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His eyebrows drew together. “You act like you’re not just refusing my house, you’re refusing…me.”
Suddenly Danni felt impatient to have it over with. “I don’t really see that we have much of a relationship,” she said coolly.
“That’s not what you told me a few days ago. You told me you thought this could be serious.” Bryan gazed at her so intently that she had to glance away.
Kristine. What else had Danni’s sister told Bryan? Told him while pretending to be Danni?
“You can’t run out on me now,” he said softly. “I’ve been advised to try something new in my life. No more corporate-type women. In fact…I’ve been told it’s good for me to be dating a carpenter.”
“Well, I am a corporate woman, aren’t I?” Her only claim to actual carpentry experience were those long-ago summers when she’d been in her teens, and she’d helped Grandpa Daniel build his house. The summers when she’d been truly, uncomplicatedly happy.
Bryan glanced around her office, then brought his gaze back to her. “I like you better in a tool belt.”
If she listened to him another second, she’d be lost. She’d find herself right back in his arms….
“Bryan, there’s so much you don’t know about me.”
“I’m listening.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. You’ll find out soon enough. Right now there’s nothing more to say except goodbye.” Quickly she went to the door and opened it. Bryan gave her another long, thoughtful glance. And then he left.
Yes, it was going to be a long night.
KRISTINE WAS FLOORING IT—and Danni hung on as the golf cart went thumping up a rise of the Sugar Beach Country Club. As it reached the crest, the view was admittedly magnificent—the green sweep of the golf course merging into white-gold sand, the Pacific shimmering pure blue to the horizon. But then the cart went charging downward again, and Danni berated her sister.
“Stop. Enough already. You’ve made your point.”
“And what point would that be?” Kristine asked, paying no attention to the golf clubs rattling in the back.
“That you’re nothing at all like the other society wives at Sugar Beach. You don’t play it safe. You live dangerously.”
Kristine stopped the cart so abruptly that Danni almost tumbled out the front. Kristine just sat there, hands clenched in her lap, staring at the ocean. Her oversize sunglasses made it impossible to read her expression.
“Kris,” Danni said at last, breaking the unnatural silence. “You haven’t answered my first question yet.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know exactly what I mean. When do you plan to tell Bryan the truth?”
Kristine went on staring straight ahead. “You said you’d give me two days. My time’s not up yet—”
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. Your time’s running out fast. And after the things he said last night—I want to make damn sure he learns the truth as soon as possible.”
Now Kristine turned to look at Danni, her mouth narrowing. “You saw Bryan last night?” she asked a moment later.
“He showed up at my office. Said he thought things were getting serious between us.”
“Just how serious did things get last night?” Kristine asked in a tight voice.
“I wish you’d listen to yourself,” Danni burst out in exasperation. “You try to have an affair, pretending to be me, and then you act jealous because…I can’t even go on. It’s too ridiculous, and too awful at the same time.”
“Just say it. I’m awful.” Kristine was suddenly all motion. She clambered out of the cart, grabbed a golf club seemingly at random, and started off across the fairway. Danni had to hurry to catch up to her.
“Kris—”
“I don’t blame you for hating me. Sometimes I hate myself. But I got so crazy when Ted…when Ted…” She couldn’t seem to finish. Instead she found her golf ball and took a forceful whack at it.
“If Ted’s the problem,” Danni said, “Bryan McKay isn’t the solution.”
Kristine marched away again, club in hand. She was wearing a very fashionable ensemble—cream-colored slacks, matching cashmere sweater, perfectly coordinated spiked shoes. You didn’t live in exclusive Sugar Beach, just north of San Diego, without exhibiting the proper fashion sense. The town wasn’t quite Beverly Hills in status, but it was close enough. Danni didn’t much care for the Sugar Beach crowd, herself. She suspected her sister didn’t either, but that was something else Kristine wouldn’t confess.
Now Danni trailed after her sister. “Okay, so you won’t talk about your husband. Just let me know when you plan to talk to Bryan.”
“I already arranged to see him, all right?”
“Make sure you tell him everything—”
“I’m fulfilling my part of the bargain. So why are you hounding me, Danni?”
“I want…” Danni struggled with frustration. “I want to put this whole mess behind me. The mess you made, by the way.”
Kristine stared at her from behind the protective barrier of her sunglasses. “I wish I could go back in time,” she said in a low voice. “All the way back to Peter. If I’d stayed with him—if you hadn’t ended up with him instead—everything would be different. Everything would be better.”
Danni told herself to remain rational and objective. “Kris, why are you bringing up old history again? After you met Ted, you told me how glad you were that you hadn’t ended up with Peter…that you’d broken off with him before it was too late.”
Kristine went back to the cart, climbed in and sped off before Danni could catch up. Then she chugged along at a most annoying pace—just fast enough that Danni had to jog in pursuit. At last Kristine glanced over her shoulder at Danni.
