~
Trey stared out his office window in a futile attempt to stop obsessing about Rebecca. As he did, their executive assistant knocked on the open door.
“Sir,” she said. “I thought you’d like your mail.”
Elaine was attractive but blissfully uninterested in men. Dressed in a smart brown suit, she set the short stack in his inbox. “The latest Bad Boys is in there,” she informed him.
The magazine was more Zane’s baby, but it had been TBBC’s first successful project. Elaine knew he liked to keep up with it.
“Thanks,” he said. “Any plans for the weekend?”
“Gardening,” she answered. “And possibly a movie.”
He didn’t ask what she was growing or which movie. Elaine didn’t invite her bosses to get familiar. Now and then, he and Zane invented stories about her wild secret life, but the truth was they found it easier not to know. Elaine was efficient, trustworthy, and never complicated their lives. Right then, that trait seemed more precious than rubies.
“Mr. Hayworth?” she added before she left. “I sent the list of responders for Monday night to your computer. It looks like most everyone you asked is coming.”
“Good,” he said. “Thanks for doing that.”
Trey didn’t want to think about Monday night, their scheduled preview for The Bad Boys Lounge. If he thought about it, he’d wonder how much Rebecca was worrying, which was sure to lead to wanting to go to her.
Rather than succumb to temptation, he pulled the mail toward himself. Yet another letter from his aunt got fed straight into the shredder. Sending them to his office was her new tactic, one that wasn’t any likelier to entice him to open them. He set aside a business proposal to read later.
The latest issue of Bad Boys was next. He did a double take when he saw the cover. A pair of eerily familiar faces grinned at him from the glossy front.
“MEET HOT HARVARD TWINS PETE & CHARLIE EILERT,” urged the headline.
Eilert was Rebecca’s name. Trey’s research had focused on her work history, but he recalled she had younger brothers. What a strange coincidence that Zane’s magazine had picked them as cover boys.
Unable to resist, Trey flipped straight to their interview. His eyes were drawn to a block of text in the middle of a column.
~
“Charlie always was intense,” Pete said jokingly of his brother. “Even at the age of ten. He decided the neighbors wouldn’t be convinced Dad was home for Christmas unless he animated the mannequin we’d dressed up as him. I was recruited to help. I conked out at midnight, but Charlie crawled the floor until daybreak, shifting the dummy from chair to chair. He wore himself out so well he fell asleep facedown in his pancakes the next morning.”
“Rebecca cooked more when I woke up,” Charlie said. “Though she did tease me.”
“She teased you worse when you tried to invent a way for the mannequin to drive us to school.”
~
Trey set down the magazine, blinked, then began again at the start. He was so amazed by what he learned that he went through it twice.
This was extraordinary. Rebecca’s childhood read like a Dickens novel. Mother dies. Father abandons family. Teenage daughter raises brothers while keeping father’s absence secret. No wonder she was uptight. She’d spent a good portion of her life looking over her shoulder.
He’d been right to sense a sympathy between them on that long-ago night at Wilde’s. They were kindred spirits, more than he’d realized.
He rose from his chair, his head buzzing with odd thoughts. Did discovering this about her change anything? Was she less of a soul mate if there was a rational cause for his reactions? He slapped his palms to his brow, barely aware he’d done it. Kindred spirits or no, given his own dysfunctional childhood, could he trust his feelings?
Stop, he thought. No one could prove soul mates existed or what being one entitled a person to. All Trey knew for sure was that Rebecca called to him. So did Zane, and he valued Zane too much to risk losing him.
He sat and looked at the article again. His hands flattened the magazine’s open pages, a bit too close to stroking them.
He couldn’t think straight—not a preferred state for him. Popping up again, he grabbed his jacket and strode across the hall to Elaine’s nice but small office. She looked up at him startled. The clock behind her said four thirty.
“I’m going out,” he said. “You can leave whenever you’re ready.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, too circumspect to ask questions.
He felt better out in the sunshine. The afternoon wasn’t sweltering, more fall than summer for the time being.