“What about you?” she countered. “You and Coop are both Fortunes, but you’re Fortunes on your mother’s side, aren’t you?”
“We are,” he said amiably. “My mother never took any of her husband’s last names. Maybe she knew none of her marriages would last.”
Beyond the fact that Cindy Fortune was not well thought of, Jessie knew nothing about Flint and Cooper’s mother. But even though she was curious—especially about that comment about multiple marriages—it seemed beyond the realm of small talk to ask for details. So with the name-related questions answered, she opted for moving on.
“You live in Denver, right?” she said then.
“Right. Just outside of the city itself.”
“Do you have a house or—”
“I rent an apartment. I like to have a home base, but not with roots that are too deep. If I end up with a neighbor I don’t like, or the grass looks greener somewhere else, I want to be able to pack my stuff and move on without much fuss. That’s what I grew up with, and I guess it stuck.”
“The Fortune family are staples around here—ranchers, businessmen, philanthropists—they’re pillars of the community. But you grew up rootless?”
“Oh, yeah,” he answered with a mirthless laugh.
But again he didn’t offer an explanation beyond that and again Jessie thought that to push him for more might be prying.
He didn’t let there be an awkward silence, though, before he said, “What about you? Do you own the place next door?”
“I do,” she answered, liking that he didn’t put her in a position of quizzing him, that he asked questions of his own. Although she tried not to think that he might actually be interested in her, and told herself he was likely just being polite.
“Owning a house of our own was my late-husband’s and my biggest goal when we got married,” she went on. “It took us five years of saving, but we celebrated our fifth anniversary by moving into that house.”
“And you’re still there after how long?”
“Eight years.”
“That’s an eternity to me. You must be all about deep roots.”
“Stability is important to me.”
“And family, too, I’m guessing—because your parents live with you and now you have Kelsey right next door.”
“You could definitely say I’m all about family,” she confirmed. “I don’t know what I would do without them.”
“That’s nice,” he said just when she was wondering if he was approving or disapproving of her closeness to her family. But he sounded as if he honestly did think it was nice and she wondered if he regretted that he wasn’t closer to his own family.
But again he kept their chat going by saying, “It was you who gave Coop the heads-up when this place became available, wasn’t it?”
“It was. That’s how it all came about so fast.”
“And they’re renting with an option to buy, right?”
“With the first three months rent-free because none of this work is being hired out.”
“That’s a big change for Coop, too—that putting down roots thing. But he seems really happy.”
“I think he is. I know Kelsey is.”
“Good for them!” Flint decreed. “And Kelsey is okay raising Anthony?”
“She is. I don’t think she would love him any more if he were her own.”
Jessie knew that Anthony was the product of an earlier relationship Cooper had had with a woman named Lulu. There were many questions about Anthony turning up in Red Rock at the same time Flint and Cooper’s Uncle William had had his car accident in January. Ultimately Anthony had been linked to the Fortunes through a small gold medallion that had been draped around his blanket-cocooned little body by a fragile chain. A medallion that had been traced back to Cindy Fortune’s children, narrowing the possibilities for Anthony’s father to Cooper or Flint.
“I’m really glad it all worked out for them the way it did,” Flint said. “It looks like Anthony will have a good home.”
“Were you disappointed that he wasn’t yours?” Jessie asked.
Flint laughed spontaneously. “No,” he answered forcefully. “I was a wreck thinking he might be mine and wondering what I was going to do with him if he was. I can’t even keep plants alive. Believe me, this was a much better way for things to turn out.”
“What would you have done if he’d been yours?” Jessie ventured, challenging him just a bit.
He laughed again. “I probably would have cried like a baby myself,” he joked.
Jessie smiled at the wall she was painting, amused by the thought of the man she’d been thinking of as super-macho quaking at the mere possibility that he might be a father.
“I would have stepped up,” he said then, without hesitation, winning him points. “But I’m afraid poor Anthony would have suffered for it.”
Jessie laughed at him. “Well, I know you travel for work and that would have made it a lot more complicated, so you’re probably right—it’s for the best that things ended up the way they did.”
But what she didn’t know was much about his work and that seemed like another avenue for conversation, so she said, “You’re in sales, aren’t you?”
“Buying and selling, yeah.”
“What is it that you buy and sell?”
“I buy Western-themed arts and crafts and novelty items, and I sell them to gift shops and galleries and some private clients all across the country.”
That piqued her interest. “When you say that you buy arts and crafts and novelty items, do you mean from manufacturers or—”
“I have accounts with some wholesale houses that bring up trinket-type things from Mexico. But whenever I can I buy from artists and craftsmen. I like to deal in the unique and original more than in the mass-produced stuff.”
“Do you work for a company or something?”
