Where You Least Expect It (14 page)

She shoved the thought from her mind.

“It went well, actually. Everything’s done but, well, the doing.”

“And your grandmother?”

“Fine. She’s fine.” She gestured in the direction of the house, still a half mile or so down the road. “I expect she’s home now. That’s why I stopped here. You know, to grab a few minutes to myself before walking the rest of the way.” If she found it funny that before her life had been crammed with just such spare minutes, she wasn’t going to admit it. She was so glad to see that Aidan was doing well. And that he had obviously missed her as much as she’d missed him…if he’d risked capture to see her.

She looked at the road behind him. “Where’s your car?”

“My what?” He was staring at her face. “Oh. I parked it down the road a ways in an abandoned drive.”

She nodded.

“I was just thinking how beautiful you are.”

No matter how many times he told her that, she didn’t think she would ever get used to it.

“May I kiss you?”

He’d never asked for permission before. He’d always just kissed her. Almost as if he were fighting an inner battle. On one side was the desire to touch her, on the other the need to lock her out. To keep himself and her safe.

She smiled, feeling awkward. “I’d love it if you’d kiss me.”

He took his hands out of his pockets and stepped closer. Max bared his teeth.

Penelope gasped. “Max!” She yanked the leash hard. “Bad boy!” She pulled him back and fastened his lead to a support beam a couple of feet behind her. He barked in protest and she patted his head. “Easy, Maximus. It’s okay. It’s just Aidan.”

Penelope turned to find him standing directly behind her, startling her for a second time.

He quirked a brow.

“I’m sorry. With everything going on, I guess I’m jumpy.”

“Understandable.”

He dropped his hands onto her shoulders and tugged her forward, nearly causing her to lose her balance. She laughed nervously. “Wow. I guess you
have
missed me.”

“You have no idea…”

He dropped his head and pressed his lips to hers.

And Penelope’s heart stopped beating in her chest. Because in that instant she knew that it wasn’t Aidan she was kissing.

A
idan had never done anything more difficult in his life than watch Davin lean in to kiss Penelope. A sense of betrayal and acidy loathing coated his insides. The only saving grace was that he knew the exact moment when Penelope realized that the man she was kissing wasn’t him, but Davin. He watched as her fingers curled into fists and the way her spine snapped upright.

He cursed, wishing he could have given her some sort of warning. But by the time he’d driven up near the bridge, Penelope had had her back to him and was tying Max to a beam, out of striking distance—

when what she should have done was set the dog free to attack Davin.

Aidan reached for the door handle, but froze when Davin appeared satisfied with the success of his bold move and drew away from Penelope, leaving her staring, puzzled, up at him.

A mix of powerful emotions assaulted Aidan, freezing his hands to the steering wheel. At the first sight of his brother in fourteen months, snapshots from his life clicked through his mind. He and Davin as kids, breaking the windows of an abandoned house with stones, each throw a competition that Aidan always won. Him holding his sobbing, broken brother as their house burned to the ground, their parents still inside. Blurred shots of his wife smiling, then crying as she shared the devastating news that the baby she carried was not his, but his brother’s. Roses pelting his wife’s casket along with the steady rain…

And now, the image of Davin once again pretending to be him and making a move on Penelope.

Enraged, Aidan had to yank on the door handle several times before it finally gave, the jerky movement nearly spitting him out onto the pavement. He struggled to regain his balance as he ran for the bridge, his vision filled with the present and the past and his brain unable to register that Penelope was untying Maximus and waving goodbye to his brother. All he could think of was how much he wanted to kill the man who had stolen so much from him.

The thought should have caught him up short, should have made him think that perhaps contacting the authorities might be the better move. But with his heart thudding angrily against his rib cage, all he could think about was exacting his own type of revenge against the man who looked so much like him, but was nothing like him. His brother, his blood, his enemy.

He heard a roar, but didn’t immediately identify it as coming from his own throat until he slammed against Davin’s back, the move knocking them both to the wood planks of the bridge.

“Aidan!” He heard Penelope’s gasp from somewhere beyond the white fog that crowded his head.

“Go! Get out of here, Penelope!” he shouted, hauling a fist back and burying it in his twin’s face. “Call the sheriff’s office. Now!”

Aidan’s arm hovered in the air, ready to come down again. Davin’s unconcerned expression as he stared up at him made his stomach turn. No emotion lurked there in those brown eyes. No guilt for having done what he had. No remorse for wreaking such havoc. Not even hate. Merely indifference.

His brother took advantage of his momentary distracted state and rolled him over until Aidan’s back was against the wood and Davin was on top of him.

“Ah, you always were so predictable, weren’t you, big brother. I knew messing with your woman would bring you out of the bushes.”

