Free Be My Baby Tonight by Kasey Michaels Page A

is
yours.” She took the plastic bag from him anyway as he followed
along, holding Margo’s carrier.
    “Yeah,” he said, giving her a slight pat on
the backside with his now free hand. “I like this part pretty well.
Thanks.”
    “Don’t mention it,” she told him, locking the
dead bolt “Please.”
    “And I like this part,” he continued as if
she hadn’t spoken, bending to kiss the tip of her nose. “And this
part...” he went on, lowering his head to kiss the bit of skin
revealed by the vee in her sweater. “And this—”
    “Okay, okay, I get it,” she said, quickly
stepping away from him. She was so nervous! “Here, carry my
overnight bag. I think you need your hands occupied.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, looking about as
innocent as a thirteen-year-old with a copy of his dad’s Playboy stuck between his mattress and box spring. “But
everything I have is also yours, remember. What parts do you like
best?”
    She raised her eyebrows, lowered her eyelids,
tried to look stern.
    He grinned at her.
    Oh, what the hell.
    “Your eyes,” she admitted. “I’ve always been
crazy about your eyes.”
    “Really?” he said, following after her, out
into the parking lot. “But they’re the same blue eyes Jack’s got.
Same color, same eyes.”
    She stopped, turned, handed him the car key
she’d fished out of her purse. “No, they’re not. They’re not even
close. How do you think I was always able to tell you apart? Now,
come on. We’ve got to drop off Margo and get to Philly, before Sam
Kizer puts out an APB for you.”
    He trotted after her, to keep up. “We’ll talk
about my eyes again, later? Because this is interesting, Suze. I
mean, Jack and I are identical twins. So what is it about my eyes
that’s different from Jack’s?”
    She blew out a quick breath. “Okay, but only
because you’re going to drive me crazy until I tell you. It’s the
devil, Tim. He peeks out through your eyes. Jack got the angel, and
you got the devil. Happy now?”
    He sort of tipped his head from side to side,
as if considering what she’d said. “Yeah, okay. I kind of like
that. Ready to roll, babe?”
    She sighed. Someday, in twenty years or so,
maybe she’d tell him she hated when he called her babe.
    For now, she’d just go with the flow....
    * * *
    Tim steered Suzanna’s late-model four-door
sedan down the narrow macadam road, past Jack and Keely’s place and
several other large homes built on three-acre lots sold to them by
Jack, who pretty much owned this entire small mountain. They
crossed over the small, one-lane bridge that spanned the narrow
Coplay Creek that flowed in front of Tim’s property, then pulled
into the long drive that led up to his own house.
    “There’s no time to stop in, see Jack and his
wife?”
    Tim shook his head as he parked the car on
the circular drive outside his mansion—his “pseudo Tudor” mansion
his Aunt Sadie had informed him—with lots of brown brick, dark
wood, and that stucco stuff. “We’ve got about ten minutes, tops, to
see Mrs. Butterworth, drop off Margo, and get moving again. Come
on, we’ll go through the house, out the kitchen, so you can see
some of the place. But just look, don’t stop.”
    “Bossy,” Suzanna said, opening her own car
door as Tim reached in the back, removed Margo’s carrier.
    When he joined her, she was standing very
still, looking up at the house. “So? What do you think?”
    “It’s big,” she said. “Very big.”
    “I know. Aunt Sadie sent me all these books,
with pictures in them, floor plans. We were out west, on a long
road trip, and I didn’t have much else to do anyway, so I looked at
the books. This is the one I liked best. I moved in just before
Thanksgiving last year.”
    “Henry the Eighth would have liked it, too,”
she said, heading up the three brick steps that were fashioned in a
huge semicircle around the front doors—two dark brown wooden things
with leaded glass inserts. A battering ram