(Blood and Bone, #1) Blood and Bone (2 page)

“You made that just for me?” He hates chicken Parmesan, which is crazy. I love it. I don’t think I love anything else, but I love it. It and the feel of my cat, Binx. He’s soft and fluffy and mean. I adore his meanness the most.

Derek brushes a large and yet perfectly groomed hand through his dark-blond hair. “Baby, I’ve got an OR time. I have to go. Which is why I made your favorite dinner. So when I’m doing my surgery, I’ll know you’re thinking about me.”

“I always think about you.” The words are plain, not meant to be charming or schmoozed. I don’t do that. I don’t know how to be charming.

He kisses my lips again but this time so delicately that it makes my stomach growl for more than the dinner he’s prepared. “I love
you,” he murmurs into my cheek before brushing past me, waving as he runs to the car.

Watching him head off makes me smile, even if I didn’t get to tell him about my weird day or about my melted yogurt. My world and my news are never anything compared to the stuff he does. He saves lives, creates hope, and heals the sick. I wish I had gone to college and become something amazing like him.

He honks and blows me a kiss from the Mercedes. I wave back and head inside, excited for my meal. He always makes it extra saucy so that when I drag my garlic bread through it, the sauce soaks into the bread. He’s a wizard, I swear.

I can’t help but grin like an idiot when I see the table is set with a pink rose placed across my plate. They’re my favorite.

Dinner is in the oven, making the entire house smell of his skill. He is an amazing chef.

He’s amazing at everything.

One day I am going to wake up and realize this was all a dream, a wonderful dream but a dream nonetheless. There is no way he’s real and mine.

I pull out the casserole dish and place it on the table. He’s picked out the wine—he does that every time. I love the way he orders for me and picks the wine and makes everything work together to bring me the best.

He’s a twelve, and I’m at best a seven. If you took my crappy job into consideration, I’m a five. His job makes him a fifteen or seventeen.

The cooking is like icing on the awesome cake.

He’s tall, six foot two, and almost no body fat. He runs and lifts and eats low carb. He lives like he wants to live forever. His dark-blond hair is always styled nicely, but he doesn’t look too groomed. He has that California glow, regardless of being from the East Coast.
He drinks weird infused waters and always takes his vitamins. It’s annoying.

We are polar opposites. My dark hair and puffy lips make me look like I might be a touch ethnic, but I’m not. My father was English, and my mom was Scottish. I’m short, five four, and curvy. My body fat is probably near the low twenties, and when I run, I cramp up. I never run, I hate it. And by some small miracle, he doesn’t care. He kisses every curve and loves every inch, and I never feel like I’m not enough. I know I’m not enough, but he would die if I told him I thought that. He loves with every ounce of himself whereas I don’t know how to give any part of me. He doesn’t even care that I don’t know anything that has happened beyond three years ago. He reminds me who I am and what I like, and helps me find myself.

It’s much more like dating a nun or a saint. Only he’s sexy and likes giving oral sex too much to go in either of those directions. I do love that man, though. I love his heart and his way of giving me everything without my ever asking for a single thing.

I lean my face over the plate, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. The first bite is incredible. The basil and Parmigiano-Reggiano swirl in my mouth, enhancing the slightly sweet marinara sauce against the perfectly crisp chicken. I am in food heaven.

When I finish, the name Samantha Barnes is still bouncing around in my head like a Ping-Pong ball. Drumming my fingers against the mahogany table, I push myself back and walk to the computer to Google her. The name comes up a hundred times on Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. I click on “Images” instead of words, scrolling past all the different varieties of Samantha Barnes there are. There’s a chef, a celebrity, a model, and a schoolteacher. The most intense has to be the bodybuilder Samantha Barnes—she’s so ripped. I rub my food belly, gawking at how hardcore and rippling with muscle she is. I scroll down, stopping the moment I see
the reason Ronald stopped me on the road. It’s so shocking my eyes are torn from the bodybuilder chick.

I click on the black-and-white thumbnail photo of me as my jaw drops.

She can’t be me—she grew up in Alabama, in a town I have never heard of. She went to Berkeley but it doesn’t say graduated, and she died in some place called Fairhope. The resemblance is so uncanny I cannot believe I’m not looking at a picture of me with blonde hair.

The fact that an identical girl named Samantha Barnes exists is one crazy moment for me, but that’s not the craziest part. For me, the most peculiar aspect of it is that she died six years ago in a fiery car crash. I was in a fiery crash three years ago.
How odd!

I click on the newspaper article to read more.

Sunday night as the sun was setting on Fairhope, the owner of the Simple Pleasures Book Shop, Samantha Barnes, died in a car accident described by witnesses as horrific. Police Chief Langley speculated that her SUV was being driven too fast for the wet road conditions. He mentioned the car might have slid on a newer section of asphalt.

It took fire crews several hours to get the blaze under control as the flames incinerated the car and several trees nearby, including the large oak that the car struck.

The mayor of Fairhope had this to say: “It is a sad and tragic day. Sam was one of the upstanding citizens of our quiet town. She will be missed and always remembered fondly.”

Barnes leaves behind a cat named Binx that her friends have adopted.

A cat named Binx?

A car accident?

A girl with my face and eyes?

I don’t know what to say, and even if I did, my throat is tight with confusion. It’s so parched it feels as if I haven’t drank in a month. I click on the next link, finding comments from local townsfolk about the tragedy. Many people still sought answers as to who the other person in the car was. Some comments mention a man from another town. Reading it all makes me oddly uncomfortable, like I am bothered by the loss of a look-alike of me. The interviews with the townspeople make it seem as if she didn’t have any family. She was single and died with a stranger who is still unidentified, even though it’s six years later.

