His First Choice (8 page)

Mention of alcohol on a Tuesday morning bothered her a bit. But then, Kacey was still in holiday mode.

Looking at her sister, who was wearing no makeup and whose long blond hair was falling straight and loose, Lacey could have been looking at herself in the mirror. The experience would have been disconcerting if she hadn't had it her entire life.

“I'll make some calls,” she said against her selfish wishes. She just needed to get home, back to her own space and the life she'd made for herself. The life she was happy with.

But when she felt Kacey's smile as well as saw it, when she sensed how much peace her capitulation brought her sister, who'd have done the same for her, she was glad she'd made the choice she'd made.

* * *

T
HEY
HAD
TEA
instead of champagne and orange juice—partially because Kacey didn't have any champagne—leaving Lacey to wonder if her sister was drinking so much she'd forgotten that she'd finished off what she had, or wasn't drinking enough to know that at some point she'd opened the bottle she'd thought she'd saved.

As she put ice in their tea glasses, she didn't ask. Because she didn't want to know the answer.

But as soon as they were settled, bare feet up on the wrought-iron bars around Kacey's spacious covered sixteenth-floor patio, Lacey said, “I'm worried about you.”

“I'm fine.”

She wasn't.

“You drank twice as much this weekend as you normally do.”

“I was thirsty.”

Didn't assuage her concerns at all.

She could tell by the way Kacey watched the hills in the distance that her sister was avoiding her unspoken question and her heart sank. Because she also knew that Kacey wouldn't have asked her to stay if she didn't need her help.

“Is it a problem, Kace? Or are we still just at the warning stage?”

They'd talked about this before. Once. Right after Kacey's third broken engagement. Her sister had it all. Got it all. And sometimes all just wasn't enough. Because it wasn't what mattered.

Kacey's shrug out and out scared her.

“You drinking every night?”

“Maybe.”

“A lot?”

“Not always.”

“For how long?”

Kacey turned to her then, her blue eyes filled with pain. “Not long, Lace, I swear. I just... I love my job, but my character, she's not real. I know that. I don't even want her to be. I'd hate to live like she does. But everyone I know, everyone I meet, they all think I'm her and...”

Lacey had been thrilled when the offer had come in for Kacey to join
The Rich and Loyal
cast the year before. Until then she'd been making a very healthy living as a print and commercial model. But if she was smart with her money, the move to daytime television could secure her future for the rest of her life.

But she'd also been worried when the offer had come in. Because at heart, Kacey wasn't all that different from Lacey.

Other than that, where Lacey just filled the space her body took up, Kacey exuded all over every room she walked into.

“How much longer does your break last?” she asked now.
The R and L
cast was on summer break. She'd known that, but had just figured Kacey would be doing promos during the time off as she'd planned. She hadn't known until this weekend that her sister had turned down offers so she could spend her summer traveling with Dean, who'd yet to produce even a glimpse of the private jet he'd told her he owned. And, she was guessing, wasn't going to be around at all after the previous night's hasty departure.

“Another month.”

“You want to come to Santa Raquel?” She didn't usually ask. Actually, she never did, as was evidenced by Kacey's open mouth as she turned to look at her.

“You're serious.”

She nodded.

“But...”

Lacey had made a big deal about needing her own space. A
big
deal.

“You're the world to me, Kace.” She'd rather live every moment of the rest of her life in Kacey's shadow if it meant keeping her sister healthy. And alive.

“I promise not to look at or talk to anyone,” Kacey said.

She was serious, and Lacey felt sick. Physically, like she had a ball of warm, mushy clay in her stomach.

“I made a mistake, Kace.” She prayed her sister was emotionally open enough to read her. “Those things I said, I was blowing off steam...”

“You were right.”

“But it's not your fault. You don't
do
anything to attract people. They just gravitate to you.”

“I'd give anything to send them your way. Well, not the Deans. But the good ones...”

For some bizarre reason a vision of Jem Bridges popped into her mind. “It's really okay,” she said. “I've been on my own for more than a year.” Since she'd moved out of the condo she was sitting in and transferred to the Santa Raquel branch of California state social services. “And I'm over all that.” At least in any way that mattered.

