by Unknown
But he’d never envisioned giving up racing either. He’d never planned to have an accident that would put him in the hospital and end his career as a dirt-track rider, but his life had been a series of unplanned changes, and now he was dealing with another—a body that was broken. His recovery wasn’t progressing easily. The lingering pain of fused vertebrae had come as a surprise. Even as he splashed across the back drive, he felt the ever-present spasms and wondered why he was following Fortune Dagosta.
Fortune Dagosta. The name couldn’t have been more perfect. The woman who held his immediate future in her hands was a flake, and yet all he could think about as he followed her was the way her hips moved and the way his muscles tightened in response.
She was tiny, and determined, and convinced that she was right. Just as his mother had been when she’d followed Hale Kincaid.
He’d never understood his mother’s reasons either, no matter how hard she’d tried to explain. From the time his mother had married the man she’d worked for as his confidential secretary, Hunter had tried every way he could to punish his wealthy adoptive father.
At ten years of age Hunter had resented the marriage and Hale. At thirty-four he still refused to believe that Hale Kincaid loved his mother. He believed Hale had married her to keep her quiet over some shady business deal or other, such as the one that forced men to work in an unsafe plant, the plant where his father had been killed.
Hale Kincaid might have adopted him, but Hunter still remembered his fathers animosity toward his boss, remembered his father’s claims that the man was more interested in his bank account than the safety of his workers. After his father had died, Hale Kincaid had tried to pretend he was a knight in shining armor, giving his mother a job, and two years later marrying her.
But Hunter had never forgiven him. He was his father’s son, determined to go his own way. And he had—until now.
Hunter’s foot slid for a second, and he righted himself, feeling the sharp pain he’d come to expect when he made a sudden move.
Fortune stopped and turned, catching a glimpse of pain in his eyes. She almost reached out to help him, caught herself, and waited. Maybe it was a mistake, bringing a man who was hurting into her life. She, who identified well with pain, was too drawn to the one who hurt.
She felt his eyes on her and followed the direction of his gaze. Her T-shirt was wet. It hugged her breasts like a spotlight, targeting nipples that, in spite of her best efforts, tightened as she watched.
Lifting his gaze to her face. Hunter felt a twinge of respect for her. The woman he was following didn’t pretend. The awareness flowed between them, open and acknowledged. But, like him, she wouldn’t let it interfere with whatever she was going after. He could understand that. Still, this children business didn’t make sense.
“I guess I’d better know, Fortune. Is there a man in your life? I mean, the missing partner, maybe?”
The rain continued. They were standing there facing each other for he didn’t know how long, when she finally answered.
“He’s still missing. But there isn’t a man in my life,” she said. “There are four of them.”
Fortune turned and walked the few steps to the barn. She opened the door, peering inside. “Hey, guys, are you in here?” She stepped inside and motioned for Hunter to follow.
“Yo, Fortune. Did you get picked?” A tall, lanky boy ambled into the center of the barn. He rocked back and forth on his heels as he studied Hunter.
“I did, thanks to you guys. Where is everybody?”
“After school they went into town with Lucy. You know how she is when a storm comes up. Head for cover and hide under the bed. I waited for you.”
“Mickey, you shouldn’t make fun of Lucy, You know that her house was struck by lightning when she was a child. Everybody in her family was killed in the fire except her. Mickey, this is Mr. Kincaid, my partner for the scavenger hunt. Hunter, Mickey.”
“You’re the one who entered Fortune in the contest?”
“No, it was Joe’s idea. All I did was snitch the form. He filled it out and put it in the bowl.”
“And how old is Joe?”
“Sixteen, same as me.”
Hunter gave Fortune a puzzled look. “You travel with two sixteen-year-olds? And you were worried about me having a foot fetish.”
“Not two, four,” Fortune corrected with a grin. “Four boys and two girls. And we lived in Lucy’s house.”
“Not anymore,” Mickey corrected. “Fortune, I know you’re going to be upset, but I promised I wouldn’t tell you. Joe took off this morning.”
