CHAPTER ONE
ROWAN HARPER LOVED the little fishing village of Rumbelow on the Cornish coast for many reasons—but most of all she loved it because nobody looked at her.
All her life, people had been staring at her. When she was a child, it was because she was standing next to her identical twin Willow, and people couldn’t help but try to find a non-existent difference between them. Later, once they hit their teens, it was because they were familiar from billboards and advertising campaigns that seemed to be everywhere, all the time.
Willow said people stared because they were beautiful. Rowan felt that they stared because they were different. Strange. Wrong, even.
Their mother said they should just be grateful that people looked at all, and they’d miss the attention when it was gone—but Rowan knew that was only because she missed it, having given up her modelling career to manage theirs instead, when they were just kids.
But here in Rumbelow nobody stared at Rowan, because there were so many other beautiful things to look at. The arc of the harbour as the sun went down. The tiny boats, bobbing on the shimmering waves. The pretty painted houses along the edge of the sea, and the rambling cottages that continued behind it, fanning off the cobblestone streets with their antique shops and coffee houses.
It was the picture-perfect Cornish village, and Rowan had loved it so much the moment she’d set eyes on it that she’d bought the first cottage she’d found and refused to leave.
That had been six years ago.
In those six years, she’d grown accustomed to the rhythms of the place. The spring festivals and summer regattas. The autumn fires and the special pie they had to eat. The Boxing Day swim in the freezing-cold sea. The local folk club playing and singing the same songs they’d played for decades—longer, maybe hundreds of years. Sea shanties and folk tunes that were older than Rowan’s thatched roof stone cottage.
This morning, as she swung a straw bag filled with treats from the local bakery over her shoulder and headed back towards the cottage, the only people who noticed her at all were the locals she saw every day, who waved politely.
Despite the community feel of the village, nobody asked too many questions here. If anyone had realised who she was—or who she had been—they never said. In Rumbelow, your life started the moment you arrived in the village, as if nothing that had come before could have ever been important.
Rowan loved that.
She took the last turn past the church, out onto the side street that led down the hill to her cottage, right on the outskirts of the village, humming happily to herself. The sun was high in the sky, if not entirely warm this early in the season, and it sparkled on the ripples of the waves as they crested below against the stony beach. This far along, the harbour had given way to a more natural appearance, and Rowan could see right across to the cliffs and the twinkling sails of the boats out at sea.
She smiled to herself, and waved to her nearest neighbour, Gwyn, as he jogged past her towards the town. Gwyn lived all the way around the curve of the harbour in the old converted lifeboat station that was now a luxury seafront property. He frowned and did a double-take before waving back, which confused her.
Until she turned through the gate onto her own garden path...
And stopped.
Because there, on her doorstep, was someone worth staring at.
Someone she hadn’t seen in person in six years.
Someone who looked just like her.
‘What are you doing here?’ Rowan whispered harshly as she fumbled for her keys. The last thing she needed was someone seeing her and her identical twin standing together on the doorstep and putting two and two together.
Not that they looked exactly identical right now. Oh, they both still had the same long blonde hair, wide blue eyes and slender figure—although Rowan admitted the pastries might have caused a small fluctuation there,
but she usually offset that with long walks on the cliffs.
But Willow was chicly dressed in wide-legged beige trousers and leather boots, topped with a simple black sweater and a tan leather jacket. Her hair flowed glossily down her back, her manicure was simple but perfect, and even her make-up was flawless.
Rowan was in a turquoise and pink maxi skirt, a white T-shirt and a hoodie, her hair was scraped back into a messy bun, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a manicure, and all her make-up had dried up and gone in the bin.
No, maybe not so identical right now.
Finally, she managed to get the door open and turned to Willow to usher her inside. ‘Come on, come on. Before someone sees you.’
Oh, she hoped that Gwyn hadn’t lingered too long on his run down the street. Or that he hadn’t noticed the strangely familiar woman standing on Rowan’s doorstep for the last...
‘How long have you been here?’ Rowan asked as she slammed the door behind them.
Willow’s eyebrows arched in surprise at the question. ‘In England or on your doorstep?’