“I’ll tell you why I’m bringing up old stories. I think there’s a pattern here. I think whenever I find a man who could actually mean something to me, you decide he has to be yours. Call it sibling rivalry, call it whatever you want—but I’m surprised you never went after Ted. Or maybe you did, behind my back.”
“Kris!” Danni exclaimed, stung—and furious. She stood still. Kristine bounced along in the cart for another few yards, but then circled back. Danni glared at her. “How could you even imagine something like that? You know me, and you ought to know how much I care about you. That’s why I’m going to forget you ever said that. You’re terribly unhappy, and you’re taking it out on me.”
Kristine maintained her bravado for another few seconds, but then her face crumpled. She took off the sunglasses, and Danni saw her reddened eyes. She looked as if she’d been crying for hours.
“Oh, Kris—”
“Danni, if you ask me what’s wrong, I swear I’ll hit you with a three wood.” Tears spilled down Kristine’s cheeks, and she swiped at them. “I can’t have anyone here see me like this,” she mumbled. “You don’t know what they’re like, Danni. They’re always watching, waiting for one little misstep, one little show of vulnerability they can use against me. And all the while they’re pretending to be my devoted friends. I never feel safe anymore.”
“So much for high society. Come on,” Danni said, climbing into the cart beside her sister. “Put the sunglasses on, and no one will be able to tell.”
Kristine replaced the protective barrier, but her mouth had a pinched look. “I’m sorry for what I said, Danni. You’re the only real friend I do have left.”
Danni sighed. “That doesn’t change the fact that I’m ticked at you, big time. It’s bad enough that you pretended to be me. But letting Bryan believe things could be serious—”
“All right, all right, I know it’s impossible.” Now Kristine sounded miserable again. “I don’t want to hurt Bryan.” And then, in a low voice, she added, “There’s been enough hurting already.”
“Kristine—”
“No more questions, Danni. I told you I’d come clean with Bryan, and I will. Tonight, in my own way.” The cart took off again at a good clip. Kristine gripped the wheel, staring straight ahead, and Danni no longer had the heart to chastise her. Besides, she had a niggling feeling inside, a fear that there might be a grain of truth to what Kristine had said. Was it possible that Danni did have some destructive need to compete with her sister when it came to men? And, if it was true, how could she ever have a sound relationship with a man…an enduring relationship…
“Oh, no,” Kristine said. “It’s him. He’s coming right toward us.”
For a wild moment, Danni thought Kristine was talking about Bryan McKay. But no…Bryan wasn’t in the golf cart approaching them. Instead her sister’s husband was at the wheel.
Kristine floored their own cart all over again—speeding away from Ted.
“Kris, this is ridiculous,” Danni said, hanging on for dear life. “At least, think of what your Sugar Beach friends will have to say about this.”
After a moment, the cart came to a jolting stop. Ted rode up beside them.
“Hello, Danni,” he said. And then, after an awkward pause, “Hello, Kris.”
At forty-one, Ted was still an extremely handsome man—tall, well-constructed, solidly built. Even if he was starting to gray a bit around the edges, settle a bit, the look suited him. However, right now his face was strained in a way Danni had never seen before.
“Kris, I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing,” he told his wife. “But you’ve got to stop.”
“I asked you to leave me alone.” Kristine’s voice wobbled. “Can’t you do that much for me?”
“No. Why should I? You’re mad at me, but you don’t even know what’s going on. You won’t even listen—”
“I don’t want to hear! Can’t you understand? That will only make it worse. Listening to all the reasons. The explanations, the excuses…”
“No excuses,” Ted muttered. “When you’re ready to hear me out, you let me know. When you’re ready to stop thinking about yourself, you let me know. I’ll be waiting…for a little while.”
“A little while?” Kristine’s voice was clogged with tears. She and her husband stared at each other, locked in their own private torment. Danni felt like an intruder, but there was nowhere to retreat. The golf course spread out all around them in its lovely emerald green…offering no reprieve anywhere. Nonetheless, she started to climb out of the cart. Kristine reached out a hand to her.
“No, Danni—please,” she implored. “Don’t leave me.”
Ted looked from one sister to the other. “Oh, hell,” he said heavily. Then he turned his cart around, and drove back the way he had come. Kristine waited until he had left before she broke down. Danni put an arm around her sister, and tried to comfort her.
The twin who infuriated her…the twin whom she loved.
CHAPTER THREE
THE THRILL of the hunt. That was the main thing Bryan liked about his work. It was his job to put money and people together for big projects, big dreams. In the process, he got called a lot of different names: venture capitalist, risk taker. Gambler. Damn fool, even, according to one client, until the client’s investment came back twentyfold.
