Her Secret Life

Mike was already shaking his head. “I should be getting back,” he said, filled with even more eagerness to go when he realized how tempted he was to stay.

“You sure? I baked cookies with Levi last night. There are still a bunch left.”

She’d led him to the kitchen rather than to the front door and took the lid off a cookie jar that was shaped like a teddy bear. He didn’t want to be rude.

But he couldn’t stay. Dipping his hand in the jar, he came up with a chocolate chip cookie that could rival his mother’s.

That made him think about the home-cooked dinner he’d missed at his sister’s. About the home Lacey and Jem shared. The ones both of his sisters and their husbands shared. The one his parents shared.

His younger brother Dennis stayed with Mike on the rare occasions Dennis was in town. And as soon as he graduated from college in May, he’d be back even less. Dennis wanted to be a professional fisherman and spent up to three months at a time out on one of the big boats in the middle of the ocean.

Escapism, Mike termed it.

“This is good,” he said, taking a second bite and closing his mouth so he could chew and swallow. Closing his mouth so he didn’t say something he’d regret.

Like accepting that cup of coffee. Or a beer.

He hadn’t finished his bourbon.

Lacey grinned. Offered him another. And smiled. Her mouth...it curved just like Kacey’s did. But there the resemblance ended.

He liked Lacey and found a curious kind of peace in her company.

With Kacey, he buzzed. Like he was fully alive. Sexually, of course, that was a given, but intellectually, too.

“What?” Lacey asked.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re staring at me. But don’t worry, I’m used to it. It was rude of me to say anything...” She turned her back, put the cookie jar in the corner of the counter.

“I didn’t mean to stare,” he said. “It was rude. And you have every right to say something.” He knew all about the struggles between the identical twins—about Lacey’s feeling she was always living in Kacey’s shadow, settling for second best.

Until Jem, of course. She’d been his first choice.

He could tell her all that. Tell her that he’d been noticing how, in spite of their identical appearance, she looked so different than her sister to him.

But, of course, he wouldn’t.

“I should get going,” he said instead. Way past time.

“I’m sure Kacey’s paying you, but I’d be glad to make the first installment, since she’s in LA.” Lacey reached for her purse. “I can write you a check...”

He didn’t take checks. Not personally. He had a woman who handled all of his billing. And accounts payable, too, at his suite of offices across from the new medical complex at the edge of town.

“That’s not necessary,” he said.

Lacey froze and stared up at him. “She is paying you, right? You didn’t offer to do this for free?”

As far as Mike was concerned, the question was none of her business, even if Kacey hadn’t been a friend. And her identical twin.

He said nothing.

“She isn’t. Mike, she’s trying, I swear, and she’s changing, but Kacey has no idea of the power she has to get people to do things for her. Your firm charges top dollar. I’m going to pay you...” She reached for her purse again.

“Stop,” he told her and was tempted to tell her he’d bill her.

The way she’d talked about her twin pissed him off. Or maybe it was because of the way she’d thought he was too...dense, or blind, to figure out that Kacey was working him.