by Fiona Brand
It wasn’t Francesca. It was Sophie.
The disguise was more complete than the one she had attempted yesterday, but once again he registered that he would know Sophie Messena even if she had a bag over her head.
There were additional giveaways, things he didn’t generally notice about other women but which he couldn’t help observing in her. The habit she had of always hitching her hair behind her right ear, which she was doing right now. And, when she was up closer, he was certain he would also see the small scar on her wrist he had noticed a couple of days ago and the tiny freckle at the base of her throat.
Just to confirm, he rang Francesca’s number again and had his confirmation. Both of the twins lived on their phones. It was inconceivable that either Francesca or Sophie would be without a phone during the day. If the twin walking toward him had been Francesca, she would have her phone in her hand now, checking on who was calling even if she didn’t bother answering.
The tension that had gripped him ever since the conversation with Atraeus dissolved and was replaced by relief and a familiar pulse of excitement.
The very fact that Sophie had taken Francesca’s place, and had dyed her hair blond, when he knew from comments Nick had made that Sophie would never go blonde, meant something.
She wanted him.
Every muscle in his body tightened.
Yesterday, Sophie had literally said she would rather die a watery death in the Atlantic Ocean than go on a date with him.
Looked like she had changed her mind.
* * *
Even before she had strolled through the glossy, sliding doors of the mall, Sophie spotted Ben, looking lean and muscular in a pair of light cotton pants and a loose white gauzy shirt, the sleeves rolled up over tanned forearms. She tried to avoid staring at him, but once she’d spotted him, it was unexpectedly difficult to drag her gaze free, almost as if she was caught in the grip of some kind of weird magnetic force.
One slow second passed, then two. She noticed that his phone was glued to his ear and wondered who he was talking to, then he half turned and his gaze locked on hers through the lenses of her sunglasses. Her stomach clenched and a hot thrill shot down her spine. Not the right reaction.
As he started toward her, irritation clear in his gaze—probably because she was a good twenty minutes late—she had the sudden distinct sense that he could see clear through her disguise, that he knew exactly who she was, and panic gripped her.
She needed to calm down and think. Better still, she needed to do something that Francesca—who was skillfully adept at coping with her multitude of exes—would do. Like pretend she hadn’t seen him.
After all, with her sunglasses on, and with the mall buzzing with shoppers, how could he possibly know that she had?
Keeping a pleasant Francesca smile on her face, she abruptly changed direction, as if she hadn’t noticed Ben, and walked briskly toward a gorgeous café, with tables and chairs grouped outside the front door. Most of the tables were filled with women, designer bags grouped at their feet, but a lone guy was standing nearby, his back toward her, checking his phone.
He was far from an ideal choice, since he was at least three inches shorter than Ben, about forty pounds heavier, and his hair was thinning in patches. Unfortunately, he was also wearing a suit that looked a shade too small, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and how was she to know that Ben had dressed down for the beach?
As she made a beeline for the man, she could feel Ben’s gaze drilling into her back, sense his long, ground-eating tread gaining on her with every step. Adrenaline zinged through her veins as she quickened her pace; she had the breathless, faintly panicked feeling of being hunted. Hitching the strap of her tote more firmly on her shoulder, she registered that she had wanted to feel pursued, but not because Ben thought she was Francesca.
Jaw taut, she sped up and waved at her quarry. When the guy in the suit realized she was headed straight for him, he gave her a startled look. Relieved that she hadn’t had to resort to a Francesca-like hug, Sophie attempted a brilliant smile. “I’m sorry, but you look exactly like the person I’m supposed to be meeting—”
“Who happens to be right behind you,” Ben growled. “But I’m pretty sure you already knew that.”
Even though she was prepared for it, Ben’s low, gravelly tones sent a little shock through her. Heart pounding, she turned toward him and tried to look surprised.
In that moment she shouldn’t have felt anything but anger tempered by a dose of caution, but apparently her body wasn’t connected to her brain, because awareness, sharp and heady, burned through her, tightening her breasts, pooling low in her belly and making her skin feel ultrasensitive.
She logged the sharpening of his gaze, as if he knew she was actually turned on by him, and tried to think. This date was going to be difficult enough to navigate. She could not afford for Ben to think that Francesca was attracted to him. She needed to do something to distract him.
Before she could change her mind, she closed the distance between them and gave him the brief Francesca-style hug she thought she might have had to give the stranger with the phone. She didn’t intend any real body contact, just the social hug, but Ben didn’t cooperate. He stood straight and unbending, as if he was carved from stone, which meant she had to take a half step closer than she’d planned and go up on her toes. In the process, she ended up brushing against him. That would have been okay, if she hadn’t felt a part of him she shouldn’t have felt.
Outrage poured through Sophie. Up until that point, she had not taken Ben’s date with Francesca seriously because in her heart of hearts she had not thought he actually wanted Francesca.
Ben had not seemed to be even remotely interested in Francesca until yesterday when he had found out Sophie had spent the night with John. And for two-and-a-half years, every time Sophie and Ben had been in the same room the attraction that had flowed between them had been like an electrical current; it had gone both ways. Plus, if Ben had felt anything toward Francesca, Sophie would have known it, and Francesca would have told her, but for all this time there had been nothing. Nada.