And now Bryan was on the hunt for new game. It had taken him over three weeks to set up this appointment with the evasive C. J. Whit-field. At last the man had agreed to meet Bryan in this small restaurant in the heart of San Diego’s Old Town.
Bryan ordered a beer, sat back and listened to the haunting flute playing somewhere outside in the cool air. It was music that put him in mind of Danni Ferris. Of course, just about everything put him in mind of Danni lately. He was still thinking about her when someone slipped into the chair across the table.
“Mr. McKay.” It was a statement, not a question, spoken by a slender brunette in her thirties. She gazed at him appraisingly, almost challengingly. It only took him a second or two to figure out who she was.
“The C.J. is misleading,” he said.
She ordered a cappuccino. “For some reason, people just assume C.J. is going to belong to some stodgy good old boy. Beats me why they don’t figure it could stand for Candace Jennifer as well as anything else.”
She didn’t look like either a Candace or a Jennifer. She looked like…a C.J. Someone who enjoyed hiding behind an air of mystery and then taking others by surprise. Bryan wasn’t impressed. He considered all the delays he’d gone through to get this appointment—the cancellations, the rearrangements. It was too elaborate. Too devious, in the end.
“Well, Mr. McKay. Start convincing me why I should do business with you and your friends.”
Bryan tried to remind himself that this was the part he liked, working to match the money with the dream. And it was a very good dream this time, belonging to a group of local architects and artists who wanted to revitalize a section of the San Diego-Tijuana border zone. An ambitious building project was in the offing—an innovative cluster of apartment buildings, a commercial district, an artisans’ compound. Bryan explained it all to C. J. Whitfield over broiled bass and asparagus soup. The soup was a mistake. And so, too, it seemed, was C.J.
“Tell me, Bryan. Why did you come to me on this one?”
“You have a reputation for imaginative thinking.”
“I also have a reputation for being filthy rich,” she remarked.
“That, too,” he said easily.
She almost smiled. “Funny thing is, Bryan McKay, you have a reputation for picking winners. But this time…I just don’t see it. For one thing, it’s a lousy location. Nobody wants to go anywhere near that part of town anymore. Nothing you build there is going to change that.”
“This group is going to change a lot of things,” he argued. “They have a certain vision—”
“Oh, no. When people start getting visionary, it always means trouble. Bryan, I’m as idealistic as the next poor schmuck, but I also believe in confronting reality. From what I’ve heard, so do you. Why this fanciful turn of yours?”
She was getting on his nerves, but he didn’t actually have a good answer for her. This wasn’t the first time he’d gambled on an idea that seemed impractical or even impossible at first. But there was something special about this project, something that captured his excitement in a way few other ideas had.
C.J. thumbed through the prospectus he’d handed her. “Sure, all the figures look fine on paper,” she said disparagingly.
Bryan found himself comparing her to Danni, and couldn’t imagine two women more different from each other. Maybe Danni was elusive in her own way, but she was also completely…genuine. Bryan liked the sound of that word. It suited Danni. He couldn’t imagine her deliberately creating an aura of mystery, couldn’t picture her staging an entrance or an exit for effect. Which was what C.J. was doing at the moment—staging her exit. She flicked her hand in the air, and a younger woman who had remained unobtrusive until now materialized to stand a respectful distance away. Bryan wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d curtseyed to her boss.
C.J. tossed the prospectus toward her assistant; the woman turned out to be a good catch.
“I’ll look the figures over again as a personal favor. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up, Bryan, if I were you.”
“Message received,” he said. “I won’t hold my breath waiting for your call.”
She treated him to another of her challenging looks. “Oh, I will call you,” she said. Was she actually flirting with him? Then she rose from her chair and swirled out of the restaurant, assistant in her wake.
Bryan finished his beer, paid the tab and wandered outside. Old Town was best at night like this, the ancient adobe buildings mellow in the golden spill of lanterns. He paused at the tiled fountain in the plaza where passersby tossed their coins for wishes and good luck. The flute music still played from somewhere just out of sight…wistful, restless. Reminding Bryan of Danni Ferris all over again.
When he let himself into his apartment a short time later, the phone was ringing. He picked it up, said hello, and heard her voice. It was oddly subdued.
“Hello, Bryan. I…can’t make it tonight, after all. I’m sorry.”
“What gives, Danni?” He seemed to say that to her a lot.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. And then, all in a rush she continued, “I was supposed to tell you something tonight. But I chickened out. I know that as soon as I tell you…you’ll despise me. And I don’t think I can bear it.”
She had a habit of speaking in riddles. “Come over,” he said. “We’ll talk it out. Nothing can be as bad as you make it sound.”
She was quiet at that, so quiet he almost thought he’d lost the connection.
“Danni,” he asked, “still there?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice low. She paused again. “Bryan what made you show up at my office last night?”
“I wanted to see you.”
