Balancing Act (Silhouette Special Edition) Read online

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  discussion questions at the end of the book!

  “I’ve wanted to do this since I met you,” Brady said.

  He stole another kiss from Libby’s mouth, and then another.

  “It isn’t that long ago,” she answered. Couldn’t even think, at the moment. Felt like hours…or like months. It wasn’t relevant somehow.

  “Seems longer. Seems…intense.” He kissed her hair and her temples, coaxing her to give him her mouth once more. Libby didn’t want to give it yet. She still needed the sound of his breathing, his heart.

  “It has been, Brady. In a lot of ways, we jumped in at the deep end because of the girls. Are we just feeling like this because our daughters are twins?”

  “That’s too complicated, isn’t it?” he said slowly, at last.

  It probably was. He was right.

  But nothing that was happening tonight felt complicated. It felt simple. A man and a woman, and chemistry so strong it was like a sorcerer’s spell.

  Dear Reader,

  Step into warm and wonderful July with six emotional stories from Silhouette Special Edition. This month is full of heart-thumping drama, healing love and plenty of babies!

  I’m thrilled to feature our READERS’ RING selection, Balancing Act (SE#1552), by veteran Mills & Boon and Silhouette Romance author Lilian Darcy. This talented Australian writer delights us with a complex tale of a couple marrying for the sake of their twin daughters, who were separated at birth. The twins and parents are newly reunited in this tender and thought-provoking read. Don’t miss it!

  Sherryl Woods hooks readers with this next romance from her miniseries, THE DEVANEYS. In Patrick’s Destiny (SE#1549), an embittered hero falls in love with a gentle woman who helps him heal a rift with his family. Return to the latest branch of popular miniseries, MONTANA MAVERICKS: THE KINGSLEYS, with Moon Over Montana (SE#1550) by Jackie Merritt. Here, an art teacher can’t help but moon over a rugged carpenter who renovates her apartment—and happens to be good with his hands!

  We are happy to introduce a multiple-baby-focused series, MANHATTAN MULTIPLES, launched by Marie Ferrarella with And Babies Make Four (SE#1551), which relates how a hardheaded businessman and a sweet-natured assistant, who loved each other in high school, reunite many years later and dive into parenthood. His Brother’s Baby (SE#1553) by Laurie Campbell is the dramatic tale of a woman determined to take care of herself and her baby girl, but what happens when her baby’s handsome uncle falls onto her path? In She’s Expecting (SE#1554) by Barbara McMahon, an ambitious hero is wildly attracted to his new secretary—his new pregnant secretary—but steels himself from mixing business with pleasure.

  As you can see, we have a lively batch of stories, delivering the very best in page-turning romance. Happy reading!

  Sincerely,

  Karen Taylor Richman

  Senior Editor

  Balancing Act

  LILIAN DARCY

  Books by Lilian Darcy

  Silhouette Special Edition

  Balancing Act #1552

  Silhouette Romance

  The Baby Bond #1390

  Her Sister’s Child #1449

  Raising Baby Jane #1478

  *Cinderella After Midnight #1542

  *Saving Cinderella #1555

  *Finding Her Prince #1567

  Pregnant and Protected #1603

  For the Taking #1620

  LILIAN DARCY

  has written over fifty books for Silhouette Romance and Harlequin Mills & Boon Medical Romance (Prescription Romance). Her first book for Silhouette appeared on the Waldenbooks Series Romance Bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 381, Hackensack, NJ 07602 or e-mail her at [email protected].

  Dear Reader,

  This was always a special book for me, and I was so pleased when it was scheduled as my first Special Edition novel. Libby and Brady really needed a long book with a rich emotional tone to tell their story fully.

  The week after my editor phoned with the news, I flew from Australia to Denver to attend the Romance Writers of America annual conference. On the flight from San Francisco to Denver there were four darling little Korean babies going to their new adoptive homes in the U.S. and this seemed like a perfect omen for Balancing Act. One of the flight attendants and I stood at the back of the plane for half the flight, holding two of the babies. They were smiling and bright-eyed and totally adorable. We got quite teary thinking of the long journey they were making to their new life and their new parents. It was easy to believe that there was something magical and predestined about the whole thing.

  As you’ll see when you read Balancing Act, Libby and Brady embrace their destiny when they realize that the two babies they’ve independently adopted are identical twins. It’s not an easy journey for them, but when the happiness of their daughters is at stake, there’s no choice.

  I really hope you enjoy this book.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Readers’ Ring Discussion Group Questions

  Chapter One

  Brady Buchanan would be here with his little daughter in twenty minutes, maybe less. Libby McGraw hadn’t even heard of the man four days ago, but already, without yet having met him, she had the strongest intuition that he was going to be an important figure in her life.

