Fortune's Twins

He stood and pulled out the chair next to him. “Please.”

She sat down, acutely aware of the man just a few inches from her now. She could feel his body heat, smell a faint whiff of his aftershave.

“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You’re not comfortable here, are you?”

“It was my friend Sylvia’s idea. We’re celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“A windfall.” She didn’t elaborate. People with money made easy targets. Her mother’s experience had taught her that. “This isn’t your favorite place, either.”

“I was just about to leave.”

“Oh.”

“But now I won’t. Want to dance?”

Adrenaline shot through her. This gorgeous guy was actually responding to her flirtation! “I’d love to.”

Gwen was a terrible dancer, so she was relieved when a slow country song came on as she and her new acquaintance hit the dance floor. Slow dancing didn’t require much skill. She just had to put her arms around the guy and rock slowly back and forth.

His muscles were hard beneath his crisp shirt, and he smelled of soap and starch and that alluring scent of expensive aftershave. Gwen was half in love with him before the song ended.

They kissed after the second slow dance. He tasted faintly of scotch, she remembered. Then he took her to his hotel. He had a suite at the Ramada, one of only two hotels in Roan.

Gwen had never behaved like this, but this night, it felt perfectly natural. They shared few words. Talking didn’t seem to be necessary. She’d connected with Garrett—that was his name—on some elemental level. She wasn’t at all embarrassed when he took her clothes off. Though she was slender, she’d always thought her breasts were too small. But the way Garrett kissed and caressed them, he made her feel they were the most perfect breasts in the world.

All of her felt perfect. She wasn’t a sophisticated lover, but with Garrett she’d felt skillful, confident, sexy. Everything she did was right. Everything he did was perfect.

Gwen wasn’t a virgin. She’d had a brief, secret relationship with a man staying at the boardinghouse one summer when she was nineteen. It was shortly after her grandmother had died, and she’d been struggling with the boardinghouse and desperate for an intimate connection. Instead the experience had turned out painful and awkward. Sex with Garrett, on the other hand, was like dancing a perfect ballet. And for the first time in her life, a man’s caresses had brought her to the pinnacle of pleasure.

They’d slept curled in each other’s arms. In the morning, he’d scrubbed her back in the shower and combed the tangles out of her hair with painstaking gentleness. Then he’d fed her a sumptuous room-service breakfast. But with daylight came harsh reality. She had to get home. Sylvia would want her car back, her boarders would want breakfast. Worst of all, there would be embarrassing questions to answer if she didn’t get home soon.

She’d used Garrett’s elegant fountain pen to scribble her name and phone number on a piece of hotel stationery. Then, with one final, searing kiss goodbye, she’d left him.

He hadn’t called. He’d promised. Then he’d forgotten her.

She’d cried on Sylvia’s shoulders for days. Then she’d found out she was pregnant, and she’d cried for another week. She’d tried to locate Garrett to tell him of his impending fatherhood. But all she had was a first name. He’d told her little about himself, so she had nothing to go on.

Gradually she’d pulled herself together and started planning her future. At least she had plenty of money to raise her child—children, she corrected herself. Two girls, according to the sonogram. She’d furnished the nursery with a fanatical eye for detail, started a trust fund for a college education, drawn up her will. She’d thought of everything.

Except the possibility of twins.

She wanted to share the news with Sylvia, the only person who knew the true circumstances of how she’d gotten pregnant. But Sylvia was in Billings, arranging for the delivery of some fancy new sinks—purple ones—for her salon. Gwen decided she would stop in The Brimming Cup and have some herbal tea. Shelly, who had recently married Dr. Connor O’Rourke, was pregnant, too, and the two mothers-to-be liked to compare notes.

As she made this decision, a vintage Jaguar passed on her left. Wow, nice car. Maybe she should have gotten one of those, instead of the more practical Mercedes.

She glanced down at her speedometer and realized she was only driving forty-five. No wonder the guy had passed her. All that reminiscing had distracted her from her driving. Vowing to be more alert, she pressed on the gas.

JESTER, MONTANA. Eli Garrett had never thought to look for Gwen here. And he’d definitely been looking. Though he was no monk, he’d never had a passionate night like the one he’d shared with delicate, auburn-haired Gwen. In that bar full of cheap perfume and teased hair, she’d seemed so fresh, like a daisy among overblown roses. The fact she couldn’t dance had endeared her to him. Her natural shyness, which she attempted to overcome, was the most charming quality he’d ever seen in a woman. He’d become almost obsessed with her. Any time his car restoration business took him to towns within a hundred miles of North Dakota, he asked around about her. But the woman had vanished like a wisp of smoke.

