He could sense her frown through the phone. ‘What do you mean?’
‘About Eloise. And me. Remember you told me not to develop a thing for her? It was already too late. It’s more than a thing. I’m in love with her.’
There was an indrawn hiss from Tori. ‘Josh. That wasn’t meant to happen.’
‘I know. But it did.’
‘You’ve fallen in love with a woman who looks just like me? Don’t you think that’s a little weird?’
‘Not weird at all. She’s actually nothing like you. I mean that in a good way. You complement each other. You’d see that if you met her. What I’m saying, Tori, is that you have to get in touch with her. I can’t keep lying—to her or to you.’
‘Are you serious, Josh?’
‘Serious about Eloise?’ He paused. ‘Yeah. I am.’
‘I’ve never heard you say that before. Finally he meets the right woman. And it has to be the twin sister I’ve never met. In Australia. You should have told me earlier.’
‘I wasn’t sure. But I’ve told you now. Call her. Please.’
* * *
It was corny, he knew, but Josh arrived at Eloise’s apartment building that evening bearing flowers. It wasn’t something he remembered ever having done since he’d bought a corsage for his prom date back in high school. The florist in the lobby of the hotel was open and on impulse he bought a huge bunch of voluptuous deep pink roses that he thought she might like. A gesture, perhaps, of how different he intended his life to be now. All part of him embracing ‘the kinder side of life’. A life with Eloise in it.
He still firmly believed that her connection with Eloise was Tori’s secret to tell, and the truth of their sisterhood should only be revealed twin to twin. And yet there had to be total honesty between him and Eloise for their fledgling—so new the feathers were still damp and crumpled—relationship to have a chance. Tori had had a few hours to call Eloise. He hoped like hell she had. Because he couldn’t move forward with Eloise until she knew about Tori. And about the part he’d played in the discovery of the twins. How he’d seen that magazine article and pointed it out to Tori; how he’d offered to help by looking up Eloise while he was in Sydney—and why he’d had to evade the truth.
As he waited for Eloise to buzz him through the security door to the block, he tried to put a name to the way he was feeling. Finally he settled on elation. Elation at the prospect of seeing her again. Of being able to explain what had happened. Elation at the prospect of her becoming someone significant in his life. He hadn’t felt like this about a woman for a long time. In fact, he’d never felt like this about a woman because he’d never met a woman like Eloise.
However, the second she opened the door of her apartment to him he knew something was amiss. Her face seemed drained of her usual vivacity, her mouth set in a grim line. She seemed, in a way, diminished. When he lowered his head to kiss her, he really knew something was wrong.
She averted her face, shrugged him away. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said coldly. She looked at the flowers with an expression he could only describe as scorn.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, perplexed. How fleeting had been that feeling of elation. It had come crashing down to smother him.
Eloise stomped away from him into the living room, as if she couldn’t bear to even breathe the same air as him, then whirled back to face him. ‘I’ve just spent the last hour on a video chat with Tori. My twin sister Tori. The sister I had no idea I had, but of course you did.’ Her cheeks were flushed.
Good. Tori had delivered. But her call didn’t seem to have had the effect he’d hoped for.
‘She called you.’ He put the flowers down on a side table.
‘She did. Can you imagine what it was like for me? First to find out I had a twin sister. And second to discover you’re a friend of hers and have known about this all the time. That you’ve completely misrepresented yourself. And let me...let me get to like you. You played games with Tori too, with our fake engagement. I had to sort her out about that.’
‘But how—?’ What had Tori said?
‘Funnily enough, Tori follows @lindytheblonde. I told you, millions do. So what does she see but a post mentioning our engagement? With a photo of us dancing very close and looking as though we wanted to tear each other’s clothes off on the dance floor.’
‘Which we probably did.’
‘That’s beside the point. For me, you are now beside the point.’
Her words felt like a kick to the gut. There were no words of his own he could summon up in reply.
‘You’d know better than I do why she hadn’t contacted me earlier, but apparently seeing us “engaged” put a bomb up her. I suspect she wasn’t at all happy about it.’
‘No,’ he said. He had omitted to tell Tori about the fake engagement. He should have. She didn’t know it was fake. It hadn’t seemed important. Not as important as Tori contacting Eloise and telling her the truth. But it must have been a shock. And to see him looking so intimate with Eloise when she’d only just found out they were together.
Tori would be furious he hadn’t told her he was engaged. Even though he actually wasn’t. And that was on top of him not telling her about his feelings for Eloise until today. But his attraction to Eloise had been a force of its own. What had happened with Eloise had developed completely independently of Tori. It had been too private, too personal to share with anyone. It had overridden even his loyalty to his friend. Quite frankly, his intimate time with Eloise was none of Tori’s business. Being lovers, a couple, meant sharing their own private, special world with no one else but each other. He’d found that magical world with Eloise, and now he could see it slipping away.
‘Tori contacted me over social media, outlining the story of the twins adopted separately when they were two years old, telling me she believed I was her sister.’
He took a step towards her, wanting to comfort her. ‘That must have been a shock.’
