Finn's Twins!

“It is,” Finn said.

Izzy looked at him, eyes wide. “How do you know?”

The kettle whistled and he poured water into the mugs for tea. “Because I shot a layout in his apartment building last year.”

“You know where he lives?” Izzy considered that. “It’s pretty fancy. It’s very fancy,” she corrected herself. “Sam never seemed fancy.”

“Maybe he’s not.”

“You don’t know him?”

“No.” Finn hobnobbed with the recently rich and famous. The Fletchers had had money since they’d got off the Mayflower.

“I think I’m out of my league,” Izzy said after a moment.

“But if he intends to marry you—”

“That’s what he said. He gave me a ring.” She flashed it briefly. It was a rock almost the size of a pea. “I thought it was a zircon,” she said. “It must not be.” She sounded even more miserable at that.

“Probably not.” Finn thought she was the strangest girl he’d met in his life. Most of the women he knew would have killed for a diamond of that size. He shoved a cup of tea in front of her, hoping to forestall the tears he saw threatening.

Izzy wrapped her hands around the mug and stared into the steaming tea. “Thank you.” She sipped it. “His mother looked at me like I had a social disease.”

“What?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t even know it was his mother at first. This lady came out while the doorman was rejecting me, and she gave me this look...it wasn’t really snotty exactly, just aware, you know, like she was registering that I didn’t belong.”

“Maybe you’re imagining things.”

Izzy shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She sighed. “I don’t think she has the faintest idea Sam and I are engaged.”

“Not every guy tells his mother about the woman he’s going to marry. Anyway,” he said briskly, “he’s a grown man. He doesn’t need her permission.”

“I just don’t want to...embarrass him.”

“You won’t embar—” he started to say, then his voice faltered because there was just so far assurances could go, and assuring Isobel Rule that in her present state of slightly hippy shambles she wouldn’t embarrass Sam Fletcher was too far.

Finn’s eyes narrowed and he studied her closely, assessing point by point the woman he saw.

She wasn’t tall and willowy like the models he shot every day. She didn’t know the first thing about how to move with their sinuous grace. But she did have assets. Her shiny brown hair, if someone cut it and styled it and tamed all that riotous curl, might actually be lovely. Her skin was freckled, but not unattractive. In fact it had a sort of peachy-rosy glow that, if she wore the right colors, would be stunning. Slate blue, drab gray and burnt umber were not the right ones. A change of clothes would help, too. Something that didn’t shriek Haight-Ashbury with an underlying hum of thrift-shop grabbag for a start.

Her features were actually quite nice, not that she’d done the slightest thing to enhance them. She had wide brown eyes flecked with green and amber, a nice straight nose. And her mouth... he looked more closely. There was something almost akin to Angelina Fiorelli’s about her mouth.

He could turn Isobel Rule into a woman who would knock all the Fletchers’ socks off.

A slow smile spread across his face. “Izzy,” he said, “have I got a deal for you.”

CHAPTER THREE

“YOU want to make me over?” She echoed Finn MacCauley’s words, trying to sound offended or at least indifferent. She didn’t do a very good job.

He shrugged. “You’re the one who just finished saying you didn’t think you were playing in his league. I only offered to fix that.”

“For a price,” she reminded him.

“You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Besides, where are you going to go if you don’t stay here?”

She didn’t know. She knew actually that his offer was close to life-saving. At least it was face-saving. She couldn’t imagine going home now and reporting to Pops and Digger and Hewey, the old sailors who shared the house Grandad had left her at his death two months before, that she couldn’t get past Sam Fletcher’s front door. They’d come storming out en masse and throw him overboard. They’d fuss and fume and get all overprotective and cosset and coddle her to within an inch of her life.

It had been all she could do to convince them she was capable of coming clear across the country alone to see him. If they’d known for a minute that she hadn’t told him she was coming, well, it didn’t bear thinking about!

No, she had to dig in and stay in New York. And Finn MacCauley’s offer was clearly the best way to do it. All he wanted in exchange was that she take care of the girls. What sort of hardship was that? She enjoyed the girls.

So what was the problem?

The problem, Izzy finally got around to admitting to herself, was Finn MacCauley himself. She’d never met anyone like him in her life. Sam, who was apparently wealthy beyond all her wildest dreams, seemed somehow more ordinary, more commonplace, than Finn.

Sam was easygoing, casual, lighthearted. There was nothing intense about Sam—unless it was the romantic spark he had fired in Izzy five years before. Finn, on the other hand, positively radiated passionate energy. She’d seen it in him the moment he’d burst out of the door to his studio. She could see it now as he prowled the confines of his kitchen.

It was a sort of intense singularly masculine energy that made her more than a little nervous. She found that surprising when she thought about it, because heaven knew she’d been raised around men. Since the age of seven, she’d been raised by men—Grandad and his sailor pals. But not one of them had she been as aware of as she was Finn MacCauley.

Did she want such a man to, as he put it so very bluntly, “shape her up”?

Did she have a choice?

Well, yes. She could say no thank you to his deal. But then where would she stay? And who would he get to take care of Tansy and Pansy?

“For how long?” she asked warily.

“How long is Fletcher going to be gone?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t relay any more of the ignominious details of her encounter with the doorman.

“I’ll find out tomorrow,” Finn said.

He acted as if it would be no big deal. Probably for him it wouldn’t be. No doubt she could learn a lot from him.

If she dared.

Visions of Pops and Digger and Hewey looking after her for the rest of her life—or theirs—rose again in her mind. She lifted her gaze and met his piratical one. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

She was awake at first light, surprised, in fact, that she’d slept at all. But the previous day’s events had been tiring enough so that it wasn’t long after her head hit the pillow that Izzy was out like a light. The sounds of the city woke her again when it was scarcely dawn. She didn’t know why sirens and rattling trash cans should sound different in New York than they did in San Francisco. She only knew that she was awakened very early.