Twin of Ice by Jude Deveraux Read Free Book Online

was smiling.
    He drove her to a place of big rocks and tall trees that she’d never seen before, miles out of town, secluded and enclosed.
    He had barely helped her out of the carriage, in such a hurry that she nearly fell, when he grabbed her in a smothering embrace. She was fighting so hard to breathe that at first she didn’t hear him.
    “I thought about nothing else but you last night,” he said. “I could smell your hair on my clothes, I could taste your lips on mine, I could—.”
    Houston managed to pull away from him. “You what?” she gasped.
    He began disarranging her hair and looking at her strangely. “You aren’t going to be shy with me today, are you? You aren’t going to be the way you were before last night, are you?”
    While he was talking, Houston was thinking, but she didn’t believe what she thought could be the only answer to his bizarre words. Blair couldn’t have…Couldn’t have made herself available to Lee? Could she? Impossible.
    “Houston, you’ve proven to me that you can be different, so there’s no need to go back to being the ice princess. I know what you’re really like now, and I can tell you that if I never see that cool woman again, I’ll be even happier. Now come here and kiss me like you did last night.”
    Houston suddenly realized what else he was saying besides telling her how wonderful Blair was. He’d not only enjoyed Blair last night, but he never wanted the cool woman he was engaged to to return. She pushed free of him. “Are you saying that I wasn’t like I usually am last night? That I was…better?”
    He smiled in an idiotic way and continued raving about how wonderful Blair was.
    “You know you were. You were like I’ve never seen you. I didn’t know you could be like that. You’ll laugh at this but I was beginning to believe that you were incapable of any real passion, that beneath your cool exterior was a heart of ice. But, if you can have a sister like Blair who starts fires at the least provocation, surely some of it had to rub off.”
    He grabbed her again before she could say a word and gave her an unpleasant, lip-grinding kiss, and when Houston managed to escape, she saw that he was angry.
    “You’re carrying this game too far,” he said. “You can’t be wildly passionate one minute and frigid the next. What are you, two people?”
    Houston wanted to scream at him that he was lusting after the wrong sister, that he was engaged to the cold, frigid one and not the fiery one he seemed to prefer.
    It was as if Lee read her thoughts, because his face changed.
    “That’s an impossibility, isn’t it, Houston?” he said. “Tell me that what I’m thinking is wrong. No one can be two people, can she?”
    Houston knew that what had been a simple game was becoming serious now. How could Blair have done this to her?
    Lee walked away and sat down heavily on a rock. “Did you and your sister trade places last night?” he asked softly. “Did I spend the evening with Blair and not with you?”
    Somehow, she managed to whisper, “Yes.”
    “I should have known from the first: how well she handled that suicide and she didn’t even know it was the house I’d bought for her—you. I don’t think I wanted to see. From the moment she said she wanted to go on the case with me to see if she could be of any help, I was so stupidly pleased that I never questioned anything after that. I should have known when I kissed her…
    “Damn both of you! I hope to hell you enjoyed making a fool of me.”
    “Lee,” Houston said, her hand on his arm. She didn’t know what she could say to him, but she wanted to try.
    The face he turned to her was frightening. “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t say a word. I don’t know what possessed either of you to play such a dirty little trick, but I can tell you that I don’t like being the butt of such a joke. Now that you and your sister have had a good laugh at my expense, I have to decide what to do