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He appeared to be giving the matter some thought. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”
Jenna wished she’d remembered to grab a kitchen knife on the way out the window. “If you know Kathryn, you’d know what colors are in her wedding.”
A look of understanding softened his features. “Some kind of purple? Lavender, right?”
Lavender was Kathryn’s signature color. Ever since they were kids, she’d worn lavender, while Jenna’d had to wear identical outfits in pink. But that was one of their many differences—Kathryn had embraced being dressed up as a sideshow act by their mother, while Jenna had hated every moment of it. She still couldn’t look at the color pink without feeling slightly nauseated.
Kathryn could never understand why Jenna had felt the need to differentiate herself from her twin with wild clothes and different hair colors, while Jenna couldn’t understand her twin’s obsession with being one of an identical pair.
“Okay, so what’s your connection to my sister and her wedding?”
“I’m her fiancé’s brother, and I’ll explain everything if you’ll just give me a half hour of your time.”
Her curiosity was piqued now that she had some assurance this Travis guy wasn’t a hardened criminal. What sort of urgent matter could bring Kathryn to turn to Jenna for help? And why had she sent her fiancé’s brother to talk to her?
She looked Travis up and down. Okay, considering his sex appeal, he was a pretty good messenger. She could stand to spend a half hour with him, though she could think of much more interesting things to do with him than talk about Kathryn and her prenuptial problems.
“I’ll listen, if you’ll buy lunch,” she said, her stomach rumbling because she’d skipped breakfast. “There’s a diner around the corner.”
TRAVIS DID HIS VERY BEST to focus on the business at hand, but Jenna Calvert had thrown him completely off track. She wasn’t at all what he’d expected. Yes, Kathryn had described her as a rebellious type, as someone who liked to shock others and be contrary just for the sake of conflict, but she hadn’t mentioned how damn sexy Jenna would be.
A waitress with three nose rings and threads of purple in her braided hair arrived to take their order, and Travis tried to take his mind off Jenna long enough to choose a lunch. His gaze landed on meat loaf, and he wasn’t sure if he’d ever even tasted it, but he’d seen it on TV and decided that’s what he was having.
“I’ll have the meat loaf, and…” Certainly wine wasn’t the appropriate beverage. “Iced tea.”
“You want green tea or black?” This was San Francisco, after all.
“Green will be fine.”
He caught himself staring at Jenna’s lush pink lips as she placed her own order for a cheeseburger, chili fries and a chocolate shake, and when the waitress disappeared, he forced his gaze back to Jenna’s eyes.
The gorgeous redhead had managed in the space of ten minutes to muddle his thoughts and set his senses on high alert. It took a monumental effort to keep from letting his gaze fall even lower than her sensuous mouth to the front of her tight black tank top—to keep from thinking about the fact that she apparently wasn’t wearing a bra.
And curse the guy who invented bras if all women could look like that without them.
She wasn’t even remotely his type. Her look wasn’t classic Coco Chanel, as he’d always preferred, but rather rebel-without-a-Nordstrom-card. With her dyed burgundy hair; her short, unpolished fingernails and her tight, faded jeans, she was about as opposite to Kathryn Calvert as she could get and still be the woman’s twin sister.
When he looked into her ice-blue eyes, he saw sparks of fire that weren’t present in her sister’s. Perhaps Jenna had spirit, something he suspected lacking in Kathryn. Travis was undeniably intrigued by this wilder twin, and he was curious to know her in spite of his suspicion that she probably had a tattoo hiding somewhere on her body.
Where and what that tattoo might be—the possibilities were endless. A little red rose on the satin skin of her inner thigh, or a tiny heart hiding beneath her panties…Whoa, mama.
What on earth was going on here? He didn’t like tattoos, and he didn’t even know if Jenna had one. But she certainly had his imagination in the gutter all of a sudden.
There was no sense in fantasizing about Kathryn’s bad-girl twin anyway, because if she agreed to his offer—and he knew she would—then she would be transformed in the next few days into an exact replica of her sister. It was his unwelcome job to make that happen.
Jenna sat across from him with her elbows propped on the table, her slender arms sporting two chunky bracelets in various stones and faux gems, displaying an utter lack of grace that Travis found oddly charming. As he explained his acquaintance with Kathryn Calvert and her engagement to his younger brother, Blake, she listened closely, never taking her gaze away from his eyes.
But next came the sensitive part, the reason he’d driven all the way from Carmel in the hope of bringing Jenna back with him.
“The wedding plans were moving along just fine until last week, when Kathryn flew to Los Angeles for what she claims was supposed to be a week-long spa treatment. She decided to get some minor plastic surgery while she was there, and—”
“What kind of plastic surgery?” Jenna’s eyes had grown perfectly round.
