Taking On Twins

Two

One month after that first Valentine kiss, Wyatt lay on a blanket in the Memorial Union Quad, Annie curled at his side, her head resting on her backpack. She was close enough to set him on fire with desire, but not close enough to kiss. Oh, yeah. Wyatt released his frustration in a long, slow breath directed at the high clouds that scudded by.

That was Annie for you.

It was a beautiful spring day. Here in Prosperino, the college campus by the sea was a riot of color and the fragrant aroma of a landscape in bloom. A perfect day for lovers. For kissing. For ducking off into the bushes for a little “hot and bothered.”

Wyatt stripped off his T-shirt to better work on his tan. He glanced at Annie. She was studying her biology.

For crying out loud, didn’t she ever give it a rest? He had some biology he’d like to show her. He flexed a biceps and watched her from his peripheral vision to see if she noticed. She didn’t. He flopped over onto his back.

Annie was a nice girl. The type of girl a guy brought home to mother. Even the kind of kooky, hormone-ravaged woman his foster mother, Meredith, had been lately.

Yep. Annie Summers was the kind of girl a guy married.

The renegade thought shocked him and he nearly choked on his gum. Married? Where had that come from?

The pink tip of her tongue protruded from her mouth as she scrunched her brow and highlighted endless paragraphs of proton/neutron-type information. He groaned, low in his throat. She was driving him batty.

Overhead, seagulls wheeled and cried, begging the students for leftover crumbs from lunch. Annie was such a sucker for the noisy critters. She called them “baby” and “honey” and enticed them with bits of her sandwich. She didn’t even do that for him, he thought grumpily.

He called the stupid, noisy birds “air-rats” and shooed them off. They reminded them too much of himself as a boy he guessed. Always begging for food.

He fired a pebble at one now, and without looking, Annie reached up and smacked his hand. He chuckled. She was so cool.

They’d been dating for nearly a month now, and it had been the slowest, most torturous month of his life. Courting this woman took finesse. Savoir-faire. A patience born of wisdom and maturity.

A veritable sainthood.

Hell, he’d be a monk by the time she got done with him. So far, she’d given up three dinky little good-night kisses and some hand-holding at the midnight movie. He’d relived every moment of these whisper kisses a million times after each successful union of their lips. But always, she’d push him away, shyly claiming that she needed time.

Time? Time for what? he wanted to know.

Normally, he’d have moved on to greener pastures by now, but this was Annie.

Annie was different.

Annie was his soulmate. He’d known that from the moment his lips had touched hers back there on Valentine’s Day and a clap of thunder had gone off in his head that left him deaf to any kind of rhyme or reason when it came to one flame-haired, fiery-tempered, good-humored, overly studious Annie Summers.

“Hey.” He reached over and tugged a strand of her wild red mop away from her cheek.

“Mmm?” Her highlighter squeaked as she found a particularly interesting section in her text.

“Want to go to a party on my dorm floor tonight?”

“Sure.”

“Really?” Annie wanted to party tonight? During dead week? Had a Frosty Freeze opened in hell?

“Yeah. I could use a study break.”

Wisely, Wyatt bit back the sound of impatience he’d been on the verge of snorting.

Study break?

This would be no milk and cookies study break. This was to be a kegger of mass proportion. An out-and-out rock-n-roll, get-down-and-funky brawl. He couldn’t wait. Right now his roommate and a couple other guys who were freshly twenty-one were out scoring the beer and other accoutrements. He could fairly hear the electric guitars tuning up from here. By ten o’clock that night, people would be swinging from the chandeliers. He just hoped Annie would loosen up for once and enjoy herself.

No such luck.

By ten that night, Annie was angrily shrugging into her slightly beer-stained jacket and marching out the door and back to her room. Wyatt, whipped puppy that he envisioned himself to be these days, followed, bellowing her name like a lovesick bull.

“Annie!”

“Shut up,” she barked.

She jerked her arm out of his grasp when he finally did catch her out on the sidewalk. The moon was full—which no doubt accounted for at least some of the insanity up on his dorm floor—and he could clearly see the disgust etched into her flawless brow.

