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Wrong Twin, Right Man
Laurie Campbell
HE WANTED A SECOND CHANCERafe Montoya had known his wife, Beth, was unhappy. She wanted him home earlier, wanted a baby, wanted more of himself than he could give. He thought that being her knight in shining armor would be enough. But then a tragic accident claimed Beth's life, and left her twin sister, Anne, injured–and he had run out of time. All he could do was help Anne recover her strength and her memory–it was what Beth would have wanted.Yet when Rafe looked in Anne's eyes, for a fleeting minute, he had the feeling it was Beth's eyes looking back at him. His Beth, ready and waiting to give him a second chance. But that was impossible…wasn't it?
Rafe smoothed out the paper and gazed at Beth’s handwriting that formed an uneven headline on the page.
Pros & Cons Of Staying Married/Getting Divorced.
What?
Rafe stared at it again, trying to come up with some reason—maybe she was helping a friend with a troubled marriage. But already his eyes were betraying him, racing down the list of pros and cons, and he felt a hollow ache creeping through his bones.
Beth’s life lay before him, and it looked like she hadn’t wanted him there. Because…
Lonely.
The word was a condemnation. He’d failed her worse than he realized, failed her right here in black and white.
No baby. No sharing. No time.
But he had tried, damn it! How could she say there was no sharing? No intimacy? He’d given Beth more of his heart and soul than he’d ever given anyone, and it still—
It still wasn’t enough.
And now it would never be enough.
Dear Reader,
It’s October, the time of year when crisper temperatures and waning daylight turns our attention to more indoor pursuits—such as reading! And we at Silhouette Special Edition are happy to supply you with the material. We begin with Marrying Molly, the next in bestselling author Christine Rimmer’s BRAVO FAMILY TIES series. A small-town mayor who swore she’d break the family tradition of becoming a mother before she becomes a wife finds herself nonetheless in the very same predicament. And the father-to-be? The very man who’s out to get her job….
THE PARKS EMPIRE series continues with Lois Faye Dyer’s The Prince’s Bride, in which a wedding planner called on to plan the wedding of an exotic prince learns that she’s the bride-to-be! Next, in The Devil You Know, Laurie Paige continues her popular SEVEN DEVILS miniseries with the story of a woman determined to turn her marriage of convenience into the real thing. Patricia Kay begins her miniseries THE HATHAWAYS OF MORGAN CREEK, the story of a Texas baking dynasty (that’s right, baking!), with Nanny in Hiding, in which a young mother on the run from her abusive ex seeks shelter in the home of Bryce Hathaway—and finds so much more. In Wrong Twin, Right Man by Laurie Campbell, a man who feels he failed his late wife terribly gets another chance to make it up—to her twin sister. At least he thinks she’s her twin…. And in Wendy Warren’s Making Babies, a newly divorced woman whose ex-husband denied her the baby she always wanted, finds a willing candidate—in the guilt-ridden lawyer who represented the creep in his divorce!
Enjoy all six of these reads, and come back again next month to see what’s up in Silhouette Special Edition.
Take care,
Gail Chasan
Senior Editor
Wrong Twin, Right Man
Laurie Campbell
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Thanks to my gifted friends on the Desert Rose
brainstorming loop, who always come through
with new possibilities, and to Lori De Jong and
Mary Rahrig, who help me keep God in the picture.
LAURIE CAMPBELL
spends her weekdays writing brochures, videos and commercial scripts for an advertising agency. At five o’clock she turns off her computer, waits thirty seconds, turns it on again and starts writing romance. Her other favorite activities include playing with her husband and son, teaching catechism class, counseling at a Phoenix mental health clinic and working with other writers. “People ask me how I find the time to do all that,” Laurie says, “and I tell them it’s easy. I never clean my house!” She rarely cleans her mailbox, either, which makes it a special treat to hear from readers on her Web site at www.bookLaurie.com.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
Chapter One
If only she could say he loved her, the toothpaste wouldn’t matter.
Neither would the late hours. Neither would the baby—
No, the baby mattered.
“I want a baby,” Beth told her sister. “It all comes back to that.”
“Write it down,” Anne ordered, turning over the dining-car flyer on their breakfast table and sliding the blank page across the white tablecloth. “If you want to straighten things out with Rafe, you need to know exactly what the problem is.”
He doesn’t love me!
But she couldn’t bring herself to say that aloud.
“He doesn’t want a baby,” Beth said instead. Which amounted to the same thing. “I know we agreed to wait until the legal clinic was up and running, but that’s taking a lot longer than I expected.”
“Write it down,” her twin repeated, handing over a pencil, and Beth dutifully jotted “doesn’t want baby” on the paper. “When was the last time you talked about it?”
“Friday. The night before I left to meet you.” The night before her and Anne’s annual “Sisters’ Vacation,” she had accused her husband of caring more about Tucson’s street kids than having kids of his own.
And he hadn’t denied it.
“What happened?” Anne asked, and Beth gritted her teeth against the tip of the pencil.
“Nothing. I was kind of hoping he’d get mad, get upset, say I was wrong.” If he had lost his temper, sworn at her in the same gutter-style Spanish he used with the former gangbangers who occasionally phoned the house, she could have taken comfort in knowing his emotions were fully engaged. “But he just said the clinic’s not all the way there yet, and we have plenty of time.”
