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CHAPTER ONE

HIS studio—at least Izzy assumed it was his studio and not his apartment—was on the fourth floor of an old brick building in Chelsea. She found his name on the wall directory just inside the heavy glass door: FINN MACCAULEY, PHOTOGRAPHER, it said in small white letters.

“He’s a wildlife photographer,” Meg had told her, smiling, as she’d packed them out the door.

“Hmm,” Izzy murmured now, glancing around, thinking that perhaps Meg had been misled. The fashion district was uptown, the Village was downtown. The city was all around. Horns blared, messengers whistled, brakes squealed, subway trains rumbled. There were buses, bikes, cars, cabs, and hundreds upon thousands of people everywhere she could see. No place for the buffalo to roam. And she’d be willing to bet there wasn’t a deer or an antelope for miles.

But whatever Finn MacCauley had told his sister wasn’t her problem. As soon as she’d done her duty, she’d be on her way to Sam’s. Izzy squared her shoulders against the weight of her backpack, picked up both the duffel bags she’d just set down and headed toward the elevator at the end of the hall. “Come along, girls.”

Two identical redheaded urchins fell in behind her.

“Is this it?” asked Tansy curiously as she gazed around the narrow, somewhat grimy-looking hallway. It smelled of stale tobacco smoke and other things Izzy didn’t want to think about. “Does Uncle Finn live here?” Tansy persisted.

“Of course not. I’m sure he lives somewhere very nice,” Izzy said with more conviction than she felt. She ushered the girls into the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor. The door rattled shut and the elevator lurched, then began to creak and rumble upward. “This must be where he takes his pictures. Of wildlife.” Rats, perhaps. She would believe rats.

Eventually the elevator wheezed to a stop. The door hesitated, then slid open onto a tiny foyer with a door and a doorbell. Ring for admittance, ordered the sign tacked beside it.

Izzy rang. An answering buzz sounded. She pushed the door open.

He shot wildlife, all right. Just not the sort she’d imagined. Immediately inside the studio door Izzy came nose to belly button with a seven-foot-tall full-length black-and-white photo of a sultry blond bimbo clad only in her Rapunzel-length hair.

Izzy’s eyes widened, then briefly shut in disbelief. She would have clapped her hands over the girls’, but there were four eyes and only two of Izzy’s hands.

“May I help you?”

Izzy’s eyes flicked open. At the far end of the narrow reception room behind a desk sat a complete counterpoint to the bimbo. This woman was fifty if she was a day, with iron gray hair cut in no-nonsense bowl fashion and dark brown eyes that seemed to widen a bit, too, behind tortoiseshell frames as she took in Izzy and her charges.

Izzy jerked the girls around so they would stop staring in openmouthed amazement at the photo. “I’m here to see Mr. MacCauley.”

The woman looked doubtful, and Izzy didn’t blame her. “You have... an appointment?”

“I’ve brought the girls.”

The woman goggled, her gaze dropping to look at the twins. Her professional demeanor slipped suddenly. “Oh, my, no, dear. They have to be much older.”

“They’re six.” Izzy started to argue. Then she realized that wasn’t what the woman meant—which implied that Finn MacCauley was as irresponsible as his sister.

“They’re not here to be photographed. These are his nieces.”

“Nieces?” Now the woman’s eyes were almost as round as her tortoiseshell frames. Her mouth pressed together in a disapproving frown. “You’re...Meg?”

Whatever the woman’s precise opinion of Finn’s sister, it wasn’t much better than Izzy’s own. “I’m a neighbor.”

“Whose neighbor?”

“Meg’s. She lives next door to us. In San Francisco. We’re not close friends or anything, Meg and I, I mean. The girls and I are,” she added as she dropped a fond glance on them. They nodded their heads in agreement.

The woman looked dazed.

Izzy decided to press on. “But when they told Meg I was coming to New York to meet my fiancé, she...asked me to drop them off.”

“Drop them...off?”

“At their uncle’s,” Izzy said firmly, in case there was any misunderstanding. “Mr. MacCauley.”