There was a slight Transatlantic twang to her sister’s voice that she’d only heard on the phone before. A consequence of living in New York for so long, Rowan supposed.
‘Both.’
Willow placed her large tote bag on the floor beside the telephone table, and Rowan saw her sister frown at the old-fashioned rotary dial phone that sat there. Phone signal was notoriously patchy in the area, so having a landline just made sense—not that anyone really had the number. Which was why she’d figured she might as well have a phone she liked to look at, since it never rang.
‘I arrived in England last night,’ Willow said, straightening up again. ‘I stayed at a hotel near Heathrow, then got a car to bring me down here this morning. I’d been standing on your doorstep for about ten minutes when you arrived. I did try to call, but...’
She gave the rotary dial phone another dubious look.
‘Cell signal can be unreliable here.’ Rowan carried her own bag down the darkened hall into the brighter kitchen at the back of the cottage, looking out over her higgledy-piggledy garden, then emptied it out onto the kitchen table. ‘Croissant?’
Willow looked nauseous at just the idea of carbs, so Rowan grabbed a plate and bit into one herself. No time for jam and butter this morning. She needed comfort food, stat.
‘So. Going to tell me why you’re here?’ Rowan dropped into the wooden chair she’d found at a second-hand shop and painted lavender, to match the plants growing just outside her window. She nodded at the other chair—another thrifted wooden chair in a different style, painted sage-green, and Willow cautiously sat too.
‘I need your help,’ Willow said.
Rowan reached for another
croissant. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’
Willow had never needed her help. Not once.
As kids, Willow had been the ringleader, the one who decided what they were doing and where. And when Rowan couldn’t keep up, Willow had made everyone else wait for her. When their mother was worried that Rowan had put on a few pounds and instigated a starvation diet, Willow was the one who sneaked her enough calories to keep going.
When Mum had yelled and screamed at Rowan for not wanting success enough, for being a failure, Willow had calmly stood between them and told her to stop.
When Rowan had started having panic attacks before runway shows, Willow had been the one to practice breathing techniques with her, and run interference so that no one else found out. When Rowan had fainted under the lights on a camera shoot once, Willow had literally caught her when she fell.
And when Rowan had wanted to leave, Willow had supported her. More than that, she’d helped her move her own money away from their mother’s control, then booked her the damn aeroplane ticket.
They might not have seen each other in person for six years, but they’d stayed in touch via email and videophone. And Willow was the only person in the world who knew where Rowan had gone when she’d dropped off the radar.
Most importantly, Willow had always, always helped her when she needed it.
Which meant that Rowan knew there was no way she could turn her sister away now.
‘What do you need?’ Rowan asked, and hoped against hope it wasn’t something she wasn’t able to give.
Eli rapped his knuckles against the wood of his brother’s office door, avoiding the frosted glass pane that read Ben O’Donnell CEO in a particularly intimidating font.
Refusing to be intimidated, Eli stuck his head around the door. ‘Got a minute?’
Ben was on the phone as usual, so he just nodded and waved a pen towards the chair opposite his desk. Eli dropped into it and waited.
Since his brother was still making vague noncommittal noises to whoever was on the other end of the phone call, Eli took a moment to study the office. It had a lot of memories, that room. Not so much since Ben became CEO of O’Donnell Industries two years ago—he’d only visited a handful of times, and never for long.
But when their father had ruled the roost...
After their mother left, Eli had spent a lot of time doing his homework at the second assistant’s desk outside the room, because at thirteen he was far too old for a nanny, but his father also didn’t trust him at home. Ben, at sixteen, had more often been with his friends—or, as far as their father was concerned, involved in school activities. But sometimes he’d come to the company headquarters building in Manhattan too, and been ushered into the inner sanctum of their father’s private office to be initiated in the secrets
of how to be a CEO.
At least, that was what Eli had assumed was happening. He was never allowed in to find out.
Growing up, people always told Eli how important his father was, how much his work mattered. People said the same thing about Ben now.
But those same people had also told Eli he was imagining it when he’d worried that his father treated Ben differently to him—loved Ben more than him. His father had said so too, telling him not to be so oversensitive. ...
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