“Twenty-six isn’t exactly over the hill,” her sister observed. “And Rafe’s, what, twenty-eight? But okay, there’s problem number one. What else?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Beth protested, just as the waiter arrived with their breakfast order. She wished they could send him away, finish this conversation without the distraction of mushroom omelets and rye toast, but of course the fun of eating in a dining car was why they’d taken the train from Los Angeles back to Tucson.
Back to the husband who didn’t want her.
Or at least not nearly as much as she wanted him.
“I still can’t believe you decided to leave your wedding ring home,” Anne told her, eyeing the claddagh ring she’d loaned Beth when she found her crying over the vacancy a few nights ago. “And didn’t even mention it! Bethie, you need to talk about things more.”
Maybe so, but she couldn’t expect her sister to fix her problems. Taking care of people was Beth’s strong point, while Anne took care of everything else.
Besides, she’d hoped that a week away from Rafe would settle the turmoil inside her.
“I just thought,” she muttered, “I could try pretending we’d never gotten married, and see how it felt.”
“But it feels sad, doesn’t it?”
Which pretty well summed up her problem. Leaving the wedding ring in her jewelry box had been a foolish gesture, and the loan of her sister’s ring hadn’t made her finger feel any less forlorn.
“You have to talk things out,” Anne continued. “Forget this new-look stuff, that’s not what you need. Not that you don’t look wonderful—”
“You’re only saying that because I look like you.”
Her sister grinned, acknowledging the point. With Beth’s brand-new haircut, they looked more alike than they had in years. “Strawberry blondes are better with short curls, that’s all there is to it. But anyway, talking to Rafe would be the fastest way to fix things. I mean, if you want to stay married.”
“That’s what’s so embarrassing!” She still wanted him as her husband, and a whole week of vacation hadn’t made any difference in that fierce, heartfelt yearning for Rafe Montoya. “What kind of woman wants a husband who doesn’t need her?”
Anne hesitated, gazing at her coffee cup before meeting her gaze with an uncomfortable expression. “Bethie, I know you’ve got this thing about taking care of people, but being needed isn’t the same thing as being loved.”
Maybe such statements made sense for a career woman who didn’t understand the essentials of love, but Anne was completely wrong. “That’s what marriage is about!”
Her sister thought that over long enough for Beth to realize there was no comfortable solution to be found, then tapped the page on the table with her usual executive determination.
“You need a list of pros and cons,” she announced. “Reasons to stay married, and reasons to get divorced. Come on, write it down.”
“But…” What if the reasons for divorce outweighed the reasons for marriage? And how on earth had she and Anne traded roles so quickly, when normally she was the one taking care of her sister? “I don’t want to give up on him yet.”
“That goes in the pro column,” Anne ordered, taking another sip of her coffee. “What else do you like about him?”
It wasn’t a question of liking him, though. It was more a matter of loving him.
And suspecting he would never love her.
“Come on,” her sister prompted. “Is he smart, handsome, rich, charming, good in bed—”
“Anne!” They were in the middle of a dining car, with people all around them, and here she was asking about Rafe in bed?
“Good-looking, punctual, courteous, good athlete—”
“All of that,” Beth interrupted hastily, trying to dismiss the memory of his athletic body pressed against hers. At least while making love to her, Rafe Montoya could be wonderfully free with his emotions. “Well, except rich. He’s still paying back his student loans, and the legal clinic won’t ever make big money.”
“So that goes in the con column, along with waiting for a baby and leaving the lid off the toothpaste,” Anne directed. “Good thing he’s punctual, though, if he’s picking us up at the train station.”
They had arranged last week that Rafe would meet them at nine-thirty this morning, so he and Beth could show Anne their new house before taking her to the airport. And, knowing him, he had phoned the station at dawn to check on their arrival time.
Because while Rafe Montoya would never give his heart, neither would he give up a responsibility.
“Probably coming right from work,” Beth said, drawing a wavy line between the two columns on her page.
“He’s at work this early?”
No hour was too early for a man whose workday could easily begin at three in the morning. Or last for seventy-two hours at a stretch…especially if a juvenile gang member needed someone to post bail, a ride home from the police station, or a temporary place to stay.
“He probably spent the night at Legalismo,” she explained. “I mean, with me on vacation, there’s not much reason to come home.”
But as soon as she heard the words “not much reason to come home,” she wished she hadn’t spoken. Because they sounded like a death knell for her marriage.
And she wasn’t quite ready to accept that yet.
“Some people,” Anne said dryly, “might think sleeping in a real bed was worth driving home for.”
People who’d grown up sleeping in a real bed, yes.
“People like you and me,” Beth agreed. “But you know how Rafe is.”
Anne raised her eyebrows in agreement, as if confirming her initial opinion of Beth’s husband. On the night of Beth and Rafe’s engagement party, the first time she’d ever met him, she had drawn Beth aside and observed that the man was “incredibly gorgeous if you like that reformed-rogue, dark-and-dangerous look. But, Bethie, do you really want to spend the rest of your life with this Saint Rafael of the street kids?”
A question which had haunted her for the past six months.
“I know how Rafe is,” Anne agreed, glancing at her wristwatch. “If you say he’s gonna be on time, he’s gonna be on time.”
“You’ll make your flight home just fine,” Beth promised, noting with a touch of amusement that her sister was already slipping from vacation mode back into work mode.
Because she was still staring at her watch.
Or rather, at Beth’s engraved confirmation gift, which Anne had borrowed on the first day of their trip. Leaving her own watch at home, Beth’s twin had announced, was a stupid idea, and she was never listening to that stress-reduction tape again.