“Oh dear.” The woman contemplated the girls, then the phone. Finally she reached for it, then hesitated and pulled her hand back, apparently having second thoughts. “He’s not going to like this,” she muttered. “He’s not going to like this one bit.”

She reached for the phone again, but before she could punch in a number, the door behind her desk burst open. A wild man stalked out.

Izzy’s stomach clenched. Her heart kicked over in her chest. He reminded her of nothing so much as the illustration she’d seen in a children’s book her grandfather had once read her about a pirate.

A black-haired, clean-shaven pirate. His face was lean, all angles and planes. His nose was hawkish and had obviously once been on the wrong end of someone’s fist or foot. He wore tattered blue jeans and a chambray shirt with the top three buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up. He was probably six feet tall, though he seemed bigger. His energy—or irritation—took up a lot of space. Meg would have said he had an aggressive aura. Izzy thought that didn’t describe it by half. His straight hair was startlingly dark against the tan of his lean face and it looked as if he’d been raking his hands through it. As if to confirm her suspicions, he did so now, lifting it in spikes all over his head.

“Where are they?” he demanded. He stomped past the receptionist, then whirled and confronted her. “They’re late!”

“I was just about to—”

“Call Tony. If he thinks I’m going to stand around here all afternoon twiddling my thumbs while his dollies drift in here when they damned well please, he’s got another think coming!”

The receptionist started to nod.

“Now!” he barked. Then he shot past her back through the door, slamming it behind him.

“Was th-that—” Pansy began nervously, her hand strangling Izzy’s.

“Shh,” Izzy said.

The door burst open once more. The wild man snapped, “Tell him if they’re not here in five minutes, he can damned well forget it. I’ll shoot the next girls who come through the door.”

Tansy and Pansy both gasped audibly.

And that was when he noticed them.

The girls tried to melt right behind Izzy’s skirt. The pirate turned his stormy blue eyes on them. “Who the hell are you?” Then his gaze lifted to focus squarely on Izzy.

Izzy pressed her knees together to stop them knocking and raised her chin. “My name is Isobel Rule,” she said firmly. “You are, I presume, Mr. MacCauley? I’ve brought your nieces.”

She was past expecting that he’d welcome them with open arms. She at least hoped he’d stay, “Oh, right, they were supposed to show up today, weren’t they? I’d forgotten.”

He looked poleaxed. “Brought my... nieces.” He stared at the girls, his tan going oddly pale. “The hell you say.”

Izzy frowned. “Language, Mr. MacCauley. Language.”

He ignored her. His gaze narrowed as it settled on the children peeping out at him. “You’re...Meg’s kids?”

Izzy stared. “You don’t know?”

“Never seem ’em before in my life,” he said flatly. “What’re they doing here?”

“I’ve brought them to stay with you.”

The receptionist gasped.

The stormy look in Finn MacCauley’s eyes increased to near gale force. “To stay? With me? You’re joking.”

“No, actually I’m not.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. He shoved both hands through his hair again, spiking it further. Then, “Yeah, right,” he said at last. He took a steadying breath and then gave her look of tolerant amusement. “So where’s Meg? Hiding in the elevator waiting for me to flip out completely?” A corner of his mouth lifted.

“She’s in Bora Bora,” Izzy said.

All his amusement vanished in a flash. “What?”

Izzy took a step backward, almost toppling over when the twins’ clinging made her lose her balance for a second. She steadied herself, cursing Meg for having stuck her in this mess. She shrugged helplessly. “She left last night with her fiancé. She said you’d encouraged her to go,” she added accusingly.

“That conniving, sneaky, two-faced little—”

“Mis-ter MacCauley!” It wasn’t all that far off Izzy’s view of her ditzy neighbor, but she would never say so in front of the woman’s daughters.

He bit off the rest of the sentence, jammed his fists into the pockets of his jeans and stormed around the receptionist’s desk. She watched him warily from within the eye of the hurricane.