“The business is mine. But business sounds more… I don’t know, corporate than I am. I’ve just come up with a name—Fortune Fine Arts and Crafts—because I’m in the process of having a website set up so I can do more selling over the internet. But really, I’m just a middleman—I hunt down stuff to sell, usually buy it outright myself and then resell it at a profit. Or sometimes I find a gallery or shop that will let me place a piece there and if it sells, the money gets split three ways—between whoever produced it, whoever’s shop or gallery it was sold from, and me.”
“That would make you an agent or an artist’s representative, then, wouldn’t it?”
“Again, sounds a lot fancier than I am. What I am is an old-fashioned horse trader. Except that I don’t deal in horses, I deal in brass sculptures of horses and kachina dolls and hand-sewn moccasins and tribal headdresses and authentic totem poles.”
“Hmm. I never considered that there would be a market for tribal headdresses or totem poles.”
“They aren’t my best sellers, but they’re fairly popular for decorating hunting and fishing lodges and hotels that want a rustic appeal.”
“And I guess you can’t call yourself a totem pole seller,” she teased him a little.
“That’s why we just say that I’m in sales,” he concluded, pleasing her with the fact that he’d grasped her gentle gibe.
“Is the goal of the new website to reduce the amount of travel you have to do?” she asked.
“I guess potentially it could, but the traveling doesn’t bother me. I don’t have anything tying me down, and I like getting around, seeing the country. The life of a traveling salesman suits me.”
Their painting met at the center of the wall behind the washer and drier then, and while Flint stepped back to survey their handiwork, Jessie used one final application of her roller to blend that meeting line seamlessly.
And with that, she sat back and looked around, too.
“That didn’t take long,” she admitted, thinking that the time had actually seemed to fly.
“Apparently we work well together,” Flint said just as Adam burs
t through the door with an excited, “Hi, Fwint!”
“Hi, Adam,” Flint greeted the three-year-old with a mirroring of Adam’s enthusiasm. “Where’ve you been today?”
“He’ppin my grampa wis our new junger gym. We digged howes for plantin’ the powes so it don’t fauw over.”
“They dug holes to cement the poles into the ground so the jungle gym doesn’t fall over,” Jessie translated. “Sometimes the L’s come out and sometimes they just don’t.” Then to her son, she said, “What are you doing here now?”
Before Adam answered that Jessie heard the voice of her oldest daughter, Ella, calling for Adam.
“We’re in the laundry room, El,” Jessie called back.
The seven-year-old bounded in, much the way Adam had except rather than joyfully having discovered Flint, the much more serious Ella scowled at her brother. “Gramma said you could only come with me if you held my hand, and you didn’t!”
“I had to find Fwint,” Adam answered as if his sister should have known that.
“Ella, you remember Flint, don’t you? Coop’s brother?” Jessie interjected, both to remind her daughter of her manners and to avoid a fight between her oldest and youngest.
“I remember,” was all Ella said to Flint because she was still more intent on wrangling with her brother. And to Adam she goaded, “Flint. His name is Flint.”
“Okay, okay,” Jessie said before war broke out. “What’s up, El?”
“Gramma says it’s almost dinnertime and she needs a pan she can’t find to cook. Can you come home and show her where it is?”
“I think I can probably do that. We’re finished here, aren’t we?” Jessie said, trying not to analyze why she was sorry that that was true, and why she was also sorry to be pulled away so suddenly.
“Looks finished to me,” Flint confirmed.
To Ella, Jessie said, “You can tell Gramma I’ll come home as soon as I wash out these paint things.”
“Come on, Adam, let’s go,” Ella said as if she’d just been given the upper hand.
“Ouw go wis Mama when she goes.”
“Adam…” Ella said in the warning tone she always took when she was in the mode of oldest-child-as-boss.
This time it was Flint who stepped in before a fight broke out. To Jessie, he said, “I’ll take care of the cleanup, go ahead and go home.”
Jessie laughed. “Be careful. I’m the mother of four—I don’t get offers for other people to cleanup too often and I never turn them down when I do.”
That made him smile back at her—a wide grin that showed perfect white teeth and drew ever-so-appealing lines around the corners of his mouth. And the very fact that his smile made her flush was a phenomenon Jessie didn’t want to delve into.
“Go,” he urged with a nudge of that sexy, slightly dimpled chin.
“If you’re sure…”
“I’m sure. It’s nothing.”
So he’s not only hot, but he’s also a nice guy, Jessie thought, remembering the previous day’s conversation with her sister.
But that, too, wasn’t something she should be caring about and she decided that before she started to actually like this guy, she’d better go home where she belonged.
“Okay, I’ll take you up on that, then,” she announced, scooting around on the drier so that she could get down.