“But wait. I can explain. I had no idea, really, that it was going to be such a big, well, riot, actually—”

“Bull.”

“No, really, I’m not lying. I knew it’d be wild, but not that bad. Especially that guy with the can of Crisco. He was kidding, I think. Anyway, I’m sorry. Forgive me?”

She slowed slightly. He was breathless. Man. When the woman was mad, she could move. They reached the end of the street that fronted his dorm and Annie turned down a main drag that led to the library.

No doubt she had some studying to do, he thought sourly. The street lamps shone through the trees and cast eerie patterns on the pavement. Now and then a Thursday night reveler or two would pass. Staggering, slurring, singing and generally firing Annie up even more. He grinned, imagining that her face was nearly as hot as her hair.

As her body.

Oh, man, she had to forgive him.

Out of energy reserves, he grabbed her arm, and when she tried to jerk away, he didn’t let go.

“Annie.” He was breathing heavy now, from the exertion or from the effect her anger had on his libido, he couldn’t tell. “Annie, please, honey, I’m sorry.”

Annie sighed. “I can’t believe you like hanging out with those…those…” She groped for the perfect word, meant to scathe. To blister. To singe.

“Animals?” he supplied helpfully.

“Yes!” she exploded, sending the word into the next zip code. “They were horrible!” She gave her arms a frenetic waving. “All gropy and dopey and—”

“Freaky and geeky?” He pulled her off the beaten trail and into a small grove of trees at the side of the library. “Goofy and doofy?” Steering her against a tree, he leaned across her body, balancing against a smooth trunk with his palm. Looking into her eyes, he arched a brow and grinned. “Dancy and fancy?”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“Why not?”

“I’m mad and I want to stay that way.”

“What if I don’t want you to?”

“Tough noogies,” she said petulantly.

He brought his lips to hers and rubbed them lightly across. “Don’t be mad,” he whispered into her mouth. Her breath was sweet. Minty and warm and fresh and…Annie.

“I can’t help it. I want you to respect me. Not treat me like some kind of brain-dead, sex-crazed party animal.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, raining kisses in a line along her jaw until he reached that little place behind her ear where she’d dabbed something musky. “I’ll never treat you like a sex-crazed animal again,” he murmured, reclaiming her mouth and speaking against her lips, her nose, her chin.

“Promise?” she breathed.

He noted that her lungs were laboring nearly as hard as his now.

“Promise.”

“What?” she murmured and wound her arms around his neck. “What did you promise? I—I forgot.”

“I promise to treat you like a sex-crazed party animal.”

“Good.” She didn’t seem to realize, or care about, his mistake.

Wyatt wasn’t actually sure that it was a mistake, but he was too busy filling his hands with her silky red curls to analyze. Just the same, before she could protest, he closed his mouth over hers for their first real kiss. A deep, soul-searching kiss that he put everything he had into, knowing that—for this evening anyway—it was all he’d get from Annie.

He eased her flat up against the tree trunk and pressed his body into hers, absently noting how well her valleys fit his hills and vice versa. As he lay over her, he lowered his hands from where they’d been tangled in her hair and captured her wrists and pulled her arms up over her head.

She writhed beneath him, arching against him, returning his kiss with every bit of the passion he’d dreamed of from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. From deep in her throat, a whimper of sorts issued, and she melted against him, her head moving back and forth, seeking, searching for a better fit of her mouth under his.

He moved with her, accommodating, anticipating her every move, straining to become a single unit with her. He released her arms and she wound them at the back of his neck. His own hands settled at her jaw. Beneath his onslaught, Wyatt could feel her losing herself, becoming weightless, boneless, fearless. He knew because the same thing was happening to him.

It was a blissful feeling that he’d never experienced before. A feeling he never wanted to lose. A feeling of unity.

Of belonging.

This. This must be what love was all about, his muzzy mind reasoned, as he tore his mouth from hers just long enough to gasp for air and go back for more. No wonder so many people spent their lives searching for it. If this was at the end of the rainbow, count him in.

