Anne McAllister - Finn's Twins!

Damn Meg anyway! How could she have done this to him? What did she think he was going to do with a pair of five- (or were they six?) year-old girls while she went off blithely to Bora Bora?

It was patently clear what she thought—that he’d take care of them, just like he took care of everything else in her life. She had only to dump them on his doorstep and good old Finn would have no choice—he’d come leaping to the rescue once more.

He scowled fiercely through the lens. “Sucker,” he muttered.

Both girls started. “I will not!” one exclaimed, jumping up and giving him an outraged glare. The other looked at him in consternation.

Finn straightened and raked a hand through his hair. “Oh, hell. We’re done. Go on, get out of here.”

They left, shooting him wary, worried glances over their shoulders as they went. Finn sorted and finished labeling the used rolls of film for Strong to send to the lab. Then he straightened the set, put away the pillows, moved the baffles, the lifts, the lights. Did whatever he could to delay the inevitable—the twins.

At least their minder was still there—this woman who’d brought disaster to his doorstep. He could hear her even now. There were piping childish voices prattling on while he wound up an extension cord, then Isobel Rule’s soft voice in reply.

She sounded mature enough, but she didn’t look much older than the twins. Maybe it was the clothes she was wearing. They looked like she’d found them in a thrift shop—or a dustbin. They were the sort of vaguely dowdy, slightly hippyish togs that he’d thought went out in the 70s.

She looked like some sort of out-of-work folk singer with her long springy brown hair, parted in the middle, and her fresh scrubbed face. She did have nice skin, rosy with just a few freckles and otherwise absolutely flawless. Probably too young to get zits yet, he thought grimly. What the hell had Meg been thinking of sending the twins with a child like her? What had Meg been thinking of sending the twins at all?

And how dare the hippyish Isobel Rule look down her freckled nose and chastise him for his language in front of them?

It was mild compared to what he was thinking!

Maybe Strong would take them home with her until he could figure out how to drag his sister and her presumably new fiancé back from their Polynesian paradise.

Yeah, that was it. Strong was a family woman. She had a husband. At least he thought she did.

It didn’t matter, Finn decided, making up his mind. With his connections, it shouldn’t take him longer than a day or two to move enough heaven and earth to get Meg back to face the music.

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.