Cooke / Cross Double Trouble (The Coxwells, #2)

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-927477-15-1
Verlag: Deborah A. Cooke
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 286 Seiten

Reihe: The Coxwells

Two sisters. One disaster.
First things first: I'm the bad twin. While my sister, Marcia, has the perfect family in the perfect suburb, I've been making my living as an Internet advice columnist and designing Web sites in my downtown loft. I always thought I had the right answer - and hair color - for any occasion. That is, until Marcia ran up loads of debt and ran out on her husband and kids, and I was left helping to pick up the pieces. Her husband, James, is a lawyer who I hate on principle alone.
But for a guy who's just lost his job, his marriage, and his expensive toys, he's keeping it together - and making me rethink my feelings toward him. It's not that he's traded in his conservative suits for sexy jeans. It's that he's not giving up what's important to him, and oh baby, I'm a sucker for a guy who hangs tough.
That doesn't mean I'm ready to step into Marcia's designer shoes now that she's gone AWOL.
And it doesn't mean I'm going to fall for James's easy charm...not again, anyhow. Besides, I've had a lifelong policy of not being mistaken for my twin and I'm not backing down on that one now - no matter how convenient it might be for a certain sexy (and persuasive) man...
'For a fast-paced, captivating story of romance, family relationships, and following your heart, Double Trouble is not to be missed.'
Romance Reviews Today

