Anne Mather - Dangerous Temptation

He’d trailed Nathan and one of his pals to a bar in the sleaziest part of town, and then been beaten up for his pains when a couple of thugs had cornered the two rich youths by the jukebox. He’d jumped in to help them, and his uncanny likeness to his brother had caused some confusion. In the ensuing struggle, Nathan and his companion had gotten away.

He knew Nathan had recognised him. He’d found out later that Jacob had never hidden the fact that he had a twin. But Nathan hadn’t cared what happened to Jake, so long as he wasn’t injured. He’d saved his own skin, and that was all he’d cared about then. Hell, it was all he cared about now.

It was one of those occasions when Jake wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off not knowing he had a brother. Although his mother and Fletch had been reconciled before she died, he doubted she’d ever truly forgiven him and Nathan for being born. He’d always reminded her of Jacob—and of the way he’d betrayed her. Her life hadn’t been easy before, but it had been a damn sight harder after Fletch found out.

Nathan combed his hand over his hair and looked up at his brother with cold, accusing eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Forget it. Forget I ever came here. Forget I ever asked you for help. It was a crazy notion anyway. We’re not really brothers. We just share a likeness, that’s all.”

“That’s all it means to you, maybe,” muttered Jake harshly.

Right now, he wanted nothing so much as to put this ugly scene behind him. He wasn’t totally convinced by Nathan’s story, even if his brother’s cowardice was plain enough to see. What did Nathan really want, and did he, Jake, really care? It sounded as if his brother’s future was as shaky as his marriage.

“What do you mean?” Nathan demanded now, and Jake winced at the sudden hope that had appeared in his brother’s face. For once Nathan wanted a brother, so why did it sound so surreal?

“Get the case,” said Jake at last, telling himself it was the lingering loyalty to his mother’s memory that made him say it. He had plenty of free time due to him; hell, he never took a holiday, and he was making no promises. But perhaps there was something he could do to ensure that Caitlin wasn’t hurt….

The hospital was teeming with people. Many of the accident victims had been brought to St Anselm’s, and the doctors and nurses were working round the clock in an effort to keep up with the load. The lobby resembled nothing so much as a train station, with would-be passengers dashing from desk to desk, desperate for news, desperate for information.

Caitlin wasn’t one of them. She didn’t feel like one of them; she didn’t look like one of them. The anxiety she could see mirrored in their faces was not her anxiety; the fear that some loved one had perished in the crash was not what had brought her here.

Yet, as she pushed her way through the press of bodies, she couldn’t help an unwilling twinge of concern. Nathan might be all kinds of a bastard, but he was her husband, and for all her avowed indifference, she would not wish to see him dead.

And he wasn’t dead. He was injured, but he wasn’t dead. When the authorities had contacted her, to tell her that her husband had been one of the passengers on board the transatlantic flight that had crashed on take-off, they had instantly informed her that Mr Wolfe was one of the survivors. Like many of those who were injured, he had been taken to St Anselm’s hospital in New York City, and if she required any further information, Caitlin should contact the hospital direct.

It had come as a complete shock. Caitlin hadn’t even known Nathan was flying back on that plane. He’d left for New York over a week ago, ostensibly to visit his father in Prescott, New Jersey. He hadn’t told her why he was going, and she hadn’t heard from him since.

Not that that was unusual. These days, they rarely discussed personal things at all. It was only because her father expected it that they continued to share the same flat. But they had their own lives, their own friends; they might as well have lived apart.

Caitlin wondered if Nathan had really been to see his father. She knew pathetically little about his background, and what she did know was hardly up to date. She knew his mother was dead and that his father was virtually a recluse—at least, that was the excuse he’d given her for Jacob Wolfe not attending their wedding. And it must have been true, she supposed, or her father wouldn’t have encouraged the match.

Weariness descended like a cloud upon her. What was she really doing here? she wondered disconsolately. Why had she let her father persuade her to make this trip? Whatever had happened, Nathan wouldn’t want to see her. She should have told her father the truth and made him send someone else.

Marshall O’Brien could have done it. Her father’s personal assistant—secretary— henchman —would have handled the less attractive details far better than she. He wouldn’t have felt as helpless as she did staring round this vast foyer, with no earthly idea where her husband might be. And no helpful nurse to direct her. She sighed heavily. Just a cacophony of voices, and squealing gurneys, and—noise!

Yet it was she who hadn’t allowed Marshall to accompany her, even though her father had suggested it. After living a lie for almost three years, she was not about to expose the travesty of their marriage just because Nathan had been involved in a plane crash. Dear God, when she’d first heard the news, for a second—for the minutest, most shameful second of her life—she had actually believed that it was over. In spite of all the guilt and recrimination she had felt later, for that one fleeting second she’d thought she was free….

A harassed receptionist eventually informed her that her husband was in a ward on the twelfth floor. “Just take the elevator, take the elevator,” the woman exclaimed when Caitlin asked for directions. Then turned away almost immediately to answer another query.

She could have been a serial killer and she’d have received the same instructions, Caitlin thought wryly. Any security there had ever been had been eclipsed by the very real demands of the situation. It was no one’s fault; there simply weren’t enough staff to handle it. In circumstances like these, the most you could hope for was a civil tone.

The lifts, when she found them, were jammed with stretchers and still more people. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, and the mix of sounds and dialects was deafening in the ponderous, clanking cubicle. But they ascended, albeit ponderously, to the upper reaches of the hospital, stopping at every floor to disgorge and take on more passengers.

Caitlin inevitably found herself pushed towards the back of the lift, with the iron rails of a gurney crushed against her stomach. She had never felt claustrophobic before, but the panic of confinement rose sharp and unfamiliar inside her. Only the awareness of the injured child on the gurney kept her silent, the bottle of plasma held high by an orderly providing a steadying focus on which to fix her gaze.

They reached the twelfth floor at last, and Caitlin forced herself to step out onto the vinyl landing. The gurney had swished away to her left, and her fellow passengers rushed off to find the nearest nursing station. But Caitlin took a moment to compose herself, as the smells of the hospital washed around her. Nathan would not expect her to rush to his bedside. In the circumstances, her being here at all seemed out of place.

She should never have married him, she thought again, with a sense of vulnerability. It was a feeling she’d had many times before. But it had been what her father had wanted, and after resisting him for so long, it had seemed the most logical thing to do.