Finn's Twins!

In the meantime, he could stick them with Strong.

She was gone.

“Where’s Strong?” he demanded, glowering down at Isobel Rule.

His receptionist was certainly nowhere in sight. In fact one of the little redheads was sitting in her chair—or had been until he’d opened the door. Then she’d taken one look at him and had scurried to duck behind Isobel Rule once more.

The apparently unflappable Isobel was sitting in a straightback chair next to the larger-than-life portrait he’d done of last year’s supermodel, Tawnee Davis. It had graced the cover of the upstart glamour mag, Hi Society, and had won him industry acclaim for what he’d accomplished with Tawnee’s lovely curves, a few shadowy angles and some artfully arranged blond hair.

Isobel Rule was a complete counterpoint. Rounded where Tawnee was curvy, covered where Tawnee was bare. Her curly brown hair not the least bit artful, her unlined eyes bespeaking innocence rather than seduction.

Not that she seemed to care. Her gaze met Finn’s. “I sent her home.”

“You...sent her home?”

“Well, it’s after seven.” She stood up and set aside the book she’d been reading. “The poor woman said she had been here since eight. She has a life—unlike you, apparently. So, I told her to go on. We all shouldn’t have to suffer. She has to cook for Tom.”

“Who’s Tom?”

Isobel gave a long-suffering sigh. “Her husband.” She shook her head. “Poor man, on his feet all day. I didn’t know they still had beat policemen in New York City. I’m glad to know they do. It makes the city seem a much friendlier place.” She looked at him brightly. “Don’t you think?”

Finn’s mouth opened and closed. He felt like a grouper, hooked, beached and gasping for air.

Strong’s husband was called Tom? He was a policeman? He’d never known any of that. In fact all he’d learned about her in the seven years she’d worked for him was that she was never sick and she made things run smoothly in the studio even when the rest of the world was going to hell in a handbasket all around him.

He glanced around, trying to get his bearings. One of the twins was peering at him through the lens of a turn-of- the-century Kodak camera he kept on a shelf by the door. “Here now,” he snapped. “Put that down.”

This twin didn’t seem nearly as skittish as the other one. She set the camera down, but she didn’t dodge behind Isobel Rule’s skirt. Instead she regarded him solemnly. “Why?”

“Because it isn’t a plaything.”

“I wasn’t playing.” Unblinking green eyes met his.

“What were you doing?”

“Framing ogres.”

“Tansy!”

Finn’s gaze flicked up at Isobel’s dismayed exclamation. He saw a deep rose color suffuse her face, blotting out the freckles. And what a color it was.

“It’s what you told me to do,” the one who was presumably Tansy protested, looking indignant. “You said to iso—islo—”

“Isolate,” Isobel supplied resignedly.

Tansy bobbed her head. “Uh-huh. Isolate scary things and they wouldn’t be so scary anymore,” she finished, slanting a glance in Finn’s direction. “You’re right.”

He felt like baring his teeth at her. “Don’t scare you anymore, huh?” he said to the child.

Tansy shook her head resolutely.

He turned his gaze on the twin peeping out from behind Isobel. “What about you? Are you scared?” He saw Tansy fix her sister with a hard look.

“N-no,” the other one, obviously Pansy, replied.

“You ought to be.”

“Mr. MacCauley!” Isobel’s blush deepened: Or was it anger causing that color?

He turned a bland smile in her direction. “Yes?”

“Stop trying to frighten them! You should be ashamed of yourself, flaunting your ferocity before small children!”

“Flaunting my ferocity? Is that what I’m doing?”

Isobel Rule pressed her lips together. Then she turned to the children. “He’s teasing,” she told both girls firmly.

Finn frowned. “Now, wait a minute—”

“You were quite right to frame him, Tansy,” Isobel went on, ignoring him. “You were clever to see that he’s not really fierce at all.”

“The hell I’m not!”

All three of them turned their gazes on him, the twins with jaws sagging, Isobel with her brows drawn down in obvious displeasure at his language. He scowled at her. But even as he pretended he didn’t care, he felt the hot tide of embarrassment creeping up his neck and rued a complexion that, even tanned as it was, would allow Isobel Rule to see his blush.

He muttered under his breath and turned away. That was when he came face-to-face once more with Strong’s empty chair and remembered he didn’t have anyone to stick the twins with.

