Taking on Twins Read Online Free PDF Page A

her fabulous hair tickled his cheeks, his neck. He breathed in the sea air, the scents of spring flowers, the velvety, cool darkness, the scent of Annie’s perfume mixed with spilled beer and old leather. He listened to the serenading crickets, the distant music and laughter of a party in progress and the footfalls of the occasional passerby. He committed each of these things to memory, realizing this was an experience he never wanted to forget.
    What Wyatt hadn’t realized at the time was that this very kiss welded him to Annie Summers for the rest of his natural life.
    Even after she married another guy and bore his sons.
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    Wyatt woke with a start, and for a moment, couldn’t remember where he was. Slowly reality began to dawn and he realized that he’d fallen asleep in his clothes. Again. And dreamed of Annie. Again.
    Blearily, he rolled on his side and checked the clock. Three in the morning. The Hacienda de Alegria was wrapped in the kind of cottony, deep silence that only happened at that particular hour. He sat up and pulled off his T-shirt and flung it on the floor.
    He’d been sweating.
    Must have been some dream.
    Right now, he could only recall fragments, but as usual, Annie played a starring role in his bed. He unzipped his jeans, eased them over his hips and kicked them off. Then, reaching for the light on his nightstand, he clicked the room into a blackness the color of the hole in his heart. Evennow, fully awake, he could feel Annie’s body pressed against his.
    How had he ever been stupid enough to let her go?
    Back then, as a child of a broken home, he’d had something to prove, he guessed. Making it to the top was all-important.
    When Annie had to leave school during her junior year and return home after her father had a debilitating stroke, their long-distance relationship had begun to suffer under the strain. She’d felt strongly about her family ties and decided that she was needed at home to help run the family business. It was a heartrending decision, but family had come first to Annie.
    And at the time, being so young, he hadn’t understood the deeply precious gift that family could be. But Annie had. To Annie, family was everything.
    Always.
    Still.
    And now, seven years later, Wyatt lived in regret.
    His Annie had married someone else. Borne his children and was now his widow. She would probably always love the father of her sons and carry his insurmountable memory in her heart till the day she died.
    He could have been the father of those children. Her one and only love. If only he hadn’t thrown it all away for a meaningless career that did not love him back at the end of the day.
    Wyatt punched his pillow. He knew eating his heart out was fruitless, so he tried to envision Annie older now. Grayer. Life-ravaged. Age-spotted. Stoop-shouldered. Knock-kneed. Tongue-tied. Rotten-toothed.
    Wyatt’s chuckle was grim.
    Seeing Annie face to face again would no doubt be the only way he’d ever be able to fully purge her from his soul.To get on with his life. To realize that what they had was now dead. Over. Ancient history.
    By now she was undoubtedly a battle-scarred old crone. The nagging, perpetually weary mother of two identical little demons. He was lucky to be footloose and fancy-free of that ugly scene.
    And, if he repeated this mantra often enough, he might just start to believe it.
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    The next morning in the wee Saturday hours, after a quick discussion with Rand, Wyatt phoned the airline from his room and reserved the last seat on a flight leaving from San Francisco to Seattle. From Seattle he’d catch a commuter to Jackson Hole and be in Keyhole by early lunchtime. Then he called and arranged for a cab to meet him out front in fifteen minutes.
    At least now he had a legitimate excuse for going to Keyhole without looking like the loser he feared Annie would see in him. He hoped she was still single. He guessed that she was probably was.