work. He was worried about her, after all. He could help her cope with that creep and not feel as if he was being entirely self-serving.
He cut a glance her way, then back to traffic as his jaw clenched. All he had to do to evade complications was avoid thinking about the way she looked in that dress, avoid imagining what she looked like out of it. All he had to do was forget about that kiss, the one that shouldn’t have happened. The one that shouldn’t have been so sweet and so wild and so incredible that he was starting to wonder if it had been a hallucination brought on by jet lag and sleep deprivation.
If only…
“So how do you feel about pizza?” Phoebe heard Daniel ask through a haze of thick, face-flushing embarrassment.
How did she feel about pizza? At the moment? Well, she felt the same way about pizza that she felt about raw liver and an old maid librarian who tried to be something she wasn’t. The thought turned her stomach.
“Pizza’s fine,” she said and fought back the humiliating recollection of Daniel’s blank reaction when he’d opened the door and gotten a gander at her all decked out in her finest, like this was a real date or something. Like she’d thought he was going to take one look at her feeble attempts to look pretty for him and sweep her into another toe-curling kiss. Like he really cared that she’d shaved her legs and opted to slip into one of two sets of truly sexy underwear that she owned.