Be sure to look up the reading group

discussion questions at the end of the book!

“I’ve wanted to do this since I met you,” Brady said.

He stole another kiss from Libby’s mouth, and then another.

“It isn’t that long ago,” she answered. Couldn’t even think, at the moment. Felt like hours…or like months. It wasn’t relevant somehow.

“Seems longer. Seems…intense.” He kissed her hair and her temples, coaxing her to give him her mouth once more. Libby didn’t want to give it yet. She still needed the sound of his breathing, his heart.

“It has been, Brady. In a lot of ways, we jumped in at the deep end because of the girls. Are we just feeling like this because our daughters are twins?”

“That’s too complicated, isn’t it?” he said slowly, at last.

It probably was. He was right.

But nothing that was happening tonight felt complicated. It felt simple. A man and a woman, and chemistry so strong it was like a sorcerer’s spell.

Dear Reader,

Step into warm and wonderful July with six emotional stories from Silhouette Special Edition. This month is full of heart-thumping drama, healing love and plenty of babies!

I’m thrilled to feature our READERS’ RING selection, Balancing Act (SE#1552), by veteran Mills & Boon and Silhouette Romance author Lilian Darcy. This talented Australian writer delights us with a complex tale of a couple marrying for the sake of their twin daughters, who were separated at birth. The twins and parents are newly reunited in this tender and thought-provoking read. Don’t miss it!

Sherryl Woods hooks readers with this next romance from her miniseries, THE DEVANEYS. In Patrick’s Destiny (SE#1549), an embittered hero falls in love with a gentle woman who helps him heal a rift with his family. Return to the latest branch of popular miniseries, MONTANA MAVERICKS: THE KINGSLEYS, with Moon Over Montana (SE#1550) by Jackie Merritt. Here, an art teacher can’t help but moon over a rugged carpenter who renovates her apartment—and happens to be good with his hands!

We are happy to introduce a multiple-baby-focused series, MANHATTAN MULTIPLES, launched by Marie Ferrarella with And Babies Make Four (SE#1551), which relates how a hardheaded businessman and a sweet-natured assistant, who loved each other in high school, reunite many years later and dive into parenthood. His Brother’s Baby (SE#1553) by Laurie Campbell is the dramatic tale of a woman determined to take care of herself and her baby girl, but what happens when her baby’s handsome uncle falls onto her path? In She’s Expecting (SE#1554) by Barbara McMahon, an ambitious hero is wildly attracted to his new secretary—his new pregnant secretary—but steels himself from mixing business with pleasure.

As you can see, we have a lively batch of stories, delivering the very best in page-turning romance. Happy reading!

Sincerely,

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor

Balancing Act
Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LILIAN DARCY

has written over fifty books for Silhouette Romance and Harlequin Mills & Boon Medical Romance (Prescription Romance). Her first book for Silhouette appeared on the Waldenbooks Series Romance Bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 381, Hackensack, NJ 07602 or e-mail her at lildarcy@austarmetro.com.au.

Dear Reader,

This was always a special book for me, and I was so pleased when it was scheduled as my first Special Edition novel. Libby and Brady really needed a long book with a rich emotional tone to tell their story fully.

The week after my editor phoned with the news, I flew from Australia to Denver to attend the Romance Writers of America annual conference. On the flight from San Francisco to Denver there were four darling little Korean babies going to their new adoptive homes in the U.S. and this seemed like a perfect omen for Balancing Act. One of the flight attendants and I stood at the back of the plane for half the flight, holding two of the babies. They were smiling and bright-eyed and totally adorable. We got quite teary thinking of the long journey they were making to their new life and their new parents. It was easy to believe that there was something magical and predestined about the whole thing.

As you’ll see when you read Balancing Act, Libby and Brady embrace their destiny when they realize that the two babies they’ve independently adopted are identical twins. It’s not an easy journey for them, but when the happiness of their daughters is at stake, there’s no choice.

I really hope you enjoy this book.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Readers’ Ring Discussion Group Questions

Chapter One

Brady Buchanan would be here with his little daughter in twenty minutes, maybe less. Libby McGraw hadn’t even heard of the man four days ago, but already, without yet having met him, she had the strongest intuition that he was going to be an important figure in her life.

“If I hadn’t entered Colleen in the Bright and Beautiful baby contest,” she muttered to herself, “I might never have known…”

A part of her regretted that contest bitterly now, although she’d been so pleased and proud and excited when Colleen had won and had been photographed for the magazine, “with proud mother Lisa-Belle McGraw, of Minnesota.”

Libby tried to focus on something—anything—but she couldn’t. There was a nagging, crampy ache low in her stomach and she knew it was only partly physical. Circling back to the bathroom mirror for the third time, she fussed with her appearance a little more. She pulled the clips out of her hair, then combed it, twisted it up and put the clips back in.

No, she decided. Leave it down.

Out came the clips again. Up went the brush to put in some shine. Yes, her hair definitely looked better framing her face today. Softer. And it camouflaged the fact that she looked so stressed-out and tired.

She reapplied her lip gloss in a brighter shade, then wondered if it, too, left her skin looking too white. She tended to lose color when she was stressed. Since Monday, she’d gone through her makeup at twice the normal rate and had slept about half the hours she needed.

She heard a sound, listened in case it was Colleen and, creeping into her daughter’s room, found her still napping. The dark, silky hair around her temples was a little damp, as if she was hot. Libby was hot, too. She felt as if she was burning up.

It was just after four in the afternoon. Friday afternoon. He—Brady Buchanan—had said that his flight was getting in at quarter to three. He had to pick up his rental car, then check himself and his daughter into their motel. It was one of the motels right opposite the Mall of America, just across Interstate 494, which ran along beside the airport.

When he’d checked in, he was coming right over. The drive across the river into St. Paul would take him around fifteen minutes. Maybe a little more if there was traffic.

And then he would be here, with a little girl named Scarlett.

Libby still hoped against hope that it would all turn out to be a huge mistake. She’d entered Colleen in the baby contest and Colleen had won. Brady had seen Colleen’s picture on the front page of the parenting magazine which had sponsored the contest, and she appeared—appeared—identical to his own little girl.

Twins, like two peas in a pod.

Since they’d each adopted their mixed-race daughters from the same orphanage in Vietnam, it wasn’t as impossible as it sounded.

Face-to-face, however, it would turn out that their girls wouldn’t look alike at all, and this overwhelming situation would be over before it had properly begun. She hoped so, desperately, fervently, blindly, because if not…

Libby was terrified about the whole thing, terrified about what Brady Buchanan would want, and what kind of a man he would be. Her instinct was to be deeply wary about the potential complications involved, and about how vulnerable she might become.

Four days ago, on the phone, out of the blue, she hadn’t had the slightest idea what the man was talking about at first. She’d been on the verge of concluding that it was a prank call, or worse. Some creep had gotten enough detail from the story in Parenting Now to find her in the St. Paul telephone directory.

But then Mr. Buchanan had changed tack suddenly. His voice—deep, with a slightly roughened note in it, like fine sandpaper sliding across heavy wood—had softened.

“Okay, you’re not getting this, are you?” he’d said. “Or you don’t believe me, I guess. Which I can understand. But it’s true. It has to be.”

“What’s true?”

“Remember the orphanage?”

“How did you know—” She’d stopped abruptly, afraid of what she might be giving away. She’d learned a deep reliance on privacy and self-sufficiency during her adult years, and was very careful to whom she told the details of how she’d gotten her darling baby, despite the fact that the adoption was in full compliance with international law.

But then something about Brady Buchanan’s voice compelled her to listen as he went on with those evocative questions, his words a little clumsy in their emotion, his phrases disjointed and stumbling over themselves.

“Did you see the white cotton diapers, the way they had ’em spread out to dry on the bushes?” he’d said. “And remember the heat? And did all the local people, when you were in Da Nang, when you went out into the streets with the baby, did they crowd around you, smiling and asking questions?”

“So you’re saying—”

“Did you see the sand at My Khe beach, how it was so white? And did you taste that fantastic seafood? That’s where you got your daughter from, isn’t it? From the orphanage outside of Da Nang?”

“Yes. Yes, I did,” she’d answered him shakily.

“That’s where my daughter came from, too.”

“Oh, mercy, it’s not possible!”

“Ms. McGraw, it has to be!”

They’d talked about it for nearly twenty minutes, arranging a way to meet as soon as he could get away from his work, trying to piece together the girls’ story. All of it was conjecture, most of it coming from him, since he’d had longer to think about it.

