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herself from smiling. She cleared her throat to stifle a laugh and admonished them, “Nicholas James! Thomas Joshua!”
    “You know our real names?” TJ asked, his voice quavering with nerves and surprise.
    Brenna had overheard Josh calling them by their full names when he’d been trying to get them to settle down in the guestroom the night before. Now, through the wall of her room, she’d have to listen to him—every night for two weeks?—reading bedtime stories to his sons. But it was better that they, and not their father, slept in the room next to hers. Or Brenna wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, for his being so tantalizingly close.
    The twins exchanged a glance. Then Buzz twisted his lips, speaking out of the side of his mouth to his brother. “We’re in trouble now.”
    They weren’t the only ones.
    Brenna continued to hold in a laugh as she took in their condition. TJ’s spiky hair dripped cola onto his face and the shoulders of his saturated tuxedo jacket. Buzz blinked pop from his eyelashes—it streamed down his cheeks like tears, and then trickled along the pleats of his once-white shirt. “We need to get you two cleaned up before your father sees you.”
    Josh had enough on his mind with his missing bride, plus he was probably going crazy looking for his boys. He didn’t need to find them like this. As it was, he certainly wasn’t going to get his deposit back on their matching tuxedos.
    “Okay, guys, let’s go,” she ordered, herding them back into the hall.
    They balked at the door to the ladies’ room, as if Brenna were trying to drag them into a dentist’s chair for a root canal.
    “We’re not going in there,” TJ insisted.
    “We’re boys,” Buzz pointed out, as if she hadn’t noticed.
    “We need to use the men’s room,” TJ explained.
    “ I can’t go in there, ” Brenna replied. “And since I just saw your dad and Uncle Nick go into the men’s room, I think you’d rather use the lad—”
    Buzz and TJ hurled their bodies against the door in their haste to scramble into the other restroom and away from their father. Brenna caught the door before it swung back in her face and followed them into the empty room. Fortunately, everyone was on the dance floor, shaking their bodies and singing along with a classic Bob Seger song. Brenna hummed a few bars as the twins shucked their jackets and cummerbunds. TJ got his tie caught around his head, the bow planted in the middle of his forehead.
    Laughing, Buzz dropped to his knees on the green-tiled floor and pointed at his brother. “You’re a girl. You’re a little sissy girl.”
    TJ slammed his hands against his brother’s sodden shirtfront. “ You’re a sissy girl.”
    “You’re a sissy girl!”
    “No one’s a sissy girl,” Brenna insisted as she turned on the water tap and reached for the paper towels that were folded in a basket on the Formica counter.
    “ You’re a girl.” The boys turned on her, as if her gender was a dirty word. TJ tugged the bow tie over his head, and Buzz rose to his feet.
    “But I’m no sissy,” Brenna warned them as she cupped the flow from the faucet and sprayed water all over the twins.
    They squealed but they didn’t run, catching water in their open mouths and letting it drip from their chins.
    She stopped spraying them, in order to mop them up with wet and then dry towels. “At least you didn’t have punch.” She could just imagine the bright red stains on their clothes.
    “Uncle Nick said it had nails in it.”
    “Spikes,” Buzz corrected his brother. “Uncle Nick said someone put spikes in it.”
    “Someone spiked the punch?” Brenna asked. Obviously the boys hadn’t had any, as their little bodies fairly hummed with energy from a pure caffeine high.
    “Who’d put spikes in punch?” TJ asked, wrinkling his nose as Brenna wiped off his face.
    “Rory,” she muttered. Since the boy had hit his teens, poor Mrs. McClintock had been struggling to keep her youngest on the