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‘Nice,’ Emily said absently. ‘Your photos were lovely,’ her twin added with a poor attempt at enthusiasm. ‘I’m so glad you had a good time. You work too hard. I don’t know what Mum and Pa would do without you. You know they really do appreciate that you passed up university to help them.’

Her sister’s tone brought a puzzled furrow to Elsie’s smooth brow. ‘We’re a family team and, let’s be honest, they’d miss you a lot more than me.’

‘No, that’s not true. I’m totally replaceable. We wouldn’t be having a new roof if I wasn’t.’

Elsie shrugged. ‘All I did was streamline things slightly, introduce some technology, the new platform does all the hard work. I’ve basically made myself redundant.’ Her frown deepened as her twin continued to dodge her gaze. They might not read each other’s thoughts but her twin’s manner was twitchy, bordering shifty.

‘You, on the other hand, can’t be replaced by any restructure. The way you charm potential investors, Em, is nothing short of a miracle, whereas all I do is try and make the accounts look healthy.’

‘You’ve worked miracles, but they are not healthy enough yet are they?’

‘It’s a work in progress, but hey, I’m meant to be the gloomy one.’ She watched her normally sunny twin sit on the window seat, oozing despair. ‘So, what’s up?’ Elsie asked, dropping into a cross-legged pose on Emily’s bed.

Emily, head down, continued to smooth the fabric of her floral skirt.

‘Have the roofers found something else?’ She speculated philosophically about the prospect while silently calculating the cost of dry rot. Half the rooms in the castle were now uninhabitable—they basically kept bucket firms in business— but the work in progress when she’d left was meant to make the worst portion watertight before Christmas. Now, it looked as if that might not happen.

Emily shook her head. ‘No. I think everything is going fine, ahead of schedule.’

Elsie gave a sigh of relief before adding, ‘So?’

‘I’m getting married.’

Having delivered her bombshell, her twin took a large gulp from her refilled wine glass. Elsie pulled her legs out from under her and put her own untouched glass down.

‘Oh, so basically same old, same old…married?’ she squawked, her feathery arched brows pulling together over her small straight nose. ‘Well, I’d say this is sudden but you’ve known Mark half your life—but I thought you two had decided that it made sense to move in together first? So, I am assuming—’ Her eyes dropped to her twin’s flat belly.

‘I’m not pregnant… I wish I was!’ Emily declared ferociously.

This from Emily, who had her life spreadsheeted for the next century!

‘I’m not marrying Mark.’

‘Not Mark?’ Elsie echoed, her blue eyes flickering wide as questions tumbled through her head. ‘I thought you two were back together—normal couples do argue, you know, and you said yourself the row was something and nothing. I thought everything was fine—you sent me the details of those apartments just last week.’ Elsie had looked at them as requested, knowing full well that her twin and the boyfriend she’d had since childhood would spend the next months, possibly years, sifting through possibilities, making endless pro and con lists.

Emily and Mark did nothing spontaneously.

‘That was before.’

‘Before what?’ Her mind juggled a dozen unlikely scenarios that could have led to this announcement. No one would have been surprised if she had made an impetuous decision in the heat of the moment, but not Emily.

‘What did he do?’ It was hard to imagine the young man they had grown up with and was now that rare thing, an idealistic lawyer, doing anything that merited this sort of punishment.

‘He hasn’t done anything. It’s me… I… I’m marrying Leandro Soares,’ she whispered.

‘I thought you just said Leandro Soares.’ Even saying the name sent a rush of shameful sensation through her body. It wasn’t the kiss—it was the fact that she had wanted to kiss him back!

‘I did.’

After several moments of silence, her arm dropped to her side and she forced the name past her dry lips for the second time. ‘Leandro Soares! You can’t do that.’

An image floated into her head: the power of a sleek brown body glistening with water, the carnality of those lips…the challenge glittering in those sloe-black eyes. The man was as far from her sister’s type as it was possible to imagine, but then he was as far from her type too, inasmuch as she had a type, and look what had happened—or hadn’t. But the fact was, it could have.

The fact that she had wanted it to made it no longer seem impossible that her twin had fallen in lust overnight and forgotten that her long-term boyfriend was meant to be her soulmate.

Leandro Soares was the sort of man capable of overriding a woman’s common sense.

Her stomach muscles were clenched so hard for a few seconds she thought she was going to be sick—she couldn’t accept that the nausea was in any way associated with jealousy. She couldn’t be jealous of Emily.