What would he be like? And what would he want to do if their girls really were twins? She’d been tossing the options back and forth in her mind for four days and four sleepless nights. There weren’t many of those options, and each of them had huge ramifications.

Oh criminy, she was terrified!

Two things cut across her darting thoughts. First, she heard Colleen, who had woken from her nap in tears, as she often did. Then, as she went to pick up her crying daughter, Libby heard the doorbell ring and knew it would be him.

Brady Buchanan.

The man who owned that dark, husky, emotional voice.

The man who was adoptive father to the child who could be—could be—her daughter’s twin.

“In a minute,” she called, and hurried into Colleen’s room. He could probably hear her crying, even from the porch.

Colleen was standing in her crib, face screwed up, mouth open wide and tears pouring down her cheeks. Libby lifted her up and began to soothe her as she headed down the stairs. By the time she had reached the front door, Colleen was quiet. Normally, she cried for longer when she woke late like this. Had she sensed that something important was about to happen?

Libby took a deep breath and opened the door, praying yet again that Brady Buchanan would be wrong. This wouldn’t be important at all.

He wasn’t wrong.

She knew it the moment she saw her daughter—her daughter!—in the arms of a total stranger. No, not her daughter, despite that instinctive moment of possessiveness and panic and leaping emotion.

This was Colleen’s sister. Her twin sister.

On the phone, Brady had talked about blood tests, and Libby had agreed. Now, she already knew that the tests would be purely a formality. The girls were identical. Silky hair, curious eyes, neat little shoulders, fine-drawn mouths.

Identical, except for the way they were dressed. In place of Colleen’s matched set of lilac floral, lace-edged T-shirt and pants, Scarlett Buchanan was dressed in a red-and-gray stretch playsuit emblazoned across the front with the words Born To Be a Buckeye. It looked as if her dad was a college football fan and a graduate of Ohio State.

Scarlett’s dad…

Libby looked at him for the first time. Only a few seconds had passed since she’d pushed open the door but it felt like much longer, and neither of them had yet spoken a word. She still couldn’t, because there was some kind of invisible hand clamped right across her throat. Instead, she just looked at him standing there—a little awkward, possibly as terrified as she was—with her daughter’s twin propped on his arm.

He wasn’t a huge man. Slightly above average height, that was all. Five-eleven, say. But he was solid as a rock. Chest like a brick wall. Shoulders padded with muscle. Washboard abs, without a doubt, beneath his clothing. You couldn’t have scraped enough fat off his frame to grease a muffin pan.

He had a few threads of premature silver in his light-brown hair, which was cut short and practical, and the faintest reddish-brown shadow of new growth on his jaw. As she gaped helplessly at him, he scraped his hand across it and she heard the light friction of callused palms against stubble.

His skin had some living in it. It was outdoor skin, tanned but not moisturized, clean but not pampered. She remembered he’d told her, over the phone, that he owned and operated his own construction company, which probably accounted for that rugged look. It also accounted for why he hadn’t been able to get here until today.

Both of them had wanted to hop straight on a plane, but he’d had project commitments he couldn’t break, and Colleen had been getting over an ear infection, so Libby was reluctant to fly.

“Hi,” he said. His smile was careful, brief.

And his eyes were blue. Complex blue. The kind that looked gray in some lights and deep, smoky green in others. On the tail end of the half smile, he frowned, and those changeable eyes seemed to darken. For a fleeting moment, Libby wondered how they would look in bright sunshine when he was laughing. Say, when he was watching his football team win their game.

He was wearing an Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt—gray with scarlet lettering, over newish blue jeans. The clothing showed off the breadth of his shoulders and the lean strength of his thighs. She’d met bigger men and stronger men, but there was something about the potent aura of maleness surrounding Brady Buchanan that affected her powerfully. She felt as though someone had picked up a big wooden spoon and started stirring it around deep in her crampy, aching stomach.

Was it only because she was so terrified about how much potential he had to change her life? Ruin her life? She’d faced that fear in the dark hours of every night since his call. She’d even wondered whether she would have reacted in the same confident way that he had if she had been the one to see a photo of her daughter’s twin in a magazine.

Would she have called every Buchanan in Ohio until she’d reached him? Or would she have convinced herself that it wasn’t possible, it had to be a mistake, and let her contented, self-reliant life go on just as it was?

It would have been very easy to play it that way. “Accidentally” lose the magazine and forget his last name. Convince herself that the girls only looked alike because of the angle of the photo. Tell herself that the adoption authorities would surely have known if there was a twin sister, so she had to be mistaken.

Brady hadn’t used any of those excuses to opt out. He’d taken the morally right and decisive action at once. He’d accessed all of Minnesota’s telephone directories via the Internet, had kept calling until he’d found her, and now, here he was.

What would she do if they disliked each other within five minutes? If his ideas on how to deal with this situation were impossibly different from hers? And what would he do?

Strong men could get in the habit of winning, of dominating with their decisions, and it was a hard habit to break. Immediately, she didn’t trust the way he had his feet planted so squarely on her porch, or the way his jaw and mouth had set. He looked too much like a man who believed in simple solutions. His solutions. She didn’t want that kind of man in her life again.

Stop this, she coached herself angrily. Don’t leap to conclusions. Get a grip. Listen to him. Communicate. Don’t duck the issues. Stand your ground. And right now, say something.

“Please come in,” said Lisa-Belle McGraw at last, her voice sweet and polite. They hadn’t been standing here in the doorway all that long. Maybe half a minute. But it seemed like half of forever.

She looked even more nervous than Brady felt. That was saying something, since he felt as though his tie was choking him and he wasn’t even wearing one. She held her daughter’s soft dark curls against her cheek in a gesture of tender possession, unconsciously emphasizing the contrast in their coloring.

Brady had expected they’d need to sit the two girls down side by side in order to compare them properly and turn their suspicions into certainty. Maybe even dress them in similar outfits or something, in order to decide whether to go ahead with the blood tests. But already it wasn’t necessary, and blood tests would only be the icing on the cake.

Just the way Colleen moved, the expression on her face, everything about her except her clothes, was so identical to Scarlett. He could tell that she’d woken from her late nap in tears, because that was what Scarlett always did, and that was how she always looked when it happened. Red and crumpled, sad and irritable.

He knew that even though Colleen had stopped crying, she would look a little zoned-out for several more minutes, and she would cling to whoever was holding her and occasionally turn to bury her face in their shoulder.

Yep, there she goes…

It was uncanny to feel as if he already knew this little girl. It tugged painfully on his heart. He remembered how he and Stacey had both bonded instantly with Scarlett, the first moment she was laid in Stacey’s arms.

“This your baby,” the orphanage worker had told them, in her broken English, and they’d loved their little girl from that moment on. How could Brady meet her twin sister and not start to feel the same?

His heart lurched again. Sideways. Out of balance.

Shift over in there, Scarlett, and make room. You don’t have the place to yourself anymore. There’s someone else I need to love now.

Someone who already had a family of her own and a life here in St. Paul.

How on earth would they deal with this?

Scarlett had napped early, and she was bright as a button in his arms right now—curious and happy and ready to toddle off at breakneck speed and explore. Ms. McGraw knew all about that, Brady could tell. Just as he knew her child, this stranger knew his little daughter. Was her heart lurching sideways, too?

After another intense look at Scarlett, she scraped her teeth over her bottom lip and repeated, even more nervously, “Please, you really must come in!”

She reached out, pushing the storm door open a little wider. The movement tightened the light fabric of a pink-and-blue summery top across her breasts. She had a neat figure, petite and curved just right, enough to give a man something to hold, and something to watch when she walked.

Brady stepped forward and suddenly he caught her scent for the first time. It reached out and drew him in, and his stride and his breathing both faltered as he walked quickly past her, still caught in its sweet net. It was like lilacs after rain, cool and intoxicating. It was like…

No. No!

He wasn’t a poetic man. It wasn’t like lilacs and rain at all. It was a punch in the gut that almost knocked him off his feet. It was a trip wire stretched across his path. Responding to Lisa-Belle McGraw as a man was the last thing in the world he’d expected or wanted. Primitive. Beyond logic or personality. And potentially disastrous.

He’d been there before, with Stacey, when he was too young to know any better—going crazy for her body and never stopping to find out who she really was. Finding out had cooled the craziness as time went on, but by then it was too late. Brady wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

It was vital to keep his head clear here. He had something else to think about. Something much more vital to his emotional well-being than the physical tricks a female body could play. And apparently Ms. McGraw had her eye on the ball much better than he did.

