Finn's Twins!

by Anne McAllister

  From Back Cover…

  Bachelor baby-sitter!

  When it comes to the female sex, Finn MacCauley is an expert. Except, that is, when the females in question are his six-year-old nieces—and identical twins. Finn just isn't equipped to be a father…

  Izzy, on the other hand, is an ideal mother. If only she wasn't engaged to another man! All Finn has to do is persuade Izzy that being temporary surrogate parents will be terrific fun—nearly as much fun as sharing Finn's glamorous life­style… and his bed!

  Excerpt…

  "I'm leaving!"

  "You leave, and the twins go with you," Finn said implacably.

  "But I can't stay! I have a life."

  "What life? What brought you to New York?"

  "I'm going to get married," Izzy said.

  Finn looked her up and down with such obvious disbelief that Izzy wanted to smack him. He smiled. "Have you picked a groom yet?"

  "Yes, I've picked a groom. And I intend on seeing him this evening."

  "You can't. Not yet. At least help me get the twins settled. Read them a story. Get them to bed." He was looking just a bit desperate!

  Finn's Twins!

  by

  Anne McAllister

  PROLOGUE

  THE phone was ringing—had been for longer than he wanted to think.

  Finn ignored it.

  He stood motionless, his entire concentration focused on the developing tray where Angelina Fiorelli's lips were beginning to emerge.

  He'd been waiting all day to do these enlargements, to see if he could find the perfect come-hither look in the best of the shots he'd taken the day before. He wasn't one of the world's most creative and eagerly sought-after commercial photographers for nothing. When he had an idea, he pursued it. And all the ringing phones in the world weren't going to interrupt him now.

  He leaned closer and permitted himself a small smile as, in the dim red light of the darkroom, he made out the faintest hint of the luscious Fiorelli outline be­ginning to develop. Yes!

  Another ring.

  Finn gritted his teeth. Were the hell was Strong?

  His matronly taskmaster of a studio manager shouldn't have any of his high-strung, ruffled-feathered clients left in the office to appease by this time. It was already after five o'clock. Why wasn't she answering it?

  Angelina's famous pouting lips were now fully de­veloped. Perhaps just a shade too sulky. Carefully Finn lifted the enlargement out of the solution and placed it in the stop bath, then submerged another.

  The phone rang again—a half ring—then stopped. At last. Finn concentrated as the next set of lips mater­ialized. There was a sharp rap on the darkroom door.

  "Go away."

  "Your sister's on the line."

  He should have known. Meg had been calling him at inopportune moments since she was old enough to talk. "Tell her I'll call her back."

  "I did. She needs to talk to you now."

  "I'm busy. Tell her I'm busy."

  There was a pause. "She's crying."

  "Oh, hell." It took no imagination at all for his mind's eye to conjure up the vision of his younger sister Meg crying. He'd seen her—and heard her—often enough. Her sweet soft voice would quiver. Her freckled face would grow blotchy and her big blue eyes would swim with tears. Then she would hiccup as she tried to explain what latest crisis in her life had prompted her to call for help.

  Finn knew the routine all too well. And Strong, alter­nately mother hen and Marine drill sergeant as the oc­casion demanded, was no better at turning Meg into a self-reliant human being than he was.

  Finn sucked in a deep breath and snatched up the re­ceiver. "Now what?"

  "Oh, Finn!" came the breathless, teary quaver he'd expected. "It's Roger!" And the end of the world from the sound of it.

  "Who's Roger?"

  "Roger de Fontaine. You know! Roger!"

  He didn't have a clue. "Some guy you've been seeing?" Always a good bet.

  "The man I love, Finn." The teary voice wavered with an emotional vibrato. "Truly."

  "Uh-huh." They'd been down this trail before. Plenty of times. Finn tucked the receiver between his ear and his shoulder and went back to contemplating Angelina Fiorelli's lips. This shot had possibilities, if only—

  "If only I could convince him," Meg said mournfully.

  "Huh?" Finn was distracted. He dragged his at­tention back to his sister, away from Angelina's mouth. "Convince him of what?"

  "That I love him."

  "Tell him." It seemed simple enough to him. He'd never fallen in love with anyone, so he'd never said the words. If he had, he would, not that he ever expected to. Why the hell did Meg have to complicate everything? Especially his life!

  "I would, Finn, but—the girls are here."

  "Of course they are. Where else would they be?" Her daughters, she meant. Twins. Red-haired, freckle-faced look-alikes with the unfortunate names of Tansy and Pansy—a product of Meg's airy-fairy period—they were five or six. Finn didn't know for sure; he'd never met them. He'd never met their father, either—another of Meg's true loves who had endured in her affections just long enough to impregnate her. The twins had been three before someone had bothered to tell Meg that he'd died windsurfing. Finn couldn't even remember his name. He wondered if Meg could.

  She lived in San Francisco. He lived in New York.

  She pestered him to come visit several times a year. "You could come out here on location sometime," she'd pointed out often enough.

  He could have. He never did.