“You aren't just saying this? You really want me to come up?”

How could her sister have been hurting this much over the talk they'd had when Lacey had told her she was moving out, and Lacey hadn't known?

“Look me in the eye,” Lacey said now. And when Kacey's gaze was glued to hers, she leaned in closer. “Feel me, Kace.”

Kacey nodded.

“Now you tell me. Do I want you to come up and stay with me?”

The tears that filled Kacey's eyes hurt Lacey's heart. And she was ashamed of herself for having caused her sister so much pain.

CHAPTER TEN

J
EM
HATED
HOW
much Lacey Hamilton's brief intrusion into their lives had affected them. If the vulnerable look on Tressa's face when he'd picked Levi up from Amelia's little beach house on Monday afternoon hadn't been enough, the fist clenching his own gut as he dropped Levi off at day care on Tuesday would have done it.

But he'd already been disturbed by Lacey's effect on him.

Fantasies of the woman had followed him all over his boat as he'd spent the weekend alone in his garage, building his dream, with a couple of jaunts out to celebrate the holiday.

Dillon, his most trusted foreman and college buddy who'd dropped out to marry his pregnant girlfriend, had had him over on Saturday night for a barbecue with him and his family. On Monday he'd met a group of the guys at a local bar for a couple of brews.

Still, if it hadn't been for the social worker hanging around in the back of his mind all the time, he wouldn't have worried at all when he had to leave his son in safekeeping so he could get to work on time Tuesday.

Levi had been a little weepier than usual.

Weepy.
A girlie term. Which didn't describe his son at all. But the little guy hadn't been whiny, and he really hadn't cried all that much, either.

He'd just almost cried over things that normally didn't bother him. Like being told that he had to go to day care when he'd wanted to spend the day with Jem.

And finding out that they were out of peanut butter and he'd have to have his toast with just jelly that morning.

The woman had said their file was still open, but with no active investigation. But what if she heard that Levi showed up at school out of sorts?

He knew why Levi was upset. And he kind of blamed Lacey Hamilton for that, too. When he was feeling particularly sour. Mostly he knew the woman had just been doing her job. That she'd invaded their lives out of true concern for Levi. And that she'd done exactly as he'd have wanted her to do, as he'd have done, if Levi were really in any kind of danger.

But didn't she see that her descending on them as she had had affected all of them?

Levi had had a nightmare Sunday night. According to Tressa, he'd been screaming for Jem. Because he'd dreamed that someone had come and taken him away from his father.

Which didn't totally make sense. He'd never given Levi even a hint about why Ms. Hamilton had been so briefly in their lives.

Unless... Had she?

“Tell me again about your dream...car,” he said as they pulled into the day care. He'd promised himself he wouldn't bring up the nightmare unless Levi did. He didn't want to make it more than it was. The four-year-old had slept just fine the previous night at home in his own bed.

Jem knew because he hadn't slept much. And when he had, it had been with the nursery monitor on the pillow beside him.

“It's that one with spoilers on it that I already told you about.” Levi sounded more sad than cantankerous.

Jem preferred cantankerous. That he knew how to deal with.

“You going to be okay at school today?” he asked.

“I wanna go to work with you.”

“I know, but you can't. I'm on-site all day today, a smaller job without a trailer for you to stay in.” Electric had been laid at a million-dollar house he'd been commissioned to build and the inspectors were coming out. “So you going to be okay in here?” He'd yet to shut off the car.

Looking from Jem to the school, Levi unfastened the belt on his car seat. “Can we be at the beach tonight?”

“Yep.”
And have chocolate for dinner, too, if it will bring the smile back to your face.

“Okay.” It was a disgruntled sound, but Jem took it. He hoped that they were on their way past this most recent crisis.

When Tressa had called him, panicked, in the middle of the night because Levi had been flailing around in his bed and screaming and she'd been unable to wake him, Jem had thought his ex-wife was overreacting. Again. He'd told her to calm down, to rub Levi's back and talk to him and see if that woke him up. And then to call him back in five minutes.