Except—and here his gaze slid sideways—Miss Isobel Rule.

Was she a miss? He looked a little harder, trying to see if she was wearing a ring, but she had her hands in the pockets of that circus tent he supposed she called a skirt. Their gazes met.

“Well, I can’t keep them,” Finn said abruptly.

“Meg said—”

“Not for the first time, Meg is wrong.” He waved hand around the studio foyer. “Do you see any dolls? Any blocks? Any puzzles or playthings? No, you don’t. Why? Because this is not a day-care center. I repeat, hot a day-care center! I can’t take them.” He did a quick lap around Strong’s desk for emphasis, stopping square in front of it to face Isobel Rule and her two worried-looking charges. He didn’t let his gaze linger on them.

“You’re their uncle,” Isobel said quietly. “They have no one else.”

“They have you.”

“Me?” she squeaked.

“Why not you? You brought them.”

“Because I got shang—because Meg asked me to,” she amended with a quick apprehensive glance at the girls.

Which meant that she was as much one of Meg’s victims as he was. That, in ordinary circumstances, would have made him feel sympathetic toward her. In the present situation, he wasn’t above taking whatever advantage he could get. “You should have said no.”

“I thought you were expecting them.”

He snorted. “You thought I agreed to baby-sit? You thought I said, sure, just drop ’em off, they can sit in the foyer and watch me shoot all day?”

“She said you shot wildlife,” Isobel replied faintly.

Finn’s hands tightened in a strangling motion. “She’ll burn in hell—”

The girls gasped.

Isobel shot him a furious glare. “That’s enough. Now you’ve terrified them. She’s not going to burn anywhere, girls,” Isobel assured them. “She’s fine. And you’re going to be fine, too. Your uncle is simply upset. Obviously he isn’t as flexible as one might like.” Another accusing glare sailed in his direction. “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you and want you—” here she nailed him with a look that promised instant death if he contradicted her “—he just needs to get used to the change in his life.”

“Our lives,” Finn said, determined to salvage whatever he could of the mess she was making of his life.

A tiny frown line appeared between Isobel’s dark brows. “What do you mean?”

“You want things fine? You want the girls calm and settled and reassured? Fair enough. But it isn’t just my life that’s changing. If they’re mine for two weeks, they’re yours, too, Isobel Rule.”

CHAPTER TWO

SHE went with him.

Only because the twins—even Tansy who was by far the braver of the two—looked horrified at the slightest hint that she might abandon them to the questionable mercies of their uncle Finn. And because she felt morally obliged to make sure Finn MacCauley’s bark really was worse than his bite.

And wasn’t it nice someone involved had a moral or two? Izzy thought irritably as she hurried to keep up with him as he strode along Amsterdam Avenue.

Like his piratical forebears, Finn MacCauley had done considerably more barking and bossing on the way uptown. He’d snapped at the girls when they dawdled. He’d grumbled about having to herd them all into a taxi when the subway was so much faster and cheaper.

“Not with luggage,” Izzy had argued. And then he’d groused about having to manhandle their bags in and out of the cab when he’d finally managed to flag one down. They had to disembark two blocks from his Upper West Side apartment because they were caught in a hopeless traffic jam, and now he was complaining about having to walk slow enough that six-year-old legs could keep up.

Izzy glanced around now, made sure the girls weren’t looking, then kicked him in the shin.

“Sh—eee!” Finn hopped on one foot and bit off something she was sure would have singed childish ears. “What the hell—heck—are you doing?”

“Shutting you up.” She gave him a saccharine smile. “How’m I doing?”

Finn looked nonplussed, then faintly guilty. He glanced back at the twins who were gawking at a boy on in-line skates weaving at breakneck speed through several lanes of still stalled traffic. “They aren’t paying any attention,” he muttered.

“They were. And you weren’t making them feel welcome.”

“They aren’t.”

She kicked him again.

“Ow! Damn it!” He bent to rub his shin and glowered at Izzy’s sneakers. “Have you got steel-capped toes in those things?”

“Don’t I wish,” Izzy murmured. She fell into step beside him as he turned the corner and slowed his pace considerably. “I’m sure you’re upset,” she said, feeling a little guilty now herself at what she’d done. “But you don’t have to take it out on the girls. It’s not their fault their mother’s a—” She cast about for a suitably polite word.

