Twin Seduction

“That’s the way Mike explained it. But she withdrew from him, too.”

“And after Maddie and I were born?”

“Whatever worries she had only grew. You were six months old when she told Mike she had to leave. She was going back to New York. He could have custody of the two of you. She wouldn’t contest it. She wouldn’t even ask for visitation rights.”

“She wanted to leave us both here on the ranch?” For a moment, Jordan let herself wonder what that might have been like—to have grown up with a twin and a father and not her mother.

Pete nodded. “But Mike wouldn’t agree. That’s when he came up with the plan. He would give her the start-up money for her jewelry business, and he would let her go back to New York. But in return, she had to take one of you with her.”

“Why?”

“Beats me. He tried to explain. He said he loved her and he wanted her to have someone in her life to care about besides her designs. He wanted her to have someone in her life who would love her.”

Jordan swallowed away the lump in her throat. As difficult as it was, she thought she could understand her mother’s panic. All her life Eva Ware been driven by a dream—to become a top designer. And for the first time since she’d come to the ranch, Jordan thought she might be coming to know her father. He was a man who was capable of great love—of his land and his heritage, of his daughters and of the woman he’d fallen in love with.

Her father had given her up so that Eva wouldn’t be alone.

“I told him he was crazy—especially after she insisted that if she did take one of you, the other could never know about it. There was to be no contact.”

“One child was enough,” Jordan said, nodding.

“That’s the way I saw it. She didn’t want to be involved in visits or in dealing with trips when the two of you would want to be together. She wanted a clean break. I told your father he was a fool to agree. But he loved her.”

“Very much, it seems.” And she thought her mother, whatever she had accomplished in her life, had been a fool to turn away from that kind of love.

Unable to remain seated any longer, Jordan rose and began to pace back and forth beneath the windows. But she turned when Cash entered the room, and when he crossed to her she simply stepped into his arms.

Safety, she thought as the warmth stole into her. And understanding. If this was what her mother had found with Mike Farrell, how had she ever been able to walk away?

“Your father didn’t keep to the letter of the bargain,” Pete said after a moment. “He sent letters and gifts and pictures of Maddie.”

Jordan turned. “She never gave them to me.” Suddenly she frowned. “But there were gifts sometimes, surprise presents.”

“The toy ranch you talked about,” Cash said.

“Yes. And she never objected when I became interested in riding and I wanted my own horse.”

“Guilty conscience?” Drawing her with him, Cash moved toward the bed. “Thank you for telling her.”

“’Bout time I told someone. Mike swore me to secrecy a long time ago. Your father, too. Shortly before he died, he gave me a sealed letter addressed to both of you. Made me promise I’d deliver it if you ever found each other. After Mike died, I thought long and hard about giving it to Maddie and telling her she had a sister. But a promise is a promise.”

“Did anyone else know about the twins?” Cash asked. “Other than you and my parents?”

Pete frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t think so.” He shifted his gaze from Jordan to Cash. “Thanks for bringing me in here. I owe you one.”

Cash smiled slowly. “I think I’ll collect right now. Tell me about the fresh vein of turquoise you’ve been mining on Maddie’s ranch.”

Pete winced. “That’s something Mike swore me to secrecy on, too. I discovered it years ago, right about the same time he met and married Eva. The deal was that I could work it for as long as I wanted. But I couldn’t tell anyone where I was getting the stones.”

“He never filed a claim?” Cash asked.

Pete shook his head. “Not Mike Farrell. He didn’t want any of the big mining companies out at his ranch sniffing around. He didn’t want the land harmed in any way.”

“So part of Maddie’s heritage is that she owns a turquoise mine?” Jordan asked.

“Yep. And it’s a damn rich one, too.”

13

IT WAS FULLY DARK when Cash turned his pickup down the road that led to the ranch. D.C. was about five minutes behind them in his rental car. He’d still been on the phone with Detective Stanton when they’d left him in Shay’s office.