“Where’d he go?”
“All I could get out of him was that he wanted to check out the Hemingway cats.”
“Oh, no.” Now the note and a missing pair of shoes made sense. She should have figured it out that morning. She would have, if she hadn’t been in such a hurry.
Joe was gone again. Joe, who had no home to run away from, seldom stayed in one place for long. He’d covered most of the East Coast in the last year. She’d never understood how he’d escaped being picked up by the authorities. He was so small that he looked like a child. She and Joe had a lot in common.
Watching, Hunter felt her crushing disappointment. He could actually see the pain reflected in her eyes. One of her children had left, and she was hurting. “What are Hemingway cats?” he asked.
Fortune straightened her shoulders and forced herself to answer. “Ernest Hemingway liked cats, and he had a pair with huge extra toes. When he died, his house was sold to a local family. They’ve preserved it as a museum. The owner of the house loved the cats and kept them. The six- and seven-toed animals kept reproducing and became known as the Hemingway cats.”
“Yeah, freak cats,” Mickey said with a sneer, “just like us. At least somebody provides food and a home for those misfits.”
“Ah, Mickey.” Fortune put her arms around the boy and hugged him. “I’ll miss Joe too. But running away isn’t the answer. Maybe—maybe he’ll find out that Florida doesn’t have what he’s looking for either. Maybe he’ll come back.”
Hunter watched as the tiny woman comforted the boy who was already two heads taller than she. Mickey bent and rested his chin on top of Fortune’s head. Hunter couldn’t tell which of them was more upset, until Fortune backed away with a sniff and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
“Well, Mickey, if everybody else has gone into town, we might as well get our clothes and join them. No point in sleeping in the barn, cowboy, when there are cots available.”
“Cots? I’m afraid to ask where.”
“Then don’t. You wanted to spend the night with me, let’s hit the road. I’m hungry.”
The rain had stopped. Mickey and Fortune fell into step, and Hunter moved hesitantly along behind them. What he wanted to do was drop them somewhere and put the entire day out of his mind. Fortune Dagosta wasn’t just a wild woman, she was a temptation, the kind of fantasy that a man dreamed up in his most private moments but avoided in real life. The random thought of her in his bed flickered through his mind with an unwelcome jolt. The last thing he wanted right now was a man-woman relationship with Fortune Dagosta.
He mentally ran through her undesirable characteristics again, imprinting them across his thoughts like a negative that had been overexposed. He immediately discounted the fiery black eyes that challenged him with every bat of her inch-long lashes, by focusing on her peaked hair. He replaced her perfect breasts and tight little bottom that was practically sending out “touch me” signals as she walked, with her “I dare you” attitude.
Try as he might, he couldn’t do a thing about the freckles. Somehow, he couldn’t erase the wild-woman image. She didn’t make sense. He wasn’t even certain that he liked her, but there was an unmistakable attraction between them that any other time would have made him turn and run. The fifty-thousand-dollar prize, however, made him swallow his reservations and follow.
After all, he reasoned, like her or not, the woman
was his partner, and if he had any chance of winning the scavenger hunt, he had to find a way to use her to his best advantage. She had two redeeming characteristics: her determination and her wacky, offbeat mind. Maybe she could channel it into solving the puzzle.
Maybe.
Their destination was the last place he might have gone to search for four kids and a woman who was afraid of storms. It wasn’t a summer camp, or a shelter for the homeless. The sign over the gate they were driving through—the padlocked, guarded gate being closed behind them by a uniformed guard—read Crisp County Prison Farm.
“What kind of woman would take children from a burned-out house to a prison farm?”
“A true friend, cowboy. Tom Benson is the warden. The children stay in his house. It’s away from the compound, separated from the prisoners by a ten-foot wall. The kids are safer here than where they came from.”
“Considering everything else that has happened today, I suppose you could say sleeping in a jail makes some kind of sense.”
Hunter turned off the engine and opened the truck door. He blinked his eyes and mentally replayed his words. “I can’t believe I said that.”