“Flake?” he supplied. “Ditz? Irresponsible idiot? Or would you like me to think of something stronger?”

Izzy tried to hide a smile. “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but...”

“I would,” Finn said darkly.

Izzy knew the voice of experience when she heard it. “She doesn’t mean to be quite so irresponsible. Meg is a dear, really,” she offered. “Sweet, funny, eager...”

“Generous?” Finn suggested ironically.

This time Izzy couldn’t suppress the smile. “In her way.”

Finn snorted. He cut in front of her, bounding up the steps to a brownstone halfway up the block, then dropped the duffels on the stoop and fished a key out of his pocket. The twins pressed against either side of Izzy, watching him as he unlocked the door and held it open. “Third floor,” he told them. “Forward march.”

His apartment, Izzy saw when he ushered them in, stretched from the front of the brownstone all the way to the back. Once she was sure it had been a warren of dark tiny rooms. Now it was one huge airy expanse with tall windows at the front and French doors opening onto a small terrace at the back. The kitchen area, on the street end, was small but efficient, with stark white cupboards and dark green tile countertops above which hung a rack with a row of well-used copper-bottomed pots and pans. In the center area, where they had come in, was a wide general living space with a gleaming hardwood floor accented by bold geometrical design, black and white area rugs and a huge modern black leather sofa and matching chairs and photos, not of seven-foot technicolor bimbos, but black-and-white studies of loons on a quiet lake, deer eating quietly in a clearing, and one lone wolf howling at the moon. Izzy stared, her attention caught.

“Move it or lose it, lady,” Finn grumbled behind her and pushed her farther into the room with the duffel bags, then kicked the door shut. He dropped the bags and straightened, wincing dramatically.

“They weren’t that heavy,” Izzy said tartly. “I carried them all the way through the airport.”

Finn muttered under his breath.

Izzy ignored him, continuing her perusal of his apartment, never having seen anything quite like it. She’d lived in the same San Francisco Victorian since she’d been orphaned and gone to live with her grandfather when she was seven. It had been cluttered and tumbled and homey. Nothing at all like this.

Against the corner provided by the back of some kitchen cabinets and nearly hidden by, heaven help her; a tree, she spied a steep wood and steel circular stairway ascending. At the terrace end of the room Izzy saw a warmer, more intimate arrangement of furniture with color this time—imagine that. There was a daybed, overstuffed chair, a bentwood rocker and several book-shelves—though it was clearly all high quality, not the mishmash of old and new, battered and worn, that still sat in her grandfather’s house. Beyond the French doors, a terrace, with a small table and two chairs, overlooked the back gardens of the block. Not much, perhaps, but considerably more aesthetically pleasing than the row of dustbins she saw from her bedroom window every morning.

It was, all in all, quite out of Izzy’s league.

“Finished gawking?” Finn asked. His arched brows mocked her.

Izzy felt her color deepen. “It’s what you get when you invite bumpkins home with you.”

Finn’s deep blue eyes gave her a once-over, making her wish the floor would conveniently open and swallow her up. Then he turned to the girls. “You’ll be sleeping upstairs,” he said as he hoisted the duffel bags up once more. “Come on.”

Izzy hung back until Finn turned, halfway up the stairs, to bark, “You, too. You’re not sleeping down there.”

“I’m not sleeping anywhere,” she said. “I’m leaving. I—”

“You leave, they go with you,” Finn said implacably. “I told you that.”

“But I can’t stay! I have a life.”

“So did I.” Past tense.

They stared at each other, neither speaking for a long moment. Then Finn asked, “What life? What brought you to New York?”

“I’m going to get married,” Izzy said.

“You?” He looked her up and down with such obvious disbelief that Izzy wanted to smack him.

“Yes, me,” she said flatly. “Want to make something of it?”

He smiled. “Have you picked a groom, yet?”

Which was what, his way of saying he didn’t think any man in his right mind would marry a girl like her? Izzy ground her teeth. “Yes, I’ve picked a groom. And I intend seeing him yet this evening. So if you’ll excuse me...”

Now it was Finn MacCauley’s turn to grind his teeth. “You can’t,” he said. “Not yet,” he added. “At least help me get them settled. Have dinner with us. Read them a story. Get them to bed.” He was looking just a bit desperate.