I Google her more, obsessed at the similarity in looks and life. I find a picture of her outside of a restaurant with several people. She looks uncomfortable. I know that face. I make it when people take
my
picture too.

I can’t help but wonder if we are related, regardless of knowing my history. My parents died a year apart when I was eighteen and nineteen, hence the no college. Sam’s parents must have been dead when her accident took place or they would have been interviewed or at least spoken of in the article. It’s weird we were both alone. It’s even weirder that we both had car accidents, though mine was only tragic to my brain. The rest of me has healed nicely. The name of the cat is creeping me out the most. I can’t deny the odds are stacked way against us both picking a name as unusual as Binx. It’s completely unlikely.

It’s strange.
Coincidental
is the word I want to use, because I don’t believe I ever had a long-lost sister. But the name of the cat is too much to be coincidence. It doesn’t add up.

I open our pictures on the computer, scrolling through them, looking for one that might be the right angle to match her picture. When I get one, I just sit and stare. It’s uncanny.

Eventually, I have to turn the computer off, as my eyes feel like they have crossed from staring too long at the same pictures of her
and me. The pictures prove her face and my face not only match, but blend—seamlessly. Even the slight lift of the right side of our mouths when we half smile is the same. Our eyebrows arch in the exact same spot. The puffy lips have the same creases in them, and our eyes have the same laugh lines.

Completely confused and incapable of comprehending any of it, I curl up in the warm and fluffy bed that feels too big without the large man who’s normally there. I need him to come home and tell me that I’m hallucinating.

It’s no wonder the weird man on the street was so convinced. She and I are identical.

I don’t know how long I have been asleep or how long Derek has been home, but when I wake it’s still dark and he’s kissing me softly along my neck. I moan and curl into him, smelling the soap and deodorant that makes up the scent of a doctor.

He wraps himself around me, pulling me into him like he never plans on letting me go.

It’s a wonderful way to sleep, cocooned in a man who makes you feel like nothing matters beyond the two of you.

Not even an exact replica of you!

2. LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

I
n the morning, not wanting to wake him as I sneak off to work, I write in my pale-pink lipstick on a napkin:

Missed you last night! See you later, xoxoxo!

It’s something I do. It’s my sad attempt at affection.

The morning flies by, and when it’s time for lunch I hurry off to get a sandwich to eat in the back room. I like eating back here, I don’t know why. The concrete room is uninviting, and yet I am completely at ease here.

The minute I come out from the back room, my Scottish boss, Angie, gives me a wink. “Ya had a visitor while ya was out!”

I stop, giving her a puzzled look. “What? Did Derek come here?”

“No, no. It weren’t him. Like I’d tell ya if the doctor himself were here. I’d keep that one to meself. But there was a man asking for ya, but by a different name. Very strange.”

My stomach drops a little. “By a different name?”

“Aye, he came right into the shop and demanded to see ya. Was up to no good, I could tell.”

“To the store?” I shake my head, lost in the possibility that anyone would come to see me. “Here? To see me? Me specifically?”

“Well, ya, but he had a different name for ya. Quite the funny story, though.” She laughs as she passes me the cleaning supplies so we can redress the mannequins in the front window and clean it. She wipes and natters on, regardless of the look I am certain is on my face. “He was tall, bloody tall, and he had an accent—Irish, he was. Never trust the Irish, if ya can even understand what the bloody hell they’re saying to ya.”

She’s a fine one to talk—her accent is hilarious. She is Scottish and sort of prejudiced against everyone in Europe. She hasn’t lived in Seattle long. Not long enough to decide if she likes the city or hates it. Apparently, she still hates the Irish, though. And the English. And Germans. And Polish people. She hates everyone, including us “bloody Yanks” who are always “bloody rude” to her and ripping her off. She kills me with all the things she hates and then loves in a bipolar sort of fashion.

She wrinkles her nose. “I mean, if he was even looking for ya at all. He seemed a touch confused.” Her comment confuses me, but I have to assume it’s friggin’ Roland or Ronald or whatever the hell that guy’s name was who was looking for Samantha. “He was Irish? You sure? Not a skinny American with an overbite?” I ask casually, making my fingers the teeth in the overbite, which actually makes no sense at all. I look like an idiot, with my fingers hanging over my lip.

“No.” She pauses, giving my mimicking of the overbite a weird look. “I’m pretty sure I know a bloody leprechaun when I see one.”

Oh God, please do not start with the racial slander again.

“What did he say? How did you know it was me he was looking for? Maybe it was just someone else.” It’s weird that two men have
showed up in my life two days in a row, both looking for me with a different name. “You said it was a funny story, but that doesn’t sound funny.”

“Right! With his wee little accent, he said he was looking for a good time and needed the number of a girl who worked here in this very shop. She met him in a club downtown and promised him love in all the wrong places.”

I groan, seeing now that she’s dicking with me. She does this sometimes to mess with me. Of course, the day after I find out I have a dead identical twin, it isn’t as funny as it normally would be. My heart is racing and I feel faint, but at least she’s just being crazy and trying to get me going.

“Ya like that one, eh? Love in all the wrong places?” She winks.

I roll my eyes, trying to take deep breaths and get my heartbeat back to a comfortable range. “Ewwww, for starters. Not to mention, I don’t club. And what does that even mean—love in all the wrong places? Is that like in an alley?”

She waggles her eyebrows at me. “It means—ya know—anal.”

My jaw drops. “What the hell? Exit only, Angie. I don’t know how you all like to do it, but for me that is exit only.”

“It’s a joke, ya wee prude.” She tosses a handful of paper towels at me. “He never got your name right, so I dinna think he was looking for ya. I’m only teasing.”