This had all been some sort of ruse? Some dark plan designed to get him to tip his hand? Aidan’s head swam with the information.

“You always did think you were the better one, Allen,” Davin said. “It’s time to prove once and for all who is the smarter brother.”

Stars danced behind Aidan’s eyes as Davin’s fist connected with his brow. He struggled to push his brother off but only succeeded in further trapping himself. Suddenly, the weight on him
disappeared. He blinked against a trickle of blood running from his brow into his eye, and found Davin standing over him, grinning in a malevolent way that made Aidan’s blood run cold.

“It’s said that the meek inherit the earth,” Davin said, kicking his legs where he tried to get up. “I say the meek are eaten by the strong, and it’s the strong that inherit the earth.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind he registered that Penelope hadn’t left. Instead she stood on the bridge, her face a model of horror, Max still tied to the support beam. He tried to tell her to leave, but a kick to his stomach left him without air.

“You never did figure it out, did you,” Davin said, a spiteful grin making him look so different from Aidan that Aidan nearly didn’t recognize him. “That I was the one who set fire to our house.”

Aidan thought he might be sick. Fire…house? Was he referring to the fire that had taken their parents’ lives?

He closed his eyes and memories crashed back on him like a wave of blinding color. He remembered waking up in the middle of the night to the acrid smell of smoke. Panicked, he’d felt around their shared bedroom for his brother. Davin hadn’t been there. Coughing, he had crawled out into the hall to find flames licking up the side of the hall walls. He’d quickly backtracked into the bedroom and closed the door, using the wadded sheet he’d placed over his nose and mouth to block the smoke from getting in from the bottom of the door. Then he’d rushed for the window, all the time calling for his brother and his parents.

He remembered being relieved when he found Davin outside on the lawn, staring up in horror at the sight of their family home burning down.

Had it been horror? Or had it been sheer awe?

Aidan rose onto his elbows with some effort, taking shallow breaths that seemed to dredge up the taste of smoke and trying to force deeper ones. “Why?”

Davin shrugged as if they were discussing which college to attend or which restaurant to eat at, rather than the pointless loss of their parents.

“Why do you think? Because they had never really been my parents. They had always been yours.” Davin drew a hand across his own mouth, coming away with blood. “Because they always chose you over me. For as long as I can remember, I thought about what it would be like to be an only child. But I knew that doing away with you, alone, wouldn’t have done the trick. They would have mourned you and forgotten about me. So I decided to do away with you all and start again from scratch. With a family that would love me, and only me. Never compare me to a brother that was always one step ahead.”

It didn’t make any sense. Davin had killed their parents? It wasn’t possible. Aidan remembered his twin being broken up, almost destroyed by the news.

Or had he been sorry that he, Allen, hadn’t died along with their parents as planned?

The idea blindsided him. So much hate…

He watched as Penelope crept up behind Davin, something long and hard in her hand. A branch. Aidan fought harder to get up as he watched Penelope swing. Davin easily warded off the blow, then grabbed Penelope’s silken black hair, filling his fist with the tresses.

Davin chuckled, pleased with himself. “My only regret is that I didn’t kill beautiful Kathleen while you watched. But that’s easily remedied, isn’t it.”

He pushed Penelope toward the opposite side of the bridge where large, jagged rocks broke the surface of the river.

Where Penelope’s mother had taken her own life twenty years before.

“No!” Aidan shouted, as Davin pushed her over the railing.

One minute Penelope had been about to save Aidan by hitting Davin in the back of the head with a branch she’d scavenged from the other side of the bridge; the next she was sailing through the air, everything appearing to move in slow motion. She took in Davin’s manic expression of satisfaction as he faced his brother. Saw Aidan’s horror as he scrambled to his feet. Felt the cool air that hovered above the river seep in to saturate her very bones. A millisecond before her body would have made
contact with the rocks that had taken her mother’s life so long ago, she reached out, wildly clawing for a handhold—something, anything, that would prevent her fall. She found it, latching with barely the tips of her fingers onto the wooden slats of the bridge, the sudden action nearly dislocating her right shoulder. But there she hung on for dear life.

“What’s the execution method Ohio employs?” She heard Davin’s voice as she pulled herself up so that her forearms rested against the wood and she could see the two men. “Death by electrocution? Fortuitous, don’t you think, that you chose to come here. Rhode Island’s method of lethal injection is far too humane. I want you to fry. And I want it to happen knowing that you’re being punished not only for Kathleen’s death, but for Penelope Moon’s.”

