Excerpt of A Husband to Belong To by Susan Fox-1

THE two young women didn't look like sisters, much less like fraternal twins, though DNA testing had confirmed their genetic bond. In almost every other way they were opposites, in looks as well as personality and upbringing.

Jaicey Craddock, older by two minutes, had blue eyes and wavy blond hair that had been streaked brighter by the Texas sun. Her tan set off her coloring, and her sanguine personality had been influenced as much by her adoptive family as it had been by the optimism she seemed to have been born with.

Her sister, Marla Norris, was a full inch shorter than she was, and her manner was as reserved as Jaicey's was outgoing. Marla's mink-brown hair was thick and straight, and had been cut to fall sleekly to her shoulders. Her wispy bangs drew more attention to her soft hazel eyes than she was aware of, and the years of keeping her feelings hidden showed in her aloof gaze, lending her a mystery that made her seem older and wiser than her sister.

Marla had been just as shaped by the hard times that had dominated her growing up years as Jaicey had been by the happy ones so prevalent in hers. Unlike Jaicey, Marla had lost her adoptive parents by the time she'd turned eight. She'd also lost what was left of her childhood, changed by shock and grief into a wary girl who'd endured a small series of foster placements and learned to survive the loneliness of not belonging and never truly feeling secure.

She'd had to create those things for herself, and she'd worked hard at it. After graduating high school, Marla had become ruthlessly self-sufficient, leery of depending on anyone but herself. She'd shunned the "mirages" of rescue that lost children dreamed of and some grown women looked to a man to provide.

It was safer that way. You couldn't be disappointed or used if you didn't put much hope or faith in other people. And if you didn't allow yourself to get too close to anyone, you couldn't be traumatized by abandonment when it came, or emotional drama. The only real price she'd paid to be free of troubles like those was that she sometimes felt lonely and unfulfilled.

Until the sister she'd never dreamed existed had breezed into her life and changed it forever.

"Are you sorry I talked you into moving to Texas?" Jaicey's question broke the companionable silence they'd fallen into as they finished with the photo albums they'd been putting together at the kitchen table in Marla's apartment. They'd spent every evening that week working on them, trading extra copies of school photos and ones they'd taken themselves over the years.

What had got them started on this project was the craving to fill in some of the first twenty-four years of life together that they'd missed out on. Plus, they'd bought the lion's share of the professional photographs Jaicey had insisted they have taken a month ago, and they'd needed a place to display the smaller ones they'd picked.

The question made Marla look over at Jaicey to see traces of uncharacteristic worry in her eyes.

"Never," Marla said, and meant it. It still amazed her that she'd packed up everything she owned three months ago and moved from Illinois to live in Coulter City, Texas, but she couldn't imagine ever regretting it.

Jaicey still looked troubled. "Not even knowing we have to keep the biggest secret of our lives for a while longer?"

"If I had misgivings, I wouldn't have moved all this way."

Now the shadows in Jaicey's beautiful eyes faded. "So if I asked you to come to the ranch this weekend, you'd say yes?"

"I'm a little less sure of that."

Jaicey grinned. "Still nervous around my big brother, huh?" she guessed. "That's called sexual attraction, little sister."

Marla felt her face warm. No one but Jaicey had ever detected her feelings so easily, and it still caught her a little off guard.

"Maybe," she allowed, "but the more time I spend around your family, the more opportunities we have to slip up."

"And you're not comfortable dodging questions." Now the worry was back in Jaicey's eyes. "I don't like keeping things from them, either."

"That, too," Marla agreed.

Not to mention that Jaicey's older brother, Jake Crad- dock, was usually the one asking questions. No matter how she answered him, she somehow managed to make him more suspicious of her than ever.

And yet his suspicion had been clear to Marla the moment Jaicey had introduced her to the Craddocks. Judd had been happy to meet her, welcoming her without reservation, but Jake had given her such a hard, searching look before he'd eventually smiled and said all the polite words, that she hadn't been able to keep herself from getting away from him as soon as she reasonably could.

Since then he'd managed to find things to ask her about, no matter how hard she tried to keep from attracting his attention. Though she'd always been good at keeping a low profile, Jake was frustratingly hard to avoid. If Jaicey hadn't been around to distract him from playing Twenty Questions or to chide him for it, Marla wasn't certain she would have been fast enough to come up with reasonable answers that weren't spur-of-the-moment lies.

