Finn's Twins!

“Well, it’s after seven.” She stood up and set aside the book she’d been reading. “The poor woman said she had been here since eight. She has a life—unlike you, apparently. So, I told her to go on. We all shouldn’t have to suffer. She has to cook for Tom.”

“Who’s Tom?”

Isobel gave a long-suffering sigh. “Her husband.” She shook her head. “Poor man, on his feet all day. I didn’t know they still had beat policemen in New York City. I’m glad to know they do. It makes the city seem a much friendlier place.” She looked at him brightly. “Don’t you think?”

Finn’s mouth opened and closed. He felt like a grouper, hooked, beached and gasping for air.

Strong’s husband was called Tom? He was a policeman? He’d never known any of that. In fact all he’d learned about her in the seven years she’d worked for him was that she was never sick and she made things run smoothly in the studio even when the rest of the world was going to hell in a handbasket all around him.

He glanced around, trying to get his bearings. One of the twins was peering at him through the lens of a turn-of- the-century Kodak camera he kept on a shelf by the door. “Here now,” he snapped. “Put that down.”

This twin didn’t seem nearly as skittish as the other one. She set the camera down, but she didn’t dodge behind Isobel Rule’s skirt. Instead she regarded him solemnly. “Why?”

“Because it isn’t a plaything.”

“I wasn’t playing.” Unblinking green eyes met his.

“What were you doing?”

“Framing ogres.”

“Tansy!”

Finn’s gaze flicked up at Isobel’s dismayed exclamation. He saw a deep rose color suffuse her face, blotting out the freckles. And what a color it was.

“It’s what you told me to do,” the one who was presumably Tansy protested, looking indignant. “You said to iso—islo—”

“Isolate,” Isobel supplied resignedly.

Tansy bobbed her head. “Uh-huh. Isolate scary things and they wouldn’t be so scary anymore,” she finished, slanting a glance in Finn’s direction. “You’re right.”

He felt like baring his teeth at her. “Don’t scare you anymore, huh?” he said to the child.

Tansy shook her head resolutely.

He turned his gaze on the twin peeping out from behind Isobel. “What about you? Are you scared?” He saw Tansy fix her sister with a hard look.

“N-no,” the other one, obviously Pansy, replied.

“You ought to be.”

“Mr. MacCauley!” Isobel’s blush deepened: Or was it anger causing that color?

He turned a bland smile in her direction. “Yes?”

“Stop trying to frighten them! You should be ashamed of yourself, flaunting your ferocity before small children!”

“Flaunting my ferocity? Is that what I’m doing?”

Isobel Rule pressed her lips together. Then she turned to the children. “He’s teasing,” she told both girls firmly.

Finn frowned. “Now, wait a minute—”

“You were quite right to frame him, Tansy,” Isobel went on, ignoring him. “You were clever to see that he’s not really fierce at all.”

“The hell I’m not!”

All three of them turned their gazes on him, the twins with jaws sagging, Isobel with her brows drawn down in obvious displeasure at his language. He scowled at her. But even as he pretended he didn’t care, he felt the hot tide of embarrassment creeping up his neck and rued a complexion that, even tanned as it was, would allow Isobel Rule to see his blush.

He muttered under his breath and turned away. That was when he came face-to-face once more with Strong’s empty chair and remembered he didn’t have anyone to stick the twins with.

Except—and here his gaze slid sideways—Miss Isobel Rule.

Was she a miss? He looked a little harder, trying to see if she was wearing a ring, but she had her hands in the pockets of that circus tent he supposed she called a skirt. Their gazes met.

“Well, I can’t keep them,” Finn said abruptly.

“Meg said—”

“Not for the first time, Meg is wrong.” He waved hand around the studio foyer. “Do you see any dolls? Any blocks? Any puzzles or playthings? No, you don’t. Why? Because this is not a day-care center. I repeat, hot a day-care center! I can’t take them.” He did a quick lap around Strong’s desk for emphasis, stopping square in front of it to face Isobel Rule and her two worried-looking charges. He didn’t let his gaze linger on them.

“You’re their uncle,” Isobel said quietly. “They have no one else.”

“They have you.”

“Me?” she squeaked.

“Why not you? You brought them.”

“Because I got shang—because Meg asked me to,” she amended with a quick apprehensive glance at the girls.

Which meant that she was as much one of Meg’s victims as he was. That, in ordinary circumstances, would have made him feel sympathetic toward her. In the present situation, he wasn’t above taking whatever advantage he could get. “You should have said no.”

“I thought you were expecting them.”

He snorted. “You thought I agreed to baby-sit? You thought I said, sure, just drop ’em off, they can sit in the foyer and watch me shoot all day?”

“She said you shot wildlife,” Isobel replied faintly.

Finn’s hands tightened in a strangling motion. “She’ll burn in hell—”

The girls gasped.

Isobel shot him a furious glare. “That’s enough. Now you’ve terrified them. She’s not going to burn anywhere, girls,” Isobel assured them. “She’s fine. And you’re going to be fine, too. Your uncle is simply upset. Obviously he isn’t as flexible as one might like.” Another accusing glare sailed in his direction. “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you and want you—” here she nailed him with a look that promised instant death if he contradicted her “—he just needs to get used to the change in his life.”

“Our lives,” Finn said, determined to salvage whatever he could of the mess she was making of his life.

A tiny frown line appeared between Isobel’s dark brows. “What do you mean?”