Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [4]
She’d tackle chapter six after dinner.
No sign of Becca.
Don’t be a worrywart. She’ll be back. Sighing, she shut the door, snapped her hair into a ponytail and, as the cabin grew darker, flipped on a lamp near the front door.
Her thoughts crept down a forbidden path, a crooked trail that still led to Thane Walker. She hadn’t seen him in years but imagined he was just as sexy and irreverent as ever, a lone-cowboy type complete with a Wyoming swagger and enough lines in his face to add an edge of severity to already-harsh features. The kind of man to avoid. The kind of man who attracted trouble. The only man who had ever been able to make Maggie’s blood run hot with only one cynical glance.
“Forget it,” she told herself. She must’ve imagined the whole scene in the barn. She’d only thought she’d heard Mary Theresa’s “voice” because it had been so long, so many silent months without a word from her twin. She walked to the fireplace and plucked an old framed photo from the mantel. It had been taken nearly ten years earlier, when Mary Theresa, who had reinvented herself as simply Marquise, à la Cher or Madonna, was about to launch her own Denver-based talk show. The two sisters stood back to back, identical twins except that they were mirror images. Mary Theresa was left-handed, Maggie used her right; one side of Mary’s mouth lifted more than the other, the opposite was true of her sister. One of Mary Theresa’s pinkies turned inward—the right. On Maggie, it was the left.
Maggie felt a smile tease her lips as she ran a finger over the faded snapshot. She and Mary Theresa both had auburn hair that curled wildly, but Mary Theresa’s had been highlighted with gold and framed her face in soft layers while Maggie’s had been scraped back into her ever-functional ponytail. Mary Theresa had worn a short, shimmering black dress, a designer original, complemented with a strand of pearls, black hose and three-inch heels. She’d been on her way to a party with some once-upon-a-time celebrities.
At that same frozen moment in time Maggie had worn sneakers, jeans, and a flannel shirt with a tail that flapped in the wind and had balanced three-year-old Becca on one outthrust hip. With the snow-shrouded Rocky Mountains as a backdrop, the two sisters braced themselves on each other, then swiveled their heads to grin into the camera. Bright I-can-take-on-the-world smiles, rosy cheeks, a smattering of freckles and green eyes that snapped with fire had stared into the lens.
It seemed like ages ago.
A lifetime.
She set the photo on the mantel, where it had been, between pictures of all stages of Becca’s life as well as her own, then glanced outside. The evening was gathering fast, stars visible through the thin layer of clouds.
“Come on, Becca,” she worried aloud as she snapped on the exterior light and stepped onto the front porch. Silently she hoped for some sign of Jasper galloping toward the barn. But there was no sound of hoofbeats, no glimpse of a gray horse appearing over the slight rise of the field. Instead she heard a breath of wind sighing through the dry leaves that still clung to the trees and the clatter of a train rolling on far-off tracks. Again the howl of a coyote on some nearby hill.
Her gaze scoured the distance.
An answering soulful cry, lonely and echoing, reverberated across the land and put Maggie’s teeth on edge. Leaning one hip against the porch rail, she tried to find the sense of calm, of well-being that she’d been looking for when she’d leased this place at the first of the year.
Everything’s fine; you’re just letting your overactive imagination get the better of you. If you were smart, Maggie-girl, you’d use this to your advantage, go inside, pour yourself a cup of coffee and start writing. You’ve got a deadline in your not-too-distant future.
Nervously she fidgeted with the wedding ring that she still wore on her hand. It was a joke really, something she’d have to give up, but couldn’t quite. Not yet.
She’d reached for the