Their conversation was interrupted by the waitress delivering their meals and drinks. Jenna continued to watch him as she dug into her burger.
When the waitress left, Travis continued. “Some kind of procedure where the doctor takes fat from one part of your body and injects it into the cheeks and lips. Kathryn is outraged with the results, and she refuses to come home until the problem has been corrected.”
Jenna laughed out loud. “What, her face is too fat now?”
Travis smiled. “Something like that. She says she looks lumpy.” He couldn’t begin to understand why anyone would endure such a procedure, especially not for beauty’s sake, but of all the people he knew, Kathryn was the easiest to imagine having fat injected into her face.
“Now I’ve heard it all.”
“The problem is, we can’t postpone the wedding or any of the prenuptial events. For one thing, Kathryn doesn’t want my family to know she was off having facial enhancements done. My mother hasn’t exactly welcomed her into the family.”
“I can imagine how important it is for Kathryn to impress her future mother-in-law.”
“She has a long list of people to impress, I’m afraid. Kathryn initiated a project with Blake to establish a women and children’s shelter through the Roth charity foundation, and she is supposed to meet with a couple interested in donating land for the project later this week.”
“So reschedule.”
“They’re already hesitant about the project thanks to Blake’s reputation for flakiness. Kathryn doesn’t want to give them any reason to back out, because such a prime piece of land so central to the Bay Area is nearly impossible to come by.”
Jenna frowned. “Sounds like she’s got herself in a real bind.”
“Not just herself, but my business, too. Our family’s investment firm has suffered recently as a result of Blake’s inability to handle responsibility, and this wedding is our chance to give some of our clients a better impression of him, to leave them feeling warm and fuzzy about Roth Investments. We need everything to come off without a hitch.”
Jenna’s expression turned wary as she bit into a French fry. “Why can’t you just tell everyone that the bride has come down with pneumonia or something and is too sick to go through with the wedding?”
Travis took his first bite of meat loaf and decided he’d been missing out all these years. He made a mental note to ask the family chef to prepare the dish regularly.
“Any postponement will look like flakiness on the family’s part, no matter what the excuse, and that’s an image we have to avoid at all costs. Several of our biggest clients have threatened to leave because of Blake’s unreliability. This marriage will show them that he’s settling down and becoming a family man.”
“Why doesn’t someone just fire your brother?”
If it were only so easy. “My father has forbidden it. Blake is Dad’s favorite.”
“This all sounds a little crazy, and I don’t understand how you think I can help.”
“The doctors have assured Kathryn that her face will look normal before the wedding, but she still refuses to come home until the damage has been undone.”
“So you just have to hope she’ll come back in time for it.”
“And that’s exactly what I’m doing, except that still leaves us without a bride for the prewedding events my parents have planned, along with the land donation meeting.”
“Does your brother know about Kathryn’s little problem?”
“No, and he cannot find out. He’s awful at keeping anything secret. He’s expecting Kathryn back from her trip on Monday, but she obviously won’t be back.”
“Isn’t he going to notice when his bride doesn’t show up for the rehearsal?”
Travis took a deep breath. “That’s where you come in. We need you to impersonate Kathryn until she returns.”
Jenna dropped her cheeseburger onto its plate and stared at him as if he’d just sprouted antennae.
“You’re out of your mind,” she said matter-of-factly, her cheek full of half-chewed cheeseburger.
“You haven’t even heard my offer yet.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to help Kathryn or the dimwit who agreed to marry her.”
Kathryn had never explained why she and Jenna were estranged from each other. Apparently the rift was a deep one, judging by Jenna’s reaction, but Kathryn had mentioned how she and her twin had switched places many times as children—how it had in fact been one of their favorite games.
“You’ll be quite well compensated.” He noted a gleam of interest in her eye that she quickly subdued.
“I’m earning a good living already. I don’t need anyone’s charity.”
From the looks of Jenna’s neighborhood, Travis was willing to bet she was barely scraping by on her meager freelance earnings, and that she could definitely use the money he had to offer.
“Not charity. Payment for a job completed.”
“Yeah, whatever. I still won’t do it.”
“You don’t even know what the compensation will be.”
“Not enough.” She turned her attention to her milk shake.
He could tell by the tenseness in her narrow shoulders that he had to pull his final punch. “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Chocolate milk shake spurted from her mouth across the table and onto the lapel of his favorite jacket. She stared at him wild-eyed.
He dipped his napkin into a glass of ice water and dabbed at the spot until it disappeared, and when he looked back up, she was scooting out of the booth.
“Where are you going?”
“Away from you and whatever crooked scheme you’ve cooked up.” She stood and shrugged on her small leather backpack.
Travis stared after her as she headed for the door.
