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“Did you have any idea? I knew I was adopted but—” Abby’s voice was shaking.
“I knew I was adopted,” the one in the fur coat said, “but I didn’t know I had sisters.”
“I was never adopted,” the jean-clad woman said, her voice hesitant. “I lived with my Aunt Ella until I was ten. She said my parents—our parents?—were killed in a car crash.”
“It’s clear we are more than sisters. We must be triplets,” the one in the fur coat announced, and they stared at each other, thrilled and shocked and astonished. “I’m Brittany.”
“Abigail. Abby.” She could hear the catch of emotion in her voice.
“Corrine. Corrie.”
The receptionist interrupted. “Mr. Hamilton will see you now.”
They followed her down the hall into an office, glancing at each other with speculative delight, with wonder.
Mr. Hamilton was a dignified man, his manner and dress authoritative. Silver hair and deep wrinkles around his eyes made him look as if he should be retired. He looked genuinely amazed as the three identical young women entered his office and took seats across from him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Pardon me for staring. I—I didn’t know. You all had different last names. I had no idea—”
He looked down at the papers in front of him, struggling for composure. When he looked up he studied them each in turn.
“Triplets,” he finally concluded. “Had you ever met each other?”
When they shook their heads, he looked very grave. “I’m sorry. I would have never popped this kind of surprise on you without warning you. I can’t imagine what she was—” His voice faded, and then he cleared his throat. “As you know from the letter you received, I have asked you here because my client wishes to bestow a gift on each of you.”
“Who is your client?” Brittany asked, and Abby noted she seemed far more comfortable in the rich surroundings than either of her sisters.
“I’m not at liberty to say. I have been given a letter to read to you.” He took a paper off his desk, held the letter way back and squinted at it.
“Dear Abigail, Brittany and Corrine,” he read in a rich baritone, “Many years ago, I made a promise to your mother. She died within minutes of extracting that promise from me. To my shame, it was a promise I was unable to keep. I have reunited you with your sisters in the hope this gesture will begin to make the amends I owe your mother and each of you. I have also given you each a gift that I hope will turn out to be the very thing you most need in your lives. My attorney, Mr. Jordan Hamilton, will outline the nature of each gift, and the conditions I have attached to it. My wish is for your every happiness.”
“What was the promise she made to our mother?” Abby asked, hungry to know any detail that would help her come to grips with this overwhelming set of circumstances.
“I’m afraid, aside from the gifts, and the attached conditions, I don’t know any more than what is in the letter,” Mr. Hamilton said.
“Conditions?” Brittany asked skeptically. “You might as well get to that first.”
“All right. In order for you to receive your gifts, permanently, you must remain here in Miracle Harbor for a period of one year.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “And you must marry within that year.”
Abby stared at him. So, it was a joke after all. It had to be. But he looked perfectly serious.
She shot a look at her sisters.
Brittany looked indignant, Corrine was looking out the window, her thoughts masked. Except for some reason, Abby knew exactly what she was feeling. Corrie was scared to death.
“The gifts?” Brittany said, narrowing her eyes at him, and folding her arms across her chest. “And this had better be good.”
He gave her a stern look, rattled his papers, then, beginning with Abby, he told them about the most astonishing gifts.…
Chapter One
After all these years, he still slept as though there was a possibility of someone sneaking in the room and putting a gun to his ear.
Even in Miracle Harbor, Oregon, where such things were unheard of.
He lay awake, now, listening, every muscle tense, ready, wondering what small noise had startled him awake in the deepest part of the night. The green glow of his clock told him it was just after 3:00 a.m.
The foghorn, he decided, not the creak of his front gate, badly in need of oiling. He allowed himself to relax slightly, and then slightly more, closing his eyes and willing himself to go back to sleep. He hated this time of night the most because he was unable to exercise his customary discipline over his mind. For some reason this was when the memories wanted to visit.
The sound came again.
