Which Twin?

Chapter 2

The laughter had started as a soft chuckle, but it quickly built in strength and volume until it was nearly deafening. As he continued to chortle, his grip on Rose’s wrists relaxed slightly, though not enough for her to break free.

Rose knew this because she jerked her hands down, hard, in an attempt to escape. At this point he stopped laughing, and although he tightened his grip, a slight smile tilted one corner of his mouth as his eyes once more locked on to hers.

“Good grief,” he said with a shake of his head. “Not that again.”

Rose stared at the crooked smile she’d seen so often in her dreams, then looked up to the amused eyes. Behind the gently teasing glint she saw a mix of anger and concern. Her response was a mutinous frown. Who was this man to stand there laughing at her, judging her? For that matter, who were any of these people? What was this place? Just what sort of nightmare had she stumbled into?

She gave an uneasy glance to the room. It was nearly three times larger than the one she occupied in Seattle. The bed was a queen, where hers was only a twin. These walls were nearly blank, while hers were filled with pictures and memorabilia. But the color scheme and placement of the furniture was eerily similar, even without the inexplicable presence of the turquoise-and-purple quilt that matched hers so precisely.

Then there was the matter of the blond woman and gray-haired man. They’d looked familiar, also, in a misty, half-remembered way. Was it possible that they had appeared in her dreams, as well?

A shiver raised gooseflesh on Rose’s arms. It was as if she’d fallen through Alice’s rabbit hole into a world filled with oddly familiar sights, like this room and the view of the bridge outside. And the man holding her wrists.

Rose looked at him and found that the remains of his smile had been replaced by another frown. “What do you mean by ‘not that again’?” she asked.

His green-brown eyes seemed to assess her before they narrowed. “Come on, Anna,” he replied. “You know. Rose— the imaginary friend you made up when you were little? And that business about missing a part of yourself.”

The floor beneath her feet began to roll from side to side like the bridge of a ship in a wind-tossed sea. All her life Rose had felt an odd sense of loneliness, as if she were somehow incomplete. Somewhere around the age of six, when she’d asked her mother about this, the woman had reminded Rose that she’d been born prematurely. Perhaps, her mother suggested, in Rose’s hurry to arrive on earth she had somehow inadvertently left some part of herself back in heaven.

At the time, Rose had accepted this explanation. After all, she’d rarely been alone. Early on she and her mother had lived in an artist commune in Oregon, where she’d been surrounded by other caring adults and their children. After she and her mother moved to Seattle, there had been classrooms full of children to interact with, along with after-school music teachers and the customers who visited her mother’s shop. During her brief marriage, she’d been surrounded by people. And for the past two years she’d been in the constant company of her mother, always conscious of the inoperable tumor, dictating that Rose’s time with Kathleen Delancey would all too soon come to an end. So, she could hardly claim to have been lonely in the conventional sense. Yet whenever she looked inside herself, she’d felt as if a part of herself was missing, some odd hole in the fabric of her existence.

And now this man was suggesting that someone else felt this way. Someone, moreover, who apparently looked enough like Rose to make everyone she came in contact with think that she was this person. Someone who’d once had an imaginary friend named Rose.

This was all nuts. It was no wonder that her head was spinning, her ears ringing and her legs suddenly wobbly. If it weren’t for the tight grip this Logan maintained on her wrists, she was certain her legs would give way, leaving her to collapse on the floor at his feet.

She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t give in to the whirling eddy that threatened to drag her into unconsciousness. She had to stay alert, on her feet, and somehow find her way out of this nightmarish place. Drawing a deep breath, Rose forced herself to meet the man’s dark eyes and speak as calmly as possible.

“I know this must sound crazy, but I am who I say I am. Let me go, and I’ll prove it to you.”

The man—Logan, she reminded herself—seemed to search her face for a moment before releasing her wrists. Rose continued to stare into his eyes a moment longer, oddly reluctant to look away. Finally she took two steps back, pulled her gaze from his as she slipped her large purse from her shoulder. She reached in and fished out her turquoise leather wallet. Drawing her driver’s license from its plastic sleeve, she handed it to the man. Shivering within her damp sweater, she watched as he studied it.