“If people see us and get an inkling as to what’s going on…” she was saying behind him. “I don’t want to have to tell anyone about this yet. Not until we’ve worked out what it means. I—I have an idea it’s going to be, uh, pretty big.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he agreed, his voice gruff and deep, and went ahead of her into the house, out of reach of the aura that had briefly ensnared him.

As he responded to Scarlett’s wriggling and put her onto her feet, first impressions piled into his mind. Ms. McGraw had a nice house on a street just two blocks south of the Minnesota governor’s mansion. He’d already noted the quiet prosperity of the neighborhood as he drove here. It was similar to the neighborhood he’d bought into in Columbus several years ago, when his construction business really took off.

The interior of the house was immaculate, furnished in florals and pastels, with a thick cream rug covering most of the hardwood floor. Photos and knickknacks were everywhere: decorative plates on the dusky-pink walls, and fresh flowers in vases on the old-fashioned piano as well as on the dining table he glimpsed in the next room. It was a real home, reflecting one caring woman’s taste. It wasn’t a place you’d easily uproot from.

And Lisa-Belle McGraw looked as if she belonged. She was a natural Minnesota blond princess, with hair that reminded him of that fairy tale, “Rumpelstiltskin,” about the goblin with the unique name who had known how to spin straw into gold. He could easily have been practising his talent on this woman’s hair. Silky, straw-colored strands, as straight as a waterfall, mingled with shiny threads that looked like pure gold in the last of the day’s September sunlight slanting through her living-room windows.

She was too pale, even with makeup, and it made both her eyes and her lips stand out. Eyes like a tropical ocean, lips that glistened like candy melting in the heat. She’d dressed up for this meeting, he guessed, as he took in her strappy pumps and the pastel swirl of feminine fabric that clung to her body.

She was as pretty as he’d seen in her photo in Parenting Now. Actually, she was more than pretty. Definitely not something he wanted to be so aware of, he reminded himself. He wasn’t in the market for a new relationship any time soon, and certainly not with this woman. Even if he liked the way she smelled.

He needed to move farther away from the memories of his marriage first.

His heart sank as he considered the possibility of emotional scenes, energy-sapping manipulation, hidden motives and downright dishonesty. In a situation like this, those things might easily happen if he didn’t play everything right. He’d had more than enough of all that with Stacey, and though he’d grieved for her in a complicated, upside-down kind of way, he couldn’t help doubting that they would have stayed the distance, had she lived. By the end, she’d lied to him a few times too often.

“Do you want to come out back, where they can play?”

Ms. McGraw’s question dragged his focus back to where it ought to have been all along. Scarlett was toddling around the living room, eager to explore. Colleen watched her from the safety of her mother’s arms.

“I expect Scarlett would like that,” he said.

“We can sit on the deck and have some coffee while we watch them.” She clasped her hands briefly, then brushed a stray silk ribbon of hair away from her face. “I—this is such a weird situation. I’m sorry, I don’t know where to begin or what to suggest.”

“Coffee sounds good,” he answered gruffly.

Coffee was the tip of the iceberg. It was the next twenty years that occupied both their minds.

“If you want to wash up first…?” she offered, her politeness apparently ingrained and automatic. Once again, her voice was sweet and clear.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

She indicated a little powder room tucked away beneath the stairs, and he barged into it, needing a few moments alone, and hoping that cool water streaming over his hands would cool his whole body down.

The exercise wasn’t a success. For a start, Scarlett got clingy and stood outside the door, crying persistently. He heard that sweet female voice again, inviting her to go out back and try the slide, but Scarlett wasn’t having any of that. No instant, instinctive bonding for her, thank you very much. She was too young to recognize the mirrorlike familiarity of that other little girl, and eighteen months was a clingy age. Brady wanted to hurry back out to her, which made him even clumsier than he’d already felt.

Ms. McGraw had maddening soaps—tiny pastel-toned seashell shapes, nestling in a glass dish. His big hands knocked several of them out onto the pristine vanity unit, and when he’d finally grabbed one, his wet palms sent it spurting out of his fingers. It ricocheted off the door, hit the bud vase on the windowsill and knocked it over. An apricot-hued rose fell to the floor.

Brady had never liked fussy decor, and now he knew why. If Ms. McGraw had heard the soap hitting the door and the vase hitting the sill, she probably wondered what on earth he was doing in here.

And Scarlett was still crying. Louder than ever. He could hear her little hands, batting at the door.

At least nothing was broken. He pressed his hands together, across his nose and mouth, and blew a long breath through his fingers, then studied his image in the mirror. He wasn’t happy about what he saw.

For a start, he should have shaved again at the motel. He looked like a thug. His jaw had felt as rough as a metal rasp just now beneath his tension-knotted hands.

And he was too casually dressed. He should have worn a buttoned-down shirt and a jacket. Like this, with his gut still churning, he felt that he didn’t project enough authority or enough intellect. He might need both those qualities, if he and this woman disagreed, at a fundamental level, about what they needed to do.

In the brains department, he wasn’t a pushover. He had a college degree, and the construction company he owned was tendering for bigger and more important jobs every year and getting them. He’d never doubted himself in that area. But he wasn’t great with words, and emotional scenes tied his tongue in knots.

There were some emotional scenes coming up. There had to be! They had the futures of two little girls weighing in the balance, and they lived in cities that were more than seven hundred miles apart.

What if Lisa-Belle McGraw expected him to make all the sacrifices? What if she had a plan for getting what she wanted, and he didn’t see it coming until it was too late?

Scarlett wailed louder, and he told her, “I’m still here, baby. I’ll be out in two seconds.”

He bent to pick up the fallen rose, stuck it roughly back in the vase and filled the little glass tube with fresh water. It overflowed and saturated his hands, as well as an inch of one sleeve. With Scarlett still crying outside, he left without taking time to use the towel, and had to dry his hands on the back of his pants before scooping his little girl into his arms once more.

Passing through the spotless kitchen and onto the wooden rear deck, he found his daughter’s twin sister’s mother already there with two porcelain mugs of coffee on a tray, some milk in sippy cups for the girls, and a plate of dainty cookies arranged on a paper lace doily.

Their cue for some polite, meaningless conversation?

Not on Ms. McGraw’s agenda, apparently. He was surprised at the determined look which had appeared on her pretty face, but it gave him a brief warning of her intentions and left him a little better prepared. Almost relieved, too. Whatever she wanted, he would much prefer it if she went after it openly and honestly, if she said what was on her mind so that they both knew where they stood.

“I don’t want to pursue this through official channels,” she said. Her voice started out wobbly and ended up firm.

“Pursue what?” he asked, betraying his impatience, and his ill ease. “The question of whether the girls are twins? Isn’t it obvious, after one glance, that they are? The blood tests are only going to confirm it.”

“Yes, it’s—” she took a deep breath, and tried to smile “—uncannily obvious.” The smile wobbled and fell off her face, like a loose wheel falling off a toy cart. “I never imagined that they could look so much alike, even when I considered that you might be right. When I first saw your daughter, I wanted to snatch her right out of your arms.” Her voice dropped to a husky whisper.

“I know the feeling,” he drawled.

She pulled herself together, and her voice firmed. “No, I just meant that I don’t want to tell anyone about it. Not Immigration or the adoption people.”

“I don’t think it would invalidate the adoptions, Ms. McGraw. I can’t see how it could.”

“Please, call me Libby.”

“Okay. Libby.” He tried it out on his tongue, but couldn’t decide if he liked it. On the one hand, it was a snappy little nickname, and an inventive way to contract the more formal Lisa-Belle. On the other, it was a little too cute. He wasn’t big on cute.

“I guess I’m just not prepared to take any kind of a chance on the adoptions,” she said. The fall air was crisp and cool, and she shivered a little as she spoke. On the grass in her yard, there was already a carpet of fallen yellow leaves. “If there was ever any risk that I might lose Colleen…”

“No one’s talking about either of us losing our daughters.” The very thought opened a pit of fear in his gut. “The adoptions were both done in full accordance with the…you know, you must have read the information about it…the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption,” he reminded her. “You know how strict Vietnam is on that issue, and the United States, too. Stacey and I wouldn’t have gotten involved with the idea if there’d been anything dodgy about it.”

“Me, neither.” She paused, then added gently, “I’m sorry, it must have been hard for you to lose your wife so soon after you’d both become parents at last.”

He nodded, and muttered something. He’d told her over the phone that he was widowed, that his wife’s death had been sudden and unexpected, the result of an accident. What he hadn’t told her was that the blood alcohol level of the man Stacey had been driving with—her lover—had been well over the legal limit at the time.