After yesterday’s kiss, and the fiery passion that had exploded between them, while Francesca had been kicking her heels inside the restaurant, the idea that Ben wanted her twin was utterly confusing.
Something was going on. She didn’t know what, exactly, but she would find out.
For now, what she did know about Ben was that on a first date with her own twin—just two days after ditching Sophie—it was not okay for Ben to be aroused.
She was allowed to feel sexual arousal. After all, just three nights ago she had been having sex with Ben, and yesterday she’d had an unscripted sexual incident with him out in the street.
She wished she didn’t feel anything for him. Unfortunately, she couldn’t wipe her memory and reprogram herself, and she did feel something.
As Sophie stepped away from Ben, she stared at a pulse that was throbbing along the side of his jaw. She was off balance, her emotions all over the place. Normally she was very good at summing up character; it was the one area where she was genuinely intuitive. But with Ben she was distressingly blind. She still had difficulty grasping that she had been so wrong about him, that he was in no way white-knight material.
She drew a breath to ease the sudden tightness in her throat, her chest, because his sexual arousal—for Francesca—was hurtful in a way she could barely process. As if her twin was far more desirable to him than Sophie had ever been. As if Sophie had only ever been second-best.
Memories flickered. It had been so difficult for her to get Ben’s attention in the first place. Eighteen months of agonizing over mixed signals before, in desperation, she’d had to make the first move. Looking back, she had to wonder if she hadn’t taken the initiative, if he would have ever made a move on her.
He glanced at his watch. “Y
ou’re late—”
“I’m here now.” The words snapped out with more edge and force than she had planned.
Keeping her expression serene with difficulty, she noticed that a couple had just vacated a nearby table. “Since we don’t have a lot of time before we fly out to the island, why don’t we get down to business?”
Sophie realized she was being too take-charge, but in that moment she lost the capacity to care. She pulled out a chair and sat down. A waitress materialized and took their order. At the last minute, she remembered to ask for what Francesca drank: a kale smoothie. She only hoped she would be able to get at least some of it down.
Ben ordered a coffee, which irritated her because she was dying for one.
Rummaging in her tote, she pulled out the kind of bright, pretty notebook that Francesca loved. Flipping it open in a little shower of glitter, she detached the cute pencil and placed them precisely side by side on the table. “I’ve been doing a little research online with regard to Buffy Holt.”
Ben stared at the notebook. “For a minute there, I forgot about Buffy, but it’s coming back to me.”
She just bet he had forgotten about Buffy. It had certainly felt that way.
“As I was saying, I’ve been doing some research online. Were you aware that Buffy is stalking you?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it—”
“I believe stalking is the correct word.” Sophie reeled off three major social media sites, and a couple that were rapidly gaining in popularity. “Buffy has a lot of pictures. Think wallpaper. If we’re going to discourage her, we’re going to need to employ serious tactics.”
Ben sat back in his chair, arms folded over his chest. “All I need is a date for the day. Once she sees I’m dating someone, she’ll get the message.”
Sophie drew a deep breath to try to douse another heated surge of outrage that Ben actually thought this was a real date. “First of all, this is not a ‘date.’” She sketched quotation marks in the air. “And if Buffy was going to get the message, she would have got it Saturday night at the earliest, Sunday morning at the latest, because by then anyone on the planet who was interested, and who had access to social media, knew that you had kissed, uh, Sophie at Nick’s launch party. And that you had very probably slept with her.”
Ben stared at her for a long moment and, once again, Sophie began to get the horribly uncomfortable feeling that his steely blue gaze had somehow lasered through her disguise.
Thankfully, at that point their drinks arrived. Sophie stared at the deep green liquid and left it where it was.
Ben lifted a brow. “So, what are you proposing?”
She picked up the notebook and pencil, and made a production of looking at the first page, which contained just the three bullet points. She didn’t think he would go for any of them, and maybe she was being passive-aggressive, but the way she saw it, the whole point was to heighten his awareness of his utter failure when it came to romantic gestures. Except, of course, when it came to Buffy.
Grimly she read the very short list, which included a gift of jewelry, a fluffy toy and that he needed to get a special tattoo. Because hell would freeze solid before she would get one.
“Not that you actually have to get tattooed,” she said smoothly. She dug in her bag for the envelope that held the transfer that Rico’s apprentice, Antonio, had made for her. “It’s a transfer. The ink comes off in the shower.” Eventually.
Ben took the envelope and slid out the transfer, which was along similar lines to the one Buffy had, but considerably larger. The silence seemed to stretch and deepen. She flipped the cover of the notebook closed. “I know the transfer looks a little large, but don’t forget we’re trying to send a message here.”
Ben laid the transfer down on the table. Under the mall lights it seemed even larger and more garish. “What does the S stand for?”
A small shock froze her in place. She stared at the transfer. “B loves S” blazed up at her.
Sophie’s heart jolted. She had been in such a hurry to collect the transfer she had barely looked at it, but there was no doubting that instead of an F the initial Antonio had used was an S.
