A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (22 page)

I opened my eyes to find him regarding me in that intent way he had. I read triumph and satisfaction in his eyes. And something. A question?

He withdrew and pushed into me again. To my astonishment my knees came up and my arms wrapped themselves around him.

“Hold on,” he said in a hoarse voice. “It's going to be a rough ride.”

It was. And incredibly I was ready for it. As he drove into me again and again, each stroke built in speed and intensity. My world narrowed to this man, the heat and hardness of his body, his hands,
and the movement of him inside of me. I felt another climax building, more slowly this time, but as we raced toward it together, I felt parts of myself slipping away.

“Come with me.” His voice was harsh in my ear. “Now.”

I had no choice. When the first wild spasm tore through me, I cried out. But it didn't end there. He showed me more, driving me up again until I knew only that searing heat. And him. His voice joined mine as I gave myself to him and we flew over that last peak together.

 

Sloan came back to awareness slowly. He couldn't think. All he knew were sensations. His face was buried in Red's hair, his body pressing hers into the mattress. His heart was racing, his breath coming in gasps.

And he was trembling. That was a first. A little sliver of fear moved through him. What in the world was she doing to him? Still dazed, he raised his head and studied her. Her eyes were half-closed, her skin still flushed from passion.

He'd wondered where it would lead when he made love to her. But he hadn't expected this…this loss of self. How could he? How could a man anticipate something he'd never experienced before? Something he was already wanting to experience again.

Incredibly, he felt a fresh wave of desire ripple through him. How could she do this to him—this woman who looked so much like Cameron. But who wasn't Cameron.

“Who the hell are you?”

“W
ho the hell are you?”

The question, especially the not-so-friendly tone of it, blew some of the fuzz out of my brain. I opened my mouth, not at all sure what was going to come out, but Sloan pressed a finger against my lips to silence me.

“Don't even think of lying, Red. I know that you're not Cameron McKenzie.”

Okay, the jig was up. There was always the possibility that someone would see through my impersonation. But I couldn't think of a worse spot to be in—lying naked beneath the man who'd just unmasked me. Worse than that, I was lying naked
beneath a man I'd just had mind-blowing sex with. A man that I incredibly wanted again, so my brain was still deep in the fuzzy zone. Otherwise, I might have thought up something. Anything.

“What's your name?”

“Brooke Ashby.”

“Brooke Ashby.” He said the name as if he were testing it on his tongue. “I can check it out.”

“Yes, you can.” Temper began to flare inside of me. “And you can get off me.”

He rubbed his thumbs over my cheekbones, and something else began to fire up inside of me.

“I'm not moving until you tell me what game you're playing, Brooke Ashby.”

“Game?”

“You come here with an amnesia story and pass yourself off as Cameron McKenzie. Several scenarios have occurred to me. In one of them, I figure you came across a picture of Cameron, were struck by the resemblance, and decided that impersonating her was the ticket to getting your hands on her inheritance.”

I stared at him. Had seducing me been just part of his plan to unmask me? Well, I didn't like his tactics. Or rather I'd liked them too much.

“Get off me!” I shoved hard against his shoulders, but I might as well have been trying to move one of those boulders on the bluff. “What kind of
man are you? You thought that I would do something like that and…and yet you made love to me?”

“Yeah. And I want to again.”

I felt the truth of what he was saying inside me. And I felt my body's reaction. There was a part of me that was angry, but there was also a part of me that was almost weeping to have him moving in me again. Since I wasn't having much luck controlling how my body was responding, I concentrated on keeping my brain unfuzzed. “That's not going to happen.”

“Yeah, it is.” As if to prove his point, he surged forward, and we both felt the way my body reacted. Heard the way my breath caught in my throat.

Sloan withdrew. “We'll get to that in a minute. First, I want the truth about what you're doing here.”

“I'll need to breathe. And I'll be able to think more clearly if you get off of me.”

“Fair enough.” He rolled to my side, but he kept an arm around my waist and one leg over mine. “But you're not getting out of this bed until you answer my questions.”

My mind raced for a moment trying to decide just what to tell him. But he hadn't moved far enough away for me to completely get the static out of my brain.

Finally, I did what I usually do when my back is
against the wall. I went with impulse. Not that following my impulses always got me out of scrapes. Case in point—giving in to my impulse to make love with Sloan Campbell. But I wanted to tell someone, and since Sloan already knew that I was an imposter, he was the most likely candidate and perhaps he could be useful. “If I tell you, will you help me find out what happened to Cameron?”

