Twice the Chance

Twice the Chance
Darlene Gardner

Jazz Lenox had her reasons for giving up her babies for adoption. So she can't burst into their lives after eight years. Yet there's no doubt these kids are hers. No one could mistake that unique hair.She knows she should walk away. Especially when she meets the twins' uncle–sexy, shoot-from-the-hip Matt Caminetti. But how does she leave a man who's so persistent…and so ruggedly appealing? Most surprising of all, Matt believes in her. Believes in them. A future together means coming clean about her past. All of it. It's the only way to find out if she really has a second shot at the life she's always wanted….

“That settles it.

You have to go out with me.”

Matt’s gaze was unwavering. “Because we’d be good for each other. And because I can’t stop thinking about you.”

With the pool lights shining down on him, Matt looked as golden as when Jazz had first seen him bathed in sunlight at the park. Now that she’d gotten to know and like him, he was even more handsome. Her heart hammered. “I wish you would.”

“Don’t you think about me?”

“No,” she said instantly.

“Now why do I think you’re not telling the truth?” he asked softly.

It made not one whit of difference if she found him appealing. She needed to operate on the assumption that the twins were the children she’d given up. Honestly, she’d be a lot less likely to run into them if she didn’t hang around their uncle.

Honestly, as far as Matt was concerned, she didn’t think she could stay away.

Dear Reader,

My mother thought she was carrying twins until the moment I was born. “I hear two heartbeats,” the doctor had told her. Instead, she got one big baby.

Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to stories about twins and why the idea for Twice the Chance came to me fully formed. It’s about a woman who stumbles across a girl and boy with unusually colored hair whom she thinks may be the twins she gave up for adoption.

The story, however, has a twist. Jazz Lenox doesn’t want anyone, especially Matt Caminetti, the man with whom she’s falling in love, to know about her suspicions. That’s because she has another secret of her own….

Until next time,

Darlene Gardner

P.S. Visit me on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.

Twice the Chance

Darlene Gardner

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

While working as a newspaper sportswriter, Darlene Gardner realized she’d rather make up quotes than rely on an athlete to say something interesting. So she quit her job and concentrated on a fiction career that landed her at Harlequin/Silhouette Books, where she wrote for the Temptation, Duets and Intimate Moments lines before finding a home at Superromance. Please visit Darlene on the web at www.darlenegardner.com.

To adoptive mothers

who love their children—and the birth mothers

who gave them the chance.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

THE SOUTH CAROLINA sun bathed the young girl in light, bringing out the unusual color of the long silky hair she wore in a ponytail.

Jazz Lenox forgot about the stitch in her side, the need to watch the packed earth for rocks and exposed roots, and her determination to run two circuits around the trail circling Ashley Greens Park in less than thirty minutes.

The girl was about seven or eight years old and wore black shorts, high blue socks and a bright blue shirt shot through with yellow lightning bolts. She was beneath the crossbar of a soccer net with her back to Jazz, on the balls of her feet, her weight slightly forward. Her ponytail swished back and forth as she moved to catch a ball careening toward her.

Her dark red ponytail.

The shade was unusual but not unique. In the three years since Jazz had moved into her one-bedroom apartment in South Carolina, a few miles outside of Charleston, she’d spotted the hair color a dozen times on people of various ages. A middle-aged man. A teenage boy. A toddler girl.

This Sunday morning was the first time Jazz had stumbled across a redhead who appeared to be the right age. Jazz realized, of course, that she could be overreacting. Maybe this child hadn’t even been a redhead at birth. It could be a coincidence that the girl’s particular shade matched not only the wispy tufts that had been on the newborn, but also Jazz’s grandmother’s hair.