Finn's Twins!

“Hmm,” Izzy murmured now, glancing around, thinking that perhaps Meg had been misled. The fashion district was uptown, the Village was downtown. The city was all around. Horns blared, messengers whistled, brakes squealed, subway trains rumbled. There were buses, bikes, cars, cabs, and hundreds upon thousands of people everywhere she could see. No place for the buffalo to roam. And she’d be willing to bet there wasn’t a deer or an antelope for miles.

But whatever Finn MacCauley had told his sister wasn’t her problem. As soon as she’d done her duty, she’d be on her way to Sam’s. Izzy squared her shoulders against the weight of her backpack, picked up both the duffel bags she’d just set down and headed toward the elevator at the end of the hall. “Come along, girls.”

Two identical redheaded urchins fell in behind her.

“Is this it?” asked Tansy curiously as she gazed around the narrow, somewhat grimy-looking hallway. It smelled of stale tobacco smoke and other things Izzy didn’t want to think about. “Does Uncle Finn live here?” Tansy persisted.

“Of course not. I’m sure he lives somewhere very nice,” Izzy said with more conviction than she felt. She ushered the girls into the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor. The door rattled shut and the elevator lurched, then began to creak and rumble upward. “This must be where he takes his pictures. Of wildlife.” Rats, perhaps. She would believe rats.

Eventually the elevator wheezed to a stop. The door hesitated, then slid open onto a tiny foyer with a door and a doorbell. Ring for admittance, ordered the sign tacked beside it.

Izzy rang. An answering buzz sounded. She pushed the door open.

He shot wildlife, all right. Just not the sort she’d imagined. Immediately inside the studio door Izzy came nose to belly button with a seven-foot-tall full-length black-and-white photo of a sultry blond bimbo clad only in her Rapunzel-length hair.

Izzy’s eyes widened, then briefly shut in disbelief. She would have clapped her hands over the girls’, but there were four eyes and only two of Izzy’s hands.

“May I help you?”

Izzy’s eyes flicked open. At the far end of the narrow reception room behind a desk sat a complete counterpoint to the bimbo. This woman was fifty if she was a day, with iron gray hair cut in no-nonsense bowl fashion and dark brown eyes that seemed to widen a bit, too, behind tortoiseshell frames as she took in Izzy and her charges.

Izzy jerked the girls around so they would stop staring in openmouthed amazement at the photo. “I’m here to see Mr. MacCauley.”

The woman looked doubtful, and Izzy didn’t blame her. “You have... an appointment?”

“I’ve brought the girls.”

The woman goggled, her gaze dropping to look at the twins. Her professional demeanor slipped suddenly. “Oh, my, no, dear. They have to be much older.”

“They’re six.” Izzy started to argue. Then she realized that wasn’t what the woman meant—which implied that Finn MacCauley was as irresponsible as his sister.

“They’re not here to be photographed. These are his nieces.”

“Nieces?” Now the woman’s eyes were almost as round as her tortoiseshell frames. Her mouth pressed together in a disapproving frown. “You’re...Meg?”

Whatever the woman’s precise opinion of Finn’s sister, it wasn’t much better than Izzy’s own. “I’m a neighbor.”

“Whose neighbor?”

“Meg’s. She lives next door to us. In San Francisco. We’re not close friends or anything, Meg and I, I mean. The girls and I are,” she added as she dropped a fond glance on them. They nodded their heads in agreement.

The woman looked dazed.

Izzy decided to press on. “But when they told Meg I was coming to New York to meet my fiancé, she...asked me to drop them off.”

“Drop them...off?”

“At their uncle’s,” Izzy said firmly, in case there was any misunderstanding. “Mr. MacCauley.”

“Oh dear.” The woman contemplated the girls, then the phone. Finally she reached for it, then hesitated and pulled her hand back, apparently having second thoughts. “He’s not going to like this,” she muttered. “He’s not going to like this one bit.”

She reached for the phone again, but before she could punch in a number, the door behind her desk burst open. A wild man stalked out.

Izzy’s stomach clenched. Her heart kicked over in her chest. He reminded her of nothing so much as the illustration she’d seen in a children’s book her grandfather had once read her about a pirate.

A black-haired, clean-shaven pirate. His face was lean, all angles and planes. His nose was hawkish and had obviously once been on the wrong end of someone’s fist or foot. He wore tattered blue jeans and a chambray shirt with the top three buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up. He was probably six feet tall, though he seemed bigger. His energy—or irritation—took up a lot of space. Meg would have said he had an aggressive aura. Izzy thought that didn’t describe it by half. His straight hair was startlingly dark against the tan of his lean face and it looked as if he’d been raking his hands through it. As if to confirm her suspicions, he did so now, lifting it in spikes all over his head.

“Where are they?” he demanded. He stomped past the receptionist, then whirled and confronted her. “They’re late!”

“I was just about to—”

“Call Tony. If he thinks I’m going to stand around here all afternoon twiddling my thumbs while his dollies drift in here when they damned well please, he’s got another think coming!”

The receptionist started to nod.

“Now!” he barked. Then he shot past her back through the door, slamming it behind him.

“Was th-that—” Pansy began nervously, her hand strangling Izzy’s.

“Shh,” Izzy said.

The door burst open once more. The wild man snapped, “Tell him if they’re not here in five minutes, he can damned well forget it. I’ll shoot the next girls who come through the door.”

Tansy and Pansy both gasped audibly.

And that was when he noticed them.

The girls tried to melt right behind Izzy’s skirt. The pirate turned his stormy blue eyes on them. “Who the hell are you?” Then his gaze lifted to focus squarely on Izzy.

Izzy pressed her knees together to stop them knocking and raised her chin. “My name is Isobel Rule,” she said firmly. “You are, I presume, Mr. MacCauley? I’ve brought your nieces.”

She was past expecting that he’d welcome them with open arms. She at least hoped he’d stay, “Oh, right, they were supposed to show up today, weren’t they? I’d forgotten.”

He looked poleaxed. “Brought my... nieces.” He stared at the girls, his tan going oddly pale. “The hell you say.”

Izzy frowned. “Language, Mr. MacCauley. Language.”

He ignored her. His gaze narrowed as it settled on the children peeping out at him. “You’re...Meg’s kids?”

Izzy stared. “You don’t know?”

“Never seem ’em before in my life,” he said flatly. “What’re they doing here?”

“I’ve brought them to stay with you.”

The receptionist gasped.

The stormy look in Finn MacCauley’s eyes increased to near gale force. “To stay? With me? You’re joking.”