She took a step back, pointedly rejecting him. ‘You could say that. It brought back in its entirety the shock of finding I’d been adopted. Tori had only just discovered that Baby One—me—had been adopted to a Boston couple, Dr Debra Evans and Dr Adam Evans—my parents, of course. Tori was Baby Two, adopted to Marissa Preston and Tom Preston, also of Boston.’
‘She’d been waiting for that information as confirmation.’ Josh felt as if he was pushing his way through thick sand, caught in a quagmire of deception that hadn’t been entirely of his own making.
‘And you knew that. You knew.’ She spat the accusation.
‘Yes,’ was all he could manage to choke out, his mind racing to see how—if—he could salvage something from this.
‘She sent me a photo of her. It was like looking at me with short hair. A...a different version of me. I nearly hyperventilated. You see stories in the media about this kind of thing. You don’t expect in a million years that you could find yourself in the story.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He’d made a few abortive attempts to tell her something of the story, but had still not been sure how much had been his to tell.
He could have prepared her for this. Or could he have? Not without revealing she might have a twin sister. He was stymied whichever path he took. But at least Eloise was telling him what had happened and hadn’t booted him straight out of the door. Although that might be because he was the only other person she knew who also knew Tori and she needed to talk about her.
Eloise raked her fingers through her hair. ‘Tori asked could we video chat? Before I considered that option, I called my mother. She was as shocked as I was—she’d had no idea there were two babies; neither apparently did Tori’s adoptive mother. I suspect both the mothers would have had a moment, even for a split second, of wondering what it would have been like if they’d been given the other baby.’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
; ‘I had no idea there was a connection to you at that stage. It was something so intensely personal I had to do it for myself. A sister. Then tell you about it afterwards.’
‘So what happened on the call?’
Tori was obviously so cranky with him about leaving her out of the engagement news, she hadn’t presented him in a favourable light. He wished he’d known that before he’d come over here with his goofy bunch of roses. Because he knew where this was heading. Had known when Eloise had so pointedly averted her face from his kiss. But he wouldn’t give up without a fight. He was in love with her.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said, the wonder and shock still in her voice. ‘At first we just stared at each other for what seemed a long time without saying a word. I saw myself on the screen. I wanted to put out my hand to touch her. To see if she was real. It was seriously like looking in the mirror. We’re the same, yet I think we’re very different people. She dresses in a rock chick kind of style. But then, you know that, don’t you? You’ve been friends since high school. Only friends, she reassured me. Strictly platonic.’
‘I think of her like a sister; her family were good to me,’ he said. ‘Remember I told you how my mother and I went to live with my aunt in the North End? I met Tori at my new school. She took the new kid under her wing.’
‘Yeah. She said that.’ Her tone was frigid. As if his role in this was irrelevant. As if he was no longer relevant to her.
‘She has two brothers. Great guys. Did she tell you that?’
‘She did. Our lives growing up were very different. But it seems we both had good adoptive parents.’
‘So did you like each other? I was sure you would.’
Her face softened. But for Tori, not for him.
‘Immediately we clicked. Certain things fell into place. We were together until we were two years old, so must have buried memories of each other. We both felt something was missing in our lives. Turned out I was her imaginary friend. She was the picture I drew for my mother as the sister I wanted. There were other weird things. We both broke our left arms when we were ten. Had our appendix out at the same time. Both creative and into art and design. Both work with rescue dogs. And seriously weird that we each have wedding-related businesses. Dresses for me, cakes for her.’
‘Not weird but a twin thing, I guess.’ Maybe a bit weird considering the sisters hadn’t seen each other for twenty-six years. ‘I’m so happy for you both—it’s an amazing thing to have found a sister.’ He didn’t want to point out that he was the one who had actually found her. It would not be appreciated, he was certain of that.
‘It got very emotional; we were both crying by the end. Of course we’ll get DNA tested. Did you know identical twins share almost one hundred per cent the same DNA? But we don’t need a test to know we’re sisters. And there was another thing. I talked to her on my laptop in my bedroom. She noticed on the shelf behind me a small, pink stuffed rabbit. I’ve had it ever since I can remember. Tori left the camera for a minute and came back with an identical one in her hand. A bit more battered than mine, as she grew up with two brothers, but she’d been told it was from her birth mother. I guess mine was from my birth mother too. But of course I’d never been told that. Maybe my parents didn’t know its significance.’
Josh ached to take her into his arms and comfort her. Finding out about Tori was obviously a positive thing for her, but a deeply emotional one. One she would need quite some getting used to. He wanted to hug her and tell her everything he knew about Tori and what a wonderful person her newly found sister was. But she’d folded her arms across her chest and the emanations coming from her were distinctly hostile.
‘I won’t offer you a drink or a snack or even a seat,’ she said. ‘Because you won’t be staying. I can’t believe I was fooled by you when I so wanted to believe in you.’
‘But you can still believe in me, Ellie.’
Her bottom lip stuck out, just like Tori’s did when she was angry. They were sisters all right. ‘Don’t call me Ellie.’
