She paused and swallowed. Wyatt had the sudden sense that she was fighting tears. While he was a typical guy and would do almost anything to make a woman stop crying, he told himself that this was nothing more than an expert performance. He refused to be engaged by the play.
But Claire didn’t cry. She took a couple of breaths, then faced him.
“You don’t know me. Regardless of what Nicole has told you, you know nothing about me. I could say the same about her, which is sad. We’re twins. Fraternal, but still. I hate how much we’ve messed over each other’s lives. I hate how things are now. I don’t…” She stopped and pressed her lips together. “Sorry. You don’t actually care about any of this, do you.”
He watched her without saying anything.
She squared her shoulders and raised her chin. “I’m here to help. I have no interest in nightclubs, I never have. I don’t have any friends here in Seattle, so you don’t have to worry about distractions. I want to take care of Nicole and reconnect with her. Nothing more. Those are the only words I have. You’ll either believe them or you won’t. The bottom line is, I’m not going anywhere. Not until Nicole is better.”
She spoke with a quiet dignity that appealed to him. His instinct was to believe her, but Nicole had always talked about how Claire played people with the same easy skill that she played the piano.
Still, he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t take off from work and he had a daughter to deal with.
“I’ll be around,” he told her. “Watching.”
“Judging. There’s a difference.”
He shrugged, not caring if he offended her.
He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket. “My cell is on this. You can always reach me on it. If there’s a problem, call.”
“There won’t be.”
He handed her the card, instead of just putting it on the counter, then realized his mistake the second their fingers touched.
The heat was so bright and raw, he expected the kitchen to explode. He swore under his breath as he glared at Claire, blaming her for the unwelcome chemistry flaring between them. She stared at the card, then looked at him.
“That was weird,” she said.
There was genuine confusion in her voice and questions in her eyes, as if she’d felt it, too, but didn’t know what it meant.
Yeah, right, he thought to himself. She was playing him.
Play away. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter how he reacted when he touched her—he would never act on those feelings. He wasn’t controlled by his hormones. He was a rational man who thought with his head, not his dick.
Still, when she smiled at him and said, “Thank you for taking care of her,” putting her hand on his arm, he wanted to pull her hard against him and kiss her until she begged for mercy. The image was so powerful, his mouth went dry and he got hard in a heartbeat. Talk about humiliating.
He stalked out of the kitchen without saying goodbye and vowed he would keep his distance from Claire. The last thing he needed in his life was another useless woman making him crazy and ruining everything she touched.
CLAIRE STARED at the clothes she’d laid across the bed and sighed. Apparently packing was not an intuitive skill. She’d been so careful with everything. Yet here were all her clothes, horribly wrinkled.
Normally Lisa’s assistant du jour would whisk the clothes away and bring them back perfectly pressed. If she wasn’t around, Claire could call the valet service at the hotel herself. But this wasn’t a hotel.She studied a silk blouse and wondered if it was safe to iron. With another sigh, she reminded herself she didn’t know how to use an iron and if she wanted to practice, perhaps a designer silk blouse was not the place to start.
“Am I really totally useless, or is this an isolated incident?” she asked herself, speaking the words softly aloud. Better to know the truth than pretend. Her goal was to change—to fit into the real world. She needed to know where she was to find out how much work was required to get where she needed to go.
A sound from down the hall caught her attention. Still holding the blouse, she hurried toward Nicole’s room and found her sister coming out of the bathroom. She was bent over at the waist, one arm pressed across her midsection. Her face was drawn, her mouth pulled in pain.
“You should have yelled for me,” Claire said as she hurried to her side. “I’m here to help.”
“If you figure out a way to pee for me, I’m all ears. Otherwise, stay out of my way.”
Claire ignored the snarky comment and rushed to the bed where she quickly smoothed the sheets and pulled back the covers. Nicole ignored her and what she’d done as she slowly, carefully, crawled back in bed. Claire reached for the covers.
“If you tuck me in, I swear I’ll kill you. Not today, but soon and when you least expect it.”
Claire stepped away from the bed.
When Nicole was settled she closed her eyes. After a second, she opened them again. “Are you just going to stand there?”
“Do you need anything? More water? Ice chips? They’ll help you stay hydrated without making you nauseous.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was reading some articles on the Internet.”
“Aren’t you mama’s little helper?”
Claire clutched her blouse in one hand. “They didn’t say anything about surgery making one ill-tempered, so I guess the sarcasm is all you.”
“I wear it proudly, like a badge of honor.” Nicole shifted and winced. “What are you doing here, Claire?”
“Jesse called me a few days ago and told me about the surgery. She said you were going to need my help.” Claire didn’t want to say the rest when it was obviously untrue, but she couldn’t think of a way to avoid it. She’d already told Wyatt and she suspected he had passed it on to Nicole. “She said you were sorry we were still estranged and that you wanted us to be a family.”
She spoke without shaking, without her voice giving away her potential hurt. But it was still there, hidden. Because connecting was the one thing she wanted.
“You believed her?” Nicole shook her head. “Seriously? After all this time, you think I’m suddenly going to change my opinion of you?”
“Your opinion of who and what you think I am,” Claire told her. “You don’t actually know me.”
“One of the few blessings in my life.”
Claire ignored that. “I’m here now and you obviously need help. I don’t see anyone else lining up for the job. Looks like you’re stuck.”
Nicole’s expression tightened. “I have friends I could call.”
“But you won’t. You hate owing anyone anything.”
“Like you said, you don’t actually know me.”
“I can guess.” Claire hated being obligated, too.
“Don’t pretend we have anything in common,” Nicole snapped. “You’re no one to me. Fine, if you think you can help, help. I don’t care. The good news is I don’t think you’re capable of anything beyond being served, so my expectations are fairly low.”
