to him and slapped him hard across the face.
He was too stunned to respond for a moment. He’d never been slapped before. Somehow, being hit by a stranger made it that much worse. She hadn’t hurt him, not really. It just stung, but he could feel the emotion behind the slap. She’d wanted to hurt him, and for good reason. He just didn’t know what that was.
There was a collective gasp as the whole ballroom seemed equally aghast, then a murmur as everyone started discussing what was going on. Out of the corner of his eye, Sawyer could see a couple brawny security guards his father had hired for the party making their way across the room to deal with the situation. Given that the last two events at the house had ended in a kidnapping and a bombing, respectively, it was a good move to have a little extra help in that regard.
“I’m going to have to ask you to come with us, ma’am,” one of the guards, wearing a black suit and an earpiece, said.
The redhead hesitated for only a moment before she spun on her heel and marched out of the ballroom with the two guards right behind her. She’d done what she’d come here to do, apparently.
Although he knew he shouldn’t abandon his date to chase down the stranger, he had to go after the woman and figure out what was going on. “I’ll be right back.”
Serena nodded, and he jogged out of the ballroom and into the entry hall to see if he could find where security had taken the woman. Sawyer glanced around, catching a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye as the men escorted the woman out the front door.
He chased her across the marble entry and pushed past the guards as they came back inside without her. At the top of the front stairs, he looked down and saw the woman waiting for a parking attendant to bring her car.
“I told you to keep it close!” she shouted at one of the men his parents had hired to manage all the cars at the wedding. “This wasn’t going to take long. Especially with those goons seeing me out after less than a minute.” She nervously glanced over her shoulder, and that was when she spied Sawyer standing at the top of the stairs.
“Do you normally wear black to weddings?” he asked. Asking why she’d slapped him seemed like jumping ahead in a conversation he wasn’t ready to wrap up so quickly. “Isn’t that against the rules or something?”
She sighed and crossed her hands over her chest. “It was the only nice dress I had that still fit. No offense to your sister. Anyway, don’t mind me,” she said. “Security has made it clear I’m not welcome, so I’m leaving. Go on back to your hot blonde. You’ve obviously moved on.”
Sawyer took a few steps down the stairs to get closer, but out of arm’s reach of the woman. He wasn’t getting hit twice in one night. “I’m sorry, there’s been some kind of mistake, I think. Do I know you?” The stinging welt on his cheek suggested that he did, but he was certain he’d never laid eyes on her before. She was stunning, even in the plain strapless black dress and simple makeup she was wearing. Her red hair shimmered in the moonlight, and fat curls cascaded over her bare shoulders.
No, he would remember meeting her.
“Are you serious?” She rolled her eyes, which were a dark shade of green like antique emeralds, and shook her head. “You ignored me for weeks after we got together, then when I finally track you down, you act like you have no idea what I’m even talking about. What? Are you going to tell me your evil doppelgänger slept with me, not you?”
Sawyer opened his mouth to argue, then stopped cold. Now it all started to make sense. Why hadn’t he realized this sooner? Women slapped his brother all the time. Or at least they should. It might help things. “I think you’re actually looking for my twin brother, not me.”
“That’s an even better excuse,” she said.
“It’s not an excuse. Ask anyone in the party and they’ll tell you I have an identical twin brother. Most people can’t tell us apart.”
She narrowed her gaze at him for a moment. “So you’re saying you’re not Sawyer Steele?”
Sawyer stopped as he opened his mouth to answer. It was one thing for her to confuse him with his brother, but this was different. “No, I am Sawyer Steele. But I think you’re looking for my twin, Finn Steele.”
The woman turned to him with her hands curled up in fists at her sides. “Are you implying that I’m some kind of slut?”
His eyes grew large with surprise. Sawyer was usually pretty good with people, very diplomatic at handling bad situations, but he couldn’t say the right thing to this woman for some reason. Her hair was as fiery as her temper, it seemed. “What? No, of course not.”
“You just told me I don’t know the name of a man I had sex with,” she said, pointing at him accusingly.
“That’s not what I meant.” He held out his hands in surrender and slowly came down the stairs to stand on the brick patio where she was waiting. He hoped that she would take a minute to breathe and calm down. “People get my brother and me mixed up all the time, is all. I’m telling you I’ve never seen you in my life, so that’s the only explanation that makes sense. What is your name?”
“Katherine McIntyre.” She said it with an insulted tone, as though he should know her name. “I go by Kat, if that helps jog your memory.”
Sawyer frowned. To be honest, the name did sound familiar, but he was certain he’d never seen her before, much less had sex with her. He glanced down over the tightly fitting black dress, which clung to her curves and stopped just above the knee to highlight her shapely legs. He was decidedly disappointed that she’d spent the night with his brother and not him. He wasn’t entirely sure that he had a type, but Kat set off all the right bells and whistles. She was a bright red Lamborghini if he’d ever seen one.
When his face didn’t light up with recognition, she continued speaking. “We met at the Charleston’s Best awards at the aquarium about three months ago. We had a lot of champagne, we talked, and when we got tired of looking at fish, we got a hotel room and got…better acquainted.” Kat looked at him with a pointed expression.
Sawyer didn’t remember going to an event at the aquarium. Actually, he was certain he hadn’t, although he remembered something was being held there a while back. That was it—he hadn’t been feeling great that day. He’d gotten a stomach bug, but he was supposed to attend as the Steele family representative to accept their award while his parents were wrapped up in finalizing wedding details. He hadn’t gone. In fact, he’d bribed his twin brother to go to the event in his place. Finn hadn’t wanted to attend, either. Sawyer had been forced to give him his new Jet Ski in exchange for going to the party.
Damn it to hell.
The realization of what really happened washed over him like a wave. Sawyer brought a hand to his face and rubbed furiously at it in frustration. It had been years since Finn had done something like this. Maybe even since college. Back then, he’d liked to meet girls at bars and give them Sawyer’s name instead of his own. He was never sure if his brother just did it for a laugh, or to keep the girls from tracking him down, but Sawyer had earned quite a reputation on campus without doing a single thing to get it. But now they were in their thirties. Thirty-three, to be exact. Way too old for this kind of childish bullshit.
“I think I know what the problem is.”
“The sex was so amazing you blocked