Another kick to the gut.
‘How can you honestly think I could believe anything you say? Tori told me everything. How you discovered a picture of me in a magazine and pointed out the resemblance. How you volunteered to look me up when you were here to report back to Tori in Boston.’
‘I had no doubt, that first day in the park, that you were twins.’
‘And you kept that to yourself. Even...even when we became lovers. How could you have done that?’
‘Out of loyalty to Tori. It was her right to tell you. Wouldn’t you do the same for a friend? Wouldn’t you want to help if it was, say, Vinh? If you had a friend, a good friend who had taken you into her family when your own family had dumped you. A friend who had always felt something—someone—was missing in her life. Wouldn’t you help her find her look-alike who just might be her identical twin?’
‘I wouldn’t completely misrepresent myself like you did.’
‘Tori made me promise not to say anything to you. I respected that. It was her secret, her story. Your story and your sister’s story. It wasn’t mine to tell.’
‘But you let things get so far between us.’
‘That’s where Tori doesn’t know the full story. I said I’d try to find you and get a close look at you to check you really were her double as you appeared to be. Photos can lie. But I didn’t count on being attracted to you. On not being able to stop thinking about you. That’s why I flew back up from Melbourne—just so I could see you again.’
‘But you said—’
‘I know. I made new business appointments in Sydney to justify the trip, unable at that stage to admit to myself it was really all about you. That was real. What happened last night was real. Those...those feelings were real.’
Slowly she shook her head. ‘It doesn’t change anything, Josh. I could never trust another word you said. Everything you said to me last night and this morning, I wanted to believe it. And you know what? It makes me distrust Tori too.’
‘You can trust her. Tori had no idea about our fake engagement or what happened between us at Silver Trees.’
‘Don’t talk about what happened between us. Don’t remind me that I trusted you, believed in you. Now I... I never want to see you again, Josh.’
‘Please, Eloise, don’t say that. I’m sorry about how I handled this. Above all, I didn’t want to hurt you. Ever.’ He wasn’t one to beg and plead, but he also didn’t want to let go what he’d found with her without a fight.
‘Hurt? Why would I be hurt? It was, after all, only one night. I... I hadn’t had time to get attached.’
One night had been enough for him to change his entire way of thinking. ‘We talked about making it more than one night.’
‘That was before I discovered how you’d lied to me.’
She was hurting, even if she was denying it. He knew her well enough to know that. And that pain had been inflicted by him. He’d tried to do the right thing by Tori and by Eloise too. Reuniting these two sisters could be a wonderful thing for them. The imaginary friend and the girl in the drawing. Now they were both angry with him. A united force.
‘Can’t we try and start again, Eloise? Now that you know the truth about Tori.’
‘No,’ she said flatly.
‘Perhaps we could meet tomorrow and talk this through?’
‘There is absolutely no point. Unless you have further business in Sydney, I suggest you fly back home to Boston.’
‘Did last night mean anything to you?’ he challenged. It sure as hell had meant something to him.
She raised her chin. ‘It was great sex,’ she said.
‘It was that,’ he agreed. Their lovemaking had been so awesome because emotions had been at play that neither of them had been prepared to admit to. Until they’d let down their guards in the morning. This morning. It seemed an age
ago now. Her barriers were right back up again.
‘But that’s all,’ she said, making absolutely sure he got the message.
It had been so much more than sex for him. But he had no right to argue the point. He had to disengage from her. This aftermath of relationships gone wrong was one of the main reasons he had avoided them for so long.
‘The only thing I ask, is if we can keep up the pretence of the engagement for a while longer,’ she said. ‘If it gets out now that we’re frauds, it will do more harm than good and I’ll be a laughing stock.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We’ll stick to the timeline. Give it a few months to peter out. You can tell people we’re in touch. Fabricate a few phone calls. Whatever you need to do. I’ll be in Boston, right out of your way. If someone should happen to ask, I’ll give them the same story. Just text me when you decide it’s gone on long enough, so we keep our stories straight about ending it. I have no intention of returning to Sydney.’ He’d been planning to buy a house here to make it easy to see her.
He was hurt. But he’d had plenty of experience of hiding his hurts. That old shield around his heart would still do its work, and the cracks would eventually mend. He’d stay clear of the Tori-Eloise reunion. He’d done his best to bring them together. Time to bow right out.
‘Let me know if you change your mind about meeting,’ he said.
Her silence told him she wasn’t going to change her mind.
‘I’ll fly out tomorrow.’
‘Good,’ she said.
There was nothing good about it, not as far as he was concerned anyway.
‘Don’t take what happened between us out on Tori,’ he said. ‘You’ll like having her as a sister.’
Wordlessly, she nodded.
‘Goodbye, Eloise.’
He turned on his heel and walked out, not looking behind him.
* * *
Eloise was left staring after Josh. She had to hold on to the back of a chair for support, take deep breaths to steady herself. How had this wonderful new phase of her life suddenly gone so horribly, horribly wrong?
Harlequin Romance April 2021 Box Set Page 28