This was so not what she’d imagined, Claire thought sadly. She’d hoped they would be able to find their way back to each other. She and Nicole were twins…fraternal, but connected from conception. Had all the time apart, the anger and misunderstandings really broken that bond?
She was here to find out.
“You probably want to rest,” Claire said. “I’ll get out of your way.”
“If only.”
She ignored that and started to leave, then paused. “Do you have a cleaning service you use?”
“For the house? No. I managed to scrub it all by myself.”
“Oh. Okay. I didn’t mean…Never mind.”
Nicole stared at her. “What didn’t you mean?” Her gaze dropped to the blouse in Claire’s hand. “You mean a service to clean my clothes?”
Claire took a step back. “It’s not important.”
“Yeah, right. Let me guess. A piano princess like you couldn’t possibly be expected to take care of your own clothes. I’d tell you how to use the washer, but that’s probably not going to help, is it? Too much silk and cashmere, I’ll bet. Poor, poor Claire. Never owned a pair of jeans. You must cry yourself to sleep every night.”
Claire did her best to deflect the hurtful darts that jabbed at her. “I won’t apologize for my life. It’s different from yours, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable. You’ve changed, Nicole. I’ve always remembered you being angry before, but I don’t remember you being mean. When did that happen?”
“Get the hell out of here.”
Claire nodded. “I’ll be down the hall if you need me.”
“That is not going to happen. I’d rather starve than deal with you.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
Ignoring the burning in her eyes and sense of loss weighing her down, Claire returned to her room, determined to fix whatever had gone wrong.
THE ALARM WENT OFF at three-forty-five in the morning. Claire turned it off and then stared at the unblinking red light. What had she been thinking? Who got up this early?
People who worked in a bakery, she reminded herself. She was one of the Keyes sisters. She had an obligation to the family business. As Nicole was in no position to check on things and Jesse had disappeared for reasons still not clear, it was left to Claire.She got up and pulled on clothes. Wrinkled clothes made only marginally better by their time in a steamy bathroom. She washed her face, applied some light makeup, pulled her long hair back in a ponytail and quietly crept downstairs. Less than fifteen minutes later, she had arrived at the bakery and parked in the back by the other employee cars.
There were lights on in the building. Claire hurried to the rear door and walked inside.
The space was warm and bright, smelling of sugar and cinnamon. Equipment filled counters and lined walls. Huge ovens radiated an impressive amount of heat. There were deep fryers and massive mixers, stacks of flour and sugar and what smelled like the richest chocolate in the world.
Claire paused and breathed in the delicious scents. She’d only been able to fix soup again the previous night, not that Nicole had been all that interested in eating. But three days of a nearly liquid diet had left Claire starving.
A middle-aged man dressed entirely in white saw her and frowned. “Hey, you. Get out of here. The bakery opens at six.”
She gave him her best smile. “Hi. I’m Claire Keyes. Nicole’s sister. I flew in because of her surgery. I’m helping out.”
“Sister? She doesn’t—” The man was small—a couple of inches shorter than her, but built like a bull. He drew his bushy eyebrows together. “You’re the one who plays the piano? The snooty one?”
“I do play the piano,” Claire said, wondering what Nicole had been telling people about her. “I’m not really snooty. Nicole, um, asked me to come by to help, what with her being laid up and all.”
The man frowned. “I don’t think so. She doesn’t like you.”
Something she’d apparently shared with the entire world. Claire had felt guilty about lying, but she didn’t anymore. She was going to find a way to fit in and the bakery was the obvious place to start.
“We’ve come to an understanding,” she said, still forcing a smile. “There must be something I can do to help. I’m her sister. Baking is in my blood.”
Or it should be. Claire had never tested the theory by actually baking anything.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t like it. You need to leave.”
The man walked away. She trailed after him. “I can help. I’m a hard worker and I’m really good with my hands. There has to be something. I’m not asking to work on the famous Keyes chocolate cake or anything.”
The man spun back to face her. “You stay away from the chocolate cake, you hear me? Only Nicole and I do that. I’ve been here fifteen years and I know what I’m doing. Now get out of here.”
“Hey, Sid? Come here for a sec.”
The voice calling came from behind a wall of ovens. Sid gave her a scowl, then hurried off in the direction of the voice. Claire used the alone time to explore the inner workings of a real bakery a little more. She smiled at a woman injecting yummy-looking filling into pastry shells. The woman ignored her. Claire kept moving.
She found another woman working a machine that applied frosting to doughnuts. The smell was heavenly and Claire’s stomach began to grumble in anticipation. She took a step toward the machine and bumped into a man carrying something.
As they struggled to get their balance, the bag he’d been carrying flew up in the air. Claire instinctively reached for it. But instead of catching it, she only bumped the side, sending it tumbling, sprinkling its contents on them, the floor and onto the already frosted doughnuts moving on the narrow conveyor belt. It spun and spun before landing, open end up, in a massive vat of dough.
“What the hell did you do?” the man demanded, as he began to swear in a language she didn’t recognize.
Sid came running. “You! You’re still here?”
The woman managing the doughnuts flipped off the belt and hurried over to inspect them. “Salt,” she muttered. “It’s everywhere. They’re ruined.”
Claire wished she could slink away. “I’m sorry,” she began. “We ran into each other and—”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Sid yelled. “Did I tell you to leave? Did you listen? Jesus, no wonder Nicole talks about you the way she does.” He leaned over the vat of dough and swore. “Salt,” he yelled. “There’s a five-pound bag of salt in the French bread dough. You think anyone’s going to want that? It’s our batch for the day. The day.”