“Well, I know you use false IDs to avoid the attention that comes with the Benedict name,” he said at last. One corner of his mouth lifted in that half smile of his as his eyes met hers. “But why choose Seattle? Was there a sale on fake Washington State licenses?”

His smile became a mocking grin as he handed the document back, hardening Rose’s frustration into anger.

“For your information, that license is real. And it says I’m legal to drive in the State of Washington because that is where I live.”

“Right. And what about the wallet? This was my Christmas present to you a little over a month ago.”

Again Rose felt the floor begin to shift beneath her feet. The turquoise wallet had been a day-after-Christmas-sale purchase at Nordstrom’s. It was something she hadn’t really needed, but upon seeing it, she’d felt she had to have it—as if it was somehow meant to be hers.

The fact that this Anna possessed the exact same wallet sent another wave of shivers dancing down her spine. Rose straightened that part of her anatomy. This was no time to get giddy over coincidences, she told herself. Such a reaction would only make it more difficult to convince this stranger of her identity.

Not that it mattered if he believed her or not. She knew who she was. What was more, in spite of all the unanswered questions tumbling through her mind regarding this look-alike of hers, she now only wanted to get out of this house, to escape from these people and the vague unsettling sense that she’d seen them before.

“Look, Logan whoever-you-are.” Rose spoke softly as she shoved her driver’s license back in place and dropped her wallet into her purse. Pushing her damp bangs out of her eyes, she glared up at him as she went on, “I’m through trying to reason with you. I am Rose Delancey, just as my license states, and I refuse to be kept in this madhouse one moment longer.”

She pivoted toward the door, but before she could take one step, strong fingers gripped her elbow and spun her back around. The man’s lips twisted scornfully as he asked, “If you aren’t Anna, then how do you know my name is Logan?”

“It’s what that woman called you.”

His eyes narrowed. “That woman is your mother.”

“No. My mother is…dead.”

Immediately Rose clamped her jaw shut, trapping the sob that wanted to follow. She wasn’t going to cry. Not now. Not after she’d promised her mother.

It was just that this was the first time she’d actually said the word dead out loud, with all its echoes of finality. The small group that had gathered for her mother’s funeral had all known what had happened, so there had been no reason for Rose to explain a thing. The end had been expected, after all, and Rose had heard several people murmur that the suddenness of it had been something of a blessing. Rose knew, of course, that they’d meant that her mother was now beyond pain, not that it was a blessing that Kathleen Delancey was gone, leaving her daughter truly alone.

And feeling, suddenly, crazy.

Swallowing hard, Rose stared at the lapel of the man’s leather jacket. She should have stayed in the apartment above her mother’s gift shop, should have gone through all her mother’s papers as the lawyer had suggested, then gradually come to terms with her loss. She never should have followed her crazy visions without first putting her life in order and getting her emotions in hand.

“Rose?”

The soft inquiry brought Rose’s head up and hope into her heart. “You called me Rose,” she said as another damp chill shuddered through her. “Does that mean you believe what I’ve been—?”

The shake of Logan’s head left the rest of Rose’s question unasked.

“I tried Anna,” he replied. “When you didn’t look up, I decided to give Rose a try.” He paused a moment, frowning into her eyes as if weighing a decision before he went on. “Look, Anna. You’re wet, cold and probably tired. We can talk after you take a warm shower and get into some dry—”

Now it was Rose’s turn to shake her head, interrupting him to insist, “For the last time, I am not Anna. I don’t live in this house, have never even been in this house, or in this…room.”

Rose shuddered as her gaze slid from his to the hauntingly familiar decor.

“Then why are you here?”

Rose closed her eyes as a sense of hopelessness engulfed her at the thought of telling this obviously cynical man about her recurring dreams of the view from the balcony outside this particular room.