It wasn’t a piece of information he enjoyed sharing with strangers, and he definitely didn’t want this woman asking questions about the state of his marriage. If that led to any kind of doubt over his capability as a father…

Would he and Libby be able to remain strangers, though?

Looking covertly at her, he wondered about how she was situated. She’d lost her husband more than four years ago. Enough time to grieve, and for the memories to soften. In the dating department, she couldn’t be short of offers if she wanted them. Not a pretty woman like her, a woman who smelled like flowers and rain and springtime. Was there anyone else in her life whom he needed to consider?

And in Scarlett’s? What kind of a connection were they making this weekend? How should he respond to that immediate impulse to take Scarlett’s twin into his heart?

Shift over, Scarlett.

He knew he could love two daughters without being unfair to either of them. The girls could build a precious bond with each other, and his mom would adore another grandchild. But where did Lisa-Belle McGraw fit in?

“So what do you want to do?” he asked her. Despite the colorless phrasing, they both understood what an enormous question it was.

“Talk a little more, first, about what might have happened,” she answered, her voice still firm. “I need to get the dates straight. I just need to understand the history.” She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “You and your wife took Scarlett from the orphanage, when, exactly?”

“June twelfth.” He had the date down pat, like a birthday or an anniversary. Scarlett’s exact birth date wasn’t known. “Fifteen months ago.”

“I was there around ten weeks later. August twentieth. I was told Colleen had just been left on the veranda at night. Someone heard her cry at around midnight and went out and found her. No idea about either of her parents, except that her father, most likely, was white and her mother was probably mixed race. I’m thinking the mom would have been conceived back during the war…”

“Yes, in the sixties or early seventies.”

“…with an American GI father. But all of that’s just conjecture, based on the way she looks. The way they look,” she corrected herself quickly.

“We were told pretty much the same story,” Brady answered. “Whether the orphanage workers had any inkling the girls were sisters… Probably not, since they passed through the place at different times. I got the impression the orphanage gets its share of mixed-race babies.”

“Yes, so did I.”

“I’m guessing the mother kept one baby in the hope she could manage to raise it, then found after a couple of months that she couldn’t.”

“I can’t imagine what that must have been like for her. I try not to think about it. Maybe she felt better knowing that her baby would be going to a better life.”

“That’s what we told ourselves, also.”

“It was for the best, I’m sure of it.”

“And of course,” he went on, “by the time she brought Colleen in, the orphanage would have had other kids passing through, and staff coming and going, possibly. And anyhow, a baby changes so much in those first few months.”

“I guess that’s how it happened,” she agreed. “And that’s where I’m happy to leave it. Whatever the exact story is, it doesn’t change what we’re facing now.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t.”

Brady took a sip of his coffee, debating on whether to reach for a cookie as well. They looked melt-in-the-mouth good, but the way they were arranged on that doily made them seem as if they were only for show. He’d already ruined Lisa-Belle’s little soap arrangement in the powder room. Didn’t want to do the same with the cookies.

Instead of taking one, he dampened down his hunger and watched the girls. Scarlett had discovered the sturdy plastic slide and playhouse set, and was exploring its ins and outs. Colleen came down the little slide. Showing off, maybe, or staking out her territory? More likely, at eighteen months, she was just having fun.

She tipped back too far on the way down, bumped hard onto her bottom and scrambled to her feet, taking the rough landing in stride just as Scarlett always did. Next time Colleen came down, Scarlett was right behind her, and both of them were laughing. They were active, vital little girls.

“The only thing I know for sure, right now, is that it would be wrong for them to grow up not knowing each other, not having the chance to be sisters,” Brady said, his voice suddenly husky. “And for me, too. How could I love one little girl and not the other? It would just be wrong.”

Shoot!

He hadn’t planned to say it. The words had just happened, falling out of his mouth, blunt as always, as soon as they crystallized in his thoughts. He looked across to where Libby McGraw sat, in a cedarwood outdoor chair just like the one he was sitting in.

Her legs were crossed at her ankles and her hands were clasped around her knees, neat and pretty and careful. Hell, and his heart was beating so much harder and faster as he waited for her reply that he could actually feel it thumping inside his chest.

Why was he so scared about what he’d given away? Why was he instantly sorry he’d laid his beliefs on the table like that?

Because he’d intended to find out what she thought and felt first.

With unsteady hands, he took two of the cookies at once and ate them in a single bite. They tasted like Christmas morning when he was eight years old.

“Why would it be wrong, Brady?” she asked carefully, after a long pause.

It wasn’t the tack he had expected her to take. He was relieved about that, but still very suspicious, on shifting ground. Something didn’t ring true in what she’d just said. “Don’t you agree?” he asked her.

“There are plenty of kids that grow up as only children, these days,” she answered. Her chin was raised and her eyes were too bright.

“True, but—”

“I wouldn’t have adopted Colleen in the first place if I’d thought I couldn’t meet all of her needs,” she went on, gathering speed. “I refinanced my home and took a pay cut so I could work at a high-quality day-care center and have her there with me.”

“I’m not saying—”

“I used to teach kindergarten, but that wouldn’t have given us the time with each other that I wanted. She gets plenty of social interaction at day care with kids her own age. If I hadn’t entered her in that contest, she and Scarlett could have gone their whole lives not knowing about each other, and they’d still have been loved and nourished and happy. They’d have missed nothing.”

Her voice was high and sweet and very firm.

Too firm.

Her eyes, in contrast, were frightened and defiant.

Okay, he understood, now.

“You don’t believe a single word of what you’re saying,” Brady growled at her, and sure enough, she flashed him a startled look and her cheeks went bright pink. “You don’t,” he repeated.

There was a silence.

“Yeah, okay, you’re right,” she agreed quietly at last. Her clasped hands had tightened around her knees, and her shoulders were rounded, vulnerable looking. There was anguish in her face now. “You’re right. I don’t.”

She shook her head, and the tiny silver earrings that were nestled against her pink lobes flashed.

“You know,” she went on, “I’ve been saying it to myself every minute since your call on Monday. I’ve tried to make myself believe it doesn’t make a difference, but I can’t.” Brady could see how hard she found it to put her emotions into words. “We have to give them the chance to be sisters, don’t we? And we have to give ourselves the chance to love both of them. But you’re in Ohio and I’m in Minnesota, and I can’t begin to think about how we’re going to do it. It—it might have been easier if we’d never known.”

“I know,” he answered, then confessed abruptly, “All the way here on the airplane, I was wishing my mom had never seen that magazine.”

Chapter Two

“I can stay until Sunday,” Brady said. “We can think about it. There are options. You know, a lot of people manage shared custody of their kids after a divorce, even when they’re living in different states. People manage to have their kids visit far-away grandparents. It’s not insurmountable.”

“No, I guess it isn’t,” Libby answered obediently. She popped a little smile onto her face, then added, “More coffee?” and when he nodded and said, “Please!” it gave her an excuse to go into the house, where she could rebel in private.

She didn’t want Brady to see how much his words about managing “shared custody” had terrified her. One look at that little girl in his arms, identical to her own Colleen, had told her how easily she could come to love two daughters, but how could she share two daughters with a stranger?

Did he expect her just to hand Colleen over for weekends and vacation visits? Put her on a plane and send her seven hundred miles? Dear Lord, no!

Her own parents had divorced when she was eight, and she’d had to do that. Just step on a plane every few months. The memories weren’t good, and she didn’t revisit them very often. Mom had never really adjusted to the divorce and to being a single parent. She hadn’t been prepared for managing on her own, so they’d moved from Kansas City to Chicago to be closer to Libby’s grandparents, and it had taken Mom a long time to find her feet.

She’d been horrified when Libby had taken on the role of single mother voluntarily. “If Glenn was still alive of course I’d have loved a grandchild, but not like this, Libby. You don’t know how hard it’s going to be.”

But Libby had cherished her independence and her freedom to run her life the way she chose. She hadn’t had that same freedom in her marriage. And now Brady was talking about “shared custody” as if it was easy and safe, as if it was something they could both just slot into their lives. He had no idea!

I should have challenged him on it. But maybe if I work as hard as I can to make this weekend nice and fun and harmonious, we can talk on Sunday and we’ll find there is another answer.

Even as she thought this, she knew it was a cop-out on her part. The kind of cop-out she’d made before, and didn’t want to make again. But wanting something and achieving it were two very different things, she’d found, especially when life came at you sideways like a runaway train.