Warmth flushed her cheeks and for a moment she felt disoriented and exposed. It was almost as if Antonio, in making the mistake, had revealed a guilty secret, because it was a fact that she had once wanted Ben to fall for her.
Desperate to control the embarrassed color in her cheeks, her chin came up and she met his gaze boldly. “Antonio must have misunderstood when I ordered the tattoo. Probably, because you had such a well-publicized relationship with Sophie.”
Smiling bleakly, she made the executive decision to rise to her feet and end what had been an unexpectedly awkward moment. She dropped the notebook and pencil back in her tote. “At the end of the day, I don’t see that it really matters if it’s an S or an F. The important point is that you’ve got someone.”
Ben stood with a fluid muscularity she tried not to notice. His gaze glittered as he slipped the transfer back in the envelope. “I’m not wearing a tattoo, so you can forget that part. Once Buffy sees me with you, she’ll get the message that I’m not interested in a relationship. In any event, I don’t think she’ll be too unhappy because I’m pretty sure it’s her father who’s pushing the relationship agenda.”
Ben’s flat statement abruptly made sense of the whole Buffy thing, since Ben was so far away from Buffy’s usual type and Holt did have a reputation for thinking dynastically. He had two other daughters besides Buffy. One had married an oil baron, another a shipping tycoon, so why not add a real estate mogul to the family?
Even so, she could not forget that Ben had given gifts to Buffy. Expensive, thoughtful gifts. The kind a man gave to a woman he cared about and whom he wanted to please. The kind of gifts he had never given to her.
Ben paid for the drinks. When he came back, he indicated they should walk across the vast expanse of the mall. His helicopter was on the pad on top of Atraeus’s building, so all they needed to do was take the elevator to the roof.
As they strolled past all the luxury shops, he checked his watch. “If we’re going shopping, we’d better get moving.”
Sophie almost stopped in her tracks. She had pushed him over the tattoo and he had reacted true to form. But she had never in a million years expected him to agree to buy gifts, because she knew what he was like. Alpha males did not deal well with shopping lists, and they did not tamely follow their girls around malls. Her brothers were a case in point; according to their wives, they had to be dragged or blackmailed.
She threw a quick glance at Ben, who was altogether too chilled. Something was off. The plan had been to be so high-maintenance that he would run a mile and leave both Francesca and herself alone. She hadn’t imagined that he would actually buy jewelry—for Francesca—especially since he had never, ever bought jewelry for her.
She drew a deep breath to ease the sudden tightness in her throat and chest. The long-ago words of her grandmother seemed to echo down the years. The charm of a man is the kindness of his heart. Her grandmother, who’d had a long and happy marriage, had known what she was talking about. So had Sophie’s own mother, before she’d been widowed. As a child Sophie could still remember her father giving her mother gorgeous, personal gifts. Bracelets for birthdays, pendants and rings for anniversaries, perfume at Christmas. It wasn’t the gifts themselves that had mattered; it had been the giving that had been so heartfelt and wonderful.
The mystifying thing was that she knew Ben was kind. Nick had mentioned how generous he was in supporting a distant cousin who had been left destitute with three young children. Ben had given her a house and helped her start her own business so that she no longer had any money worries. She knew he supported charities, especially those for sick and disabled children, and for animals. He had clearly been kind to Buffy Holt. But for reasons she could not fathom he had
not been kind to her.
She stared at Ben, no longer caring about avoiding eye contact. “Let me get this straight. You’re okay with buying me jewelry?”
Ben’s gaze was frustratingly unreadable. “As long as we get it now.” He indicated the closest jewelry store. “We’ve got ten minutes then we need to leave.”
Sophie caught her breath at the familiar, very expensive name emblazoned on the glass frontage of the store. “You want to shop at Ambrosi?” They were the maker of the diamond earrings he had bid on at auction and given to Buffy. Ambrosi sold what she liked to refer to as “commitment jewelry,” because there was nothing either cheap or fake behind those doors.
Ben’s gaze shifted to the store next to Ambrosi, with its distinctive black-and-gold frontage. “I don’t care where we shop,” he said flatly, “as long as I’m not buying diamonds from Atraeus.”
The mention of John Atraeus abruptly spun her back to the wet, steamy sidewalk yesterday, and Ben bluntly stating that he didn’t want Atraeus sending her flowers, as if he had the right to an opinion.
Before she could think that through, Ben’s hand landed briefly in the small of her back, sending another one of those small shocks through her as he urged her into the rich white-and-gilt interior of Ambrosi.
Twelve
Every cell in Sophie’s body tingled. She was ultra-aware of Ben at her side, large and altogether too rough-edged and masculine for a store filled with delicate diamond and pearl creations.
With Ben so distractingly close, it was hard to stay in character and hard to think. If she had been shopping for herself, she would have gone for the more classical pieces, but she was supposed to be Francesca, so she headed for the counter that held Ambrosi’s more modern, flamboyant designs.
She studied pendants and earrings made from flowerlike clusters of diamonds and pink pearls. Ben bent to look into the cabinet, the clean scent of his skin and a waft of some expensive cologne sending another fiery jolt of awareness through her.
