with your brothers?” she asked cautiously. She didn’t mean to pry—it certainly fell under the category of none of her business—but she was curious.
“Probably,” came his bleak answer. He studied the ice pack in his hand, turning it slowly. He looked at her. “You got brothers or sisters?” he asked.
Startled by his question, she only stared for a moment. He mistook her hesitation and waved away her need to answer but for some reason she wanted to. “I have a twin sister,” she said.
He eyed her. “Someone who looks just like you or the other kind?”
“Someone who looks just like me,” she said, then added with a fierce glower, “but we’re nothing alike. She’s more like our mother. I take after my father.”
“Where are you from?”
How to answer…She supposed she was from Manhattan but really, her family had houses all over the place. They’d wintered in Manhattan, summered in the Hamptons, it was all so cliché. Her mother had made sure the Rose family was always in the right social circles, attended the right parties, dressed to impress. The whole shallow, superficial nonsense made Aubrey want to gag. Noting Sammy’s expectant expression, she made something up. “Vermont.”
Why she said Vermont she hadn’t a clue but for some reason she couldn’t just admit that she’d grown up a privileged nomad, living mostly in hotel penthouses and the occasional sumptuous cottage. Vermont sounded rustic and accessible. She tried to smile but gave up when it felt forced. Returning to what was safe, she gestured to the ice pack. “You need to keep that on or the swelling won’t go down. Tomorrow, your jaw will be sore,” she advised, grabbing her purse to leave. “Good night, Mr. Halvorsen.”
SAMMY WATCHED AS AUBREY LEFT, bothered by her stiff manner with him. She persisted in calling him Mr. Halvorsen, which made him feel like an old man, and she made sure there was an invisible line between them that she didn’t even come close to crossing. That’s a good thing, his inner voice reminded, but it still didn’t sit right with him. He was a lady killer of the first rate but this woman was immune to his charms. Well, to be fair, he hadn’t really turned up the wattage when it came to her. He wasn’t attracted to her sort, anyway. And what sort was she? the voice challenged. Not easy to reel in, he answered darkly. Pressing the ice pack to his face, he allowed a groan since he was alone. He suffered the pain while Aubrey was there but now…shit, that hurt. So Aubrey was a twin, he mused. Interesting. He couldn’t imagine two of her running around. She mentioned they were nothing alike. Did that mean her sister was prone to giggling, flashing bright pearly smiles and flirting? He tried to picture Aubrey being like that and it was too much for his meager imagination, not to mention the headache that had begun to pulse behind his eyeball. He sighed and tossed the ice pack in the sink to melt. It was probably a good thing Aubrey was a little on the uptight side. If pressed, he’d have to admit she wasn’t hard on the eyes. When she wasn’t scowling at him, that was.
CHAPTER FIVE
AUBREY GRIPPED THE PHONE a little tighter and pressed her lips together to keep the distressed sound in her brain from escaping through her mouth.
“Mother, you hate the country,” she reminded Barbie, silently wondering how on earth she’d been found. Then she remembered a short conversation with Arianna before she’d left, mentioning the small California town of Emmett’s Mill. “And you’d really hate it here. There is nothing but trees and country folk, two things that you find little to recommend. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be opening the Manhattan apartment for the season?” she asked, almost desperately.
“Aubrey, if I didn’t know better I’d say you were trying to keep me from visiting,” Barbie said with a sniff. “I am your mother. It’s my duty to see what you’re about, even if you’ve decided to exile yourself to the sticks of California.”
The way she said California made it sound as though she’d just compared it to Tijuana.
“I’m not exiling myself, Mother,” Aubrey said between gritted teeth. “I wanted a change in scenery and Emmett’s Mill seemed a nice getaway from the city.”
“Yes, but did you truly need to go so far? You could have easily taken in the country in the Hamptons, although this time of year it’s dreadful, as you know, but still it would’ve been preferable to this…what is the place called, Everest Hill?”
“Emmett’s Mill,” Aubrey corrected and mentally counted to ten.
“Whatever. What’s with the fascination with this town? I’d never even heard of it until Arianna mentioned that’s where you were. All this time when you said you wanted a change of scenery I thought you meant you wanted to go to Europe for a bit.”
Aubrey felt truly invaded with her mother poking and prodding at her personal reasons for moving and it chafed no end. She wasn’t about to tell her mother that she fell in love with Emmett’s Mill through the pages of a magazine. American Photographic had featured Emmett’s Mill in one of their annual Twenty Best Places To Live and Aubrey had worn the pages thin from the many times she’d gazed at the images, wishing she could just insert herself into those colorful, quaint photos. Everything in that pictorial had seemed so much better than the life she was living at the time. Of course, that was around the time that her relationship with Derek had started to unravel. Anything might’ve seemed like Eden as long as it was far from New York.
“It doesn’t matter what brought me here, Mother,” she said a bit sharply. “This is my home now and I love it.”
“No need to get snippy, Aubrey,” her mother admonished. “I was only curious. It just seems so random, that’s all.”
“Well, perhaps it was but now I’m quite happy.”
“Excellent. Then you’ll enjoy showing us the sights.”
Aubrey knew that the moment her mother stepped foot in Emmett’s Mill she was likely to declare there were no sights to see, so Aubrey figured it was best to avoid the whole fiasco of a visit in the first place. She tried a different route to dissuade her mother from her plan to visit, and by visit she meant berate Aubrey constantly for ruining her life and by proxy Barbie’s life. “Besides, Mother, I really don’t have time to visit. I have a full-time job as a nanny for this adorable little boy and so it would be a wasted trip. And I thought you and Arianna had plans to redecorate the apartment? You know that will take at least a few months just to agree on the designer.”
Arianna and Barbie always quibbled over taste and style, sending more than one designer running away in frustration at their inability to come to an agreement on anything from textiles to color. The very idea of being caught in their web of misery was enough to make Aubrey want to live in a cave.
“Oh, Aubrey,” Barbie said in distaste. “Being a glorified babysitter is not what anyone would call a career. You’re an Ivy League graduate for crying out loud. If you’re not going to use your good looks to their full potential and snag a suitable husband—which really, you should give another thought to as you’re not getting any younger—then you might as well find a way to put that ridiculous degree of yours to use.”
“I am putting that degree to good use, Mother,” she said, her blood pressure rising with each syllable dripping with disdain from her mother’s professionally plumped lips. “I have a degree in child psychology and a minor in child development. I guess you could say I’m an expert in the field of raising children to be happy, well-adjusted adults.”
“Darling,