When she felt Logan’s hand gently grasp her upper arms, she realized he must have seen her shoulders slump. Her knees seemed to bend of their own accord. Once she was sitting on the edge of the bed, she opened her eyes. Aware of the man seated next to her, she stared at the bridge through the sliding glass door, realizing that her explanation would sound insane.

“Dreams,” she said anyway. “I have repeatedly dreamed of this particular view of that bridge. I came here to find if this view existed in reality. I needed…”

As her voice trailed off, Logan couldn’t miss the despair shimmering in her dark eyes. The expression on her face was so damned sincere that he was half tempted to believe that this truly might not be Anna Benedict. But he knew Anna’s vivid imagination all too well for that. Like Alice In Wonderland, she was fully capable of imagining “six impossible things before breakfast” and believing each of them completely.

Logan had always suspected that this characteristic was a reaction to her family’s expectations. Keeping an eye on Anna had been a duty he had gladly fulfilled ever since the day that Robert and Elise Benedict brought their new daughter home. The tiny infant’s cry had elicited a fierce sense of protectiveness in his ten-year-old soul that had never waned no matter how she’d tried his patience over the years.

Not, he reminded himself with a twitch of his lips, that he was a paragon of patience, but he understood the introverted young woman’s battle to find her place in a family of over-achievers. In the past six months, though, he’d been so busy overseeing Benedict family legal concerns that he hadn’t spent much time with Anna.

It occurred to him now, as he studied the combination of confusion and fear on Anna’s too-pale face, that her brief disappearance might have been in response to the numerous social and political functions she’d been required to attend. But whatever the cause, it was obvious that something had made Anna snap. Something serious enough, it seemed, to cause her to fantasize that her mother was no longer alive.

Logan recoiled from the thought. Fifty-three-year-old Elise was a dynamo of organization, capable of simultaneously setting up a charity bazaar, overseeing the arts foundation her husband had established for local schools, and designing the interior of a homeless shelter. The fact that Elise managed all this without losing an ounce of composure, getting a spot of dirt on her tasteful haute couture outfit or allowing one lock of hair to escape her meticulously arranged hairstyle might intimidate any daughter.

But to imagine her mother dead?

“Look. You have to believe me.”

Anna’s words pulled Logan’s attention to her pleading eyes. “I don’t belong here,” she went on. “I want to leave this house, now.”

The desperation in her voice made Logan look at her long and hard. Anna’s face seemed thinner and very pale, considering her fondness for the California sun. Her indigo eyes appeared more deep set, yet larger and more luminous.

Luminous? Logan blinked. Where the hell had that word come from. Never, in all the years he’d known Anna, had he paid much attention to her eyes. Well once, when she was twelve and insisted that her blue eyes, combined with the fact that both her parents had brown, proved that she’d been adopted. The explanation had been simple enough, of course. Elise and Robert each had one blue-eyed parent, supplying the recessive gene that Anna, but not her brother, Chas, had inherited.

Logan’s sudden poetic attention to the young woman’s features was far less easy to explain. Even more confusing was his sudden awareness of the gentle curves that formed the body so close to his. As his flesh began to warm, his muscles tensed. He’d known Anna all her life, and never before had he reacted to her with this…this—

He shook away the half-formed thought. Anna was his sister, dammit. Okay—she was Chas’s sister, but as an unofficial Benedict that was how he’d always viewed her. Yet, insane as it was, he found himself mesmerized by the hopeless expression in those dark eyes of hers, fascinated by the curve of her lips, felt his head bending inexorably toward hers.

It was at that moment, without any warning, that Anna stood. Logan got to his feet as well, instinctively grasping her upper arms again, the strange moment of temptation forgotten in his concern about Anna’s mental state.

“I can’t let you leave,” he said. “Not the way you’re acting. I’m sure your moth—that Elise will be along with the doctor any minute. Then—”

“Then what?” she demanded. Concern tightened the straight black eyebrows beneath her new bangs. “This doctor will give me a sedative? Something to ease my poor befuddled mind? Absolutely not.”

