Balancing Act. Lilian Darcy

was just after four in the afternoon. Friday afternoon. He—Brady Buchanan—had said that his flight was getting in at quarter to three. He had to pick up his rental car, then check himself and his daughter into their motel. It was one of the motels right opposite the Mall of America, just across Interstate 494, which ran along beside the airport.

      When he’d checked in, he was coming right over. The drive across the river into St. Paul would take him around fifteen minutes. Maybe a little more if there was traffic.

      And then he would be here, with a little girl named Scarlett.

      Libby still hoped against hope that it would all turn out to be a huge mistake. She’d entered Colleen in the baby contest and Colleen had won. Brady had seen Colleen’s picture on the front page of the parenting magazine which had sponsored the contest, and she appeared—appeared—identical to his own little girl.

      Twins, like two peas in a pod.

      Since they’d each adopted their mixed-race daughters from the same orphanage in Vietnam, it wasn’t as impossible as it sounded.

      Face-to-face, however, it would turn out that their girls wouldn’t look alike at all, and this overwhelming situation would be over before it had properly begun. She hoped so, desperately, fervently, blindly, because if not…

      Libby was terrified about the whole thing, terrified about what Brady Buchanan would want, and what kind of a man he would be. Her instinct was to be deeply wary about the potential complications involved, and about how vulnerable she might become.

      Four days ago, on the phone, out of the blue, she hadn’t had the slightest idea what the man was talking about at first. She’d been on the verge of concluding that it was a prank call, or worse. Some creep had gotten enough detail from the story in Parenting Now to find her in the St. Paul telephone directory.

      But then Mr. Buchanan had changed tack suddenly. His voice—deep, with a slightly roughened note in it, like fine sandpaper sliding across heavy wood—had softened.

      “Okay, you’re not getting this, are you?” he’d said. “Or you don’t believe me, I guess. Which I can understand. But it’s true. It has to be.”

      “What’s true?”

      “Remember the orphanage?”

      “How did you know—” She’d stopped abruptly, afraid of what she might be giving away. She’d learned a deep reliance on privacy and self-sufficiency during her adult years, and was very careful to whom she told the details of how she’d gotten her darling baby, despite the fact that the adoption was in full compliance with international law.

      But then something about Brady Buchanan’s voice compelled her to listen as he went on with those evocative questions, his words a little clumsy in their emotion, his phrases disjointed and stumbling over themselves.

      “Did you see the white cotton diapers, the way they had ’em spread out to dry on the bushes?” he’d said. “And remember the heat? And did all the local people, when you were in Da Nang, when you went out into the streets with the baby, did they crowd around you, smiling and asking questions?”

      “So you’re saying—”

      “Did you see the sand at My Khe beach, how it was so white? And did you taste that fantastic seafood? That’s where you got your daughter from, isn’t it? From the orphanage outside of Da Nang?”

      “Yes. Yes, I did,” she’d answered him shakily.

      “That’s where my daughter came from, too.”

      “Oh, mercy, it’s not possible!”

      “Ms. McGraw, it has to be!”

      They’d talked about it for nearly twenty minutes, arranging a way to meet as soon as he could get away from his work, trying to piece together the girls’ story. All of it was conjecture, most of it coming from him, since he’d had longer to think about it.

      What would he be like? And what would he want to do if their girls really were twins? She’d been tossing the options back and forth in her mind for four days and four sleepless nights. There weren’t many of those options, and each of them had huge ramifications.

      Oh criminy, she was terrified!

      Two things cut across her darting thoughts. First, she heard Colleen, who had woken from her nap in tears, as she often did. Then, as she went to pick up her crying daughter, Libby heard the doorbell ring and knew it would be him.

      Brady Buchanan.

      The man who owned that dark, husky, emotional voice.

      The man who was adoptive father to the child who could be—could be—her daughter’s twin.

      “In a minute,” she called, and hurried into Colleen’s room. He could probably hear her crying, even from the porch.

      Colleen was standing in her crib, face screwed up, mouth open wide and tears pouring down her cheeks. Libby lifted her up and began to soothe her as she headed down the stairs. By the time she had reached the front door, Colleen was quiet. Normally, she cried for longer when she woke late like this. Had she sensed that something important was about to happen?

      Libby took a deep breath and opened the door, praying yet again that Brady Buchanan would be wrong. This wouldn’t be important at all.

      He wasn’t wrong.

      She knew it the moment she saw her daughter—her daughter!—in the arms of a total stranger. No, not her daughter, despite that instinctive moment of possessiveness and panic and leaping emotion.

      This was Colleen’s sister. Her twin sister.

      On the phone, Brady had talked about blood tests, and Libby had agreed. Now, she already knew that the tests would be purely a formality. The girls were identical. Silky hair, curious eyes, neat little shoulders, fine-drawn mouths.

      Identical, except for the way they were dressed. In place of Colleen’s matched set of lilac floral, lace-edged T-shirt and pants, Scarlett Buchanan was dressed in a red-and-gray stretch playsuit emblazoned across the front with the words Born To Be a Buckeye. It looked as if her dad was a college football fan and a graduate of Ohio State.

      Scarlett’s dad…

      Libby looked at him for the first time. Only a few seconds had passed since she’d pushed open the door but it felt like much longer, and neither of them had yet spoken a word. She still couldn’t, because there was some kind of invisible hand clamped right across her throat. Instead, she just looked at him standing there—a little awkward, possibly as terrified as she was—with her daughter’s twin propped on his arm.

      He wasn’t a huge man. Slightly above average height, that was all. Five-eleven, say. But he was solid as a rock. Chest like a brick wall. Shoulders padded with muscle. Washboard abs, without a doubt, beneath his clothing. You couldn’t have scraped enough fat off his frame to grease a muffin pan.

      He had a few threads of premature silver in his light-brown hair, which was cut short and practical, and the faintest reddish-brown shadow of new growth on his jaw. As she gaped helplessly at him, he scraped his hand across it and she heard the light friction of callused palms against stubble.

      His skin had some living in it. It was outdoor skin, tanned but not moisturized, clean but not pampered. She remembered he’d told her, over the phone, that he owned and operated his own construction company, which probably accounted for that rugged look. It also accounted for why he hadn’t been able to get here until today.

      Both of them had wanted to hop straight on a plane, but he’d had project commitments he couldn’t break, and Colleen had been getting over an ear infection, so Libby was reluctant to fly.

      “Hi,” he said. His smile was careful, brief.

      And his eyes were blue. Complex blue. The kind that looked gray in some lights and deep, smoky green in others. On the tail end of the half smile, he frowned, and those changeable eyes seemed to darken.