Twin Seduction

“I’ll take you on a tour day after tomorrow. The best way to see it is on horseback. Think you can handle Brutus?”

“Yes.” He was taking her seriously. Something inside of Jordan softened. “Why would you think that I might come up with something?”

He shrugged. “Gregory Peck was a tenderfoot in The Big Country, and he solved the feud over the Big Muddy.”

“True.” She grinned at him. “Now finish explaining why you proposed to my sister.”

“It’s pretty well-known around here that our fathers always had this dream that one day Maddie and I would marry and join the two ranches.” He raised a hand. “Maddie and I agreed long ago that wasn’t a possibility. Our relationship never took the turn that yours and mine has. But if we put it out there that we were engaged, I figured people would believe it and since Maddie would no longer have a need to sell, that might put an end to the incidents.”

Jordan tilted her head to one side. “I’ve heard of a marriage of convenience. So this was sort of an engagement of convenience?”

“A fake engagement of convenience.”

“Would Maddie have agreed?”

Cash sighed. “Maybe. After some serious and figurative arm-twisting on my part.”

Jordan smiled at him. “That’s how I got her to agree to switch places with me. You’re a sweet man, Cash Landry.”

Color rose in Cash’s face, but before he could reply, they were interrupted by a sharp knock on the door. Jordan moved quickly and opened it before Cash could.

Although he couldn’t have explained it rationally, he was relieved to see it was his foreman Sweeney standing on the porch. But once Cash noticed the sober expression on Sweeney’s usually jovial face, his tension returned.

The tall man took off his hat and nodded to Jordan. “Mornin’, Ms. Maddie.” Then he shifted his gaze to Cash. “Glad you’re here, boss.”

“Problem?” Cash asked.

Sweeney’s eyes never left Cash’s as he nodded. “I finished with the stock, and I was on my way over here to check on Ms. Maddie the way you asked me to. When I passed by her studio, I noticed that the door was ajar. So I went in.”

“What is it?” Jordan asked.

“I’d better show you,” Sweeney said.

4

JORDAN ALMOST had to run to keep up with the men’s long-legged strides. The look in the older man’s eyes had triggered a cold dread deep inside of her. The sun beating down from a clear, steel-blue sky wasn’t enough to chase away the goose bumps that had broken out on her skin.

Maddie’s studio had been broken into? Why? And by whom? Had something been stolen?She thought she’d steeled herself. In the past few weeks, she’d developed a skill for doing that, but when Sweeney pushed the door open and she saw the devastation, her knees nearly buckled and she couldn’t keep from crying out.

The open shelving that must have lined the walls had all been shoved over. Boxes had been overturned, their contents scattered. Gems and silver wires littered the floor. And scattered over everything like freshly fallen snow were shreds of paper. Maddie’s design sketches? Something in Jordan’s stomach twisted. Eva had always pasted her latest designs on the wall over her workspace. Would Maddie be able to replace them?

Leaning down, she picked up a chunk of turquoise the size of a baby’s fist. A quick glance around confirmed that other stones—garnet, lapis, tiger’s eye, some even larger than the turquoise—had been thrown helter-skelter throughout the debris. They had to be quite valuable.

“Why didn’t they take the stones?” she asked.

“Good question.”

She hadn’t even been aware that Cash was touching her until he gave her shoulders a squeeze.

“Take a deep breath.”

She did and felt her lungs burn. Control. She reached deep for it. When the backs of her eyes began to sting, she blinked rapidly and carefully picked her way further into the room. Cash moved with her.

Her heart thudded painfully in her chest as she thought of her mother’s studio, pictured Eva’s reaction if something like this had happened to her. A flame of anger began to burn inside of her. While thieves had broken into the main salon of the Madison Avenue store a few weeks back, they hadn’t destroyed the place.

Taking another breath, she said in a low tone, “We can’t let her see this.”

“She won’t have to,” Cash said equally quietly. “I’ll call my housekeeper. Mary’s known Maddie since she was a child. She’ll gather some friends and they’ll put the place in order. Her husband will have the shelves back up in no time. This can all be fixed.”