She hated lies, but Jake was so good at probing into areas she didn't want to account for that it was a challenge to answer and tell the truth, or at least as much of the truth as she could. After their first encounter, she'd gone home and brainstormed possible future questions, trying to formulate true but uninformative answers, along with a few little evasions, just in case.

Now anytime Marla went for a visit to Craddock Ranch, she was taking the risk that she might unintentionally give Jake a clue to figure things out before Jaicey could advance her careful campaign to confess. Even worse, he might somehow get her to blab their secret. He seemed to have a knack for scrambling her emotions as well as her brain, which made her even more reluctant to be around him. Marla didn't want to be the one who gave the secret away.

Jaicey was afraid to just baldly confess to Jake and his father that she'd gone looking for her birth mother and come home with a sister. Judd and Jake were stick-lers for loyalty, so they might think that what Jaicey had done was disloyal.

Or ungrateful. Judd and his late wife, Nona, had given Jaicey everything a little girl could want, especially love, and Jaicey didn't want him to think that what they'd done for her hadn't been good enough. A lot of adoptive parents were hurt by what might look like disloyalty or ingratitude, and Marla couldn't blame them for feeling insecure, at least for a while. On top of that, Judd Craddock's health hadn't been too good the past couple of years, so Jaicey didn't want to shock him.

Her plan was to gradually lead up to it. Jaicey was sure there'd be a right time and place, but she was determined in the meantime for her family to get to know Marla. Jaicey was convinced they'd greet her confession better if they already liked her new "best friend." Marla wasn't at all confident of that.

She wouldn't have done things this way if she'd been in Jaicey's place, and she felt guilty for not thinking more clearly about the consequences of her sister's plan. It would have been better if she'd stayed in Chicago until things had been worked out with the Craddocks, but after Jaicey had repeatedly urged her to move to Texas, Marla couldn't have refused if her life had depended on it. Now that she'd lived here for a few weeks and loved it, the only thing she regretted was that she felt compelled to keep a secret of this magnitude.

She should have known better than to let Jaicey talk her into going to the ranch that first time, but she'd been as carried away by curiosity about the Craddocks and the need to know everything about her sister as Jaicey had been eager to bring her whole family together.

They should have told the Craddocks weeks ago.After all this time they were sure to be angry once they knew, whether they ever showed that anger to Jaicey or not.

Jaicey was the one they loved, and Marla had no doubt that any upset they felt about the revelation would be directed far more toward her than Jaicey. Their first thought would likely be that Marla had been the one who'd wanted to keep things secret for a while.

They might even believe that she'd influenced Jaicey to be disloyal by keeping a secret from them so long. To the Craddocks, family members never "took sides" against each other. It was also possible they'd think she'd been the one to approach Jaicey instead of the other way around, no matter what Jaicey told them now.

That was the problem with keeping a secret this big. The worst part was that once it was revealed, the Craddock's trust in Jaicey might be affected long into the future, and Marla worried about that.

Craddock was a big name in Texas, with the holdings and the fortune that went with it. Marla already knew from her sister that more than one opportunist had targeted each of the Craddocks in the past. Though Marla's pride was outraged at the idea that anyone would consider her an opportunist, it wouldn't be unheard of from people who'd learned to be skeptical of strangers.

Perhaps that was why Jake was so suspicious of her friendship with his sister. Jaicey was an heiress, and Marla was a nobody with only a few thousand dollars in savings. Maybe once he found out the truth, Jake would think Marla had been motivated more by Craddock money than a true wish to be reunited with her sister.

If he did, he'd find out soon enough that he was wrong. She'd had plenty of time these past months to exploit Jaicey's natural generosity. Marla had been on guard against it from the beginning, particularly after she'd had car trouble and her sister had tried to buy her a new car. She'd adamantly refused, then found herself refusing other gifts, even going so far as to make Jaicey return some jewelry and clothes she'd bought.

Jaicey hadn't been happy about any of that, but she'd finally understood Marla meant what she said about paying her own way. Marla had even set a spending limit on birthday and Christmas gifts, which Jaicey still complained about.

The only thing she'd allowed Jaicey to do for her was to give her a personal reference for the job she'd taken as a secretary with a Coulter City law firm. Surely the Craddocks wouldn't find fault with that.

Jaicey stood then and started to reach for the briefcase she'd set on a kitchen chair.

"I mean it, Marlie," she was saying. "I want you to come to the ranch this weekend. I have a feeling this visit might make a big difference between you and Jake."

Marla wasn't exactly relieved by that idea. She'd just as soon keep her distance from Jake for the time being, but she didn't comment.