“Yes, you can.” Temper began to flare inside of me. “And you can get off me.”
He rubbed his thumbs over my cheekbones, and something else began to fire up inside of me.
“I’m not moving until you tell me what game you’re playing, Brooke Ashby.”
“Game?”
“You come here with an amnesia story and pass yourself off as Cameron McKenzie. Several scenarios have occurred to me. In one of them, I figure you came across a picture of Cameron, were struck by the resemblance, and decided that impersonating her was the ticket to getting your hands on her inheritance.”
I stared at him. Had seducing me been just part of his plan to unmask me? Well, I didn’t like his tactics. Or rather I’d liked them too much.
“Get off me!” I shoved hard against his shoulders, but I might as well have been trying to move one of those boulders on the bluff. “What kind of man are you? You thought that I would do something like that and…and yet you made love to me?”
“Yeah. And I want to again.”
I felt the truth of what he was saying inside me. And I felt my body’s reaction. There was a part of me that was angry, but there was also a part of me that was almost weeping to have him moving in me again. Since I wasn’t having much luck controlling how my body was responding, I concentrated on keeping my brain unfuzzed. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Yeah, it is.” As if to prove his point, he surged forward, and we both felt the way my body reacted. Heard the way my breath caught in my throat.
Sloan withdrew. “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, I want the truth about what you’re doing here.”
“I’ll need to breathe. And I’ll be able to think more clearly if you get off of me.”
“Fair enough.” He rolled to my side, but he kept an arm around my waist and one leg over mine. “But you’re not getting out of this bed until you answer my questions.”
My mind raced for a moment trying to decide just what to tell him. But he hadn’t moved far enough away for me to completely get the static out of my brain.
Finally, I did what I usually do when my back is against the wall. I went with impulse. Not that following my impulses always got me out of scrapes. Case in point—giving in to my impulse to make love with Sloan Campbell. But I wanted to tell someone, and since Sloan already knew that I was an imposter, he was the most likely candidate and perhaps he could be useful. “If I tell you, will you help me find out what happened to Cameron?”
His gaze remained steady on mine. “Then she didn’t send you here?”
“No. Why would you think that? Oh. The face-saving thing again? She sends me here to seduce you. Then she has a good reason not to go through with the wedding.” I stared at him. It would make a great story line for Mallory Carstairs on Secrets. But…“Would Cameron actually do something like that?”
“She has a lot of her father in her. She likes to play games.”
Evidently, the big difference between Cameron and me was that I could dream up plot lines, but she could really carry them out.
“Did James have a hand in your coming here?” Sloan asked.
“No. And you haven’t answered my question. If I tell you, will you help me find out what’s happened to Cameron?”
“Why do you think something’s happened to her?”
“Because I’m her twin, and I can feel it.”
Surprise flickered over his face. “Her twin?” He frowned. “I don’t think so. Cameron doesn’t have a twin sister.”
“I didn’t think I had one, either, until five weeks ago. That’s when I received an anonymous letter telling me that I was adopted.”
I found that telling him about the letter was like pulling my finger out of a dike. Everything else came pouring out with it. I told him about talking to my parents and how they’d confirmed I was adopted and that my whole life had been a lie. I told him about hiring Pepper and what she’d discovered and my decision to come to the ranch to find out what I could about Cameron.
Spilling all the beans probably wasn’t my wisest strategy, but Sloan was a good listener. He didn’t interrupt, didn’t react in a judgmental way. And it was helping, I found, to put everything I’d discovered so far into words.
I also became aware that lying there in his bed and revealing all my secrets to him was almost as intimate as making love with him had been. For a while after I was finally finished, he didn’t say a word. My insides twisted into knots. What must he think of me? I claimed that I’d come to the ranch to find out what had happened to my newly discovered sister, and as part of my little adventure, I’d agreed to marry him on Friday and then I’d slept with him. Looking at it from an objective point of view, his scenario about my coming here seemed a lot more feasible than the truth.
But when he finally spoke, all Sloan said was, “So you’re telling me that you believe Cameron and you are twin sisters, separated at birth and both put up for adoption.”
“Yes. Except Cameron wasn’t adopted, was she?”
He was looking at me in that intent way he had. “No. At least not that I’m aware of.”
“Beatrice gave me a tour of the ballroom this morning, and I saw Elizabeth McKenzie. I could be her daughter. Cameron and I could both be her daughters.”
“You’re implying that Elizabeth had twins and she and James gave one of you up? I can’t see James doing that.”
I was having trouble with that, too. “And it doesn’t explain my friend Pepper’s discovery of Cameron’s adoption records. She’s checking into it again. But that’s not what’s important right now. What’s important is to find Cameron. I have a really bad feeling—I’ve had it ever since I found out that she was missing—that something bad has happened to her. She didn’t just go off in a snit like everyone seems to think. What did the two of you argue about?”
“I caught her kissing Hal Linton in the garden. After I sent him off, I reminded her that part of our agreement was that although our marriage was partly a business arrangement, we would be monogamous. She lost her temper then. But I don’t think what I said was the only thing that set her off. Something else was bothering her. Anyway, she said she was going to call off the wedding. And I told her to go ahead. I knew that once she thought it over, she’d back down. Cameron never accepts criticism well. When she went missing, none of us were worried about her. It’s not unusual for her to disappear like that.”
“But five weeks? You think she needs that much time to figure out whether or not she wants to go through with the wedding?”
“It’s possible that she’s decided to call it off. She doesn’t like to back down once she’s given her word. So she may be figuring out how to persuade her father to side with her on this.”
He didn’t sound angry or upset that Cameron might be deciding to call off the wedding. I tried not to read too much into that because whatever the truth was surrounding Cameron and Sloan’s marriage, it didn’t change the fact that I’d just made love with my sister’s fiancé. Or the fact that I wanted to do it again. I was all too aware of the strength and the heat of his arm lying across my stomach.
As if he were reading my mind, Sloan slid his hand up to cup my breast, and my nipples—traitors that I’d already found them to be—hardened.
“Don’t,” I said. But my voice didn’t sound convincing even to me. In spite of the satisfaction I’d experienced only a short time before, my body was already heating, yearning.
“Why not?”
I nearly cried out in protest when he removed his hand and levered himself into a sitting position.
“Because…”
My voice trailed off when I saw that instead of leaving, he was taking off the condom and replacing it with another.
I just lay there mesmerized, watching him do it. I couldn’t think of my sister or the wedding or anything but making love to Sloan again. When I finally raised a hand, it wasn’t to push him away. Oh no. Instead, I ran my fingers over the long hard length of him, and I wished I’d thought to do it before he’d slipped the latex on.
The sound he made deep in his throat echoed what I was feeling almost perfectly. He moved quickly then, first lifting away my hand and then finding a place for himself between my legs.
Exhibiting my usual total lack of control where he was concerned, I immediately wrapped arms and legs around him and arched upward.
But he didn’t fill me. Instead, he said, “You haven’t yet asked how I knew that you weren’t Cameron.”
I hadn’t. It was a sure sign of how far gone I was that my inner Alice hadn’t kicked in on that little issue. “How?”
He leaned down to brush his mouth over mine. “Your reaction to Saturn was a clue. At the Derby, Cameron was afraid of him. He didn’t take to her, either.” He paused to trail a line of kisses along my jaw.
When his teeth nipped my earlobe, pleasure fizzed through me. “But that wasn’t it.”
His voice was a husky whisper in my ear, and I could feel him against me right where I needed him. But it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t letting me move, and I wasn’t sure I could speak.