He hadn’t anticipated her walking away once he’d started to talk money. Nor had he imagined he’d be so mesmerized by the sway of her hips in those faded Levi’s that he’d be frozen in place, speechless and unable to form complete thoughts. No, things weren’t going the way he’d planned at all.
2
JENNA CLIMBED THE STAIRS to her apartment, her mind playing over and over Travis’s proposal. Had she made too rash a decision? Twenty-five grand was a lot of money to walk away from, yet the thought of not only helping Kathryn, but actually taking over her life, was just too much to contemplate all at once.
Jenna had spent every moment since she’d left home ten years ago trying to forget that she was not unique in the world, that she had an identical twin out there and that she wasn’t even the best liked of the two. Kathryn had always been their parents’ favorite, their teachers’ favorite and the one who had more friends and more boyfriends. Kathryn knew the art of getting along to get along, while Jenna had been born with a rebellious streak that angered authority figures and scared away the faint of heart.
An image of Travis Roth popped into her head. A perverse little part of her wondered if he was faint of heart, or if he’d be the kind of guy who could hang on when life with Jenna got unpredictable. Crazy thoughts, considering a guy like Travis and a girl like Jenna would never get together, not in a thousand years—unless, of course, some sort of paid services were involved.
Like being hired to impersonate her sister.
The thought gave Jenna a shudder. Impersonating Kathryn would be like taking a giant leap backward in time. She’d be admitting that all her rebellion in the past ten years had been for nothing—that with a bottle of dye, some scissors, a change of clothes and a bit of makeup, she was just a duplicate of her ever-so-proper sister.
The wild hairstyles, the sexy clothes, the wild men, the wild nights out…
All for nothing.
The choices she’d made to prove herself an individual could be wiped away in one fell swoop.
Jenna reached her floor of the apartment building, and the first thing she saw was her door standing ajar. She froze, and her stomach contracted into a rock.
Could Travis have gotten it open before he came outside and found her trying to escape? Possible, but how could he have so quickly gotten around the couch she’d jammed up against it earlier? That, along with getting past the locks, would have taken more time than he’d had to come back outside and catch her sneaking away.
She took a step closer and saw that the locks hadn’t been broken, and an image of the open fire-escape window flashed in her mind. In this neighborhood, no one left fire-escape windows open unless they wanted to find all their valuables and not-so-valuables for sale at a swap meet the next weekend.
Her heart raced. Should she go in or just leave and call the police from a neighbor’s place? Common sense told her to leave, but curiosity had her aching to peek inside, if only for a moment.
Her computer—she had to know that it was safe.
Jenna held her breath and stepped into the doorway, thinking of how she was going to pitch Guard-Dog-In-A-Box out the window at Travis Roth’s head if she saw him outside her building again. Slowly, she eased her head around the half-open door, until she could see the interior of the apartment.
It took her a moment to make sense of the changes since she’d last been there an hour ago. Couch overturned, cushions ripped open, papers and books strewn everywhere, bookshelves emptied and her laptop missing from her desk.
Jenna’s heart pounded in her ears as she realized the months—the years— of work saved on her hard drive that now might be missing, and she didn’t see her box of floppy disks anywhere among the mess.
She gripped the door frame and resisted the urge to rush in and search for her laptop and files before she knew for sure that the intruder was gone. She needed to think, make a plan…. First she’d go to Mrs. Lupinski’s and ask to use the phone.
She backed away from the door and crept up the stairs.
Damn it.
Was Travis Roth a diversion for someone to break into her apartment? No, that didn’t make sense. He hadn’t come expecting that she’d flee out the window, that they’d end up having lunch at a diner down the street…But he could have had some other plan to get her out of the apartment. Could that whole story about her sister have been an elaborate charade?
Her mind raced from thought to thought, and her hands began to shake as the reality of what she’d likely just lost sank in.
Jenna raised her fist to knock on Mrs. Lupinski’s door, but the door swung open at that moment and her neighbor, in mint-green curlers and a red satin robe, peered out.
“Shouldn’t have left your window open, huh! Saw some guy climbing up the fire escape, and twenty minutes later he walked right out the front carrying a black bag full of stuff.”
“Did you call the police?”
“How was I supposed to know if he was up to no-good? Could have been a friend of yours for all I knew.” Mrs. Lupinski’s robe slid open in the front to reveal a black lace nightgown. The sounds of a daytime soap opera could be heard in the background.
Jenna shuddered. She knew better than to argue with her cantankerous neighbor. “I need to use your phone. My apartment has been robbed and ransacked.” While you were up here minding your own business.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
She wanted to throw up or kick something. Or both. Tears burned her eyes, but she blinked them away, determined not to let her neighbor see how upset she really was.