His gaze remained steady on mine. “Then she didn't send you here?”

“No. Why would you think that? Oh. The face-saving thing again? She sends me here to seduce you. Then she has a good reason not to go through with the wedding.” I stared at him. It would make a great story line for Mallory Carstairs on
Secrets
. But… “Would Cameron actually do something like that?”

“She has a lot of her father in her. She likes to play games.”

Evidently, the big difference between Cameron and me was that I could dream up plot lines, but she could really carry them out.

“Did James have a hand in your coming here?” Sloan asked.

“No. And you haven't answered my question. If I tell you, will you help me find out what's happened to Cameron?”

“Why do you think something's happened to her?”

“Because I'm her twin, and I can feel it.”

Surprise flickered over his face. “Her twin?” He frowned. “I don't think so. Cameron doesn't have a twin sister.”

“I didn't think I had one, either, until five weeks ago. That's when I received an anonymous letter telling me that I was adopted.”

I found that telling him about the letter was like pulling my finger out of a dike. Everything else came pouring out with it. I told him about talking to my parents and how they'd confirmed I was adopted and that my whole life had been a lie. I told him about hiring Pepper and what she'd discovered and my decision to come to the ranch to find out what I could about Cameron.

Spilling all the beans probably wasn't my wisest strategy, but Sloan was a good listener. He didn't interrupt, didn't react in a judgmental way. And it was helping, I found, to put everything I'd discovered so far into words.

I also became aware that lying there in his bed and revealing all my secrets to him was almost as intimate as making love with him had been. For a while after I was finally finished, he didn't say a word. My insides twisted into knots. What must he think of me? I claimed that I'd come to the ranch to
find out what had happened to my newly discovered sister, and as part of my little adventure, I'd agreed to marry him on Friday and then I'd slept with him. Looking at it from an objective point of view, his scenario about my coming here seemed a lot more feasible than the truth.

But when he finally spoke, all Sloan said was, “So you're telling me that you believe Cameron and you are twin sisters, separated at birth and both put up for adoption.”

“Yes. Except Cameron wasn't adopted, was she?”

He was looking at me in that intent way he had. “No. At least not that I'm aware of.”

“Beatrice gave me a tour of the ballroom this morning, and I saw Elizabeth McKenzie. I could be her daughter. Cameron and I could both be her daughters.”

“You're implying that Elizabeth had twins and she and James gave one of you up? I can't see James doing that.”

I was having trouble with that, too. “And it doesn't explain my friend Pepper's discovery of Cameron's adoption records. She's checking into it again. But that's not what's important right now. What's important is to find Cameron. I have a really bad feeling—I've had it ever since I found out that she was missing—that something horrible
has happened to her. She didn't just go off in a snit like everyone seems to think. What did the two of you argue about?”

“I caught her kissing Hal Linton in the garden. After I sent him off, I reminded her that part of our agreement was that although our marriage was partly a business arrangement, we would be monogamous. She lost her temper then. But I don't think what I said was the only thing that set her off. Something else was bothering her. Anyway, she said she was going to call off the wedding. And I told her to go ahead. I knew that once she thought it over, she'd back down. Cameron never accepts criticism well. When she went missing, none of us were worried about her. It's not unusual for her to disappear like that.”

“But five weeks? You think she needs that much time to figure out whether or not she wants to go through with the wedding?”

“It's possible that she's decided to call it off. She doesn't like to back down once she's given her word. So she may be figuring out how to persuade her father to side with her on this.”

He didn't sound angry or upset that Cameron might be deciding to call off the wedding. I tried not to read too much into that because whatever the truth was surrounding Cameron and Sloan's marriage, it didn't change the fact that I'd just
made love with my sister's fiancé. Or the fact that I wanted to do it again. I was all too aware of the strength and the heat of his arm lying across my stomach.

As if he were reading my mind, Sloan slid his hand up to cup my breast, and my nipples—traitors that I'd already found them to be—hardened.

“Don't,” I said. But my voice didn't sound convincing even to me. In spite of the satisfaction I'd experienced only a short time before, my body was already heating, yearning.

“Why not?”

I nearly cried out in protest when he removed his hand and levered himself into a sitting position. “Because…”

My voice trailed off when I saw that instead of leaving, he was taking off the condom and replacing it with another.