Izzy chewed on her lower lip. She wanted to get to Sam’s before it got too late in the evening. He wasn’t even expecting her. She hadn’t told him for sure what day she was coming. She’d wanted it to be a surprise. But she felt a certain obligation to the girls, too. Even if Finn MacCauley had been the best uncle in the world she’d have felt a little apprehensive about leaving them with a man she didn’t know. And as much as she might like to discomfit a man as arrogant as Mr. Wildlife MacCauley, well...it was wrong to take her irritation out on the girls.

“Until they’re in bed,” she said.

Finn let out a pent-up breath. He looked at the two little girls who stared up at him in unblinking fascination. “Follow me,” he told them and led the way up the curve of the stairs.

Izzy stared after him, heard him growl something at the girls, and hurried to join them. “Be kind,” she said.

“Nobody’s being kind to me.” Finn pointed the girls toward one of the bedrooms. “Which of these bags is yours?”

“This small one. The big ones you’re carrying are the girls’. I’ll take mine back down.”

She had just started down the steps when Tansy said, “Wow! Lookit this!”

All of a sudden Finn’s hand reached out and snatched the little girl out of the room and shut the door abruptly. “In here,” he said, steering her into the other bedroom as Izzy stared. “For now.”

Izzy looked closely. Was that a flush deepening on Finn MacCauley’s tanned cheeks? A smile quirked the corner of her mouth.

Finn dropped the girls’ duffels in the smaller bedroom at the end of the hall. “Back downstairs,” he commanded, herding them all in front of him. Izzy gave him an arch smile, which he determinedly ignored.

Once they were back downstairs, though, his battery seemed to run out. He stood and stared at them mutely, then looked at Izzy in silent appeal.

“Dinner?” she suggested. “You must be hungry, girls?”

Tansy and Pansy nodded.

Finn latched onto the suggestion like a drowning man tossed a life preserver. He headed toward the refrigerator with alacrity, opened the door, stooped and stared. And stared some more.

The girls edged over to stand next to him. Finally Tansy ventured, “You don’t got much. Milk an’ beer an’ what’s that?”

“Pickles.” Finn straightened, sighed and shut the refrigerator door. He flicked Izzy what might have been an apologetic look. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

“How about take-out?”

Both girls jumped up and down. “Ooh, yeah!” Pansy exclaimed. “Moo goo gai pan! Kung Fu Pork and Beans!”

“Kung Fu what?” Finn gaped.

Izzy shrugged lamely. “There was this weird Chinese take-away down the street from us. Sort of...nontraditional.” A grin flickered. “They specialized in dim sum and barbecue. Meg used to get supper there pretty often.”

Finn didn’t look surprised. “Whatever you say.” He fetched a stack of take-out menus from a drawer in the kitchen and handed them to the girls. “Take your pick. I’ll be right back.”

While Izzy read the hard words to them, Finn disappeared back upstairs. Izzy was beginning to wonder if he’d vanished out the fire escape when at last she heard his footsteps clattering back down the wooden stair treads. She turned just in time to see him paste a smile on his face. “All right, let’s get moving. Ready to go, girls?” he said briskly, heading toward the door.

Pansy shrank back, but Tansy came after him and thrust a bright pink paper menu into his hand. “This place.”

Finn glanced at it. “Good choice.” He opened the door. Tansy preceded him. Pansy hung back. Izzy didn’t move at all. He looked back at her. “Well?” he said sharply.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have them to yourself for a few minutes?”

“Damn sure.”

“Mister—”

“I know. I know. Don’t swear. Come along. They’re hungry. Who knows what six-year-old girls do when they’re hungry?” He looked at them as if they might take a chunk out of his ankle at any moment. He made a growling sound deep in his throat.

Pansy, mistaking the tone for an indication that he just might take a bite out of her, skittered nervously past him. Tansy merely giggled. Izzy, seeing that he wasn’t moving unless she did, sighed and brushed past him out the door.

The walk to and from the Chinese restaurant, though it was only three blocks away, was the final straw for two very tired little girls. The early morning trip to the airport, the long transcontinental flight, the taxi ride into Manhattan followed by their traumatic meeting with their uncle and another long ride uptown had done them in.

They barely touched the moo goo gai pan. They nibbled at the five-spice chicken wings, and they all but fell asleep in the bird’s nest soup. It was a good thing the four of them carried all the food home to eat it, Izzy thought.

