different.”
“I just have a few minutes,” she said, stepping into the house and following him back toward his kitchen. “Zach hired a replacement for me and he starts the job tonight. I’ll be working the evening shift with him, showing him the ropes. I had just enough time to run this by and, well, I wanted to ask you a question.”
Lucca set the pan of lasagna on the counter and tried to recall if he’d done something worth getting an ass- chewing over since he’d last seen his sister. He didn’t think so. Warily, he asked, “About what?”
“Mom. You’ve been working at the house for over a week now. How do you like it?”
The house? Lucca knew his sister well enough to understand that she wasn’t truly asking about his experience. “Are you having second thoughts about leaving your job?”
“No. Not really. I know leaving is the right decision. It’s the ‘where I go next’ that’s making me insecure.”
Lucca didn’t like the uncertain look on his sister’s face, so he snorted. “Oh, come on, Gabi. You are the most confident woman I’ve ever known. You don’t have an insecure atom in your body. What is this really about?”
She offered him a tender smile. “You can be a sweetheart when you want, Lucca Romano. Now, give me the scoop. What is it like at Aspenglow Place?”
Lucca opened the oven door and slid the pan of lasagna inside. He set the temperature at two hundred degrees. “I have the siding scraped and sanded and ready to prime.”
“I mean being with Mom all day.”
“I’m not with her all day, Gabs. I’m working outside and she’s usually indoors. But having her boss me around isn’t really anything different than what’s she’s been doing all my life.”
Glumly, Gabi asked, “So she still treats you like you’re ten years old? And I’m thinking about working with her full-time? Great. Just great.”
“Honey.” Lucca folded his arms. “If you’re having this much doubt and you haven’t even spent a day with Mom, I think you should take a long, hard look at what you are doing.”
“You are supposed to make me feel better.”
“Darlin’, that is not my job.”
“Sure it is. You’ve been doing that all our lives. You’ve always been my go-to brother when I needed to feel better.”
“Well, babycakes, times have changed. I have my hands full on that front as it is.”
Gabi cocked her head and studied him. “How is that going? Is Eternity Springs working its magic on you?”
Lucca aimed a deliberate look toward the wall clock. “Don’t you need to get to work?”
“Seriously, Lucca. How are you doing?”
“I hear your boss is a hard-ass. You’d better get going.”
“It’s one little question. Answer it.” He didn’t respond, and after a moment, Gabi said, “Well, I think it’s a good sign that you haven’t ended up in the sheriff’s office drunk tank again.”
“Eternity Springs has a drunk tank?”
“Not really, no. But people do gossip. I wish you’d talk to me, brother.”
He scowled at her. “Nice weather we’re having.”
“I see you obviously haven’t been here long enough.”
“Good-bye, Gabriella.”
She flashed a grin, then walked over to press a kiss to his cheek. “Good-bye, Lucca. I love you, Lucca. Enjoy your lasagna, Lucca.”
He reflected on her question as he sat at his kitchen table a few minutes later and cautiously speared a bite of her lasagna with his fork. Was he glad he’d come to Colorado?
His thoughts drifted back to the previous evening and the time spent with the sexy schoolteacher. He had enjoyed her company. Hell, he’d come close to enjoying it too much. A couple of times there he’d been a breath away from kissing her.
Something about her stoked him. It wasn’t only her looks, though that glorious hair and curvy ass absolutely did do it for him. But she had this, well, glow about her that drew him. She was light and bright and that appealed to him. He was tired of being dark.
Kissing her, however, would have been a colossal mistake. He had a tough enough job as it was keeping a healthy balance of family involvement in his everyday life; no way did he want them involved in his love life.
“Not that I have a love life,” he grumbled and stuck the bite of pasta into his mouth. The moment the food hit his taste buds, he grimaced. Way too much salt. How could she screw up lasagna so badly?
With a silent apology to his sister, he dumped the lasagna in the garbage and made a ham sandwich. He sat down in front of the television to watch the Rockies game, but by the fourth inning, the walls were closing in. He could head over to Murphy’s Pub, order a beer, and sit out on the patio for a while. He would limit himself to one beer, maybe two. He wouldn’t stay until closing time. Just long enough so that he could come back and fall asleep without feeling claustrophobic.
But instead of grabbing his wallet and heading for Murphy’s, he opened a bottle of Cabernet. Next he grabbed two wineglasses from the cabinet, exited his back door, and walked across his backyard to Hope’s where he stretched out in the same lounge chair he’d occupied the night before. He poured a glass and waited, his face tilted toward the sky.
Ten minutes later, Hope opened her back door. “Lucca, is that you?”
“You expecting somebody else?”
“I’m not expecting anyone. I thought an animal had gotten into the yard. Roxy has been pawing at the back door and barking.”
He started to make a comment about his own animalistic desires, but thought better of it. “Come on out, Hope. It’s another beautiful evening and I want to show you Cassiopeia.”
She joined him and they passed another enjoyable two hours talking about stars and kindergarten and autumn activities in Eternity Springs. As he poured her a third glass of wine—her last, she insisted—she asked, “What’s it like to be an identical twin?”
He considered it, then took the question to the stars. “Gemini, the Twins. The best time to see that constellation is in December. To see it now, we’d have to look for it shortly before dawn. Gemini has always been my favorite, and I’ll never forget the first time we found it, Tony and I. We were ten, I think. Maybe eleven. We snuck out of the house in December and climbed onto the roof at the high school. We had our star charts and a flashlight pointer. When we knew we’d found it, we looked at each other and that connection between us got a little stronger. After we researched all the different myths, Tony and I argued for weeks about which of us was which. In Babylonian astronomy, the main stars were known as the Great Twins and regarded as minor gods.”
“I’ll bet you just loved that.”
“Oh, yeah.” He grinned at the memory. “It was the Greek mythology that brought us to blows, though.”
“Why is that?”
“The Greeks made one twin a god, and the other a mortal. Castor and Pollux were the children of Leda and they were Argonauts. But Pollux was the son of the god Zeus and Castor was the son of the king of Sparta, a mortal. Of course, Tony and I both wanted to be Pollux. We ended up compromising by switching who got to be who every other month.”
“So did Pollux have the better role in the mythology?”
“Not really. Both brothers were Argonauts and they were two parts of a whole so when Castor died, Pollux begged his father, Zeus, to give Castor immortality, and he did, by uniting them together in the heavens.”
“Are you and Tony two parts of a whole?”
Lucca considered the question, picturing his brother the last time he’d seen him. Lucca had been sleeping off a wild night in a Caribbean beach cabana when Tony tracked him down. It was the first time in a long time he’d seen the same disgust on his brother’s face that he’d seen on his own when he looked into the mirror. “At times in