Again she pulled away from him, this time with so much force that Logan was jerked forward. Rather than risk hurting her arms more than his bruising grip must already be doing, he let gravity draw her backward, onto the bed. Following her down, he pinned her there with his body.

This didn’t end the struggle, however. Instead of lying still, Anna continued to twist and squirm as her arms flailed in an attempt to hit him. Logan slid his hands down each arm, until he again captured her wrists. Although her upper body was now relatively still, the area below her waist continued to shift wildly. When she began to buck, Logan decided he’d had enough.

“Knock it off.”

He purposely spoke in the low growl he used when dealing with a roomful of arguing lawyers and clients. It apparently worked on half-crazed women, too, for Anna not only stopped moving, she went completely limp.

Slowly Logan raised his head and looked down. Her eyes were closed, her features soft and without expression. Pushing himself into a sitting position, he grabbed the obviously unconscious Anna’s left wrist. As he searched for a pulse, Elise Benedict’s voice echoed down the hall.

“Yes, Doctor. Anna is claiming she doesn’t know any of us. She seems disoriented and unusually excitable. I think she needs something to calm her nerves—to keep her from doing damage to herself.”

Logan managed to scramble to his feet at the side of the bed seconds before Elise entered the room. She was followed by a tall, thin man with white hair and black-framed glasses. The dark eyes behind those spectacles glanced at Logan before focusing on the inert young woman in the bed.

“I think she fainted,” Logan said.

Dr. Alcott bent down to place two fingers on the side of Anna’s neck. After a second he straightened. “Good strong pulse,” he said, then once more looked at Logan, his dark eyes narrowed. “Elise tells me that Anna fell and hit her head. Is this true?”

Logan nodded. “Yes. She lost her footing on the veranda, and her feet flew out from under her. Her back took the brunt of the fall, but her head apparently hit the tile surface, too. She appeared to be a bit dazed when I reached her.”

Something of an understatement, Logan thought as Robert Benedict reentered the room. The man was under a great deal of pressure, between serving in California’s legislature and battling to win the primary that would, hopefully, propel his political career into the national arena. The last thing he needed to hear was that his daughter had been acting strangely even before she hit her head.

“Dr. Alcott,” Robert said as the man opened his bag and removed a stethoscope. “Do you think that blow to Anna’s head could have caused her to act as if she’d suddenly found herself in a house of strangers?”

Alcott glanced up with a frown. “Is that what’s been going on?”

“I’m afraid so,” Elise replied with a sigh. “Of course you know how she was before…before I called you the other day. But at least then she seemed to know us. Now—” the woman paused to bite her lip as she gazed at her daughter “—amnesia.” She shook her head. “Oh, Anna.”

Logan tensed at the almost undetectable note of disapproval in Elise’s soft voice. The tone had the power to cut like a lash, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the charming smile that accompanied the words. He knew this because that tone had been directed toward him more than once after the death of his parents placed him in the Benedicts’ care.

And in their debt.

No, he reminded himself. In Robert’s debt. It had been Robert who had recognized a ten-year-old orphan’s fear of being sent to live with strangers. It was Robert to whom he owed his loyalty, along with whatever help he could offer now.

Logan turned to the man and said quietly, “You left word that Anna was missing. What’s been going on?”

He purposely didn’t mention the messages that Anna had left him. In her second call, she’d begged Logan not to tell her family that she’d been trying to reach him. Until he knew more about what had been happening in his absence, he would honor that request.

Robert glanced toward his wife before replying. “Well, I mishandled a question Anna placed to me yesterday morning.” Robert’s hand rose to comb through his hair as he went on. “The timing couldn’t have been worse. You were in France, Chas was making arrangements for the campaign, Elise was up to her earlobes in arranging tonight’s fund-raiser, and I was putting the finishing touches on a speech. I’m afraid that I—”

“Robert,” Elise broke in softly as she placed a graceful hand on his arm. “I refuse to allow you to feel guilty. Despite our busy schedules, we’ve always been there for Anna, always encouraging her, even when it became obvious that she was incapable of seeing anything through, that she would always be chasing after something new.”