Penelope’s arms ached and pulled from where she hung on to the narrow ledge. She slipped slightly, and looked down at where the rocks waited for her. Her throat choked off all air as she remembered the pictures of her mother’s battered body that the local newspaper had run on the front page.
Fate runs in a circle,
she remembered her grandmother telling her once. Although she’d been ten at the time and heartbroken by the ruthless teasing she’d suffered at school that day, Penelope applied the saying to the here and now.

Was this her fate? To die in the same way her mother had?

She must have made a sound when she nearly lost her grip, because she looked up to find Davin grinning at her with evil intent. She heard a shout behind him.

“No!”

She watched as Davin lurched forward against the railing. Had Aidan hit him from behind? The sudden move shook the bridge enough to make her grip more precarious. She was fighting to get a better hold when one of Davin’s feet prodded at her fingers.

Oh, God, she was going to fall.

Then he was gone from sight.

Penelope held on, but the muscles of her fingers and arms were under tremendous strain, and they felt on the verge of giving out. She heard a
crack
and peered through the railing slats to watch Aidan repeatedly punch his brother. Then Davin roared and pinned him against the opposite side of the bridge. On they battled, first one, then the other gaining the upper hand as Penelope fought to maintain her hold, seeking a foothold and finding nothing but cold, empty air.

Max’s incessant barking drew her attention, and she found his eyes moving from the fighting men to her and back again, straining until his chain collar bit into his neck. Penelope’s eyes burned with tears at his futile attempt to help her.

If only she had heeded his warnings. If only she had untied him. If only she had let Mrs. Noonan drive her all the way home instead of dropping her off at the bridge.

She jerked her attention back to the two men, finding it amazingly easy to tell them apart, now that they were together. Davin’s face was drawn in sharp, pale lines, his jaw tight, his mouth a gash against his skin, his brow lowered and dark.

And Aidan…

Her heart surged into her throat as he took a blow to his already bleeding brow and sagged against the opposite railing. Then she watched Davin cross to pick up the branch that she had intended to use on him. The irony that Aidan would be hit with the branch she had chosen to try to save him with made her dizzy with the unfairness of it all.

“Aidan!” she cried, slipping another inch.

His eyes snapped open and focused on her, then on the wood swinging for his head. He ducked and caught his brother around the waist, pushing him until he was against the other railing, mere feet from where Penelope hung on. The wood flew from Davin’s grip and sailed over the railing, wedging between the rocks like a deadly spear just under Penelope’s dangling feet.

She slipped again and screamed.

“Aidan, please!” she yelled, knowing even as she did so that it was unfair to ask him to save her when he was trying so hard to save himself.

Her right hand slid completely off the ledge, leaving her left arm trembling with the strain it took to hold her weight.

Then her fingers started to give way. She summoned every ounce of strength she had to maintain her grip, but couldn’t do it. She watched in terror as her fingers slid completely free…and she was airborne—

Aidan’s hand clamped tightly around her wrist, stopping her descent. She looked up to find his face straining with the effort it took to keep her from falling. But more than that, she saw relief and love.

She looked down to find Davin skewered by the tree branch, his unmoving body bobbing in the churning water around the rocks.

Hours later Penelope huddled on the west bank of the river, wishing there was a way she could avoid ever going over the bridge again. The wool blanket the sheriff had draped over her shoulders was doing little to chase away the chill that permeated every cell of her body. Sheriff’s deputies milled around, the lights on the top of the squad cars filling the night with an eerie red and blue glow. A spotlight revealed the body lying on top of the rocks.

Penelope shuddered and turned away—the man looked so much like Aidan…

She noticed the sheriff grilling Aidan where he sat in the back of a squad car, his arms handcuffed behind his back. Even with the proof that Aidan had a twin, and with Penelope’s corroboration, the sheriff appeared reluctant to buy their story.

Half of Old Orchard had come out to ogle from the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the opposite end of the bridge. A collective gasp went up as the spotlight illuminated the body; then, after a heartbeat of silence, the chatter level rose as they all openly speculated about what happened.

Penelope heard someone raise her voice, and the crowd reluctantly parted. Mavis popped out, Mrs. O’Malley on her heels. Relief rushed through Penelope, but her body seemed incapable of following her command to stand.

“Let me through, you imbecile. That’s my granddaughter over there.” Mavis swatted at the arm of a young deputy who was trying to keep her from ducking under the tape.

The deputy seemed taken aback by a particularly strong whack and let her under.

“Me, um, too,” Mrs. O’Malley said, shadowing Mavis’s heels.

“What happened?” Mavis asked, crouching down before Penelope and smoothing the hair from her face.

Penelope hadn’t realized her teeth were chattering until that moment. She tried for a smile and said, “You remember that life you said we both needed to lead? Well, I’d say I’ve now officially had enough excitement to last for the next two incarnations.”