  Keeping a continent between Meg and himself had always seemed the better part of good sense. And once she'd had her twin albatrosses, he'd found more reason to stay away. Finn didn't do children.

  He didn't have to, he reasoned. He hadn't had any. Meg had, so she ought to be responsible. He'd told her so more than once.

  "I know, I know," she said now. "But if Roger and I had a little time alone, everything would be fine. He's getting so impatient. We could get married and then they'd have two parents."

  "Good idea."

  "But I need to convince him."

  "Hire a baby-sitter and go out for dinner."

  "We need more than dinner, Finn. We need time. Days. Weeks."

  "Weeks?"

  "Only a couple," she said quickly. "Just for the two of us. But now that the girls are out of school it's harder than ever to get time alone."

  "Send them to camp."

  "Camp?" She sounded doubtful. "That costs a lot of money, doesn't it?"

  "I wouldn't know."

  "I suppose I could think about it—" the quaver was back "—but I do hate to ask Roger to pay for sending them before we've even…" She sighed. "And you know I can't." Meg lived hand-to-mouth, always had. The only times she ever got enough money to be even slightly ahead was when she talked Finn into providing it.

  Like now.

  Meg sniffled into the other end of the line. Finn ground his teeth. "You need to settle down, Meg," he told her. "Grow up. Be responsible."

  She made a sound that was suspiciously like a sob. "I'm trying. I told you, Roger and I—"

  "Just need time."

  "Yes. He'll be a wonderful father, I know he will!" There was a little-girl eagerness in her voice now. "He's strong and masterful and so very smart."

  "Good for him." Finn didn't say, then what does he see in you? Meg couldn't help it because she was vague and flighty.

  "I'll send you a thousand," he told her. "You can surely find a good camp to stick them in for a couple of weeks for that."

  "Oh, yes! Of course I can!" All the tears in her voice were gone. "I knew you'd help. You're the best, Finn. The best brother in the whole world!"

  "Uh-huh," Finn said dryly. "You don't have t
o con­vince me. Convince Roger. Those daughters of yours need a strong, dependable father." God knew they needed one responsible parent. And Meg needed someone else to dump her problems on—besides him.

  "I know," Meg said meekly. "You're absolutely right."

  "So get them one." Finn hung up. Satisfied that he'd averted his baby sister's latest disaster, he went back to Angelina Fiorelli's luscious lips.

  CHAPTER ONE

  HIS studio—at least Izzy assumed it was his studio and not his apartment—was on the fourth floor of an old brick building in Chelsea. She found his name on the wall directory just inside the heavy glass door: FINN MACCAULEY, PHOTOGRAPHER, it said in small white letters.

  "He's a wildlife photographer," Meg had told her, smiling, as she'd packed them out the door.

  "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 say, "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."

  "No, actually I'm not."

  He didn't say anything for a moment. He shoved both hands through his hair again, spiking it further. Then, "Yeah, right," he said at last. He took a
steadying breath and then gave her look of tolerant amusement. "So where's Meg? Hiding in the elevator waiting for me to flip out completely?" A corner of his mouth lifted.

  "She's in Bora Bora," Izzy said.

  All his amusement vanished in a flash. "What?"

  Izzy took a step backward, almost toppling over when the twins' clinging made her lose her balance for a second. She steadied herself, cursing Meg for having stuck her in this mess. She shrugged helplessly. "She left last night with her fiancé. She said you'd encouraged her to go," she added accusingly.

  "That conniving, sneaky, two-faced little—''

  "Mis-ter MacCauley!" It wasn't all that far off Izzy's view of her ditzy neighbor, but she would never say so in front of the woman's daughters.

  He bit off the rest of the sentence, jammed his fists into the pockets of his jeans and stormed around the receptionist's desk. She watched him warily from within the eye of the hurricane.

  There was a sudden buzz from the doorbell. Auto­matically the receptionist responded. The door burst open and two chestnut-haired buxom bombshells in Day-Glo miniskirts trooped in.

  "Oh, Finn, dear, sorry we're late! So much traffic coming down Seventh Avenue you just wouldn't be­lieve!" the taller one said breathlessly.

  They both brushed past Izzy and the twins as if they were pieces of furniture, skittering up to press kisses on Finn MacCauley's tan cheeks and ruffle his already ruffled hair with their long fingernails.

  "Tony sends his love. He says thanks so much for the favor. Where do you want us?" The shorter one was already tugging her skimpy scoop-neck shirt over her head as she headed through the door Finn had emerged from. The taller one paused long enough to bat her lashes at him, then followed her friend.

  No one moved in their wake. Then Finn rubbed a hand over his mussed hair in a vain attempt to comb it. He fixed the twins with a hard stare. "Sit there," he com­manded, his gaze flicking from them to the bench alongside the seven-foot Rapunzel. They gulped audibly, then scurried to obey.

  "You, too," he said to Izzy.

  "I have to go," she objected. "I was only supposed to deliver—"

  "Sit there and wait or take them with you."