Anne McAllister - Finn's Twins!

“Drop them...off?”

“At their uncle’s,” Izzy said firmly, in case there was any misunderstanding. “Mr. MacCauley.”

“Oh dear.” The woman contemplated the girls, then the phone. Finally she reached for it, then hesitated and pulled her hand back, apparently having second thoughts. “He’s not going to like this,” she muttered. “He’s not going to like this one bit.”

She reached for the phone again, but before she could punch in a number, the door behind her desk burst open. A wild man stalked out.

Izzy’s stomach clenched. Her heart kicked over in her chest. He reminded her of nothing so much as the illustration she’d seen in a children’s book her grandfather had once read her about a pirate.

A black-haired, clean-shaven pirate. His face was lean, all angles and planes. His nose was hawkish and had obviously once been on the wrong end of someone’s fist or foot. He wore tattered blue jeans and a chambray shirt with the top three buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up. He was probably six feet tall, though he seemed bigger. His energy—or irritation—took up a lot of space. Meg would have said he had an aggressive aura. Izzy thought that didn’t describe it by half. His straight hair was startlingly dark against the tan of his lean face and it looked as if he’d been raking his hands through it. As if to confirm her suspicions, he did so now, lifting it in spikes all over his head.

“Where are they?” he demanded. He stomped past the receptionist, then whirled and confronted her. “They’re late!”

“I was just about to—”

“Call Tony. If he thinks I’m going to stand around here all afternoon twiddling my thumbs while his dollies drift in here when they damned well please, he’s got another think coming!”

The receptionist started to nod.

“Now!” he barked. Then he shot past her back through the door, slamming it behind him.

“Was th-that—” Pansy began nervously, her hand strangling Izzy’s.

“Shh,” Izzy said.

The door burst open once more. The wild man snapped, “Tell him if they’re not here in five minutes, he can damned well forget it. I’ll shoot the next girls who come through the door.”

Tansy and Pansy both gasped audibly.

And that was when he noticed them.

The girls tried to melt right behind Izzy’s skirt. The pirate turned his stormy blue eyes on them. “Who the hell are you?” Then his gaze lifted to focus squarely on Izzy.

Izzy pressed her knees together to stop them knocking and raised her chin. “My name is Isobel Rule,” she said firmly. “You are, I presume, Mr. MacCauley? I’ve brought your nieces.”

She was past expecting that he’d welcome them with open arms. She at least hoped he’d stay, “Oh, right, they were supposed to show up today, weren’t they? I’d forgotten.”

He looked poleaxed. “Brought my... nieces.” He stared at the girls, his tan going oddly pale. “The hell you say.”

Izzy frowned. “Language, Mr. MacCauley. Language.”

He ignored her. His gaze narrowed as it settled on the children peeping out at him. “You’re...Meg’s kids?”

Izzy stared. “You don’t know?”

“Never seem ’em before in my life,” he said flatly. “What’re they doing here?”

“I’ve brought them to stay with you.”

The receptionist gasped.

The stormy look in Finn MacCauley’s eyes increased to near gale force. “To stay? With me? You’re joking.”

“No, actually I’m not.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. He shoved both hands through his hair again, spiking it further. Then, “Yeah, right,” he said at last. He took a steadying breath and then gave her look of tolerant amusement. “So where’s Meg? Hiding in the elevator waiting for me to flip out completely?” A corner of his mouth lifted.

“She’s in Bora Bora,” Izzy said.

All his amusement vanished in a flash. “What?”

Izzy took a step backward, almost toppling over when the twins’ clinging made her lose her balance for a second. She steadied herself, cursing Meg for having stuck her in this mess. She shrugged helplessly. “She left last night with her fiancé. She said you’d encouraged her to go,” she added accusingly.

“That conniving, sneaky, two-faced little—”

“Mis-ter MacCauley!” It wasn’t all that far off Izzy’s view of her ditzy neighbor, but she would never say so in front of the woman’s daughters.

He bit off the rest of the sentence, jammed his fists into the pockets of his jeans and stormed around the receptionist’s desk. She watched him warily from within the eye of the hurricane.

There was a sudden buzz from the doorbell. Automatically the receptionist responded. The door burst open and two chestnut-haired buxom bombshells in Day-Glo miniskirts trooped in.

“Oh, Finn, dear, sorry we’re late! So much traffic coming down Seventh Avenue you just wouldn’t believe!” the taller one said breathlessly.

They both brushed past Izzy and the twins as if they were pieces of furniture, skittering up to press kisses on Finn MacCauley’s tan cheeks and ruffle his already ruffled hair with their long fingernails.

“Tony sends his love. He says thanks so much for the favor. Where do you want us?” The shorter one was already tugging her skimpy scoop-neck shirt over her head as she headed through the door Finn had emerged from. The taller one paused long enough to bat her lashes at him, then followed her friend.

No one moved in their wake. Then Finn rubbed a hand over his mussed hair in a vain attempt to comb it. He fixed the twins with a hard stare. “Sit there,” he commanded, his gaze flicking from them to the bench alongside the seven-foot Rapunzel. They gulped audibly, then scurried to obey.

“You, too,” he said to Izzy.

“I have to go,” she objected. “I was only supposed to deliver—”

“Sit there and wait or take them with you.”

Izzy’s chin jutted. “I’m not taking—”

“Then you’ll wait, damn you.” Finn MacCauley’s chin stuck out even farther. They glowered at each other. Izzy’s glare turned decidedly mutinous.

“If you don’t,” Finn said, apparently no stranger to mutiny when he saw it, “I’ll find you if I have to track you to the ends of the earth.”

And he would, too, damn it, Finn thought savagely as he fumbled with one of the lights he was aiming at a pair of shapely almost bare backsides.

“Aren’t you finished yet?” one of the girls whined. “I’m tired.”

“You’ve been fiddling with those lights for hours,” the other one complained. “It’s late. Tony was expecting us at six.”

“Tough.” It hadn’t been much over an hour. It just seemed like forever. Finn finished setting the light and stepped back. “Stop wriggling around, for heaven’s sake.”

“But it’s hot.”

“Tony never said it would take so long... or be so boring,” the shorter one said grumpily. “The lights hurt my eyes.”

“Too bad.” Finn stamped back to the camera.

Tony’s girls were still wriggling—and pouting. He sighed. He’d probably got as much work out of them as he was going to. He never would have used them at all, except he owed Tony a favor for talking Angelina Fiorelli into spending an entire afternoon of her very busy New York jaunt in his studio. Of course it looked like the shots he took would end up being profitable for both of them, so Angelina was happy. But he still owed Tony, and shooting a couple of eager wannabes for a sunscreen ad that only required lots of honey-toned skin and absolutely no expression seemed an easy way to accomplish the payback. That was before he’d spent the last hour with them.

But they were preferable to what was waiting for him once he was done.