Total pages in book: 197
Estimated words: 199143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 996(@200wpm)___ 797(@250wpm)___ 664(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 199143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 996(@200wpm)___ 797(@250wpm)___ 664(@300wpm)
Like parties.
Or birthdays.
Today was their party.
They probably shouldn’t have snuck out.
Oh, well.
There was a lot about eight-year-old twins, Bene and Beni, that was exactly the same. Like the way they looked—obviously. But also the way they dressed. How they talked. The expressions their faces made. Or that’s what everyone else always told them whenever somebody said they had bad attitudes.
Something Beni noticed about other people? When they noticed how similar the twins were, then they started treating them as though they were exactly the same, too. Gifts came doubled. Outfits that matched right down to the socks. People just referred to them as the twins or those Guzzi twins.
As though they didn’t have their own names.
Nothing bothered Beni more than when someone started treating him and his twin like they were the same person. Because they weren’t. Even if they looked and did things the same, it didn’t mean they were. Bene didn’t have as much trouble with that as he did.
See, sometimes they were different.
Beni learned to swim first. Bene could still run faster. He always woke up at the crack of dawn and his brother never did. Bene thought poached eggs were good and Beni thought they were puke on a plate.
But it was a lot easier to just let people think and do whatever they wanted when it came to the twins than it was to constantly correct others. Besides, he didn’t mind. And Bene really didn’t care. So just because it was a little annoying didn’t mean it affected Beni enough to make it stop. Plus, their parents and brothers never treated them like they were anything other than Beni and Bene.
Wasn’t that what counted?
“Wait up, Bene!” Beni shouted, still trying to catch up with his twin.
He couldn’t see beyond the bushy bend in the trail. Maybe he should have known better than to come around it so fast, but especially when Bene loved to just jump out of anywhere and scare the crap out of him.
Like he did this time.
“Beni!”
His twin jumping out of the bushes with his hands going wild and his voice loud enough that even the people at the party would hear him was enough to send Beni flying back on the trail. Of course, he stumbled over his shoes and fell right on his ass.
Bene’s laughter surrounded him, but just as fast, his twin was in front of him and pulling him up from the ground with a strong grip. Once the two were standing face to face again, Beni shook his head while Bene laughed.
“Got you again, bro,” Bene said.
“Screw you.”
His brother hadn’t let his hand go. He squeezed tight, and so did Bene. Their hands locked around each other reminded him of something else that was different between them.
The scars on the side of their hands.
So faint, and thin.
Two red lines.
But Bene’s was shorter than his.
They couldn’t even remember how they got them.
“Beni, Bene!”
Bene let out a dramatic sigh and gave his twin a grin. “Busted.”
“Get back to the house!” came their father’s call, faint as it was in the woods.
Beni shrugged and his twin dropped his hand. “Well, we tried.”
That would, undoubtedly, be the story of their life.
Chapter 6 - Cara POV
Every night, Cara took her time to remove the stress of the day away. It started in her closet where she shed the clothes of the day for something more comfortable in bed. Then, she moved to her vanity where she wiped away her makeup and prepped her skin for the evening. Eventually, she made her way to her library.
Her favorite space.
The one room in the entire mansion that had been designed entirely for her. Yes, her husband and boys used it. When she had a patient that came to the house for a session, they often found themselves sitting in the leather couches that faced each other in front of the bay windows. Sometimes, after dinner parties, she brought a few friends up to her library to continue drinking because Gian kept the wet bar well-stocked.
Nonetheless, party or not ... patient or none, night after night, Cara found herself back in her library where she ended her evenings with two fingers of her favorite cognac and just one more chapter of whatever book she had picked to read for that week. She didn’t get to do that as much as she wanted to anymore, either.
Read, that was.
Yet, she made time for it.
Even if it was only a chapter at a time.
“The house is quiet, hmm?” came a familiar drawl from the doorway.
Gian rarely interrupted Cara when she was reading seeing as how he knew it wasn’t often she could sit down for longer than thirty minutes at a time to read. When he did, however, she never got annoyed about it. She found him leaning in the doorway—both oak doors to the library stayed wide open unless she had a patient in the library with her. Otherwise, she wanted the space to seem open and inviting to others.