“Well...”
“No, we were just heading home,” Lacey said. “We’ve got...”
“I’d love to have an Uncle Bob’s sandwich,” Kacey blurted just a little too loud. “I’m starving. We haven’t had lunch yet, either.”
“We had a late breakfast,” Lacey said, looking at her sister.
“I’m starving,” Kacey said again.
And then the strangest thing happened. Lacey Hamilton stared at her sister. Her shoulders straightened. And she agreed to have lunch with them.
If they weren’t intruding, of course.
Of course he had to say they weren’t.
And tried not to feel like he should be adding a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit to his son’s college account.
* * *
SHE’D HAVE TO have lunch. Kacey had figured out that Jeremiah Bridges was the client Lacey had mentioned. She knew it the second she’d met her twin’s gaze. Probably based on some unconscious reaction Lacey had made. She never had been able to hide anything from Kacey.
Which was both good and bad.
“I apologize,” Jem, as he’d told Kacey to call him, said as he walked behind Kacey, who was being led by Levi, and next to Lacey toward a table out on the patio that overlooked the beach. “If you had plans...”
“We really didn’t,” Lacey told him. The only way she was going to prove to her sister that Jem Bridges meant nothing to her was to make it so.
Clearly she wasn’t going to be able to hide.
“Your sister seems nice.”
“She is. She’s my best friend.”
They were through the restaurant and almost outside. Another few feet and she could grab a chair next to Kacey and across from...
“I want to sit next to Lacey and you can sit there,” Levi said to Kacey, pointing to the seat directly across from him. “We can play the peg game.”
There was a triangular board with holes in it that held golf tees, and the object was to jump tees until there was only one left. It was harder than it looked.
“Have you ever been here before?” Jem asked as he took the seat across from Lacey.
“No.”
“Lacey’s only been here a year and a half and she works all the time,” Kacey said. Lacey would have kicked her under the table if she hadn’t been afraid of catching Jem’s ankle in the process.
Pulling her hair back, she took the elastic she’d slipped around her wrist as they’d headed out and used it to secure a ponytail. There. At least she could be somewhat business-minded.
“Where did you live before you came here?” Jem asked, looking like he might grin again as he watched her secure her hair.
“With me,” Kacey piped in. And then, with a pointed look at Lacey, proceeded to become absorbed by the golf tees Levi was putting in and out of holes with no rule following whatsoever.
“You lived with your sister?”
“While I was in college,” Lacey said. “And then I just stayed.”
“I’d rather see my sister...never,” Jem told her with an unapologetic air that she kind of liked. “A phone call every few years would do me fine.”
She looked over at her sister, sure that Jem really just wanted to hear about her. And knowing she could comply.