She'd called him in ten. Levi had been having a chocolate cream cookie and a glass of milk.

The crisis had passed, he'd thought.

Once again he was back to wait-and-see.

He hated that place.

* * *

K
ACEY
HAD
BEEN
with her almost a week and Lacey was getting spoiled. The little house she'd purchased a couple of blocks from the beach was spotless and she hadn't lifted a finger. Dinner was waiting for her no matter how late she got home each night. Her laundry was not only done, but hung in order exactly as she liked it.

And neither Lacey nor Kacey had had a single sip of alcohol.

“It's like you said,” Kacey was saying as they strolled along the beach the Saturday after Memorial Day. “I didn't need it, I just wanted it.”

Lacey had hoped the words were true; she believed them to be true. Still, it was good to know for sure...

“If you kept your mind blurred, you didn't have to face what was really going on.”

In denim shorts that showed off her long, tanned legs almost up to her butt, and a cropped white shirt, Kacey looked like every guy's dream—at least in Lacey's estimation—but for the frown on her face. It matched the vibe Lacey was getting.

“Talk to me,” she said.

At Kacey's urging, Lacey had left her hair down that day. It hung even longer than Kacey's and had the same loose natural curls, giving it body. But where Kacey's hair glistened and hung sexily around her face, Lacey's looked dull and hung in her eyes. She didn't have to look in a mirror to know that.

It didn't matter if they both went to the same stylist, used the exact same product and washed their hair at exactly the same time... Kacey's hair had more glow.

Kacey kicked up sand with her bare toes and then turned to the water, standing and facing the horizon as her toes sank into the sand.

Waiting for a middle-aged couple who were holding hands to pass, Lacey joined her at the water's edge. She'd worn shorts, too. The six-inch ones she always wore. Black, that day. And a sleeveless, button-up white blouse with a little lace collar.

“I love my job,” Kacey was saying. “I just don't like my life.”

Kacey loved the condo she'd bought when they'd both received a healthy royalty check for a year's worth of commercials they'd done their last year of high school. Lacey had used the money to pay for college.

“You don't like the men in your life.” Lacey homed in on the real problem, the one most difficult for her to talk about with her sister.

If ever there was a sore spot between the two of them, men would be it. Which was why Lacey usually kept her mouth shut on the subject.

With a sideways glance at Lacey, Kacey made a face. “You're right, I don't. But it's more than that. Being here...with you...it's making it all so much more clear to me.”

“Being with me? Why?” Lacey frowned at her sister. Truly perplexed. Yeah, they shared a bond that was stronger than life. But they didn't have to be together to have it. It just was. Like their identical features.

“Just being here,” Kacey said, shrugging.

A pair of twentysomething guys passed by. Closely. As though they'd made the trek down the beach specifically to get close to them. To Kacey. Neither one of them tried to meet Lacey's gaze, which was fine with her. She'd learned a long time before that life was about a lot more than looks.

“You've got a great life, Lace. Full, like you don't get home until after dark, and when you do, you're tired, but it's a good tired. Like you spent your day doing things that make you feel worthy. They fill you up. And...your house—it's like a real home. You have your own yard, a driveway.”

“You can more than afford a house in Beverly Hills, Kacey. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”

“I know.”

The guys passed by a second time, making eye contact with Kacey. She turned back to the water.

“It's just...your house, your life...it feels like...substance, you know?”

“I live alone,” she pointed out. “It's you being here that's giving my house all that substance and life you're talking about. Picture me coming home every night, to an empty house with no lights on, unless I failed to turn one off in the morning, with no dinner cooking and laundry to do. You'll be liking your life a whole lot better. At least you have hall lights and a doorman to greet you every night. You have people at the pool who greet you when you go down. Same for the gym on the third floor.”

Lacey would still pick her house in Santa Raquel, but that was beside the point.

“Are you going to tell me about him?”

“About who?”

“Whatever guy's finally managed to snag your interest.”

