Kevin was off fetching BBQ to satisfy his wife’s post-pregnancy craving, which meant it was just the twins and new baby hanging out in his sister’s comfortable suburban home. He supposed he’d have to give Marian back eventually, but not anytime soon. At least, not until she started crying.
“I never really pictured you as the baby-swooning kind of guy,” Jamie said, giving him a thoughtful look as she leaned back and resumed folding the mountain of towels on the couch beside her.
He snorted. “Just because I don’t go up and coo at strange children on the subway doesn’t mean I’m not completely enamored with this little princess.”
“If you and Kev keep talking like that, you’re going to turn her into a spoiled brat,” Jamie said fondly.
He glanced up. “Oh, so is now not a good time to bring in the pink pony I brought her along with an IOU for a Porsche on her sixteenth birthday?”
His twin merely rolled her eyes as she moved the stack of clean laundry to the side. “How are you, anyway?”
“’Bout the same as I was last time you saw me a few weeks ago,” he said.
Jamie shook her head. “I don’t think so. There’s something different about you.”
Oh great. Not this.
“You’re my twin,” he deflected. “Aren’t you just supposed to know?”
“All right, then, if that’s how you want to play it,” she said, leaning back. “I think there’s a woman in your life. I think that’s why you’re down here twice in one month. Not just to see me, not even to see the baby, but because you’re running.”
“Yes, there are women in my life,” he said, dodging the last part of her accusation. The part that hit way too close to home. “Lots, actually. You. Mom. Your little Craisin. Two grandmothers, both of whom have deemed me their favorite. A handful of aunts. Also who insist I’m their favorite.”
“Who is she?” Jamie asked, refusing to be sidetracked. “The girl you took to Thanksgiving?”
He glanced up sharply, and his twin shrugged. “Mom told me how you brought her and how you both fell all over each other insisting you were just friends, but she’s never seen you so happy.”
“Mom sees what she wants to see. You know that.”
“Well that’s what I figured . . . that you were just taking pity on a lonely neighbor. I know how you like to take care of sad creatures. Cats, dogs, even that weird turtle.”
“Agatha wasn’t weird.”
“She bit me.”
“Probably because you called her weird,” Josh said.
“Seriously though, tell me about the girl.”
He opened his mouth to tell her to mind her own damn business when he caught a whiff of something less than fresh. “Ah, I think we have a cleanup on aisle baby.”
Jamie sighed. “Yeah. She does that. A lot.”
His sister didn’t seem too bugged though as she pushed up from the couch and came to gather the now-waking infant in her arms. “I’d make you change her, but you’ll probably withhold information to get back at me,” she said over her shoulder as she headed upstairs.
“I’ll withhold information anyway,” he called after her.
His sister disappeared upstairs, and Josh started to take out his phone to text Heather, just to check in, but decided against it. As much as he’d teased her about not reading his mind, the truth was, Jamie was as good at it as anybody. Even more annoying, his twin had a tendency to figure things out about Josh before he’d had a chance to figure them out.
He was having a hard enough time keeping his own thoughts off Heather—he didn’t need Jamie’s weird twin juju to make a mess of things he was struggling to keep under control.
They’d emerged mostly unscathed from their fight-and-fuck the other day. Both were doing a damn good job of pretending it hadn’t happened. And while he was grateful, he was also feeling like something was missing.
It made no sense. The sex was great, both the makeup sex and the not-makeup sex.
He liked Heather. She liked him.
They were enjoying each other, which is all he’d wanted from the very beginning.
And now that he had what he wanted, it was somehow not enough?