Fortune had a feeling that Hunter would have preferred to be anyplace else in the world. There was something about the prison that bothered him. She could tell it by the strained expression on his face, by the way he hovered close to his truck, as though he expected to need it for a fast getaway.
“Tom’s wife, Rachel, is with Child Welfare. She’s the one who is trying to help us get our license to operate a temporary facility for runaways. She’d even agreed to be the resident counselor—until we had our little fire. She and Tom have plenty of room, and they’ve offered us a place to stay until we get all this worked out.”
Inside the house the children were already bedded down for the night. Lucy was doing her schoolteacher bit, listening to them read from the dog-eared books that Fortune had rescued from the trash bins behind the elementary school. No matter that the four children doing the reading were long past third grade.
“Hi, Fortune, who’s the dude?” The girl speaking was blond—at least the outer edges of her hair were blond. There was a streak down one side that was the same color as the barn behind the burned-out house.
“I should have known. Like mother, like daughter,” Hunter muttered under his breath.
“Yep,” Fortune agreed with a grin. “There was a woman from Umsters, who found a look-alike right in the dumpsters. They worked through the night, to make their hair a fright, and applied for jobs as twin Munsters.”
“Phew, Fortune,” the girl said, holding her nose in an exaggerated gesture of rejection.
“Okay, so my limericks lack something. You still have to admit they’re original.”
“Great!” Hunter said, “if having a partner dressed in quilt-scrap couturier isn’t enough, she’s a comedian too.”
Fortune could have said that she was reasonably good at intuition and hunches, but from the confused look on her partner’s face, she decided to stop the game-playing. He’d been a good sport up to now, and she owed him an explanation.
“Sorry, Hunter, let me introduce you. This is my friend Lucy. My look-alike is called Jade. We’re not related, beyond a kindred spirit. You’ve already met Mickey. The others are Teddy, Carol, and Beau. They’re friends, visitors. They’re here temporarily.”
“Yeah,” Beau agreed, staring at Fortune’s feet. “Visiting temporarily. I’ve been meaning to talk to you, Fortune. I didn’t mind the house, but I’m not cut out for this kind of shelter. I’m thinking about moving on too.”
Fortune sat down on a cot. “Oh, no, Beau. Not yet. You’ve only got three more weeks until the school year ends. Don’t go.” His revelation wasn’t unexpected. It seemed that when one of her kids moved on, everybody else began to waver. She wanted them to find their way, but not by running away.
“Aw, Fortune, what good’s that gonna do? I can’t stay here. I need a job, and there ain’t anybody gonna hire me. You just talking crap bout us having a normal life. Look what happened to Joe. Nobody believed that he didn’t mean to set the fire.”
“One of your kids set the house on fire?” Hunter didn’t know why that surprised him.
“Joe gave up.” Fortune ignored her partner. “We’re going to make it, guys. Once we win the money, we’re going to fix the house, and, who knows, we might even take a trip. Cowboy, help us out here. Where would you like to go?” she asked Hunter.
“To bed. My head is spinning. All you need to travel is some magic beans and a star to swing on.”
“Magic beans—maybe you’re right, cowboy. Let’s find you a bed.”
Hunter looked around. “Me, sleep here? Thanks but no thanks. They do lock those gates at night, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” Mickey said with a look of resignation on his face. “They sure do. But you can get out, dude.”
“Then I guess it will be safe to leave you here. I’ll pick you up in the morning, Fortune.”
“What’s the matter, don’t you like the accommodations?” This question came from Jade, who hadn’t taken her eyes from Hunter since he’d entered the house.
“I don’t like jails. I like nice soft mattresses in rooms with windows that open if I want to let the world in—or,” he added, lowering his voice, “if I want to get out.”
“I see,” Fortune said softly. But she wasn’t certain that she did. The man had insisted on spending the night baby-sitting her, but once he’d seen the prison farm, he’d turned white as a sheet and backed away. Something about the place bothered him. “Not necessary, cowboy, we can meet at the starting point.”