The quiet crunch of someone’s muffled footsteps moving up the walk. He listened for and heard the scrape of the loose board on the second step up to the porch.
It was when he heard the soft groan of his front door handle being tried that he moved, fast and quiet, out of the his bed and to the window.
An old car, hitched to a U-Haul trailer, was parked out on the street. Thieves? Planning to clean him right out?
They’d be disappointed. He had no interest in “stuff.” His apartment was Spartan. No TV, no stereo, just his computer.
Had he once had an interest in “stuff”? He had trouble remembering small things like that. Though he had a flash now of his wife, Stacey, standing in front of something in a store, looking back at him, laughing at the outrageous price, but there had been something wistful in her eyes, too.
He flinched as if he’d been struck when he remembered what they had been looking at that day.
A bassinet.
A blackness that did not bode well for his intruder, descended over him. Wearing only the boxers he slept in, he made his way down the steps and through the darkened house, the of movement—stealthy, cautious, icily calm—second nature to him.
He slid out the back door, not opening it enough to let it squeak, his plan already formed. He’d use the walkway alongside the house and follow it to the front. The prowler would be trapped on the narrow porch. He’d have to go through him to get away.
Fat chance of that.
This intruder had picked the wrong house.
Home of Shane McCall, agent, Drug Investigation Unit. Retired.
The mist was thick and swirling, the cement of the sidewalk ice-cold under his bare feet, the rhododendrons so thick along the side path that his bare skin was brushing the rough shingles of his house on one side, and getting soaked by the rubbery leaves on the other. These details barely registered, he was so intensely focused. He came around the side of the house, stopped in the shadow of the fog and dense overgrown shrubs, and watched.
He saw a shape bent over the door; the night too dark and the fog too thick for more than vague impressions. A baseball cap. A build too slight to be threatening to him.
A kid, he thought, and felt his anger wane as he watched the intruder jiggle the door handle again. Was he trying to pick the lock? Shane should have just called the police. Maybe Morgan was working tonight. When the business was done they could have exchanged war stories.
Vastly preferable to going back up those stairs to bed when he’d finished here, to the memories that were waiting for him.
Knowing that calling the police was still an option, and knowing he wouldn’t take it, he moved quietly out of the shadows to the bottom of his steps.
It occurred to him that maybe he should have taken his service revolver out of retirement, that someone without the physical size to handle a confrontation might attempt to even out his odds with a weapon. A knife, a handgun. That was probably especially true of the kind of kid who would break into a house at three in the morning.
His mind working with that rapid, detached lightning swiftness that came naturally to him, Shane decided on a course of action—keep his distance, make it seem like he was packing a gun himself.
Hard to do, considering he was standing out here in his undershorts. But not impossible.
He went to the bottom of the stairs, and with the cold authority that came so easily to him, he said, “Put your hands up where I can see them. Don’t turn around.”
The figure bolted upright and then froze.
“You heard me. Hands up.”
“I can’t.” Fear had made the voice high and girlish.
“You can’t?” he said, his voice cool and hard. “You’d better.”
“I might drop the baby.”
The voice was so scared that it was quivering. The baby?
Shane went up the steps two at a time, put his hand on intruder’s shoulder and spun him around.
Her.
Two hers, a full-grown her, and a baby her, both looking at him with the same saucer-huge blue eyes. Blue eyes tinged with a hint of brown.
He dropped his hand from her shoulder, ran it through the dampness of his hair, and swore.
When her foot connected with his shin, he was reminded, painfully that he had forgotten rule one: never let your guard down ever.
“Fire,” she screamed. “Fire.”
Without thinking he clamped his hand over her mouth before she managed to roust the whole neighborhood, something he was not exactly dressed for.
