My honesty took me by surprise.
Not because I wasn’t a generally honest person. But I’d barely given the thought any time to process, and boom, there it tumbled out of my mouth.
Bauer hummed. “Not far off, I guess. But you have to admit, the fact that I met you because you inexplicably showed up to a public event trying to pass yourself off as your twin sister makes you pretty intriguing.”
I rolled my lips together.
“And you’re not going to tell me why you did that?”
“My sister asked me to,” I answered honestly, after only the slightest hesitation. “She had a lecture she couldn’t miss tonight, but she knew how important this was to Finn and your parents.”
The way his gaze searched my face, I felt like I was being subjected to the human equivalent of a lie detector test.
“So you only did this because Lia asked you to.” His tone was chock-full of skepticism, and I couldn’t blame him.
“Yup.”
“Okay then.” He picked up a framed picture of the two of us taken at Logan’s last game as a player. We were just barely stepping into our teenage years, a phase when absolutely no one could tell us apart if we didn’t want them to. It was taken before Finn came into our lives, before there was a single thing my sister had that I wanted. Even if she didn’t have Finn in the way I wanted him, he was still hers.
And I was ending the night exactly the same way as I started it, without any firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be the sole recipient of his attention. My lips pinched tight because I hated the self-pity. It was pointless and ineffective.
Nothing, absolutely nothing was gained from feeling sorry for yourself when it came to circumstances outside of our control. That was a valuable lesson I’d learned from Brooke leaving, and Logan stepping up to take care of us.
What was the point of bemoaning Brooke’s leaving? There wasn’t one.
What was the point of feeling sad because the one boy I liked didn’t look at me that way? There wasn’t one.
Bauer carefully set down the frame. “It must be strange to look at someone else and see your own face looking back at you.”
Was it? I looked at Lia and saw Lia. I knew our family was the same. Finn probably was too. But to someone like Bauer, who didn’t know me at all and really didn’t know my sister well, it must have seemed strange. But that was the thing about being a twin, wasn’t it? We were a novelty.
“I guess I’m pretty used to it by now.”
He nodded.
“Bauer,” I said gently. “What do you want? I know you didn’t come to talk about the ins and outs of being an identical twin.”
“Well …” He paused and gave me a lopsided grin. “I kinda did.”
My brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I need you to pretend to be Lia again.”
“You … what now?”
He squared his shoulders and opened his mouth to say something when Lia burst through the door.
Her eyes widened dramatically at the sight of Bauer, then they flipped to me and blinked a few times at the sight of my pajamas.
Bauer crossed his arms over his chest and leveled a dry look in her direction.
She slipped her backpack off her shoulder and let it fall with a thump on the floor. “Shit,” she whispered.
“Welcome home, Lia,” he said quietly. “I bet your night wasn’t half as exciting as mine.”
BAUER
As frustrated as I was with these Ward sisters and the conversation I was about to have with both of them, I’d never been so happy to see Lia in all the years I’d known her. Because if she hadn’t walked through that door, I might not have been able to keep myself from reaching for Claire again just to see what she’d do.
If I thought she was smokin’ in the yellow dress, what she was able to do with cotton sleep shorts and a T-shirt was a fuckin miracle of fabric.
But instead of staring at her like I quite desperately wanted to, I kept my gaze pinned on her twin sister. The one meeting my stare head-on, quite unapologetically.
“Where have you been?” Claire asked her twin. “I thought you’d be home hours ago.”
Lia tore her gaze from me. “I-I met Catherine Atwood, and we got to talking …” She pointed a hand at me. “Can we discuss why this person is in our apartment who’s never been in our apartment, please?”
“Yes, let’s do that,” I agreed. “I’d love to talk about why I’m here.”
“Why did you go in Finn’s place?” Lia asked, trading a loaded glance with her sister. It was a twin-look if I’d ever seen one, something I was completely unable to decipher. Claire could, though, because she gave a slight nod.
I grimaced at the exchange. “Oh no, I don’t think that’s the first question that will be answered tonight.”
Lia grimaced right back, but she didn’t argue.
With both of them standing in front of me, I had to fight how disconcerting it was to have that mirror image in front of me.
I’d practiced what I was going to say under the assumption that Claire would be my only audience. Add in her sister, who I got along with about as well as a root canal, and this just got a touch more complicated.
“Not that I owe you this explanation,” I said, “since I was the one who got the switcheroo, but Finn is home with a man cold.”
Lia tilted her head. “Can a man call it a man cold? I’m pretty sure that’s just for the women who have to deal with them.”
“Why’s that? I don’t curl up under the covers like a little bitch when I have the sniffles.”
She blew a hard breath out of her lips. “No? What’d you do the last time you had a cold?”
“Won an invitational and got handed a fat ass check.”
Lia rolled her eyes.
Now it was Claire’s turn to grimace, except interestingly enough, she didn’t grimace at me. It was aimed at her sister.
That had a smile spreading wide over my face. “Princess, no need to get upset at her. Lia has always been my biggest supporter.”
“Princess?” Lia asked in disbelief.
Claire’s face colored. “Okay, Lia knows why Finn bailed. Now if you care to tell us why you’re here, we can let you continue with your evening.”
“You won’t like it,” I told her.
“What is it?” they said in perfect, perfect unison. The tone, the tilt of the head, the slight narrowing of the blue eyes.
“That is so freaky.” I shook my head. “No wonder you fooled Adele and my dad.”
Lia beamed at her sister. “I told you you could do it.”
Claire gestured at me. “He knew right away, though.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.