“Good. Okay. We won’t have to tell her it happened.”

“Yes, we will. She has a right to know about this, Jordan. And we need to know if anything like this is going on in New York.”

A ripple of fear moved through her. “You think she’s in danger, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think. But I don’t like the terms of your mother’s will.”

She looked at him then. He had a take-charge attitude that she was grateful for. In most of her relationships, including the one she’d had with her mother and in her job, she’d been the person who usually called the shots. She was relieved in this case that she didn’t have to figure out everything.

As she turned back to face the piles of debris, a thought suddenly occurred to her. “The jewelry show—the one that’s coming up tomorrow in Santa Fe. Maybe those pieces were what they were after.” Panic jolted her system. “I told her I’d substitute for her at that show. She said the new designs were in the safe, but—”

Cash ran his hands from her shoulders down her arms and back up again. “They are in the safe. She keeps all her finished work there.”

The relief Jordan felt nearly had her knees buckling again. She knew that. Maddie had told her that. She wasn’t going to fall apart. She couldn’t. Very deliberately, she let her gaze sweep the room again. Someone had done this to scare her sister.

Behind her, Cash moved to speak to the older man who’d remained outside. “Go back to the ranch. Let Steven and Mary know. Tell them I’ll call them as soon as the phones come back on line. If you could pack me some clothes and bring them, I’d be grateful. I’ll be staying here until we figure out what’s going on.”

“Yes, boss.”

Jordan heard the older man’s footsteps fade, but she was still focused on the destruction. She pictured her sister sitting at the worktable. Then she scanned the studio again. The carelessness of the destruction, the meanness of it jump-started her anger.

When the first wave moved through her, Cash said, “C’mon. We’re getting out of here.”

She turned to face him, temper blazing in her eyes. “We’re not just going to repair this place. We’re going to find the bastard who did it and make him pay.”

“Deal,” Cash said.

AS JORDAN PUSHED off the speakerphone button ending her call with Maddie, Cash slipped his arm around her and pulled her close. She looked shell-shocked. And no wonder. The news in Manhattan was even worse than it was in Santa Fe.

The message light on the phone had been blinking when they’d reentered the farm house, signaling that the phone was working—at least temporarily. The message had been from Maddie, and the machine must have picked it up when they were still in bed. That had been the phone call that had awakened him. According to Maddie, Jase Campbell had returned. When Jordan had reached Maddie at Eva Ware Designs, Cash was relieved to learn that Campbell had been with her.He’d thought for a moment that Jordan was going to lose it when she’d told Maddie about the vandalism in her studio. But she’d rallied. She was an extraordinarily strong woman.

Then Jase Campbell delivered the bad news from their end. Eva Ware’s death was being investigated as a homicide. A witness had seen a car parked across the street and claimed that when Eva Ware had crossed to her apartment building, the car had been aimed straight at her.

On top of that, Jase believed that Eva’s death might be related to the robbery at Eva Ware designs. In Cash’s opinion, that news, added to the terms of Eva Ware’s will, put both Jordan and Maddie in grave jeopardy. It didn’t comfort him that Jase Campbell was on the same page on that score.

“She was murdered,” Jordan said as she turned into him and laid her head on his shoulder.

He wrapped his arms around her. When she tipped her head up to meet his gaze and he saw a tear roll quietly down her cheek, he had a moment of raw panic.

He had no experience handling a woman’s tears. After his mother’s death, he’d been totally surrounded by men. But he had to do something. Jordan had just been dealt a bull’s-eye blow. When Maddie and Jase had given her the news, her face had gone ghost-white. Even now, her breathing was shallow.

Was she going to faint on him? Panic nearly swamped him again.

Easing away, he kept an arm around her shoulder as he led her to the couch. Once he had her settled, he strode back into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Mike Farrell’s single-malt Scotch out of a cabinet. Carefully, he poured three fingers’ worth into a glass and drank one of them himself.