Balancing Act

He was wearing an Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt—gray with scarlet lettering, over newish blue jeans. The clothing showed off the breadth of his shoulders and the lean strength of his thighs. She’d met bigger men and stronger men, but there was something about the potent aura of maleness surrounding Brady Buchanan that affected her powerfully. She felt as though someone had picked up a big wooden spoon and started stirring it around deep in her crampy, aching stomach.

Was it only because she was so terrified about how much potential he had to change her life? Ruin her life? She’d faced that fear in the dark hours of every night since his call. She’d even wondered whether she would have reacted in the same confident way that he had if she had been the one to see a photo of her daughter’s twin in a magazine.

Would she have called every Buchanan in Ohio until she’d reached him? Or would she have convinced herself that it wasn’t possible, it had to be a mistake, and let her contented, self-reliant life go on just as it was?

It would have been very easy to play it that way. “Accidentally” lose the magazine and forget his last name. Convince herself that the girls only looked alike because of the angle of the photo. Tell herself that the adoption authorities would surely have known if there was a twin sister, so she had to be mistaken.

Brady hadn’t used any of those excuses to opt out. He’d taken the morally right and decisive action at once. He’d accessed all of Minnesota’s telephone directories via the Internet, had kept calling until he’d found her, and now, here he was.

What would she do if they disliked each other within five minutes? If his ideas on how to deal with this situation were impossibly different from hers? And what would he do?

Strong men could get in the habit of winning, of dominating with their decisions, and it was a hard habit to break. Immediately, she didn’t trust the way he had his feet planted so squarely on her porch, or the way his jaw and mouth had set. He looked too much like a man who believed in simple solutions. His solutions. She didn’t want that kind of man in her life again.

Stop this, she coached herself angrily. Don’t leap to conclusions. Get a grip. Listen to him. Communicate. Don’t duck the issues. Stand your ground. And right now, say something.

“Please come in,” said Lisa-Belle McGraw at last, her voice sweet and polite. They hadn’t been standing here in the doorway all that long. Maybe half a minute. But it seemed like half of forever.

She looked even more nervous than Brady felt. That was saying something, since he felt as though his tie was choking him and he wasn’t even wearing one. She held her daughter’s soft dark curls against her cheek in a gesture of tender possession, unconsciously emphasizing the contrast in their coloring.

Brady had expected they’d need to sit the two girls down side by side in order to compare them properly and turn their suspicions into certainty. Maybe even dress them in similar outfits or something, in order to decide whether to go ahead with the blood tests. But already it wasn’t necessary, and blood tests would only be the icing on the cake.

Just the way Colleen moved, the expression on her face, everything about her except her clothes, was so identical to Scarlett. He could tell that she’d woken from her late nap in tears, because that was what Scarlett always did, and that was how she always looked when it happened. Red and crumpled, sad and irritable.

He knew that even though Colleen had stopped crying, she would look a little zoned-out for several more minutes, and she would cling to whoever was holding her and occasionally turn to bury her face in their shoulder.

Yep, there she goes…

It was uncanny to feel as if he already knew this little girl. It tugged painfully on his heart. He remembered how he and Stacey had both bonded instantly with Scarlett, the first moment she was laid in Stacey’s arms.

“This your baby,” the orphanage worker had told them, in her broken English, and they’d loved their little girl from that moment on. How could Brady meet her twin sister and not start to feel the same?

His heart lurched again. Sideways. Out of balance.

Shift over in there, Scarlett, and make room. You don’t have the place to yourself anymore. There’s someone else I need to love now.

Someone who already had a family of her own and a life here in St. Paul.

How on earth would they deal with this?

Scarlett had napped early, and she was bright as a button in his arms right now—curious and happy and ready to toddle off at breakneck speed and explore. Ms. McGraw knew all about that, Brady could tell. Just as he knew her child, this stranger knew his little daughter. Was her heart lurching sideways, too?

After another intense look at Scarlett, she scraped her teeth over her bottom lip and repeated, even more nervously, “Please, you really must come in!”

She reached out, pushing the storm door open a little wider. The movement tightened the light fabric of a pink-and-blue summery top across her breasts. She had a neat figure, petite and curved just right, enough to give a man something to hold, and something to watch when she walked.

Brady stepped forward and suddenly he caught her scent for the first time. It reached out and drew him in, and his stride and his breathing both faltered as he walked quickly past her, still caught in its sweet net. It was like lilacs after rain, cool and intoxicating. It was like…

No. No!

He wasn’t a poetic man. It wasn’t like lilacs and rain at all. It was a punch in the gut that almost knocked him off his feet. It was a trip wire stretched across his path. Responding to Lisa-Belle McGraw as a man was the last thing in the world he’d expected or wanted. Primitive. Beyond logic or personality. And potentially disastrous.