The NYPD was getting closer to wrapping up their cases against Adam and Dorothy Ware. Though both continued to deny having hired any hit people or having any connection to Rainbow Enterprises Limited, both had connections to John Kessler, Adam’s loan shark, who could easily have put either of them in touch with a paid assassin. And to Cash’s way of thinking, both Dorothy and Adam certainly had motive to kill Maddie and Jordan. If the twins were both eliminated, according to the terms of Eva’s will, Dorothy, Adam and Carleton would each get an even bigger slice of the pie that was Eva Ware’s estate.Maddie and Jase were still out of cell-phone contact at the hospital, but Dino Angelis was using every resource he had at Campbell and Angelis Security to check into both Dorothy’s and Adam’s e-mail and phone records.

They’d left Shay questioning Daniel Pearson. The real estate man had lawyered up as soon as he’d been brought in. Faced with the DNA results on the cigarette butts, he admitted to having been in the area where Pete had been found, but he vehemently denied that he’d been there that morning. He had confessed that he did indeed have a buyer for the Farrell Ranch, but the only contact he’d had with his client was through a spokesperson for Rainbow Enterprises Limited.

Shay was having two of his men check Pearson’s alibi. Since it promised to be a long night, Cash hadn’t objected when Jordan had asked if they could return to the ranch.

She’d been dead on her feet. Little wonder. Still, she hadn’t fallen asleep on the ride from Santa Fe. He suspected that she was just as wired as he was. He figured he wasn’t going to get much shut-eye until he could be sure that the danger for Jordan was over.

And he wasn’t sure that it was. He thought of D.C.’s analogy to a connect-the-dots puzzle. To his way of thinking, they still didn’t have a clear picture. If it turned out that neither Dorothy Ware nor Adam had hired the hit woman in New York or the man who’d tried to drive them off the road yesterday, who had?

As they rounded a curve in the road, he glanced toward Jordan. “Penny for your thoughts.”

“My mind keeps returning to the secrets everyone has been keeping. My aunt, my cousin, my mother. My father, too. All those years of hiding the existence of that turquoise mine. Preserving the integrity of the land and his heritage must have been very important to him.”

She paused for a moment as he turned into the drive that led to the ranch house. “You knew him. Would he object to the idea of starting up a dude ranch as a side business? Would that go against what he would have wanted for his land?”

Reaching over, he linked his fingers with hers. “I think he’d go along with it if you believe it’s a way that Maddie can make ends meet.”

“I don’t have it all thought through yet.”

“I don’t know about that. The way Greg Majors explained it to you at the jewelry show, it sounded pretty good.”

She smiled at him. “It did, didn’t it? I was really tempted to buy into it. But Maddie won’t be able to take it on. I’ll have to figure a solution to that.”

Cash’s heart took a hard thump. “Why not run it yourself, Jordan?”

There was a beat of silence. “I can’t be in two places at once. I’ve thought about the fact that Maddie is now the most obvious choice to step into our mother’s shoes as head designer at Eva Ware Designs. But that may not be what she wants. It could be that she’d like to remain independent. In that case, I’ll be needed more than ever at my mother’s company. We’ll have to find a new designer, and I’ll have to be there to negotiate the transition.”

“And you seem to be equally committed to find a solution so that Maddie can keep the ranch.”

“I am.”

“Perhaps neither one of you are going to be able to return completely to your own lives. Maybe that’s why your mother gave you twenty-one days.”

“According to Pete, she needed that amount of time to be sure she was making the right decision in marrying my father. Clearly, it wasn’t a magic number.”

“Who’s to say it wasn’t?” Cash countered. “If Mike Farrell and Eva Ware had never married, neither you nor Maddie would be here. However much you may judge them for the decisions they made later, they both took a risk. And you were the result. Who’s to say that it was wrong?”

For a couple of beats, Jordan said nothing, and something around Cash’s heart tightened. Finally, she said, “We still have about nineteen days left to work out the details.”