I just lay there mesmerized, watching him do it. I couldn't think of my sister or the wedding or anything but making love to Sloan again. When I finally raised a hand, it wasn't to push him away. Oh no. Instead, I ran my fingers over the long hard length of him, and I wished I'd thought to do it before he'd slipped the latex on.

The sound he made deep in his throat echoed what I was feeling almost perfectly. He moved
quickly then, first lifting away my hand and then finding a place for himself between my legs.

Exhibiting my usual total lack of control where he was concerned, I immediately wrapped arms and legs around him and arched upward.

But he didn't fill me. Instead, he said, “You haven't yet asked how I knew that you weren't Cameron.”

I hadn't. It was a sure sign of how far gone I was that my inner Alice hadn't kicked in on that little issue. “How?”

He leaned down to brush his mouth over mine. “Your reaction to Saturn was a clue. At the Derby, Cameron was afraid of him. He didn't take to her, either.” He paused to trail a line of kisses along my jaw.

When his teeth nipped my earlobe, pleasure fizzed through me. “But that wasn't it.”

His voice was a husky whisper in my ear, and I could feel him against me right where I needed him. But it wasn't enough. He wasn't letting me move, and I wasn't sure I could speak.

“It was when I kissed you the first time on the bluff, I knew that you weren't Cameron, and in the garden last night, I confirmed it. You see, I never kissed Cameron quite that way before, and I never wanted to do this to her.”

He entered me in one fast plunge, filling me so completely I cried out.

“I don't want to stop doing this to you, Brooke.” He withdrew and pushed into me again. And again. True to his word, he didn't stop for a very long time.

 

When I could finally breathe and think again, I found that Sloan and I were lying side-by-side, tucked together like spoons, and as much as I knew I should, I didn't want to move. This was why forbidden fruit was forbidden, I reminded myself—the addiction factor.

“We'll have to tell James,” Sloan finally said.

“No.” I wiggled around to face him. “We can't. Not yet. If we do, I'll have to stop impersonating Cameron, and having amnesia gives me the perfect excuse to ask a lot of questions.”

He studied me. “Questions about what?”

“About who was around on the day Cameron disappeared.” I swallowed hard. “And about who might benefit if she doesn't come back.”

“Because you have a ‘feeling' she was the victim of foul play?”

He was frowning, and I could still hear skepticism in his tone. So I drew in a deep breath and told him about the anonymous phone call I'd received.

When I was finished, he continued to study me with that I-can-see-right-through-you look of his.

“Cameron is an heiress,” I said. “You were
quick enough to jump to the conclusion that I came here masquerading as her to get her money. What happens if she never comes back and your marriage can't take place? What will James do with the estate then?”

“I don't know. But I imagine he'll do a variation of what he intended to do before Cameron and I agreed to marry. In his current will he leaves Cameron the estate and the land, but all of the decisions about running the ranch and the business, including any sale of the land, is placed under the control of a board of directors, a group hand-picked by James. He's been pretty closemouthed about whom he's selected, but my guess is that Doc Carter would be on it, perhaps Rachel Lakewood and Jack Boland. They are all close friends of James and very like-minded. James would like to have control of this place even from the grave.”

“But he was going to give that up and turn the place over to you and Cameron if you marry because…?”

Sloan gave me a wry smile. “My guess is that Cameron gave him an offer he couldn't refuse. She'd marry someone he'd approve of with the ability to run the ranch just as well as his hand-selected board, and he'd have at least the hope of grandchildren. That's just a guess on my part, but she'd know what kind of a carrot to dangle in front of her father. Of course, it could have been
that the marriage part was James's idea. A carrot he dangled in front of Cameron's nose—marry someone I approve of and I'll leave you both everything.”

“And Cameron chose you?”

“Perhaps. It could have been James's idea. He didn't want me to leave five years ago, and he knows how much I love this place. He also knew what to dangle in front of me to get me to come back.”

I swallowed hard again. I didn't like putting my growing suspicion into words. “And if something has happened to Cameron, who would James leave the place to then? Beatrice and Austin with the board making all the decisions?”

“Probably. I hadn't given it any thought.” His frown deepened. “But that would be a good guess, and I don't like where this is going.”

“I don't, either. Who might know James's backup plan? Who would he confide in?”

“Doc Carter,” Sloan said without hesitation. “He and James have been close since they were kids. James trusts him.”