He’d been there before, with Stacey, when he was too young to know any better—going crazy for her body and never stopping to find out who she really was. Finding out had cooled the craziness as time went on, but by then it was too late. Brady wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

It was vital to keep his head clear here. He had something else to think about. Something much more vital to his emotional well-being than the physical tricks a female body could play. And apparently Ms. McGraw had her eye on the ball much better than he did.

“If people see us and get an inkling as to what’s going on…” she was saying behind him. “I don’t want to have to tell anyone about this yet. Not until we’ve worked out what it means. I—I have an idea it’s going to be, uh, pretty big.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he agreed, his voice gruff and deep, and went ahead of her into the house, out of reach of the aura that had briefly ensnared him.

As he responded to Scarlett’s wriggling and put her onto her feet, first impressions piled into his mind. Ms. McGraw had a nice house on a street just two blocks south of the Minnesota governor’s mansion. He’d already noted the quiet prosperity of the neighborhood as he drove here. It was similar to the neighborhood he’d bought into in Columbus several years ago, when his construction business really took off.

The interior of the house was immaculate, furnished in florals and pastels, with a thick cream rug covering most of the hardwood floor. Photos and knickknacks were everywhere: decorative plates on the dusky-pink walls, and fresh flowers in vases on the old-fashioned piano as well as on the dining table he glimpsed in the next room. It was a real home, reflecting one caring woman’s taste. It wasn’t a place you’d easily uproot from.

And Lisa-Belle McGraw looked as if she belonged. She was a natural Minnesota blond princess, with hair that reminded him of that fairy tale, “Rumpelstiltskin,” about the goblin with the unique name who had known how to spin straw into gold. He could easily have been practising his talent on this woman’s hair. Silky, straw-colored strands, as straight as a waterfall, mingled with shiny threads that looked like pure gold in the last of the day’s September sunlight slanting through her living-room windows.

She was too pale, even with makeup, and it made both her eyes and her lips stand out. Eyes like a tropical ocean, lips that glistened like candy melting in the heat. She’d dressed up for this meeting, he guessed, as he took in her strappy pumps and the pastel swirl of feminine fabric that clung to her body.

She was as pretty as he’d seen in her photo in Parenting Now. Actually, she was more than pretty. Definitely not something he wanted to be so aware of, he reminded himself. He wasn’t in the market for a new relationship any time soon, and certainly not with this woman. Even if he liked the way she smelled.

He needed to move farther away from the memories of his marriage first.

His heart sank as he considered the possibility of emotional scenes, energy-sapping manipulation, hidden motives and downright dishonesty. In a situation like this, those things might easily happen if he didn’t play everything right. He’d had more than enough of all that with Stacey, and though he’d grieved for her in a complicated, upside-down kind of way, he couldn’t help doubting that they would have stayed the distance, had she lived. By the end, she’d lied to him a few times too often.

“Do you want to come out back, where they can play?”

Ms. McGraw’s question dragged his focus back to where it ought to have been all along. Scarlett was toddling around the living room, eager to explore. Colleen watched her from the safety of her mother’s arms.

“I expect Scarlett would like that,” he said.

“We can sit on the deck and have some coffee while we watch them.” She clasped her hands briefly, then brushed a stray silk ribbon of hair away from her face. “I—this is such a weird situation. I’m sorry, I don’t know where to begin or what to suggest.”

“Coffee sounds good,” he answered gruffly.

Coffee was the tip of the iceberg. It was the next twenty years that occupied both their minds.

“If you want to wash up first…?” she offered, her politeness apparently ingrained and automatic. Once again, her voice was sweet and clear.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

She indicated a little powder room tucked away beneath the stairs, and he barged into it, needing a few moments alone, and hoping that cool water streaming over his hands would cool his whole body down.

The exercise wasn’t a success. For a start, Scarlett got clingy and stood outside the door, crying persistently. He heard that sweet female voice again, inviting her to go out back and try the slide, but Scarlett wasn’t having any of that. No instant, instinctive bonding for her, thank you very much. She was too young to recognize the mirrorlike familiarity of that other little girl, and eighteen months was a clingy age. Brady wanted to hurry back out to her, which made him even clumsier than he’d already felt.

Ms. McGraw had maddening soaps—tiny pastel-toned seashell shapes, nestling in a glass dish. His big hands knocked several of them out onto the pristine vanity unit, and when he’d finally grabbed one, his wet palms sent it spurting out of his fingers. It ricocheted off the door, hit the bud vase on the windowsill and knocked it over. An apricot-hued rose fell to the floor.

Brady had never liked fussy decor, and now he knew why. If Ms. McGraw had heard the soap hitting the door and the vase hitting the sill, she probably wondered what on earth he was doing in here.

And Scarlett was still crying. Louder than ever. He could hear her little hands, batting at the door.