  “If I hadn’t entered Colleen in the Bright and Beautiful baby contest,” she muttered to herself, “I might never have known…”

  A part of her regretted that contest bitterly now, although she’d been so pleased and proud and excited when Colleen had won and had been photographed for the magazine, “with proud mother Lisa-Belle McGraw, of Minnesota.”

  Libby tried to focus on something—anything—but she couldn’t. There was a nagging, crampy ache low in her stomach and she knew it was only partly physical. Circling back to the bathroom mirror for the third time, she fussed with her appearance a little more. She pulled the clips out of her hair, then combed it, twisted it up and put the clips back in.

  No, she decided. Leave it down.

  Out came the clips again. Up went the brush to put in some shine. Yes, her hair definitely looked better framing her face today. Softer. And it camouflaged the fact that she looked so stressed-out and tired.

  She reapplied her lip gloss in a brighter shade, then wondered if it, too, left her skin looking too white. She tended to lose color when she was stressed. Since Monday, she’d gone through her makeup at twice the normal rate and had slept about half the hours she needed.

  She heard a sound, listened in case it was Colleen and, creeping into her daughter’s room, found her still napping. The dark, silky hair around her temples was a little damp, as if she was hot. Libby was hot, too. She felt as if she was burning up.

  It was just after four in the afternoon. Friday afternoon. He—Brady Buchanan—had said that his flight was getting in at quarter to three.
He had to pick up his rental car, then check himself and his daughter into their motel. It was one of the motels right opposite the Mall of America, just across Interstate 494, which ran along beside the airport.

  When he’d checked in, he was coming right over. The drive across the river into St. Paul would take him around fifteen minutes. Maybe a little more if there was traffic.

  And then he would be here, with a little girl named Scarlett.

  Libby still hoped against hope that it would all turn out to be a huge mistake. She’d entered Colleen in the baby contest and Colleen had won. Brady had seen Colleen’s picture on the front page of the parenting magazine which had sponsored the contest, and she appeared—appeared—identical to his own little girl.

  Twins, like two peas in a pod.

  Since they’d each adopted their mixed-race daughters from the same orphanage in Vietnam, it wasn’t as impossible as it sounded.

  Face-to-face, however, it would turn out that their girls wouldn’t look alike at all, and this overwhelming situation would be over before it had properly begun. She hoped so, desperately, fervently, blindly, because if not…

  Libby was terrified about the whole thing, terrified about what Brady Buchanan would want, and what kind of a man he would be. Her instinct was to be deeply wary about the potential complications involved, and about how vulnerable she might become.

  Four days ago, on the phone, out of the blue, she hadn’t had the slightest idea what the man was talking about at first. She’d been on the verge of concluding that it was a prank call, or worse. Some creep had gotten enough detail from the story in Parenting Now to find her in the St. Paul telephone directory.

  But then Mr. Buchanan had changed tack suddenly. His voice—deep, with a slightly roughened note in it, like fine sandpaper sliding across heavy wood—had softened.

  “Okay, you’re not getting this, are you?” he’d said. “Or you don’t believe me, I guess. Which I can understand. But it’s true. It has to be.”

  “What’s true?”

  “Remember the orphanage?”

  “How did you know—” She’d stopped abruptly, afraid of what she might be giving away. She’d learned a deep reliance on privacy and self-sufficiency during her adult years, and was very careful to whom she told the details of how she’d gotten her darling baby, despite the fact that the adoption was in full compliance with international law.

  But then something about Brady Buchanan’s voice compelled her to listen as he went on with those evocative questions, his words a little clumsy in their emotion, his phrases disjointed and stumbling over themselves.

  “Did you see the white cotton diapers, the way they had ’em spread out to dry on the bushes?” he’d said. “And remember the heat? And did all the local people, when you were in Da Nang, when you went out into the streets with the baby, did they crowd around you, smiling and asking questions?”

  “So you’re saying—”

  “Did you see the sand at My Khe beach, how it was so white? And did you taste that fantastic seafood? That’s where you got your daughter from, isn’t it? From the orphanage outside of Da Nang?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did,” she’d answered him shakily.

  “That’s where my daughter came from, too.”

  “Oh, mercy, it’s not possible!”

  “Ms. McGraw, it has to be!”

  They’d talked about it for nearly twenty minutes, arranging a way to meet as soon as he could get away from his work, trying to piece together the girls’ story. All of it was conjecture, most of it coming from him, since he’d had longer to think about it.

  What would he be like? And what would he want to do if their girls really were twins? She’d been tossing the options back and forth in her mind for four days and four sleepless nights. There weren’t many of those options, and each of them had huge ramifications.

  Oh criminy, she was terrified!

  Two things cut across her darting thoughts. First, she heard Colleen, who had woken from her nap in tears, as she often did. Then, as she went to pick up her crying daughter, Libby heard the doorbell ring and knew it would be him.

  Brady Buchanan.

  The man who owned that dark, husky, emotional voice.