Still unsure of how she would handle the situation, she poured two fresh mugs of coffee and went back out to the rear deck. Brady had vanished from the deck chair, and a few seconds of panicky searching—he was a stranger, she knew almost nothing about him, and she’d left him with her precious daughter, was she crazy?—revealed him safely down in the yard with the girls.

Oh, mercy, what a sight it was!

Silently, she put the coffee mugs down on the barbecue table and watched. Somehow, he’d gotten himself horizontal on the damp grass, solid as a fallen log, and both girls were running to and fro, covering him deeply with leaves.

They were shrieking with laughter—identical laughter—tossing wild handfuls of color every which way and earning exaggerated protests from Brady which they clearly found hilarious.

“More leaves? We’re having more leaves?” he was saying in that gravelly voice she was starting to know. “What? I’m not buried deep enough for you, yet, guys? I swear—”

Then he caught sight of Libby and stopped abruptly, and she had to hide a laugh of her own at the sight of his face.

He was blushing?

No, it had to be the effort and exertion of all that protesting, followed by the sudden scramble to his feet.

“I…uh…” he said, and brushed himself down, strong shoulders moving beneath the gray fabric of his sweatshirt. “That was…you know…”

“I know,” she answered, still laughing. “They loved it.”

She wanted him to laugh with her, but he’d closed off, retreated somehow. Coming up the steps and reaching for the coffee mug she still held in her hand, he looked intimidating and serious, a construction company boss through and through, not the kind of man you’d ever catch horsing around with two little girls.

Libby was sorry, now, that she’d caught him out. She didn’t want to create more distance than necessary.

Their fingers touched briefly as he took the mug. As a piece of body contact, it was nothing. Quicker and lighter than the touch of a makeup brush on her cheek, or the flick of her hand when she shooed a mosquito from Colleen’s face. All the same, it was warm and physical and potent, and she wished it hadn’t happened.

Possibly he did, too.

If he’d even noticed it, Libby revised. She doubted that the imprint of it had lingered on his skin the way it was still lingering on hers. And she doubted that her scent was still wrapping around him, the way his had wrapped around her. It was clean and male, reminding her of freshly shaven wood, and it was mixed with the earthy scent of the leaves.

He could have had half a dozen better reasons for moving away from her so quickly, with that distant frown still on his face.

Brady knew he was frowning too much, knew it made him look distant—intimidating, even—and he didn’t care. Deliberately, he turned his back on Libby, took a big mouthful of coffee and stared down at the fall color carpeting the yard.

He shouldn’t have fooled around with the leaves like that. He couldn’t afford to have this woman think he was soft, lacking intelligence, easy to manipulate, easy to distract from his goals with a bit of pretty color, and ready to take care of everything as needed.

Even though he was soft. He knew that. When it came to Scarlett’s well-being, he was a pussycat. He turned to liquid inside, like a soft-centered chocolate candy, every time he felt her little arms around his neck, or saw her smile, or had to kiss a bump.

And when it came to Scarlett, he would take care of everything as needed. He would walk over hot coals to give her the things she should have. A play in the leaves. Pretty toys at Christmas. A college education. Her very own twin sister.

What kind of sacrifices was Libby McGraw prepared to make? he wondered.

They drank their coffee mostly in silence, just watching the girls and commenting occasionally on their play. Inwardly, Libby was working on her courage, putting it in place piece by piece, like building a solid brick wall.

She waited until Brady had drained his mug, then cleared her throat—it shouldn’t have been so tight, but it was—and said, “How about we go out for pizza? There’s a place just a few blocks from here that’s kid-friendly, and the girls should stay the distance, don’t you think, after their naps? It’s not even six, yet. Seven, Ohio time.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” he agreed.

She took a deep breath and forced herself to speak. “Because I don’t want to leave it until the end of the weekend before we talk about this, Brady. I want to get it on the table tonight, so that we both know where we stand.”

He looked at her, and she could see the speculation and assessment in his face. He didn’t fully trust her. It was written in the jut of his jaw and the narrowing of his eyes. It was shouted by the frequent glances he gave toward both the girls. Definitely, he didn’t trust her.

The feeling was mutual, and maybe that was good. Staying on her guard was a lot better than the alternatives.

Since it was still pretty early, they had their pick of several tables at the pizza restaurant, and chose one in a quiet corner in back, near the open kitchen. The girls were happy to squiggle with crayons on sheets of paper, watch the pizzas sliding in and out of the big, wood-fired oven and slurp their juice.

“Have you always lived in St. Paul?” Brady asked Libby as they waited for their order, and she couldn’t help her suspicion that it was more than just a casual question. Had she once again lost the initiative she was seeking?

“No, I was born in Kansas City,” she answered him, too accustomed to behaving as good manners dictated. She wasn’t prepared to avoid his question, or to challenge it, no matter how suspicious of it she was. “But I grew up in Chicago after my parents got divorced. I met my husband at Northwestern—he was doing his master’s—and we moved here when his company transferred him, around ten years ago, right after I finished college.”

“You’ve moved around some, then. I was born in Columbus, and I’ve stayed there.”

“So Scarlett is a third-generation Buckeye fan?”

He laughed. It was the kind of laugh that invited a response, deep and chuckling, like a little stream gurgling way down in a forest’s secret hollows. “Fifth.”

“Wow!”

“My grandfather used to take me to games when I was a kid, and his father took him. I’ve been taking Scarlett since she was a baby. Not sure how she’ll go this season, now that she wants to run around.”

“That’s nice.”

His eyes were nice, too. Libby didn’t want to notice the fact, but it was a little hard not to, when they were looking at her from just a few feet away, across the table. She was right in what she’d seen earlier. They didn’t always look blue. Now, for instance, you’d have said they were gray—dark and smoky and thoughtful.

She got the impression he wasn’t an intellectual man—not the kind of person who read serious books and watched documentaries on TV—but he wasn’t stupid, either. He was the kind of person who kept his thought processes to himself, then came out with surprising results in the end. Take his next question, for example.

“Were you and your husband trying to have a baby for long?” he asked. “Were you on that whole assisted reproduction treadmill, like Stacey and I put ourselves through?”

“No, we hadn’t been trying long at all,” she answered, startled into honesty. A couple’s fertility wasn’t something most people wanted to ask about at a first meeting. As it happened, she and Glenn hadn’t had time to discover whether they had any problems in that area. “Just three or four months,” she added. “Glenn hadn’t felt ready until he hit thirty-seven.”

Too late, she realized what she’d unconsciously implied—that she herself had been ready much sooner.

Well, that was true, wasn’t it? Although ten years younger than he was, she’d been ready for a long time, but Glenn had stood firm, as always. He wasn’t ready to share her with a baby yet. He wanted her all to himself. He still had career goals to accomplish. He didn’t want to be tied down and woken in the night. She had pretended to herself for years that she understood those reasons, and that she didn’t mind.

She just wished she hadn’t let Brady Buchanan in on the secret. There had been some dissatisfactions in her marriage before Glenn’s illness. For the sake of the deeper connection they’d made with each other during those last months when Glenn had softened so much, however, she kept those to herself.

It seemed weird to be talking on such a personal level with Brady, a near-stranger, but discovering that you shared twin daughters with a man cut through some of the usual barriers.

Some of them.

In other areas, she felt even more wary, and more protective of secrets and doubts and resolutions.

She went on quickly, “Then his cancer was diagnosed, and that was the end of it. With the type of cancer and treatment he had, there was no possibility of getting another chance to conceive once his treatment was over, even if he had survived.”

“That must have been tough.”

“It was. A double loss, in a lot of ways. My husband, and my chance for a child that was his. Even so, it took me a long time to decide on adoption. I knew it would be a major undertaking on my own.”

“Stacey and I tried to have a baby for eight years,” Brady said. “Deciding to go for an intercountry adoption gave us the best year of our marriage.”

It didn’t quite make sense. They’d only had Scarlett for two or three months before his wife’s death. He must have been including the months before that.

Libby couldn’t agree on those months being good ones in her own case. Although she’d appreciated the need for all the bureaucratic red tape in two countries, in order to ensure that children were willingly given up to responsible adoptive parents, she’d found the actual process of it—the waiting and the uncertainty—quite gruelling.

She’d had to list every address she’d had in her adult life, every organization she’d ever belonged to, and every job she’d ever had. She’d been allowed to choose the sex and approximate age of the child she hoped for, but that was all. Brady and Stacey must have been through the same thing.

She’d spent weeks in fear that her application would snag and fail on some small detail, and weeks more, before her flight to Vietnam, panicking that she might not be able to bond with the child who’d been chosen for her.

