Dead Even - Mariah Stewart [73]
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, annoyed that she’d let Will draw her into a conversation about Jack. She refused to call him anything but that. Just Jack. As if by refusing to acknowledge him by anything other than his first name, she could disavow their blood relationship.
She’d always been better at that than Portia. She wondered if Jack had sent Portia a separate packet of photos. If he’d sent them to the house she and her sister shared, Miranda would have seen them. Maybe he’d intended for them to share the photos, though wouldn’t he have addressed the envelope to both of them? Unless he knew that Portia wasn’t there.
Of course Jack knew Portia wasn’t there; Miranda mentally slapped herself on the forehead with an open palm. She’d been in London last month on a short leave. She must have called him.
I’ll bet every dime I have that she called him.
The thought was so jarring that she sat straight up in her seat. Will looked over at her, one eyebrow raised in question.
“Just . . . dreaming, I guess.” She muttered the first thing that came into her mind.
“You weren’t sleeping,” he noted, and went back to the article he was reading.
“I was almost asleep,” she lied, and settled herself back into her seat again.
The more she thought about it, the more she knew that her sister had met with the enemy. Over the years, Portia had brought up contacting Jack many times, and Miranda had always blown her off. Well, Portia must have tired of waiting for her twin to come around, and had contacted him on her own. How else to explain the photos, the chatty letter, arriving out of the blue after all this time? To the best of her knowledge, he’d never shown much interest in either of his firstborns. Why now, unless Portia had pushed him?
She tried to move past the growing anger, but she found she could not. It was mixed too tightly with a lifetime of bad feelings and a sense of betrayal. She tried not to think about the photographs Jack had sent, but the scenes kept playing over and over in her mind. She’d lied to Will when she’d said she didn’t remember. Of course she remembered.
They’d spent the day on the beach, she and Portia and their mother and Jack, whom Miranda remembered as being impossibly tall, to her eye, the tallest man in the world. And he was strong, strong enough to carry Miranda on one shoulder and Portia on the other. Nancy had stayed on the blanket and snapped that little camera of hers just about every time one of them moved, so that if you placed the pictures in order and fanned them slowly, it was almost like watching a film. Portia used to do that, stack them in order and then flip them, so that she could watch Jack pick her up and plunk her down on his shoulder, then lean over to pick up Miranda and do the same with her. Then he walked for what seemed like forever down the beach, his daughters on his shoulders, all the time talking to them in that deep Brit voice about a beach in England he used to go to as a child, and how he’d take them there sometime.
Of course, he never had. It was all just a game to Jack.
Miranda remembered, too, how her mother had cried herself to sleep the next night, after Jack left. How her face went pale a week later when a photo of him with another of his celebrity girlfriends appeared on the cover of a magazine. There was always someone new for Jack, some beautiful model or singer—or, yes, even a princess. In the magazines, there was always someone young and beautiful on his arm, but never Nancy, who was not beautiful nor particularly talented nor clever—nor was she royal. She was the daughter of two science teachers from a tiny town outside Omaha. Every time Nancy saw one of those photographs, she’d crumble, and she’d stay crumbled for days, leaving her daughters pretty much to fend for themselves until she snapped out of it.
When Miranda was old enough to understand the situation, she’d yelled at her mother for having gone into one of her funks after seeing Jack on some award show.
“Mom, would you look at