  The man who was adoptive father to the child who could be—could be—her daughter’s twin.

  “In a minute,” she called, and hurried into Colleen’s room. He could probably hear her crying, even from the porch.

  Colleen was standing in her crib, face screwed up, mouth open wide and tears pouring down her cheeks. Libby lifted her up and began to soothe her as she headed down the stairs. By the time she had reached the front door, Colleen was quiet. Normally, she cried for longer when she woke late like this. Had she sensed that something important was about to happen?

  Libby took a deep breath and opened the door, praying yet again that Brady Buchanan would be wrong. This wouldn’t be important at all.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  She knew it the moment she saw her daughter—her daughter!—in the arms of a total stranger. No, not her daughter, despite that instinctive moment of possessiveness and panic and leaping emotion.

  This was Colleen’s sister. Her twin sister.

  On the phone, Brady had talked about blood tests, and Libby had agreed. Now, she already knew that the tests would be purely a formality. The girls were identical. Silky hair, curious eyes, neat little shoulders, fine-drawn mouths.

  Identical, except for the way they were dressed. In place of Colleen’s matched set of lilac floral, lace-edged T-shirt and pants, Scarlett Buchanan was dressed in a red-and-gray stretch playsuit emblazoned across the front with the words Born To Be a Buckeye. It looked as if her dad was a college football fan and a graduate of Ohio State.

  Scarlett’s dad…

  Libby looked at him for the first time. Only a few seconds had passed since she’d pushed open the door but it felt like much longer, and neither of them had yet spoken a word. She still couldn’t, because there was some kind of invisible hand clamped right across her throat. Instead, she just looked at him standing there—a little awkward, possibly as terrified as she was—with her daughter’s twin propped on his arm.

  He wasn’t a huge man. Slightly above average height, that was all. Five-eleven, say. But he was solid as a rock. Chest like a brick wall. Shoulders padded with muscle. Washboard abs, without a doubt, beneath his clothing. You couldn’t have scraped enough fat off his frame to grease a muffin pan.

  He had a few threads of premature silver in his light-brown hair, which was cut short and practical, and the faintest reddish-brown shadow of new growth on his jaw. As she gaped helplessly at him, he scraped his hand across it and she heard the light friction of callused palms against stubble.

  His skin had some living in it. It was outdoor skin, tanned but not moisturized, clean but not pampered. She remembered he’d told her, over the phone, that he owned and operated his own construction company, which probably accounted for that rugged look. It also accounted for why he hadn’t been able to get here until today.

  Both of them had wanted to hop straight on a plane, but he’d had project commitments he couldn’t break, and Colleen had been getting over an ear infection, so Libby was reluctant to fly.

  “Hi,” he said. His smile was careful, brief.

  And his eyes were blue. Complex blue. The kind that looked gray in some lights and deep, smoky green in others. On the tail end of the half smile, he frowned, and those changeable eyes seemed to darken. For a fleeting moment, Libby wondered how they would look in bright sunshine when he was laughing. Say, when he was watching his football team win their game.

  He was wearing an Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt—gray with scarlet lettering, over newish blue jeans. The clothing showed off the breadth of his shoulders and the lean strength of his thighs. She’d met bigger men and stronger men, but there was something about the potent aura of maleness surrounding Brady Buchanan that affected her powerfully. She felt as though someone
had picked up a big wooden spoon and started stirring it around deep in her crampy, aching stomach.

  Was it only because she was so terrified about how much potential he had to change her life? Ruin her life? She’d faced that fear in the dark hours of every night since his call. She’d even wondered whether she would have reacted in the same confident way that he had if she had been the one to see a photo of her daughter’s twin in a magazine.

  Would she have called every Buchanan in Ohio until she’d reached him? Or would she have convinced herself that it wasn’t possible, it had to be a mistake, and let her contented, self-reliant life go on just as it was?

  It would have been very easy to play it that way. “Accidentally” lose the magazine and forget his last name. Convince herself that the girls only looked alike because of the angle of the photo. Tell herself that the adoption authorities would surely have known if there was a twin sister, so she had to be mistaken.

  Brady hadn’t used any of those excuses to opt out. He’d taken the morally right and decisive action at once. He’d accessed all of Minnesota’s telephone directories via the Internet, had kept calling until he’d found her, and now, here he was.

  What would she do if they disliked each other within five minutes? If his ideas on how to deal with this situation were impossibly different from hers? And what would he do?

  Strong men could get in the habit of winning, of dominating with their decisions, and it was a hard habit to break. Immediately, she didn’t trust the way he had his feet planted so squarely on her porch, or the way his jaw and mouth had set. He looked too much like a man who believed in simple solutions. His solutions. She didn’t want that kind of man in her life again.

  Stop this, she coached herself angrily. Don’t leap to conclusions. Get a grip. Listen to him. Communicate. Don’t duck the issues. Stand your ground. And right now, say something.