The Disobedient Virgin

“It’s going to be. That’s all I know,” he said gruffly. “I’m meeting two strangers whose genes I share, and when I do…Well, who knows? They might turn out to be guys I’d like to know better or—”

“They will,” Catarina said quickly. “I feel it in my bones.”

He looked down at her and smiled. “Such beautiful bones.”

She smiled, too. Then she turned in his arms and faced him. “I love you, Joaquim Ramirez.”

Jake tilted her face to his. “And that’s all that matters,” he said, and knew in his heart it was true.

And yet, he thought, and yet how incredible it would be if his brothers turned out to be men he’d be proud to call his friends.

A little after two-thirty he kissed Cat goodbye and took a taxi to the offices of Javier Estes. He’d figured on traffic. Besides, by then he’d been pacing the terrace like a trapped animal.

“Go,” Cat had said gently, when he’d said maybe he ought to get started.

But when he stepped out of the cab he still had forty minutes to kill. No way was he going up to Estes’s office to wait that out.

The street could have been one in New York. Tall buildings crowded together, but he could see a break in the unrelenting glass and steel forest right across the way, where a neon sign said Café.

Jake checked for a break in the stream of cars and trucks, found one and jogged toward it.

The café was a cool, dimly lit oasis. Leather booths, mostly unoccupied, stretched the length of one wall, and a zinc bar stood to the right, where a lone bartender was polishing glasses. The man acknowledged Jake with a polite smile and a lift of his eyebrows.

“Um whisky, por favor,” Jake said.

The bartender nodded. “Sorry,” he said, in perfect English. “I thought the girl served you before she went on her break.”

“I’m afraid you have me confused with another patron,” Jake said politely.

The bartender cocked his head. “Yeah. Now that I take a second look…” He nodded. “Whiskey, you said? Scotch?”

“Yeah. Laphroaig, if you have it, and bottled water on the—”

“Side.” Another smile as the bartender poured the drink, then the water. “Amazing.”

“What is?” Jake said, as he took out his wallet and put down some bills.

“That guy in the back. The last booth. He ordered Laphroaig, too, with bottled water on the side, and he looks enough like you to be your—Hey! Hey, you forgot your whiskey!”

The man in the last booth had risen to his feet and was staring at Jake. Jake returned the stare.

The hair rose on the back of his neck.

He could have been looking into a mirror.

Everything was the same. Height. Weight. Build. The ink-black hair that curled over his forehead no matter how he tried to prevent it. Green eyes. Even that little indentation in the chin he’d nicked a dozen times as a kid, first learning to shave.

Hell, the guy was his doppelganger.

Jake swallowed hard and walked toward the back of the room just as the other man began moving toward him. They met mid-way, and now Jake could see there were differences. It was the same face, the same build—and yet it wasn’t. The shape of the nose, of the eyes. Half an inch or so in height. The man facing him had a little less curl in his hair at the temples…

Jake cleared his throat.

“Are you…?” he said, just as the stranger opened his mouth and said the same words. Both of them hesitated.

“My name,” Jake said, “is—is Ramirez.”

The other man nodded. “Yes. Same here. Ramirez. Luis Ramirez.” He gave a little laugh. “Or Anton Scott-Lee. Depends on the time and place.”