She couldn’t imagine how those had been good months in Brady’s life, but maybe it was a very different process if you weren’t going through it alone.

“So, if you moved because of your husband’s job, that means you don’t have parents or siblings here, right?” he asked, while she was still thinking about his last statement.

“No, no siblings anywhere,” she told him.

His gray, thoughtful gaze was still fixed on her, and she found it unsettling. His questions were like an interview, or a test. For the sake of Colleen and Scarlett, she hid her growing anger and discomfort. What was he angling toward?

“I’m an only child,” she explained.

“Me, too.”

“My parents divorced when I was in grade school, as I said. My mother’s still in Chicago, and my Dad died when I was eighteen.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes, it was hard,” she answered. It wasn’t something she let herself think about.

“But at least you have your mother, not so far away.”

“Far enough!”

Mom hadn’t visited since Colleen’s adoption. She’d sent gifts, and she talked about coming, but she hadn’t made it yet. Mom was a cautious, conservative person, slow to adjust to new situations. How would she deal with the news of Colleen’s twin?

“And what about your husband’s parents?” Brady asked.

“They’re in Florida. We were never all that close, and I’ve lost touch with them since Glenn’s death.”

It all sounded too arid and distant. She knew that, and wondered what Brady would think. It wasn’t her fault. She’d called Glenn’s parents and sent cards for birthdays and anniversaries and holidays. But if they were out when she called and she left a message, they never called back. They never sent cards in return, and when she’d told them about her plan to adopt a Vietnamese baby, she could practically hear the ice crackling down the phone. They’d considered her action an affront to their son’s memory.

This was when she’d given up. She and Colleen would go on putting down their roots here in St. Paul. They had a great house in a great neighborhood. She had good friends she’d made over the past ten years, and more friends she’d begun to make with other mothers since adopting Colleen. They were both happy at the day-care center, and she’d begun to consider schools for her daughter’s education later on.

Brady was looking at her as if all of this—this failure, this distance, this determined independence—was scrolling across her forehead like a TelePrompTer, and as if it said as much about who she was as did her taste in clothes. It probably did.

Their pizza arrived, along with salad and soda pop for the adults. Brady took a knife, cut a slice of pizza into bite-sized pieces for Scarlett, then used it to lift a second slice onto Libby’s plate, while she was occupied in helping Colleen. He had big hands, but he used them well, with sure, economical movements.

Sliding a third slice onto his own plate, he got some sauce on his forefinger and casually wiped it into his mouth.

“You said you didn’t want to wait before we talked,” he said. “Does that mean you already know what you want to do?”

“It means I know what we have to do,” she corrected him quickly. “As I see it, Brady, there’s no choice.”

She took a small bite of the hot, crisp slice, but her appetite didn’t respond. Her stomach was far too churned up to feel hungry, and she was nauseous. She had a deep, instinctive dread of laying her emotional cards on the table like this, which she could never really understand. It wasn’t fair to blame Glenn and the patterns that had evolved during their marriage.

“Okay, so tell me.” Brady leaned forward a little, his face serious and steady.

“I don’t buy your point about visits and access, like after a divorce,” she began.

“No?” He looked as if he was sincerely ready to listen, and she liked that. Grabbed on to it hard, gritted her teeth, fought back the nausea, and hoped with her whole heart.

“These girls have already lost both their biological parents, whoever they were,” she went on. “During the adoption ceremony in Vietnam, we undertook to keep them in touch with their cultural heritage.”

“Yes, I remember that bit.”

“It’s going to be hard to make that more than a token thing, across a whole, huge ocean. I can’t justify making their relationship with each other only a token thing, as well. The girls are way too young just to put them on a plane and send them back and forth, in any case, and there’s only one way I can see to avoid doing that,” she finished on a rush of words that came out more aggressively than she’d intended.

“Yeah?” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. His attitude had changed. He looked skeptical, now, ready to shoot first and ask questions later.

She lifted her chin, took a deep breath and just said it. “One of us is going to have to move.”

Okay, Brady thought.

Hadn’t he known something like that was coming? Wasn’t it the only reasonable solution a sane, feeling person could come up with? It wasn’t so drastic. People moved from one part of the country to another for far less meaningful reasons. And wouldn’t he have said it himself, if she hadn’t?

No, he wouldn’t. Not yet.

He didn’t like the way she’d said “one of us,” and he wasn’t fooled by the apologetic spread of her dainty, pretty hands as soon as she finished speaking, nor by the nervous lapping of her pink tongue against the still-glistening color on her upper lip as she waited for his response.

He took a large bite of pizza, aware that she’d barely touched her own slice.

So one of them was going to have to move? Hanging in the air, unspoken, he could almost hear her corollary, “And I’m happy and set up in St. Paul, so I don’t see why it should be me.”

Well, she was wrong about that.

This was why he hadn’t wanted to discuss it so soon. He’d known that if she really believed in the importance of keeping the girls connected, this was the solution she’d propose. He’d seen it coming, in his own heart and in hers, but he’d wanted to wait, in the hope they’d each manage to build a little trust.

This was why he’d asked her all those questions, just now. He’d wanted to gauge the ties she had here in Minnesota, and whether there was any possible way she could justify asking him to uproot his life. If he moved, he would have to sell his company, deprive Scarlett of a close, loving grandmother, start over in a new state and a new town. When Libby had no family here, and could easily get a job almost anyplace she went, was it unreasonable, on his part, to expect her to make the move?

He didn’t think so, and she might as well know it upfront. He wasn’t going to leave himself open to emotional manipulation.

“Columbus is a great place to raise kids,” he said steadily, not quite smiling. “Housing is affordable. People are friendly. Winters are mild compared to here. You’re going to love it. I’ll even help you with your move.”

He’d made her speechless. That wasn’t a bad thing. She sat there, slowly turning pink, with her pretty mouth dropped open. She looked at Colleen, looked at him, looked at Scarlett. Still didn’t say a word. Closed her mouth eventually, as if she knew it was more polite, and went on saying nothing.

So maybe he should give himself more credit for his powers of speech. He knew that running his own company for the past five years had honed his ability to handle careless sub-contractors and late-paying clients.

State your position up-front and show the opposition how he or she stands to win. Build immediately on your advantage.

It seemed he’d honed his ability to handle personal relationships as well, because even now, after he’d given her plenty of time, she still didn’t speak, and he still had the upper hand.

“I could see you in Upper Arlington,” he went on. “Worthington, or maybe Clintonville, where I live myself. Bexley is beautiful, but that’s on the other side of town from where I’m located.”

“I guess it wouldn’t make sense to move seven hundred miles and have the girls still end up a long drive from each other,” Libby said at last. Her voice shook a little, Brady thought.

Was she trying not to cry? Yeah, he felt a little emotional, too. Both of their lives had turned upside-down today. He was still crossing his fingers that they’d each flipped in the same direction.

He waited once more for her to make some kind of a counter offer, as a potential client might do in response to his company’s cost estimation on a big project.

I’ll move, but not until spring.

I’ll move, but it would seem fair if you covered half the expenses.

I’ll move, but I’ll need somewhere to stay until I can decide where I want to live, and whether I want to rent or buy. And there has to be a fall-back if it doesn’t work out. I don’t want to sell my house in St. Paul, and I want to get back here sometimes to see friends.

She didn’t say any of that. Instead, she poured herself some more pop, and Colleen some more juice. Then she helped with Colleen’s pizza.

Brady saw that her hands were shaking, and he felt an odd and powerful need to take them between his work-hardened palms and say, “Stop. It’s okay. Are you upset at the thought of moving? If you feel that strongly about it, St. Paul looks like a great city, and I’ll love it here.”

Was that what she wanted? Were the shaking hands just a cold-blooded example of the kind of emotional manipulation he couldn’t stomach? Was the silence an opportunity for her to hone her strategy? It wouldn’t surprise him. Some women played their relationships like chess games. He just wished Libby would say what she felt, and say it clearly. But she didn’t.

Instead, she was speaking in a bright tone to her daughter. “Let me cut that piece in half for you, honey. Yes, I know you want to do it yourself, but this bit Mommy has to help with. There you go, beautiful.”

He liked the way she talked to her daughter. Sweet and steady and clear. Plenty of endearments, but not too much fussing. Suddenly he found himself making the counter offers for her. All of them. In the same clipped, confident voice he used when proposing contract terms.

