Anne McAllister - Finn's Twins!

“I would, Finn, but—the girls are here.”

“Of course they are. Where else would they be?” Her daughters, she meant. Twins. Red-haired, freckle-faced look-alikes with the unfortunate names of Tansy and Pansy—a product of Meg’s airy-fairy period—they were five or six. Finn didn’t know for sure; he’d never met them. He’d never met their father, either—another of Meg’s true loves who had endured in her affections just long enough to impregnate her. The twins had been three before someone had bothered to tell Meg that he’d died windsurfing. Finn couldn’t even remember his name. He wondered if Meg could.

She lived in San Francisco. He lived in New York.

She pestered him to come visit several times a year. “You could come out here on location sometime,” she’d pointed out often enough.

He could have. He never did.

Keeping a continent between Meg and himself had always seemed the better part of good sense. And once she’d had her twin albatrosses, he’d found more reason to stay away. Finn didn’t do children.

He didn’t have to, he reasoned. He hadn’t had any. Meg had, so she ought to be responsible. He’d told her so more than once.

“I know, I know,” she said now. “But if Roger and I had a little time alone, everything would be fine. He’s getting so impatient. We could get married and then they’d have two parents.”

“Good idea.”

“But I need to convince him.”

“Hire a baby-sitter and go out for dinner.”

“We need more than dinner, Finn. We need time. Days. Weeks.”

“Weeks?”

“Only a couple,” she said quickly. “Just for the two of us. But now that the girls are out of school it’s harder than ever to get time alone.”

“Send them to camp.”

“Camp?” She sounded doubtful. “That costs a lot of money, doesn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I suppose I could think about it—” the quaver was back “—but I do hate to ask Roger to pay for sending them before we’ve even...” She sighed. “And you know I can’t.” Meg lived hand-to-mouth, always had. The only times she ever got enough money to be even slightly ahead was when she talked Finn into providing it.

Like now.

Meg sniffled into the other end of the line. Finn ground his teeth. “You need to settle down, Meg,” he told her. “Grow up. Be responsible.”

She made a sound that was suspiciously like a sob. “I’m trying. I told you, Roger and I—”

“Just need time.”

“Yes. He’ll be a wonderful father, I know he will!” There was a little-girl eagerness in her voice now. “He’s strong and masterful and so very smart.”

“Good for him.” Finn didn’t say, then what does he see in you? Meg couldn’t help it because she was vague and flighty.

“I’ll send you a thousand,” he told her. “You can surely find a good camp to stick them in for a couple of weeks for that.”

“Oh, yes! Of course I can!” All the tears in her voice were gone. “I knew you’d help. You’re the best, Finn. The best brother in the whole world!”

“Uh-huh,” Finn said dryly. “You don’t have to convince me. Convince Roger. Those daughters of yours need a strong, dependable father.” God knew they needed one responsible parent. And Meg needed someone else to dump her problems on—besides him.

“I know,” Meg said meekly. “You’re absolutely right.”

“So get them one.” Finn hung up. Satisfied that he’d averted his baby sister’s latest disaster, he went back to Angelina Fiorelli’s luscious lips.

CHAPTER ONE

HIS studio—at least Izzy assumed it was his studio and not his apartment—was on the fourth floor of an old brick building in Chelsea. She found his name on the wall directory just inside the heavy glass door: FINN MACCAULEY, PHOTOGRAPHER, it said in small white letters.

“He’s a wildlife photographer,” Meg had told her, smiling, as she’d packed them out the door.

“Hmm,” Izzy murmured now, glancing around, thinking that perhaps Meg had been misled. The fashion district was uptown, the Village was downtown. The city was all around. Horns blared, messengers whistled, brakes squealed, subway trains rumbled. There were buses, bikes, cars, cabs, and hundreds upon thousands of people everywhere she could see. No place for the buffalo to roam. And she’d be willing to bet there wasn’t a deer or an antelope for miles.

But whatever Finn MacCauley had told his sister wasn’t her problem. As soon as she’d done her duty, she’d be on her way to Sam’s. Izzy squared her shoulders against the weight of her backpack, picked up both the duffel bags she’d just set down and headed toward the elevator at the end of the hall. “Come along, girls.”

Two identical redheaded urchins fell in behind her.

“Is this it?” asked Tansy curiously as she gazed around the narrow, somewhat grimy-looking hallway. It smelled of stale tobacco smoke and other things Izzy didn’t want to think about. “Does Uncle Finn live here?” Tansy persisted.

“Of course not. I’m sure he lives somewhere very nice,” Izzy said with more conviction than she felt. She ushered the girls into the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor. The door rattled shut and the elevator lurched, then began to creak and rumble upward. “This must be where he takes his pictures. Of wildlife.” Rats, perhaps. She would believe rats.

Eventually the elevator wheezed to a stop. The door hesitated, then slid open onto a tiny foyer with a door and a doorbell. Ring for admittance, ordered the sign tacked beside it.

Izzy rang. An answering buzz sounded. She pushed the door open.

He shot wildlife, all right. Just not the sort she’d imagined. Immediately inside the studio door Izzy came nose to belly button with a seven-foot-tall full-length black-and-white photo of a sultry blond bimbo clad only in her Rapunzel-length hair.

Izzy’s eyes widened, then briefly shut in disbelief. She would have clapped her hands over the girls’, but there were four eyes and only two of Izzy’s hands.

“May I help you?”

Izzy’s eyes flicked open. At the far end of the narrow reception room behind a desk sat a complete counterpoint to the bimbo. This woman was fifty if she was a day, with iron gray hair cut in no-nonsense bowl fashion and dark brown eyes that seemed to widen a bit, too, behind tortoiseshell frames as she took in Izzy and her charges.

Izzy jerked the girls around so they would stop staring in openmouthed amazement at the photo. “I’m here to see Mr. MacCauley.”

The woman looked doubtful, and Izzy didn’t blame her. “You have... an appointment?”

“I’ve brought the girls.”

The woman goggled, her gaze dropping to look at the twins. Her professional demeanor slipped suddenly. “Oh, my, no, dear. They have to be much older.”

“They’re six.” Izzy started to argue. Then she realized that wasn’t what the woman meant—which implied that Finn MacCauley was as irresponsible as his sister.

“They’re not here to be photographed. These are his nieces.”

“Nieces?” Now the woman’s eyes were almost as round as her tortoiseshell frames. Her mouth pressed together in a disapproving frown. “You’re...Meg?”

Whatever the woman’s precise opinion of Finn’s sister, it wasn’t much better than Izzy’s own. “I’m a neighbor.”

“Whose neighbor?”

“Meg’s. She lives next door to us. In San Francisco. We’re not close friends or anything, Meg and I, I mean. The girls and I are,” she added as she dropped a fond glance on them. They nodded their heads in agreement.

The woman looked dazed.

Izzy decided to press on. “But when they told Meg I was coming to New York to meet my fiancé, she...asked me to drop them off.”