She was beautiful. Blond hair, very short and straight, poking out from under a Cubs ball cap and framing a face of utter loveliness—perfect skin, high cheekbones, a shapely nose. Her eyes were her dominating feature, though. Huge, the color partly a sea blue he had only seen once, a long time ago, off the coast of Kailua-Kona, in Hawaii, and partly brown. The combination was nothing short of astounding.
Those eyes were sparkling with unshed tears.
He swore again. She was shaking now, and the baby looked anxiously at her mother, screwed up her face and began to howl.
The noise seemed to reverberate in the fog, and he glanced uneasily at the neighbor’s houses again.
“Promise you won’t scream,” he said. “Or yell fire.” Fire. All right. She was beautiful, but obviously deranged.
She nodded.
He moved his hand fractionally, and she backed away from him until she could back away no more, her shoulder blades right up against his front door, her eyes wide, her arms folded protectively around the baby. It wasn’t a small baby. In fact, she was quite sturdy looking, possibly two.
“Stay away from us, you pervert.”
“Pervert?” he sputtered. “Pervert?”
“Hiding in the bushes in your undershorts waiting for a defenseless woman to come home. That’s called a pervert.”
“Home?” He stared at her. Her voice was shaking but her eyes were flashing. She probably weighed less than him by at least eighty pounds. And he knew she was going to take him on if he came one step closer.
She nodded, licked her lips nervously. Her eyes darted by him, looking for an escape.
He folded his arms over his chest. “This happens to be my home. I thought you were a prowler.”
Her mouth fell open, and then her eyes narrowed with suspicion.
He could see what she was thinking: that perverts were damnably clever. But he could also see the confusion in her face, her eyes searching for and finding the black iron house number over the wall-mounted porch light.
He was not sure he’d ever been quite so insulted. A pervert? Him? And she didn’t seem really deranged. Just exhausted. He could see dark crescents bruising the skin under those beautiful eyes.
She studied him a moment longer, and then he could see some finely held tension ease slightly.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I’ve made a mistake. I’m very tired. I—”
To his horror, little tears were slipping down her cheeks now, too. She wasn’t wearing any mascara, which he liked for some foolishly irrational reason. Her shoulders were shaking under a jacket that looked too thin to offer any kind of protection from the penetrating chill of the night.
The baby’s howls intensified when she saw the tears dribbling down her mother’s cheeks.
Striving for dignity, the woman pulled back her shoulders, lifted her chin. The gestures wrenched oddly at a heart that he would have sworn, only moments ago, had been cast in pure iron.
“Could you just direct me to a motel?”
“I could, but you won’t have any luck.” This did not seem to surprise her. “Why fire?”
“Pardon?”
“You yelled fire,” he reminded her. “Are perverts scared of it? Like holding a cross up to a vampire?”
She laughed nervously. “I read once that nobody listens when a woman calls for help. But they will if someone calls fire.”
She wasn’t from around here, he decided. Not even close. Survival tactics of a big city woman. Her voice was intriguing. It wasn’t sweet, like her face. It had a little raspy edge to it.
“Why aren’t there any motels? There were ‘No Vacancy’ signs on every motel for the last fifty miles it seemed.” She wiped impatiently at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, and then wiped the baby’s face, and kissed her on the nose.
A magical effect. The baby, an exact replica of her mother, except with blonder hair that was, wildly curly and unruly, ceased howling. The girl turned her head enough to look solemnly at him out of the corner of one eye, but apparently the glance failed to reassure, and she began to cry again, louder than before.
“There’s a major resort going up on the edge of town. We have contractors, carpenters, plumbers…you name it they’re here.”
He doubted there was a room to be had anywhere this night.
Unless you counted his empty house. Three bedrooms. One up, two down. The place had been a duplex until a few months ago when, with his landlord’s permission, he had turned the upstairs kitchen into a workroom.
Don’t, he told himself.
But he did, feeling slightly put out that he’d frightened her so badly, but even more put out that the baby was going to wake up the whole bloody neighborhood.
“Look, maybe you better come in for a minute.”
