She ducked down to give him her knowing half smile. “Right-for your sister’s wedding.”

He gave her back a huff of unamused laughter. “If you really want to hear the story, come by my hotel after work. I’ll buy you a drink-or you can buy me one.”

“A drink?”

“A beer…martini…something with an umbrella in it-hell, I don’t care.”

Her smile broadened. “How ’bout a Diet Coke?”

“Whatever turns you on,” he heard himself say, and it wasn’t something he was in the habit of saying.

“Where are you staying?” Her voice was both husky and breathless, and the frisson of awareness took another meander across his skin.

He gave her the name of his hotel, a good-size one located well off the Strip. She nodded. “I know where it is.” She straightened and firmly closed the door.

Holt watched her walk away, watched a stiff November wind lift the blond feathers of her hair to catch the desert sunlight. And, after a while, let go of the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

He was driving back to his hotel when his cell phone rang. Since he wasn’t a big fan of people who tried to talk on their cell phones and drive at the same time, he picked it up and glanced at it to see if it was somebody he could ignore. When he saw who it was, he thumbed it on, said, “Hang on a minute…” and pulled into a strip mall parking lot. He turned into the first vacant spot he came to and turned off the motor, then picked up the phone again.

“Brooke-”

“Have you seen her? Is it her?” Her voice was high and anxious, on the edge of tears.

“I’ve just come from having lunch with her-”

“Oh God…”

“-and, to be perfectly honest, I can’t be sure. She says she’s not your sister, but…”

Now her voice dropped to a husky mutter. “I don’t understand.”

Holt sighed deeply. “Look, I’m pretty sure Billie Farrell and Brenna Fallon are one and the same. She’s probably got her reasons for not wanting to admit it. I imagine it wasn’t easy being on her own at fourteen. She’s learned to be careful about who she trusts.”

“Did you tell her-” Brooke expelled a breath in an impatient hiss and reined herself in. “Yes, okay. But the pictures I gave you-has she changed so much?” Her voice was wistful, close to tears again.

He ran a weary hand over his eyes; he was beginning to feel the effects of a night without sleep. “Hard to tell. If I could just see her eyes…” He gave a huff of frustrated laughter. “But she wouldn’t take off the damn dark glasses.”

Brooke laughed, too, a small gulp. “I know, I keep watching the poker game over and over, screaming at the TV screen, Dammit, Bren, take off the damn sunglasses!”

There was a long pause, and then she said softly, “She has very distinctive eyes, Holt. Not like mine, or Cory’s. Hers are…I guess they’re what you call hazel. But they’re sort of golden, actually. Almost the same color as her hair.”

“According to Cory,” Holt said, “those are your mother’s eyes. Your brother Matt has them, too.”

Billie was in her bathroom, huddled under the warm shower spray, trying to think.

She’d asked for the afternoon off, pleading illness, and since she’d never done such a thing before, ever, her boss had not only given it to her, but had expressed his concern for her health.

“Probably just a bug-one of those twenty-four-hour flu things,” Billie had told him. And the truth was, she did feel kind of sick to her stomach.

She didn’t know what to do. She really had not seen this coming. The thing with Miley, yeah; she always had suspected her past would come back to haunt her one day. She just hadn’t thought the ghosts would come from so far in her past.

Every instinct she had was telling her to get the heck out of Dodge-she’d even gotten her old suitcase down out of the overhead storage in her parking garage, but had left it sitting empty beside the back door. Because what was the point? Holt Kincaid had managed to find her once, and he’d surely find her again, no matter where she ran. She couldn’t go back on the streets where she could vanish into the legions of anonymous dispossessed; she wasn’t fourteen anymore-she was a grown-up member of society, fully documented and therefore traceable.

What was she going to do? What could she do?

It was at that point in her panic that she’d headed for the shower. She did some of her best thinking in the shower.

So. What were her options?

Running would always be her first choice, but in this case, probably a bad one. Not only would it be futile, at best only postponing the inevitable, but there was the thing about brothers. Holt Kincaid had said brothers.

Admit it, Billie, you’re dying to know what that’s about.

And, the man with the answers is dying to tell you.

So why don’t you do it? Go see the man, buy him that drink-or let him buy you one-and see what he has to say. What are you afraid of?

Afraid?

That did it. She turned off the water and yanked back the shower curtain. Grabbed a towel and scrubbed her skin rosy and her hair into layers of spikes, every movement jerky with anger. If there was anything in the world Billie hated, it was being afraid. She was done with being afraid. Done long ago with feeling scared and helpless. Knowledge was power, right? These days, Billie Farrell was all about having the power. Which meant she had to have the knowledge.

And the man with the knowledge was Holt Kincaid.

The ringing telephone dragged Holt into consciousness from the depths of a sound and dreamless sleep. He groped first for his cell phone, then realized it was the room phone that was making the racket.

What the hell? he thought. A glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand told him it was three o’clock in the afternoon, since it was obviously daylight. Too early for Billie to be off work. He picked up the receiver and growled, “Kincaid.”

“Hey, you up for that drink?”

“Billie?” He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, scrubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Where are you?”

“In the lobby. What’s the matter, did I wake you up?”

“Yeah, well…I didn’t get much sleep last night.” He was wide awake now, and his heart was going a mile a minute.

“So you coming down, or what?”

“Yeah, sure. Give me five minutes.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll be in the bar. Want me to order for you?”