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cooke, Deborah

Cross, Claire

Leseproben

Two
Dear Aunt Mary— I’m in love! I’ve found my PURRfect soul mate in a chat room! :-D Any advice on that 1st live meet? Or ::ulp:: on moving across the country? Smitten in St Paul They do say that curiosity killed the cat. This would have been the perfect opportunity for me to just shut up and get on with my life, such as it was. Certainly, no one was asking for my help. But then, they also say that satisfaction brought that cat back, right? That’s one of the major scores of my life. That night, back in what passed for my cozy, safe haven (i.e. a drafty warehouse in a wicked bad neighborhood), I couldn’t let it go. Now, I’m not going to tell you exactly where in Boston this warehouse is, because I don’t want to be responsible for keeping you up nights, fretting yourself senseless over li’l ol’ me. Trust me—I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it for thirty-eight years. Maybe we should take a moment to set the scene, now that you think I’m living in a former pickle factory with broken windows and gangs members doing dastardly deeds in the dark streets hereabouts. It’s actually a nineteenth-century candy factory, the windows aren’t broken because they’re made of glass bricks and the graffiti from the gangs has a certain artistic flair. If nothing else, it decorates the outside of what is otherwise a breathtakingly functional structure. As far as I know, they limit their expressions to calligraphy. That’s all I want to know. Okay, it may not be precisely legal in terms of the zoning for me to be living here, but that’s immaterial—I live in my office. Why not? I work a ton of hours, live, eat and breathe my sweet code. Besides, with two thousand square feet of brick walls, twenty-foot ceilings, and ancient hardwood factory floors, it’s not as if there isn’t room for me too. I have a lot of stainless shelving on wheels—an assembly of that in the vicinity of the sink passes for my kitchen. I sleep on a futon, which makes for a ‘reception area’ by day and offers no privacy whatsoever. Maybe there’s something paranoid deep in my psyche, some forgotten trauma which left an indelible scar, but I need to see all of my surroundings all the time. This place gives me that. I can see all the way to the walls in every direction from any position. What’s beyond the walls I can ignore. How’s that for a trick? There’s only one entrance—a big steel sucker that rolls up like a garage door. You don’t trot too fast over that threshold—the freight elevator shaft is on the other side and some illustrious soul once saw fit to remove the safety grate. There’s a fire escape too, but that door is bolted down hard and rusted too. So, yes, I need to duck not only the zoning inspector but the fire marshal. It adds a certain spice to life. The place is cheap, for how big it is. And the windows are amazing. Rows upon rows of glass bricks, stretching all the way to the ceiling. They have just a little ripple in the glass, not a pattern, so the world beyond looks like a reflection of itself. Or a Monet painting. The light is awesome—not that I’m often awake to see it. It’s a great space and one that took me half of forever to find. I have half of the second floor of the building—the first floor is more showy, but I had security concerns. I can lock down the door and disallow access to my space from the elevator—there’s another smaller elevator at the back of the building to service the other part of this floor. Perfect security. See, there’s nothing domestic about my veritable wall of old monitors and televisions hot-wired to play computer screen. Or on the mounds of computer cadavers, their hard drives and CD-ROMs plucked like the choice morsels of road kill and the rest left to gather dust. People give me old boxes, I buy my share and I get some hot stuff in for beta testing. Beta testing doesn’t pay that well, but it gives me a revenue baseline and with everything powered up all the time, I log enough hours to find some bugs. It also gives me some fearsome juice bills. The tubes are particularly impressive, I think. On a slow day, I hooked them all up to one source and with a flick of the wrist, I can animate the wall that they’re stacked against. Only a geek would appreciate how cool it can look to have umpteen versions of your code dancing in unison—especially in the dead of the night. It’s also a mind-boggling way to play games. On this particular night, it didn’t do a thing for me. Even a pot of primo Jamaican dark roast did little to make me want to get to work. I swiveled in one of my borderline antique chairs—acquired for peanuts at the university property disposition department, like most of my decor—then slung my legs over its arm. I was thinking about James. Not a healthy preoccupation and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop. He’d looked so defeated, that must be it. And who knew the man had a killer grin? I was certain I’d never seen him smile like that. But worse, I was used to seeing him in total control, commander of the universe or something like that. Just how bad were the finances of the Coxwell household? How broke was broke, in my sister’s estimation? Even James seemed pretty stressed about the cash, but then, we were from different worlds, the Coxwells and the O’Reilly’s. He might be down to his last five million or so and feeling the pinch. And Marcia had a pretty high burn rate—coming from nothing teaches you zip about the language of money. I’d come by what fluency I had the hard way, and she’d never been to that part of town. I prowled around, like the proverbial feline on the hunt, unable to concentrate on any of the questions sent to dear opinionated Aunt Mary. I was trying, if you must know, to persuade myself to forget about it. My mother always said that my need to know other people’s business would get me into trouble—not so far, but there’s still time. And I had a feeling that once I started to dig into this, it would be tough to stop. Curiosity won. Wondering was getting me nowhere, and nothing done, after all. James wasn’t the only one who needed billable hours to make the math work. The cost-effective solution was to ferret out the truth, then get back to my diligent labor. Enquiring minds want to know and all that. Of course, it had nothing at all to do with James, or even with Marcia. I couldn’t have cared less whether I ever saw her again or not. I just like to know stuff. What makes people tick. What triggers them. What it takes to get something done. My sister had crossed a little threshold of no return. I wondered—quite naturally—just what it took to push her that far. After all, if she ever came back, I might need to give her a nudge myself. I got on the phone and you know how it is. You know someone who knows someone who knows someone and sooner or later, you’ve got the number of the secured line for some guy somewhere who can negotiate a black market one-time-use fee for a password to a big credit bureau. Is this legal? Don’t be ridiculous. But it’s there, and hurts no one other that the mega-corporation that keeps the database. This is incidentally the same mega-corporation which has tried to ruin my life on several occasions, through absolutely no fault of my own. It’s not as if I have a vendetta against them, but defrauding them of a hundred bucks here and now wasn’t even going to make a bleep on my moral radar screen. See, I made a bad marital choice, but am hardly the only one who ever did that. Why should it cost me for the rest of my blessed life? Okay, the guy was a loser—I should have insisted in the divorce papers that he have an “L” tattooed on his forehead, as a warning to all my unsuspecting single sisters—but enough is enough. The last drop of blood I had to pay to be rid of him forever was coming up due in a few weeks and I had the cash coming in, right on time. Amnesty from the IRS would be mine shortly. Finally. Monkey off my back and all that. It’s been my holy grail for what seems like most of my life, but has really only been about six years. Only. Ha. I tell you, I should plan a major celebration. It’s got to be worth a bottle of the good stuff to get your life back from them. It’s not as if anyone’s going to reclaim my gray hairs. Anyhoo, defrauding this corporate entity who blew the whistle and got this steamroller going in the first place is a zero guilt decision—in fact, it’s a matter of principle. I like bucking the system, after all, AND backing...