It would have been much simpler if he’d simply called the number she’d left for him. Unfortunately, he’d managed to spill his room-service coffee all over the sheet of stationery she’d written on. The blue ink had run in a hundred different directions, and no amount of blotting or cursing would bring it back. He’d even hired a documents expert to examine the paper—that was how desperate he was. But no luck.

Just when he’d begun to resign himself to the fact that the most intriguing woman he’d ever met was out of his reach forever, a stroke of luck had brought her to his attention. He’d been picking up a 1928 Nash Coupe some rancher had found in a barn, covered with hay, just outside of Denver where Eli lived. The rancher’s wife had insisted Eli come inside for some lemonade, since it was ninety degrees outside, almost unheard of high in the Rockies, even in mid-August. There, on her kitchen counter, a photo on the front page of a newspaper had jumped out at him.

It was Gwen. No doubt about it. Her face had invaded his dreams so many nights it was etched into his brain.

“Main Street Millionaires have a new reason to celebrate,” the photo caption read. The photo depicted an attractive couple, identified as Sam and Ruby Cade, who had apparently thrown a party when they’d reconciled their marriage. Gwen was off to the side of the photo, holding a huge cake.

And she was pregnant.

For a few moments, all Eli could do was stare. Was she married, then? Or…mentally he counted back the months. Was it possible the child was his?

“Can you believe that?” the rancher’s wife said when she noticed Eli’s interest in the photo. “Every time one of those Main Street Millionaires moves a muscle, somebody has to plaster the news on the front page. I mean, who cares?”

Apparently a lot of people did. When a small, hardscrabble town in Montana suddenly had more millionaires per capita than any town in the U.S., it was news, and the lottery win in Jester had captured the fancy of the whole country. Though Eli hadn’t followed the story, he’d still heard about it.

Now he wished he’d paid more attention. His search for Gwen could have been shortened considerably. No wonder she’d been celebrating the night they’d met.

“My cousin sent me that paper,” the rancher’s wife said. “It’s a few weeks old. He—my cousin, that is—invested in some hotel development scheme in Jester. Seems the mayor there is trying to turn the town into a tourist attraction. But they can’t find any land to build the hotel on, so the whole deal’s probably awash.”

Eli was hardly listening. He gulped down his lemonade, said his goodbyes, and jumped into his tow truck. Once he had the Nash safely tucked into one of his garage bays, he climbed into his silver 1960 Jaguar and headed for Jester, Montana. His GPS gave him the driving instructions.

Now that he was in Jester, he didn’t know quite where to start. It was certainly a quaint town. A bit rundown, but here and there were signs of economic recovery. A shiny new Cadillac was parked in front of a general store, called simply The Mercantile. The hardware store was getting a face-lift. And a bronze statue of a bucking horse, in front of the Jester Town Hall, gleamed with a recent polishing.

In a town this size, all he needed to do was ask anyone about Gwen, and someone would enlighten him. Where to ask—the barbershop? Several older men sat outside Kenning’s Barbershop, shooting the breeze.

Then Eli saw an inviting coffee shop, The Brimming Cup. Perfect. He hadn’t had lunch. And now that he was so close to finding Gwen, he was curiously hesitant. What would he do if she was married? Or what if he was about to become a father? He hadn’t thought through what he would say.

Or how he would feel.

A bell above the door announced Eli’s entrance into the large, airy diner. The place had a ’50s feel to it, with a long Formica, chrome-trimmed counter and stools topped with light blue vinyl. An old Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner appeared to be operational, though currently it was silent.

A pretty young woman with sleek, chin-length brown hair smiled at him from behind the counter. “Sit anywhere you like. You just missed the lunch rush, so the place is all yours.”

He was, indeed, the only customer. He chose one of the four booths that faced the front windows and perused a laminated menu that had been stuck behind the salt-and-pepper shakers.

As the waitress emerged from behind the counter, Eli could see that she was pregnant. Jeez, was it something in the Jester water supply? She set a glass of water, a napkin and some silverware on the table.

“Know what you want?”

“A hamburger, please, lettuce and tomato only. And a cup of decaf.” Normally he liked his caffeine, but he was already wired.

The waitress scribbled on her pad. “Be right up.”

He’d just taken his first sip of the coffee, which was surprisingly good, when the bell over the door rang. Eli looked up, curious to see who might be joining him, when he almost choked on his coffee.

It was Gwen! If this wasn’t fate stepping in, he didn’t know what was.