With his fingers, he traced the contours of her face, memorizing the feel of her cheeks, the union of their mouths, the way her fabulous hair tickled his cheeks, his neck. He breathed in the sea air, the scents of spring flowers, the velvety, cool darkness, the scent of Annie’s perfume mixed with spilled beer and old leather. He listened to the serenading crickets, the distant music and laughter of a party in progress and the footfalls of the occasional passerby. He committed each of these things to memory, realizing this was an experience he never wanted to forget.

What Wyatt hadn’t realized at the time was that this very kiss welded him to Annie Summers for the rest of his natural life.

Even after she married another guy and bore his sons.

Wyatt woke with a start, and for a moment, couldn’t remember where he was. Slowly reality began to dawn and he realized that he’d fallen asleep in his clothes. Again. And dreamed of Annie. Again.

Blearily, he rolled on his side and checked the clock. Three in the morning. The Hacienda de Alegria was wrapped in the kind of cottony, deep silence that only happened at that particular hour. He sat up and pulled off his T-shirt and flung it on the floor.

He’d been sweating.

Must have been some dream.

Right now, he could only recall fragments, but as usual, Annie played a starring role in his bed. He unzipped his jeans, eased them over his hips and kicked them off. Then, reaching for the light on his nightstand, he clicked the room into a blackness the color of the hole in his heart. Even now, fully awake, he could feel Annie’s body pressed against his.

How had he ever been stupid enough to let her go?

Back then, as a child of a broken home, he’d had something to prove, he guessed. Making it to the top was all-important.

When Annie had to leave school during her junior year and return home after her father had a debilitating stroke, their long-distance relationship had begun to suffer under the strain. She’d felt strongly about her family ties and decided that she was needed at home to help run the family business. It was a heartrending decision, but family had come first to Annie.

And at the time, being so young, he hadn’t understood the deeply precious gift that family could be. But Annie had. To Annie, family was everything.

Always.

Still.

And now, seven years later, Wyatt lived in regret.

His Annie had married someone else. Borne his children and was now his widow. She would probably always love the father of her sons and carry his insurmountable memory in her heart till the day she died.

He could have been the father of those children. Her one and only love. If only he hadn’t thrown it all away for a meaningless career that did not love him back at the end of the day.

Wyatt punched his pillow. He knew eating his heart out was fruitless, so he tried to envision Annie older now. Grayer. Life-ravaged. Age-spotted. Stoop-shouldered. Knock-kneed. Tongue-tied. Rotten-toothed.

Wyatt’s chuckle was grim.

Seeing Annie face to face again would no doubt be the only way he’d ever be able to fully purge her from his soul. To get on with his life. To realize that what they had was now dead. Over. Ancient history.

By now she was undoubtedly a battle-scarred old crone. The nagging, perpetually weary mother of two identical little demons. He was lucky to be footloose and fancy-free of that ugly scene.

And, if he repeated this mantra often enough, he might just start to believe it.

The next morning in the wee Saturday hours, after a quick discussion with Rand, Wyatt phoned the airline from his room and reserved the last seat on a flight leaving from San Francisco to Seattle. From Seattle he’d catch a commuter to Jackson Hole and be in Keyhole by early lunchtime. Then he called and arranged for a cab to meet him out front in fifteen minutes.

At least now he had a legitimate excuse for going to Keyhole without looking like the loser he feared Annie would see in him. He hoped she was still single. He guessed that she was probably was. He’d have called and asked before now, but until this deal with Emily came up, he hadn’t been able to figure out a way to barge back into her life. A life that seemed to have gone on quite happily without him. He had to give her credit. That was something he’d been unable to do.

Maybe this trip would give him a chance to apologize and maybe work on a sense of closure, if nothing else.

For once, Wyatt was glad that Lucy was a terminal matchmaker.

He could barely believe that within a matter of hours, he’d be in the same town as Annie. His gut clenched and his heart picked up speed at the thought. He and Rand had agreed to keep this trip low-key with the family. No need to risk Emily’s location by letting too many in on the secret.

Already, he’d repacked and made his excuses—an unexpected business appointment in the Midwest—to Liza, Nick and Joe, whom he’d found having coffee out by the pool. They’d all been disappointed, but understanding. Especially since he’d promised Liza a pound of flesh if he didn’t make it back in time for her wedding.

