SnapshotsMoments of our lives, captured forever.... The wrong twin. And the right one. Only Rick McCullough knows the real reason he married Martine Barrineau instead of her twin, Trista. Best friends since the age of nine, the three were inseparable. But it was Trista with whom he'd always shared something deeper than friendship. Ten years and so much heartbreak later, Rick and Trista might have a second chance. But by this time, life's twists and turns have taken them down very different paths. Sweetwater Cottage in the South Carolina Lowcountry was where they'd always felt a special connection, as pictures of so many vacations show. Now after all these years, they're at Sweetwater Cottage again. Read an excerpt of SNAPSHOTS below: 1981 The first picture of Rick, Martine and me was taken on his second day in Miss Davison's third grade. There he is, standing in the back row with the other big boys, grinning widely and looking completely at home. In the picture, Martine and I sit in the front row, two skinny nine-year-old girls missing various front teeth. We were the twins. Our names were always scrunched together - TristanMartine. If you're not a twin, you probably have a hard time imagining how we were never separate identities but a collective noun, not to mention that people could hardly tell us apart, though we are mirror twins. I'm left-handed, Martine is right-handed. I part my hair on the left, and Martine parts hers on the right. Rick was a transfer student who arrived in the middle of the semester, and we were drawn to him as soon as we spotted him shuffling his feet beside the teacher's desk on that first morning. He had sandy hair shading toward brown and blue eyes tending more toward gray than ours, which were on the violet side. Freckles. A strong, straight nose. High cheekbones that were to become craggy in adolescence and a ready smile that would become his trademark. It was as if the three of us were instantly connected on sight, as if someone somewhere had thrown a master switch and we were three instead of two plus one. Soon we were no longer TristanMartine; we were Trista, Martine and Rick. Three names were more difficult to run together than two. By Rick's second week in our class, we'd formed a secret club we called the ILTs. This came about when the school cafeteria served tacos and we discovered that we all loved them more than any other lunch food at Field School. The three of us raced through the wide halls back to the classroom in spite of the No Running rule, screaming "I love tacos!" In the back of the school bus on the way home, we unanimously agreed that ILT was our shorthand for I Love Tacos. On the back of an "I will not run in the hall" paper, the three of us added our first initials to ILT so we'd have names that rhymed. Rick became Rilt, Martine was Milt, and I was Tilt. The password to our secret club was "Burrito," and that was what we also named the club goldfish, which belonged to Rick. By the time summer arrived, the three of us were inseparable and our parents had become fast friends. Our tree house, erected in the low fork of an oak in the woods not far from our house, was the neighborhood gathering spot for all the kids. That summer was the first year that we three spent time together at Tappany Island, an unspoiled barrier island off the South Carolina coast reachable only by a picturesque side-swinging drawbridge. Rick's mother usually spent the whole summer there with Rick and his older brother, Hal. Boyd McCulloch, Rick's father, drove down on weekends, and the first time we were invited to the cottage, Martine, our parents and I accompanied him in his big Roadmaster station wagon. After a wonderful weekend, Mom and Dad departed on Sunday night with Boyd, but Martine and I stayed for the rest of the week. We settled happily into a guest room connected to another by a bath. Our room was decorated with antiques, heirloom quilts, and hand-crocheted dresser scarves. We loved the ornate iron bedsteads, delighted in the wispy curtains that could be looped back to expose the view of the dunes with a slice of blue ocean beyond. Ever after, that was our room at the cottage. I mean to tell you, Sweetwater Cottage was no palace. It was an unpretentious old grande dame of a house, built high off the ground but not spiked up on stilts like the ones they build in flood zones today. The cottage was surrounded by a veranda, which we always called the porch because, Rick's father said, veranda sounded much too granda for a blowsy old lady like the cottage. The shingles on the outside have been painted many colors and were, in my childhood, a milky blue. Lilah Rose, Rick's mom, who delighted in decorating and redecorating, had the shingles painted yellow some years back, and she's the one who skirted the space under the house with white lattice. Spreading oak trees shrouded in wispy curtains of gray moss shaded the house; dried fronds of palmettos at the edge of the dense woods across the road clattered in the breeze. The island abounded in roads of white sand, fine as sifted sugar; glistening salt marshes sheltered all manner of wildlife; tidal creeks wended their pristine, unspoiled way through the island. And best of all, we had the wide majestic ocean with its many moods. Across the road was the river and the marsh, home to a variety of creatures both large and small. I loved to watch the birds - dapper little crested kingfishers, diving from tree limbs to catch their dinner, ospreys soaring and wheeling against the brilliant blue sky, graceful white ibis stalking the shallows. But we saw lots of animals, too, raccoons and otters and turtles. Even a couple of alligators. I guess you've figured out that Tappany Island was a kids' paradise. The three of us, Rick, Martine and I, often rode bikes to Jeter's Market at the crossroads of Bridge Road and Center Street. The store was fragrant with the smoky scent of the barbecued pork that the Jeters made in the wooden shed out back and with whatever fresh fish local fishermen brought in that day from the nearby public docks. Old toothless Mr. Jeter never minded if we kids read comic books without buying them, perhaps because while reading, we consumed great quantities of boiled peanuts and gummy bears which he charged to the McCullochs' account. We walked every one of those winding roads. We yanked untold numbers of blue crabs out of the marsh and poked curiously at jellyfish stranded on the wide sandy beach by the tide. So happy were we during our first summer there that we vowed on both spit and blood to meet on Tappany Island every single summer of our lives as long as we lived. Making such a promise exhilarated us, gave the stamp of permanency to our extraordinary friendship, and was the occasion for Lilah Rose to snap a picture. We're nine years old, arms flung around each other, eyes squinting into the bright sunshine and wearing T-shirts with our club names Rilt, Milt, and Tilt emblazoned across the front. Martine is sticking out her tongue at the camera, and Rick's fingers are forked behind my head, giving me devil's horns. That's how it started for Rick and Martine and me. Later, after I read The Three Musketeers and we watched the movie video together at my insistence, we adopted All For One, One For All as our motto. It was unthinkable that anything would ever come between us. Unthinkable - but inevitable. What we didn't know is that it would be one of us. ~ Buy Snapshots at www.eharlequin.com By: Pamela Browning Imprint and Series: Harlequin American Romance Publication date: 07/07 ISBN: 13:978-0-373-65414-7 Copyright © 2007 By: Pamela Browning ® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. The edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A. For more romance information surf to: http://www.eHarlequin.com |
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