There was a sudden buzz from the doorbell. Automatically the receptionist responded. The door burst open and two chestnut-haired buxom bombshells in Day-Glo miniskirts trooped in.

“Oh, Finn, dear, sorry we’re late! So much traffic coming down Seventh Avenue you just wouldn’t believe!” the taller one said breathlessly.

They both brushed past Izzy and the twins as if they were pieces of furniture, skittering up to press kisses on Finn MacCauley’s tan cheeks and ruffle his already ruffled hair with their long fingernails.

“Tony sends his love. He says thanks so much for the favor. Where do you want us?” The shorter one was already tugging her skimpy scoop-neck shirt over her head as she headed through the door Finn had emerged from. The taller one paused long enough to bat her lashes at him, then followed her friend.

No one moved in their wake. Then Finn rubbed a hand over his mussed hair in a vain attempt to comb it. He fixed the twins with a hard stare. “Sit there,” he commanded, his gaze flicking from them to the bench alongside the seven-foot Rapunzel. They gulped audibly, then scurried to obey.

“You, too,” he said to Izzy.

“I have to go,” she objected. “I was only supposed to deliver—”

“Sit there and wait or take them with you.”

Izzy’s chin jutted. “I’m not taking—”

“Then you’ll wait, damn you.” Finn MacCauley’s chin stuck out even farther. They glowered at each other. Izzy’s glare turned decidedly mutinous.

“If you don’t,” Finn said, apparently no stranger to mutiny when he saw it, “I’ll find you if I have to track you to the ends of the earth.”

And he would, too, damn it, Finn thought savagely as he fumbled with one of the lights he was aiming at a pair of shapely almost bare backsides.

“Aren’t you finished yet?” one of the girls whined. “I’m tired.”

“You’ve been fiddling with those lights for hours,” the other one complained. “It’s late. Tony was expecting us at six.”

“Tough.” It hadn’t been much over an hour. It just seemed like forever. Finn finished setting the light and stepped back. “Stop wriggling around, for heaven’s sake.”

“But it’s hot.”

“Tony never said it would take so long... or be so boring,” the shorter one said grumpily. “The lights hurt my eyes.”

“Too bad.” Finn stamped back to the camera.

Tony’s girls were still wriggling—and pouting. He sighed. He’d probably got as much work out of them as he was going to. He never would have used them at all, except he owed Tony a favor for talking Angelina Fiorelli into spending an entire afternoon of her very busy New York jaunt in his studio. Of course it looked like the shots he took would end up being profitable for both of them, so Angelina was happy. But he still owed Tony, and shooting a couple of eager wannabes for a sunscreen ad that only required lots of honey-toned skin and absolutely no expression seemed an easy way to accomplish the payback. That was before he’d spent the last hour with them.

But they were preferable to what was waiting for him once he was done.

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.

“You’re their uncle,” Isobel said quietly. “They have no one else.”

“They have you.”

“Me?” she squeaked.

“Why not you? You brought them.”

“Because I got shang—because Meg asked me to,” she amended with a quick apprehensive glance at the girls.

Which meant that she was as much one of Meg’s victims as he was. That, in ordinary circumstances, would have made him feel sympathetic toward her. In the present situation, he wasn’t above taking whatever advantage he could get. “You should have said no.”

“I thought you were expecting them.”

He snorted. “You thought I agreed to baby-sit? You thought I said, sure, just drop ’em off, they can sit in the foyer and watch me shoot all day?”

“She said you shot wildlife,” Isobel replied faintly.

Finn’s hands tightened in a strangling motion. “She’ll burn in hell—”

The girls gasped.

Isobel shot him a furious glare. “That’s enough. Now you’ve terrified them. She’s not going to burn anywhere, girls,” Isobel assured them. “She’s fine. And you’re going to be fine, too. Your uncle is simply upset. Obviously he isn’t as flexible as one might like.” Another accusing glare sailed in his direction. “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you and want you—” here she nailed him with a look that promised instant death if he contradicted her “—he just needs to get used to the change in his life.”