back at him. “And she doesn’t look a thing like me.”
“You’re beautiful.” He slid it forward.
“Thanks, but I’m blond—natural, by the way—and my face is longer, my mouth is wider, my eyes are shaped differently.” Unable to resist, she took one more look. “She’s really…delicate-looking.” Willow-thin and fragile. No cleft in the chin. No glasses. No boobs.
No dice.
“We don’t even look related.” She gave the picture a good shove.
“Triplets aren’t always identical,” he said. “Sometimes two are, and one is from a different egg. That might explain the difference in your looks and makes it possible that you’re a match for the marrow, when she’s not.”
“She’s not?” That hit her hard. If this alleged sister had been a match, would Eileen Stafford have dispatched an investigator to find her ? Or would she have let Vanessa go to her grave without ever initiating contact? Of course, she would have. God, she despised the woman right down to her last bad cell.
She turned toward the bar, lifting her hair with one hand to get a nonexistent breeze on her neck. “Where is that drink?” This was so ugly, so complicated, and so not what she wanted to be doing with her time in St. Kitts. Or anywhere, for that matter.
With impossible purpose, Wade inched the picture back across the table, like a gambler willing to risk a decent card for the remote possibility of a better one.
“Her name is Dr. Miranda Lang.”
Something slipped inside Vanessa. Miranda .
She didn’t care what her name was. She didn’t care . Didn’t he get that?
“What kind of doctor?” she asked, so casually it couldn’t be interpreted as anything but small talk.
“An anthropologist. She has a book out that’s been getting some media coverage, about the Mayan calendar and the myth that the world is going to end in 2012. Have you heard about it?”
She lifted an indifferent shoulder. “Unless it moves money, changes the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or otherwise generates cash with at least seven, preferably eight, figures involved, no.” She fanned her sticky neck, wishing something wasn’t pressing so hard on her chest.
Finally, a drink tray landed on their table.
“Thank God,” Vanessa mumbled, her gaze sliding over the much-needed vodka only to land on the much-hated picture.
Wavy auburn hair. Wide smile. Pretty. An anthropologist.
She grabbed the ice-cold glass and plucked out the damned lime. “There’s obviously been a mistake. I’m sorry she’s going to be disappointed. But my father and I did exhaustive research, and there were no sisters.”
She put the cold glass to her lips.
“I have another picture.”
She didn’t drink. She couldn’t. She watched as he slowly reached back into his billfold, methodically drawing out another picture. Part of her wanted to kick him into faster action and get this hell over with. But it was easier just to watch his stunningly masculine hands as they moved to find something she just knew she didn’t want to see. Nice hands. Sexy fingers. Bad, bad news.
“I think you’ll be real interested in this one.” He burned her with a look that might have been a warning or might have been something else. It was hard to read this man, hard to get past the eyes and the body and the face.
Was that a calculated move? Send an irresistible hottie to sway her . I need bone marrow . Her stomach tightened, and she pressed the icy cold glass on her cheek.
“This picture,” he said, his voice as measured as his movements, “is actually of the back of Miranda’s neck.”
Her vodka splashed over the rim of her glass. Oh, no. No .
“Right here.” He reached a hand around her head, making a tiny circle with his fingertip, right above the hairline, a million little hairs rising up at his touch and sending shivers down her back.
“She has a tattoo right here, and all three babies were marked with them. You have one, don’t you?”
The drink slipped out