“Wait till spring if you want, and count on me to cover the moving expenses,” he said. “I have a pretty big place. You can stay there, with your own room and bathroom, while you decide on a permanent place. You don’t need to sell your house here right away. Best for both of us if you have some fall-back in case this doesn’t work out.”

“You’ve thought it through, haven’t you?” There was a note of controlled accusation in her voice.

“Didn’t take long,” he answered. “Most of it’s obvious. Makes sense that neither of us burns our bridges. Makes sense for you to have the time you need.”

“And is there a deadline on my decision?”

He shot her a closer look. Was she angry? Her voice was still just as sweet and steady. Her cheeks were still just as pink. He didn’t know what to think, didn’t understand what was going on in her head.

When Mom was angry or upset, she said exactly what was on her mind. Loudly. When she tried some underhanded tactics and he confronted her with them, she confessed at once. He appreciated that.

With Stacey, in contrast, it had been like building a house on quicksand. She’d lied. She’d pretended to have emotions she didn’t feel in order to get her way. She’d played on the beliefs she knew he had about duty and honor. She’d splashed around her emotions—genuine and false—like a one-year-old throwing food.

He waited for a mild, Miss Minnesota Princess version of either Mom or Stacey, but nothing happened, and this left him at a loss. Colleen shifted in her seat and looked uncomfortable. She provided a welcome change of focus. The restaurant was filling fast, and the noise level was rising, along with the smell of pizza in the oven.

“I think she’s working on a diaper,” Brady and Libby both said in unison.

Libby added, “I’ll take her out. Eat all you want of the pizza and salad because I’m done.”

“You haven’t eaten very much,” he pointed out, although this wasn’t the issue he wanted to confront her on. “You haven’t finished a single slice.”

She shrugged and gave a polite smile. “I wasn’t very hungry.”

Holding her daughter’s hand, she walked in the direction of the bathroom, still giving no indication of what she was feeling beyond her well-mannered facade.

Brady watched helplessly after her, wondering whether he’d won tonight’s most important victory, Ohio State Buckeyes over Minnesota Gophers, or whether instead he’d just stared down the barrel of his own defeat.

Chapter Three

Libby shifted her life to Ohio on a Thursday in late October with Colleen, after five weeks of making lists and telephone calls and announcements, of talking to Realtors and moving companies, of packing and sorting and giving away.

Brady had told her back in September that she could “wait until spring” to make the move, as if this was some sort of a concession from him, or as if he were giving her permission, but this was her own decision, and she saw it differently. She hadn’t wanted to wait. It was six months until spring, and that was a long time in a child’s life.

She found all the concerned and curious questioning from friends and co-workers stressful, too, and needed a definite date on which all that would stop.

Mom had been skeptical and discouraging about the move, and had asked Libby over the phone more than once, “Is it really that important to give Colleen a sister?”

“Brady and I both think so,” Libby had told her.

“But you always insisted on how self-sufficient and happy and well-adjusted you were going to be, just the two of you, even though I always thought it would be harder than you expected. Now you’re doing a complete about-face.”

Well, it wasn’t like that, Libby considered, but she didn’t say so.

Her emotional compass was pointing steadily in one direction—toward Ohio, where the girls could be sisters, where they’d have a chance to establish what could be the most enduring relationship of their lives, and where she wouldn’t ever have to just send her daughter off on a plane. She couldn’t predict in advance if the move would succeed or fail. She just had to jump in with both feet and do it.

To give Brady credit, he seemed to understand. “Send your stuff on ahead, and I’ll arrange to be there when it arrives. I’ll have your room ready for you. Let’s focus on the practical things. The rest can wait.”

She and Colleen took two days to make the drive from Minnesota, staying in a motel in Bloomington, Illinois, on Thursday night. Colleen awoke early the next morning, and Libby dressed her in the cute outfit she’d packed specially—a long-sleeved cotton knit dress in pink and white, high-waisted and full in the skirt, with matching leggings.

After a breakfast stop just outside Champaign, Colleen napped for three hours in the car and Libby was able to make good time. They hit Columbus midafternoon, with Miss Bright and Beautiful getting bored and fretful in her car seat after so long.

Libby could easily have fretted, also. Her legs were stiff, her head ached, her eyes felt as dry as ash. And she was nervous, with a sinking, queasy stomach and clammy hands.

Brady had given her clear directions to a neighborhood she discovered to be quiet and tree-filled. The day was smoky and cool—undeniably fall, with piles of leaves in rust and tan and orange and gold carpeting the grass beneath the bare trees. It was much milder here than it had been two days ago in St. Paul, however.

As Libby drove down Brady’s street, a middle-aged man worked a leaf blower, and a helmeted child clattered along the sidewalk on a purple bicycle. She was looking for number 1654, and here it was—a house of sand-colored Ohio stone, with pale blue ornamental shutters, a steep slate roof, a sweep of gently sloping lawn out front, shaded by a couple of big trees and a fenced rear yard.

She parked in front of one half of the double garage and walked to the front door at Colleen’s pace, holding her warm little hand. Almost as soon as she rang the bell, she could hear Brady’s heavy footsteps, and the door opened seconds later.

“Hi.” His eyes met hers for just a second, looking slate-blue and preoccupied, and he lifted a hand in greeting.

She was swamped with memories of the time they’d spent together in St. Paul, and didn’t know what to do with them. She’d forgotten the aura of strength that surrounded him, and the way her body responded to it.

He had a cell phone pressed to his ear, and he was reeling off what sounded like building specifications. Something like that. Figures and quantities and codes. He wore jeans, a black sweatshirt and a waterproof gray jacket, as if he’d just gotten home, or was about to go out. There was no sign of his daughter.

Libby felt cold after the heated car, and she was tired, prickly and ready to find fault. Capping the upheaval of the past six weeks, she’d wanted more than a “hi” and a glance, and she hadn’t wanted the powerful pull Brady seemed to exert on her body without even trying.

Now he was nodding, listening to the voice at the other end of the line, trying to get a word in. “Yes…yes, Nate. I got that. You tell me what you have, okay?”

Libby picked up Colleen.

Still listening and saying, “Yes,” every few seconds, Brady stepped back, reached around to flatten a hand between her shoulder blades, and pulled her inside.

He had big hands, and his touch was warm and heavy on her back. Her shoulder nudged the curve where his arm met his body and she remembered too many moments back in Minnesota when she’d felt this pull and this awareness.

He had that same earthy, resinous smell that she’d first noticed, like fresh-cut wood, and the same faint sheen of reddish beard just beginning to grow out against his rugged skin. As she passed him, moving ahead into the hall, she could easily have reached out and brushed her hand across that strong, square jaw.

She wasn’t usually so conscious of how her body shaped itself near a man’s, and of how the air moved between them. And she couldn’t remember when she’d last wanted to inhale a man’s scent like inhaling the fresh air of spring. But then, there weren’t many men in her life that she ever got this close to. Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising if she felt jittery and hypersensitive.

He kicked the door shut behind him and said, as an aside from his phone conversation, “Stairs. Go on up, Libby. All the way to the end.” To her new, temporary room.

He followed her, still absorbed in his call, and he didn’t end it until they reached the room’s closed door, when his firm footsteps stopped just behind her.

“Sorry about that,” he said at last, flipping the phone shut and sliding it into his back pocket. “I took today off to get the house ready for you, but they can’t leave me alone. We have a big project that’s running behind schedule. It’s not important.”

“Sounds like it is.” She stepped sideways, with Colleen still in her arms, and angled herself so that Brady wasn’t looming over her shoulder.

He gave a rueful smile that crinkled the skin around his eyes and showed straight white teeth. “Well, it’s not important important.”

Libby smiled, too. “A subtle yet critical difference, I guess. Where’s Scarlett?” she added on a rush.

She felt a fluttery anticipation about seeing Colleen’s twin that she tried to dampen down. It didn’t feel safe to start to care so soon and so much.

“Mom has her on Fridays,” Brady answered.

He flattened a hand against his back pocket, as if to check that his cell phone was there. It was an unnecessary gesture, since he’d put it there just seconds ago. He was on edge, just as she was. His strong shoulders were held tight, and he curled his hands into fists then let them go again.

“She works Monday through Thursday,” he went on. “So on those days Scarlett’s in day care. You’re earlier than I was expecting. I was just about to go pick her up from Mom’s. Here…” He opened the door.

It was a big room, built over the whole area of the double garage, and it was lit by large windows on three sides. The white drapes looked new. Libby recognized her own queen-sized oak sleigh bed, with matching tallboy and dresser, her own delicately flower-sprigged sheet set, comforter and pillows, and the oak glider-rocker she’d bought last year, for sitting in to feed a bottle to Colleen.