Lacey moved her foot in the sand sinking beneath her feet and almost lost her balance. “There's no guy in my life,” she said quite clearly. “I haven't been on a date in over a year.”

And then it had been a date Kacey had set her up on. Not that she was going to admit that to her.

Knowing the truth about the differences between her and her identical twin was one thing, looking pathetic because of them was another.

“I could date if I wanted to,” she added, a tad bit defensively. She'd been asked out. She just hadn't wanted to go.

“Of course you could—you're gorgeous.” Kacey was looking at her and then turned her head just a fraction. Lacey didn't need to turn around to know the two men had returned.

Her sister smiled, but then turned back around. “It's not a matter of you being capable of finding a date, Lace. It's a matter of you being open to finding a date.”

She didn't want to talk about it.

“And something tells me that you've met someone.”

She hadn't said a word. And just because one particular face kept showing up in her thoughts didn't mean that anything had changed in her life.

“You're imagining things,” she said now, waiting for Kacey to turn back around and put the guys out of their misery. Hoping at this point that she would. And was uncomfortable when she didn't.

“You watched that aftershave commercial last night like you were memorizing every detail,” Kacey said.

The guy in the commercial had been a construction worker. She'd taken a little side trip, trying to remember if the only other construction worker she knew personally, Jeremiah Bridges, wore cologne.

“That's ridiculous,” she said now, wondering how long they were going to stand there staring at the horizon with the ocean lapping at their feet. Until the tide came in? The tips of her shorts would get wet and she hated driving with the wet, soppy feeling at the back of her knees.

“You had a pretty good study of the men's underwear section at the department store the other evening.”

It was the whole “boxers or briefs” thing. Yeah, Jeremiah's face—and, well, other imagined parts of him—had come to mind, but that only meant the guy was memorable.

He was a reprobate. And prickly, too. The fact that he stood out in her mind was hardly her fault.

“You're wearing your hair down.” Kacey broke into Lacey's silence.

“You told me to!” No hiding the accusation in that tone.

“I always tell you to. You never listen.”

“I do, too.” Pretty much every time her sister nagged her, she'd leave her hair in a ponytail rather than putting it up in the twist she preferred.

“I want what you have, Lace,” Kacey said.

“I don't have anything.”

“You have a chance.”

“Right. Like you don't?”

“You think I'm going to meet some nice normal guy who'd like to make a real home with me?” Kacey's pain cut through Lacey's defenses.

“You will,” she said, grabbing her sister's hands and turning her to face her. “Just stop spending all of your time in the clubs and Hollywood hangouts.”

“I go to the library one night a week,” Kacey told her. “I actually joined a book club. Not a single normal guy has even talked to me.”

Because she effervesced sex and power and money, which intimidated “normal” guys. Even when they'd been little with parents who'd had a middle-class income, Kacey had fit right in with the celebrities they'd encountered at the studios, as though she'd been born to be a star.

Lacey had liked the work, liked a lot of the places they got to go; she'd just been more reserved. It had been a lot easier to let Kacey charm all of the strangers with whom they'd come in contact. She was a natural at it.

Lacey had no idea what to tell her. Except... “Well, one thing you can do is stop going out with guys who clearly aren't what you're looking for.”

Nodding, Kacey dropped one of her hands, kept hold of the other and started walking again.

“So...you aren't going to tell me who he is?”

“There is no one.”

“I understand, you know?”

“Understand what?”

“Why you won't tell me.”

“There's nothing to tell.”

Kids ran and played in the sand. Some darted in and out of the chilly Pacific waters. Men, women, teenagers lounged in the sand. It was Santa Raquel in the summertime and Lacey loved it.

“It's okay, Lace.”

“What is?”

“That you don't want me to meet him.”

Oh, God.

Stopping in her tracks, she pulled her sister to an abrupt stop, as well. A girl jogging on the beach veered around them and gave them a dirty look.

“It's not that,” she said, looking Kacey in the eye. “I swear, Kacey.” Though, if truth be told, if there really was a guy, then...maybe...

“I just want you to know that I understand. I don't blame you if...”