When Tansy’s head dipped and jerked up, then dipped again and finally hit the table, Izzy said, “I think they’ve had it.” Pansy had already been asleep in her chair for the past ten minutes.

Finn, who had been shoveling in food silently since they’d sat down, now said, “Thank God. Shall I carry them upstairs or will they wake up?”

The way he said it told her how much he wanted to avoid that. She wondered if he planned to spend the next two weeks ignoring them completely. He’d certainly done his best during dinner.

“I think you can carry them. Once they drift off, they’re usually dead to the world.”

“Had a lot of experience with them, have you?”

Izzy shrugged awkwardly. “They’ve stayed with us a few times.” She stood up and carried her plate to the sink, then came back to pick up the girls’ plates. Finn was still sitting at the table, watching her. She averted her gaze, focusing entirely on clearing the table.

Finally he shoved back his chair and went around the table to pick up Tansy. He looked awkward and more than a little tentative as he did so. When he straightened he looked at Izzy. “Come with me and pull back the covers.”

Izzy followed him. Whatever Tansy had seen on the bedroom wall he had obviously removed while she and the twins were deciding on dinner. All she could see now was a king-size bed with a navy blue duvet, a teak dresser completely devoid of anything at all, and a couple of rather whiter-than-the-walls spots where two pictures had obviously hung.

He saw Izzy’s glance go to the bare spots and gave her a steely look, then settled Tansy onto the bed. While Izzy turned down the covers on the other side, then brought in the girls’ bags, he went back downstairs for her sister.

Izzy was just slipping Tansy into a thin cotton gown when he got back with Pansy cradled in his arms. He laid her on the far side of the bed, then stood silently by and watched while Izzy removed her shirt and shorts, then put a gown on her as well. Then she pulled the summer-weight duvet over them.

“Probably should have made sure they brushed their teeth,” Izzy said as she bent to drop a kiss on each girl’s forehead. “But I guess they’ll survive one night without. Their toothbrushes are in their bags. I’m sure you won’t have any trouble finding them.” She flicked a reassuring smile in Finn’s direction, then stepped back and waited for him to give them each a kiss as well.

He didn’t move. He just stood in the doorway, looking down at the two small bodies in the very big bed. His expression was unreadable. Finally he sighed, raked a hand through his hair, and turned and walked away.

Izzy watched him go.

The girls wouldn’t care that he hadn’t kissed them. Probably Pansy would be relieved. But still...

It’s not your business, Izzy told herself firmly as she shut out the light. You did your part. And that was true, but she wished she felt better about leaving the girls with him. She wished he had at least kissed them.

He was standing by the French doors staring out into the waning summer twilight when she came down the stairs. His hands were jammed into the front pockets of his faded jeans, his shoulders were slightly slumped. A swath of dark hair fell across his forehead. He didn’t look particularly piratical now, unless he was a pirate whose ship had just been boarded and sunk.

Izzy would have liked to say something cheerful. She didn’t think the words had been invented yet. She cleared her throat. “I...really do have to be going now.”

He turned. “A rat abandoning the sinking ship?” he said, his mouth twisting wryly. The metaphor was so close to her own that she blinked.

“You’ll be fine,” she assured him.

He snorted. “Yeah, right. They look like they expect me to kill them.”

“They’re nervous. They’ll calm down. It won’t happen all at once. You can’t expect it to. But you were a little...nicer over dinner.”

“I didn’t say anything at all over dinner.”

“Which was a distinct improvement,” Izzy said tartly. “But,” she went on, determined to give him his due, “I understand what a shock this was for you. I had no idea Meg hadn’t told you she was sending them.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Meg. A shock a minute.”

“Surely you know someone who can keep an eye on them for you?”

He grimaced. “Strong. Though I don’t think it really comes under the heading of office management.”

“No,” Izzy agreed. “Maybe she has a daughter.” She paused. “But you wouldn’t know that, would you?” He didn’t seem to know anything else.

Finn shoved his hair back. “No, I wouldn’t know that.”

“It’s only for two weeks. Take a vacation.”

“Just like that? Drop everything and—”

She picked up her bag and began to rummage through it. “I almost forgot. Meg gave me a letter for you.” She tugged out the slightly crumpled envelope. It had been slightly crumpled when Meg had given it to her, so she hadn’t worried about simply stuffing it in her bag. Now she held it out to him. When he took it, she zipped up her bag and shouldered it, then moved toward the door.