Brady had angled the rocker so that it would get bathed in southern winter sun, and the matching oak crib was right next to it, made up with Colleen’s white broderie anglaise bed linen.

Finally, on top of the tallboy, sitting on a plastic place-mat, there was a pewter beer tankard stuffed—yes, you’d have to call it stuffed—with a big bunch of supermarket flowers, still swathed in their silver wrapping.

“Anything you want moved,” Brady offered, “just say so.”

“No, it looks good.” Apart from the supermarket sticker on the flowers.

The flowers said a lot. He must have remembered she liked to have them around the house. He’d taken the trouble to buy some. But he didn’t have a clue how to arrange them, and he didn’t even own a proper vase. The mix of thoughtfulness and clumsiness somehow softened her heart to a dangerous level.

They were both trying so hard.

So hard.

That had to be a good thing, didn’t it?

“It’s a great room,” she told him, meaning it.

“There’s a bathroom right next door that’s just for you.”

“You didn’t have to make the bed.”

He shrugged. “You moved your life seven-hundred-odd miles. I made a bed. Are we even yet?”

She laughed, and it eased a little of the awkwardness in the air. Colleen wriggled out of her arms, toddled forward and launched herself at the rocking chair. Her fat, diaper-wrapped bottom stuck out and she buried her face in the cushion seat. She was attached to this chair, and Libby was grateful for the presence of the familiar object. All of this had to be confusing for a young child. It was confusing enough for an adult!

“Let me help unload your car, then I’ll go get Scarlett,” Brady said, watching Lisa-Belle watch Colleen.

He felt that they needed both girls here, blatantly identical, to remind them of why they were putting themselves through this. It was awkward. No doubt about that. He’d had Nate badgering him in one ear when she arrived. He hadn’t known what to say to her.

Welcome to my life?

And the flowers were probably dumb.

“Are you hungry?” he said, his voice gruff. “I could fix you coffee and a snack and you and Colleen can eat while I unpack.”

“I’m fine. I’m not leaving all the unpacking to you.”

No, Libby, honey, you missed your cue.

He’d been trying to give them both an out, a way not to have to eyeball each other as they went back and forth with boxes and bags for the next ten minutes. She hadn’t taken it. He tried again. “Or take a shower if you want.”

“Tonight. Not now.” She was too wrapped inside her own tension to perceive her wide-open escape route. “We should unpack.”

Colleen followed her mommy back and forth, threatening a couple of times to trip Brady up as he came in the opposite direction. He had to watch out for her underfoot, and he had to be careful, but he knew Scarlett would have done the exact same thing in an unfamiliar situation. Both girls were a little clingy.

Libby distracted him. She was petite, but she didn’t play helpless. She did her share. As he approached the car for his second load, he saw her leaning into the back seat to pick up a box, her bottom taut and round beneath a floral skirt that somehow managed to be both soft and flowing and sexily clingy at the same time. His body stirred and his blood felt as heavy as lead.

Ah, hell! This again!

This attraction that he didn’t want. The mechanics of male anatomy were a damned nuisance, sometimes. What would she think if she knew he was looking at her this way? How was he going to handle it, having her sleeping under his roof, maybe for weeks?

It had become clear during the day and a half he’d spent in Minnesota that she wasn’t involved with anyone there, and it must be pretty obvious to her that he hadn’t dated since Stacey’s death. Physically, his needs tormented him at times, but emotionally he felt only reluctance about any kind of involvement, and so in that area he was very much alone.

On paper, therefore, they were both free to leap into bed with each other tonight, as soon as the girls were asleep.

Who would know?

Whose business would it be, anyhow?

But he didn’t believe you could put sex in its own little compartment that didn’t impinge on the rest of your life, even if that was a convenient theory for some men, and he was sure that Libby wouldn’t believe it, either.

Sex mattered. Even sharing a kitchen could matter.

They had the girls to consider. They had to create a workable, co-operative relationship that would survive the next twenty years, and if they stuffed it up with sex and domestic illusions and a short-lived affair right at the beginning, it would be their daughters who would suffer the most.

He should have given Libby the phone number of one of the motels along Olentangy River Road and left her to fend for herself, honor and duty be damned. It might have been a necessary protection for both of them.

The car was full. Several suitcases, those boxes, and what looked like a big styrofoam cooler that Libby carried through the house and into the kitchen at the back. Two of the boxes she wanted in the kitchen as well.

“What’s in these?” he asked.

“Pantry goods. I thought I might as well bring them rather than throwing them out.”

“And in the cooler?”

“Frozen casseroles. Chicken and mushroom. Burgundy beef. Irish stew.”

Brady’s mouth began to water. So she cooked. She actually cooked. Having tasted her baking the day they’d first met, he was in no doubt whatsoever that she would cook well, and he hadn’t eaten a woman’s home-cooked meal in so long he could hardly remember what it was like.

Mom used to slap together a few easy recipes several nights in the week when he was a kid, but she’d stopped altogether when Dad had died ten years ago. She ate strange little evening meals now, like cottage cheese and sliced banana on toast, or canned soup in a mug. She was a big fan of the drive-through window at the local fast-food chain, too. Now that Scarlett had outgrown jars of baby food, so was Brady.

Burgundy beef, on the other hand… Shoot, but that sounded good!

“We could have one of them tonight, if you don’t have anything planned,” Libby offered.

Uh, no, he didn’t have anything planned.

He told her so, while realizing that he should have planned a whole lot of things. So that they didn’t have to confront the weird reality of their new situation. If either of them made too many mistakes at the beginning, their commitment to putting their daughters’ relationship first might show up as impossibly naive and unworkable.

They could end up in court, hating each other. That guilty wish—Libby had admitted to it, as well—that his mom had never seen Colleen’s photo in that magazine might turn into a bitter, lifelong and reasoned regret.

“I’ll put two of these in the freezer and leave the third to thaw,” Libby said.

“Burgundy beef sounds good,” he suggested, a little embarrassed at the eagerness that immediately crept into his voice.

She smiled. “Burgundy beef it is, then.”

The sun struggled through a thin patch in the low, smoky cloud at that moment and the kitchen lit up, striking her blond hair, giving that melted-candy look to her pretty mouth. His blood slowed and his groin stirred again.

He was hungry. Not burgundy-beef hungry, but candy hungry, hungry for a woman’s sweet, melting mouth, hungry for her soft skin, for the touch of her fingers and the press of her breasts. Hungry for this woman. Just because she was here?

“I’ll go pick up Scarlett,” he said abruptly. Libby was staring at him, lips parted, eyes startled and swimming with heat. “Please make yourselves at home.” He grabbed his keys from a pocket, headed out the side door and let out a sigh of relief as soon as he reached the steps.

Chapter Four

“Make yourselves at home?” Libby muttered, after Brady had gone.

For how long would they need to do that? A week? A month? There was a pile of newspapers on the table in the breakfast nook, and she realized that he must have been collecting and saving the real estate section from the Columbus Dispatch for her, for the past three or four weeks. Flipping through the top copy, she saw that he’d circled a few places with a yellow highlighter pen.

Thoughtful.

Or was he just trying to get rid of her fast? She supported that plan. Standing in the kitchen together just now, the current between them had almost glowed. Her spine still tingled. Her breasts still ached. When she wrapped her arms around herself, it was his heat that she felt.

Colleen tugged at her skirt. “Fir-sty,” she said.

“You’re thirsty, honey?”

“’N hundwy, too.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got.”

There was milk in the fridge. Not a lot else.

She remembered some packets of peanut butter crackers in one of the pantry boxes and dug them out, looked around and discovered Colleen’s own high chair sitting beside Scarlett’s in a corner of the big kitchen. Libby slid the high chair out from the wall and lifted Colleen into it, and Colleen seemed quite happy to accept that it was here.

Hello, chair.

Libby peered through to the living room. There was none of her stuff in here. In the end, she’d rented her house out partly furnished to some friends who were renovating their own place, and she’d only brought enough to furnish a modest apartment here in Columbus. It was part of the not-burning-her-boats strategy she and Brady had both agreed on. She’d have to fly home in a couple of months to make a more long-term arrangement, but she didn’t want to think about that yet.

Brady’s living room was very masculine, furnished with brown leather sofas—a two-seater, a three-seater and an armchair—a large, low, heavy-looking coffee table made of dark wood, a square of Persian carpet on the hardwood floor, an open fire-place and a series of framed, limited edition photos of spectacular moments in sport.

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