LITMIR.BIZ

      Prologue

      February 15

      Brittany Patterson, who considered herself to be unshockable, was in shock.

      It was everything she could do to keep her hands calmly folded on her lap, instead of wrapping her arms around herself and hugging, hard and long. It was everything she could do to keep the hot tears that smoldered behind her eyes from falling.

      Sisters.

      She, who had always been alone, was no longer alone.

      Brittany wanted to scoff at her own sentiment. She hadn’t been alone, precisely. She’d had her adoptive parents. Friends.

      And yet when she glanced again at the faces of her sisters, so eerily similar to her own, she felt as if she had been lonely all her life, her heart waiting for something it knew.

      Not just sisters. But triplets. Brittany Patterson had just found out she was one of triplets. She wanted to gaze at them, drink in their features, marvel at the quirk of Abby’s mouth, Corrine’s toss of her hair, mannerisms she possessed herself.

      Instead, she forced herself to listen to the silver-haired Jordan Hamilton, hoping the lawyer would say something that would unravel the mystery of why they had not always been together.

      Instead the mystery deepened.

      He did not know why they had grown up apart, each unaware of the existence of the others. He knew only that they had been reunited, here, in his office by a person he would not name. And that same person had bestowed a gift on each of them.

      Vaguely she registered her sister, Abby, had received a house. Vaguely she registered conditions. And then her own name penetrated the warm, misty fog of her brain, and she listened, some part of her alert, while the other still swam in the warmth of her discovery. Sisters.

      “…the gift of the Main Street Bakery, 207 Main Street, Miracle Harbor, Oregon, on the condition that Miss Patterson reside in Miracle Harbor for a period of one year, and that she marry within that time period.”

      Brittany drew in her breath sharply, landed solidly on Planet Earth, and eyed the distinguished, silver-haired lawyer, waiting for him to laugh.

      But he wasn’t laughing.

      “Mr. Hamilton, my parents are behind this, aren’t they?” she said. She supposed they were regretting that they had taken such a firm stand after her car accident. They probably had found out, somehow, she had sold the beautiful Fabergé tennis bracelet just last week. In a way, their plot was brilliant.

      “Your parents?” Jordan Hamilton asked. He seemed genuinely astonished.

      “You know,” she said, “buy me a career and get me married off in one fell swoop.” She said this lightly, as if it didn’t matter one little bit to her that her parents did not think she was capable of looking after herself. Not that that assessment would be completely unfair.

      Six months had passed since they had cut the purse strings, right after she had wrecked her beautiful apple-red Corvette and wound up in the hospital. Their terms were brutally simple. No allowance, no loans, no credit cards, no access to the bank account. They had told her they were not going to pay for her to kill herself, that it was time for her to join the real world, learn to be a responsible adult, make her contribution to the human race.

      Six months, and Brittany had yet to find a job. Even though she was trying so hard.

      “But what about us?” one of her sisters, Corrine, asked. “How could your parents manufacture us?”

      “Why would your adoptive parents give me a house?” Abby chimed in.

      Brittany

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