Nobody had a hard time believing that Wyatt put business first. He always had.

They had no way of knowing that he was a changed man. Or at the very least, an evolving man.

On his way out to await his cab, Wyatt breathed in all the familiar morning scents of Joe Colton’s “House of Joe.” Rich, aromatic coffee wafted in from the kitchen and a warm breeze carried the fragrance of blooming roses in from the courtyard where Nick and Liza were to be married next week. The bakers were working overtime, and though the fresh cinnamon rolls and coffee cakes smelled heavenly, Wyatt couldn’t eat. He was too keyed up over the thought of seeing Annie again.

Before he stepped out the front door, Wyatt heard voices coming from the parlor, just off the foyer. He paused to poke his head inside and bid a quick goodbye to whoever might be in there. As he cracked the door, the voices grew heated, rising in both volume and intensity.

Uncle Graham and his son, Jackson, were at it again.

Grimacing, Wyatt backed away. Rather than chance drawing their attention, he left the door ajar and moved as far away from the parlor as possible, and still be in the house and able to watch for his cab through the leaded glass sidelights at the front doors. Unfortunately, as much as he tried to block it out, it was impossible not to overhear the content of the disturbing conversation.

Jackson’s voice had an ominous, feral quality. “Okay, Dad. One more time. The reason you’ve been making these massive deposits into this mystery account is because you are being…blackmailed?”

“Keep your voice down,” Graham growled.

“Why the hell should I keep my voice down? Blackmail is illegal! Whoever is doing this to you can be stopped. Get yourself a good lawyer. I’m available. If you don’t want me, the family is loaded with them. Just ask Rand or Wyatt. I’m sure they can think of a way to bail you out of whatever mess you’ve gotten yourself into.” Jackson’s voice was filled with the parental censure usually reserved for father to son and not vice versa.

Wyatt could hear the soles of Jackson’s shoes tattooing out an agitated beat that must have had him pacing in furious circles.

“That wouldn’t be prudent.”

“What, you don’t like Rand? Wyatt?”

“Has nothing to do with them. Or you.”

“Then what?”

“I’m being blackmailed by a member of the family.”

The echo of pacing footsteps stopped.

At this, Wyatt felt a warning tension grip the muscles at the back of his neck and he abandoned his position behind the giant potted palm and as casually as he could—given the circumstances—moved to the parlor door to listen. This was far too interesting to ignore.

Jackson sounded incredulous. “Come again?”

“I’m being blackmailed by a member of this family.”

“Who?”

“I find it difficult to say, as I don’t want to tarnish your image of someone you hold to be nothing less than a saint.” Graham sounded smug. Arrogant. A man who had not one whit of his brother, Joe’s, grace and maturity.

“I find your childish games tiresome, Dad. Why don’t you cut to the chase before I doze off?”

“Can’t have that.” The legs of a chair scraped against the floor. “Perhaps this will wake you up. I’m being blackmailed by Meredith.”

Silence.

“Cat got your tongue?”

Jackson snorted. “Why would Aunt Meredith blackmail you?”

Graham seemed to take great pleasure in dropping this particular bomb. “Because I’m Teddy’s father.” The snick of a lighter sounded and a haze of pungent cigar smoke filtered out to the foyer. “Surprised?”

Silence.

“Son, you seem a little dismayed by the indelicate truth.” Graham’s harsh laughter rumbled. “Having a hard time believing that Joe’s lily-pure wife could take pleasure in my bed? Or perhaps it’s finding out that you have a little brother that’s a bit off-putting.”

A sound of pure disgust issued from Jackson’s throat.

“Not so perfect after all, are they?” Graham sucked on his cigar for a moment. “Still have good old Uncle Joe and Aunt Meredith up on the damned pedestal?”

Wyatt’s mind raced. More than ever, he was convinced that Meredith was not Meredith. Emily’s situation seemed increasingly grave with every tick of the parlor clock. Clearly, Patsy Portman had a dangerous agenda. He couldn’t get to Keyhole soon enough. A sense of urgency had his mouth dry as day-old toast and his heart roaring like a wounded lion in his ears. He’d have to call Rand and Lucy from Keyhole and tell them what he’d overheard.