“No, I’ll pick you up at the gate at eight-fifteen. We’ll drive to the dealership together. I’ve arranged to leave my truck there.”
“If you’d feel better about it, that suits me fine. See you in the morning.”
Hunter turned and left the room, pausing in the doorway for one last look at the woman he’d be with for the next nine days. “Uh, Fortune,” he said hesitantly, wanting to leave with some final comment that would settle his unease, “you do have shoes, don’t you? Real shoes? It isn’t safe to ride a bike without something substantial on your feet.”
“I’ll have something on my feet, Hunter. I promise.” Though at the moment she wasn’t certain what. Learning that Joe was gone explained what had happened to her tennis shoes, but she couldn’t tell Hunter. Sports shoes were important to a kid, and a kid like Joe couldn’t see the Hemingway cats barefoot. She understood that.
…
Hunter, on the other hand, was less understanding when she met him at the prison gate the next morning wearing a pair of scuffed Keds and her only other pair of clean jeans. There were no knees in this pair either, and at the last minute she’d cut them off, turning them into long shorts. Fortune thought they went very well with the tank top she wore, and they would certainly be cooler.
She had a rare headache, born of a sleepless night trying to figure out what to do with her kids while she was gone. There were too many runaways, and not enough guardian angels to provide for them.
Tom and Rachel agreed to house them at the farm until Fortune returned. There was plenty of room. The Crisp County Prison Farm still produced its own food, so at least they could eat.
If the fire weren’t enough, Lucy had disclosed that, in spite of Tom and Rachel’s influence, the county had issued a citation for operating a child-care center without a permit. Because the fire had been set by a boy who’d been labeled a juvenile delinquent, the entire program was being threatened with closure. Now Joe had run away.
Winning the scavenger hunt was her only hope. Playing quirky word games and looking for a needle in a haystack were two things Fortune had always been able to do well. Her imagination had soothed her loneliness and taken her everywhere a child with nothing wanted to go. Books and discarded magazines had fed the flames of Fortune’s imagination then, and necessity fed it now. Once she and Hunter were
given their clues, they’d find a way to win. They had to.
Hunter Kincaid was the closest thing Fortune had to a guardian angel, whether he knew it or not. He was her only hope. He’d drive that monster machine, and she’d navigate and decipher. She took a long look at the man getting out of the truck and sighed.
Her partner was wearing leather pants that looked like cowboy chaps over his jeans, and a vest over an army-drab T-shirt. He’d exchanged his Stetson for a baseball cap, but sunglasses still masked his eyes. Good, she thought. She didn’t want to get lost in those blue eyes now. They had serious things to do, and she badly needed to stay in control.
“Morning, General Kincaid. Reporting for duty as ordered, sir,” Fortune said, marching out through the gate, overlooking his frown at the same time she managed a jaunty salute.
Hunter took one look at her stretchy top and the shapely set of bare legs and groaned silently. His conclusion that his attraction to Fortune Dagosta was because of stress went right out the window. “This is your idea of proper scavenger-hunting attire?”
“It beats leather to hell and back. It was ninety-five degrees in the shade yesterday, or have you forgotten?”
“I remember. But suppose we have to go somewhere that’s cold, not to mention the problem you’re going to have with your bare skin after eight hours on a bike. You’ll wish you were wearing leather to protect your body, wild woman.”
“I didn’t know that.”
He pulled out one of the three cigars he’d allotted himself for the day and lit it. “Never mind, I figured this is about what I’d run into. I came prepared.”
“Prepared for what? To die? You’re dressed for war, and you’re smoking cigars.”
“I’m beginning to think that riding with you may become a war. As for my cigars, what’s wrong with you, Ms. Dagosta? Are you some kind of health freak?”
“Maybe, but I have enough sense not to endanger my health by smoking.”
“I knew it.” He tapped the fire from his cigar and replaced the smelly object in his pocket. “And you probably don’t eat steak either.” Then he reached into the truck and pulled out a plastic bag.