“Make it the coffee shop,” Holt said, swallowing a yawn. “You can order me a cup of coffee-black.”

As he lurched into the bathroom to splash water on his face and run a comb through his hair, he was wondering one thing: Would Billie be wearing her sunglasses?

In the parlance of Vegas, he was willing to lay odds on it.

Billie would have given a lot to be able to keep her heart from pounding when she saw Holt Kincaid standing in the entrance to the coffee shop. But although she’d learned to control a good many of her body’s natural reflexes, pulse rate wasn’t one of them.

Schooling her visible movements to be slow, careful, deliberate, she picked up her Coke and took a sip, then watched over the rim of the moisture-beaded glass as he spoke to the hostess, who pointed him toward the table where she was sitting. She smiled as she saw the hostess’s body language change in the subtle and indefinable ways of a woman in the presence of a very attractive man.

He was attractive, no denying that. Wearing the same slacks, jacket and open-at-the-neck dress shirt he’d had on this morning, he didn’t look quite so out of place in the hotel restaurant as he had wandering among the potted plants at the garden center. But no matter what kind of setting he found himself in, she thought, Holt Kincaid wasn’t a man to fade into the woodwork.

The hostess’s eyes followed him as he zigzagged his way across the almost-empty dining room, and so did Billie’s. When he pulled out the chair opposite her, she saw that he had a bedspread wrinkle across one cheek, and something in her chest did a peculiar little flip.

Another thing she hadn’t learned to control-yet. She definitely needed to work on that.

Holt settled into the chair and reached for the cup of coffee steaming on the table in front of him, gave her a little nod of greeting and drawled, “Miss Billie.”

“Wow,” she said, lifting her eyebrows, “that didn’t sound like California.”

He drank coffee, grimaced and set it down. “I said I live in L.A. I was born and raised in Georgia.”

“Really. You don’t have an accent. Usually.”

“I left the South behind fairly early on. It still crops up now and again, I guess.”

Most people would have missed the slight flinching of the soft skin around his eyes when he said that, but Billie didn’t. And she thought, Aha. He’s got ghosts in his past, too.

She filed the knowledge away for future reference.

“Sorry about your nap,” she said, and her eyes kept coming back to the wrinkle mark on his cheek. She had the strongest desire to reach out and touch it. Why did it seem so poignant to her? Something about that mark on the supercool, iron-hard Clint Eastwood clone brought to mind images of unexpected innocence…or vulnerability.

He regarded her while he drank coffee, then said, “I wasn’t expecting you this early.”

“Well, here I am.” She lifted a shoulder, not about to concede how badly she wanted what he had to give her. Billie didn’t give her opponents that kind of advantage over her, not if she could help it.

Holt didn’t say anything, just watched her over the rim of his coffee cup. She fought down impatient anger and said lightly, “You were going to tell me a story.”

His eyebrows rose. He set down the cup. “Just like that? No social niceties?”

She gave a little tiff of sarcastic laughter. “Social niceties? What do you want to do, put money in the jukebox and dance?”

Unbidden, the thought popped into Holt’s head that dancing with Billie Farrell might be a very nice thing. Unsettled by the notion, he gave her a thoughtful smile. For a moment the air between them did the sizzle and crackle thing, and then he thought, What the hell am I doing? He cleared his throat, shifted around in his chair and frowned. “I’m just trying to think where to start.”

“How about, who hired you to find…this woman?”

He nodded. “Fair enough. His name is Cory Pearson.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No,” said Holt, “of course you haven’t. But the story begins with him. When Cory was a little kid his dad went off to fight in Vietnam. He came back changed-nothing like the loving daddy who used to tell his little boy bedtime stories he made up himself. He was moody and withdrawn…started drinking heavily, couldn’t hold a job. It was a familiar story at that time.

“Anyway, as time went on, the family grew to include four more children-two boys, and then twin girls. When their father was having one of his spells of PTSD, it was Cory’s job to keep the little ones out of his way while his mother tried to talk her husband back from whatever hell he’d gotten lost in. Finally, one night when the little girls-the twins-were about two, their father had a violent episode during which he shot his wife and then himself.”

“Good God,” Billie exclaimed.

Holt nodded, picked up his cup and found it empty. A waitress appeared to refill it. He thanked her, waited until she had left, then went on. All the while Billie sat without moving, without seeming to breathe, even, her face gone still and pale as death.

“Since there was no other family, the kids were taken by social services. Evidently, no foster family could be found to take all five, so they were farmed out all over the system. Eventually, the four younger children were adopted-the two boys by one family, the twins by another.”

Billie spoke almost without moving her lips, and devoid of all inflection. “What about Cory?”

“He was older, about twelve by that time. Too old for most adoptive parents to consider. He stayed in foster care for a while, but ran away so many times trying to find his brothers and baby sisters, that he eventually wound up in juvenile detention. By the time he graduated out of the system when he was eighteen, his brothers and sisters had vanished-adopted and gone.”

Billie muttered under her breath.

Holt nodded. “He was just a kid, and a known troublemaker at that. What could he do?” He paused, cleared his throat and wondered whether, behind those dark lenses, there might, just possibly, be tears in her eyes. Was it his wishful thinking, or did her mouth have a softness about it he hadn’t seen before?

As if determined to deny that, she cleared her throat and said harshly, “Okay, so he’s hired you to find the four siblings-I get it. So why did he wait so long? Vietnam-that had to be…what, thirty years ago?”