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“Baby, what’s wrong?”
Trey Barnes looked up from the notebook he’d been staring at for going on twenty minutes. He’d been trying to rough out some notes for the next novel due in his contract. The idea was there, all but fully formed in his head, yet something stopped him.
No.
Not something.
It wasn’t some nebulous unknown.
His chest was tight and a knot of worry sat in his gut, all but pulling on him. He wanted to get up, find his phone and call his twin. The urge to talk to him was driving him crazy.
But Travis had already sent him a text—an unprompted one, for once, and it had been waiting on his phone before Trey had even had his coffee.
Text me when you’re up.
So, Trey had.
Instead of texting back, Travis had called.
“What the fuck is wrong?”Trey had demanded.
Travis, as he always did, had danced around the question without really answering, then, bluntly, said, “I’m on my way to your place. Should be there in about an hour.”
Before Trey could ask anything else, his twin said he had to go and the noise in the background had been so loud, Trey had barely heard him.
“Travis is coming,” Trey murmured as Ressa squeezed his shoulder.
“That’s great!” Ressa came around and dropped into his lap.
Automatically, he slid a hand up her thigh and placed it on her belly. They hadn’t told anybody about the baby yet. With both Marin and Abby pregnant, it didn’t seem fair to distract from what was going on. Ressa confessed she was also nervous. At barely two months, she wanted to wait until she was farther along first and Trey had agreed to wait.
“You know,” he said wryly. “You don’t have to pretend to like him on my account.”
“I don’t dislike your brother,” she said calmly. Her dark brown eyes held his levelly. “I don’t know him well enough to have made a decision, but he loves you ... and hell, Neeci loves him. She’s only met him twice, but she’s a better judge of character than most adults.”
“Kids frequently are.” Trey brushed her hair back from her face and tugged her down to meet his kiss. “I love you, Ressa Bliss-Barnes.”
Ressa laughed, her nose crinkling up and her eyes bright with laughter.
He was catching that laugh with his lips when a knock sounded on the door.
They broke apart and Trey sighed. “That’s Travis.”
“It’s so weird how you two can tell.”
“Not to me,” he replied easily.
Hand in hand, they walked to the foyer and he opened the door with a smile.
That smile wobbled, then fell as he saw his twin for the first time since he’d married Ressa a year earlier.
The changes were myriad.
Travis was leaner—too lean, like he’d been scraped down to little but muscle, sinew and bone. That would have worried him.
But ...
Trey cocked his head, vaguely aware of ... something.