But that set the tarp into motion and it began to slide, taking her with it until Flint lunged forward to catch her.
And in a split second Jessie found herself with Flint Fortune’s handsome face scant inches from hers, his arms on either side of her, his hands flat against the tarp but so close to her rear end that she thought she could almost feel them.
And her own hands somehow clasped to his power-house shoulders to catch herself.
Wide-eyed, she stared into his dark eyes and wasn’t quite sure whether it was the near fall from the drier or Flint that had stolen her breath. But one way or another, for a moment she was frozen there, so close that they could have kissed had either of them moved an inch.
And why that went through her mind, she had no idea.
“Mama?” Ella said with some shock in her voice.
It took Jessie a moment to remember herself, to breathe, to veer away from Flint and pull her hands from shoulders she was enjoying the feel of much too much…
“Whoops,” she said feebly.
“Mama aw-most fawed off—tha’s funny,” Adam said with a giggle.
“Thanks for the catch,” Jessie muttered, leaning as far back from Flint as she could.
But still he stayed where he was, anchoring the tarp, looking into her eyes, while a much more intimate smile slowly spread agile lips. So intimate that it made something skitter across the surface of Jessie’s skin—a sensation she hadn’t had in longer than she could remember.
“No problem,” he said in a voice that had a deeper, almost sensual timbre.
Then he pushed off the drier and took hold of the tarp from behind her. “Okay, now slide off,” he advised.
Under the watchful eye of two of her children, Jessie did, wondering at the scowl that had come onto Ella’s pretty, freckled face as the little girl glared at Flint as if he’d done something wrong.
“Okay, we better get going before Gramma sends more troops,” Jessie said in a tone she hoped sounded normal. Inside, though, she was a jumble of excitement and confusion and something that seemed to remind her she was a woman—a feeling she hadn’t experienced in a very, very long time.
As she guided her kids out of the laundry room she couldn’t help glancing back just once because she thought she could feel Flint watching her.
He stood with his hips leaning against the front of the drier, his arms crossed over his wide chest. And he wasn’t merely watching her—there was something else in those eyes that almost seemed appreciative…
Why that again set off that tingling-across-the-surface-of-her-skin feeling, that reminder that she was a woman, she didn’t know.
She only knew that it needed to stop.
And it needed not to happen again.
She was a mother, first and foremost, and she couldn’t let herself be distracted from that. She already had her hands full.
And yet just the thought of having her hands full made her mind wander back to the feel of Flint’s rock-solid shoulders.
And whether she wanted to admit it or not, she’d liked the way they’d felt.
Chapter Three
Flint stood high atop his brother’s roof early Tuesday morning. He was supposed to be checking for loose shingles. Instead he was so intent on watching Jessie cross from her backyard into Cooper’s through the connecting gate that he was late in realizing that a car had pulled up in front of the house.
Only when Jessie had disappeared from sight was Flint’s attention drawn in the opposite direction, just as his other brother Ross was getting out from behind the wheel.
“Hey, down there! This is a surprise!” Flint called.
No one had said anything about Ross coming by today, or about his bringing their uncle William and William’s fiancée, Lily. But there they all were.
“I have some news,” Ross yelled back as he closed the driver’s side door.
Growing up, Ross, the oldest of Cindy’s children had looked out for his siblings and in that same vein, Flint saw him making sure that the elderly couple got safely out of his car as Flint climbed down the ladder and met them at the front porch.
William and Lily were supposed to be married in January. The match between William and his late-cousin Ryan’s widow had been kept quiet until they’d both felt the family could accept their relationship. The relationship that had come about despite the fact that William and Ryan had been close, despite the fact that Lily had adored her husband until his death six years before from a brain tumor. Two years ago, the also-widowed William and Lily had found their way to each other, and what had begun as a family connection turned into a friendship that had blossomed into love.
For months it hadn’t been known where he was, or whether he was dead or alive. Then, just a few weeks ago, he was located living on the streets in Haggerty, suffering from amnesia, not even aware of who he was.
Since being returned to Red Rock, to his family, to Lily—who had always believed William would return to her—he was getting better at recognizing the people who cared about him. And because he had a particular soft spot for Anthony—for no reason anyone could explain—Flint knew that whenever she got the chance, Lily liked to expose William to the baby in hope that something about Anthony was reaching William’s deeply buried recollections and helping to draw them to the surface.
“I don’t know what news you have, but it’s good to see you all,” Flint greeted the small group. “How are you feeling, Uncle William?”
“A little like I’m walking through a fog, but okay,” the older man answered, still sounding slightly befuddled.
“I thought it might be better if I brought Lily and Uncle William with me rather than tell what I have to tell twice,” Ross said then.
“Sure. Why don’t we go inside?” Flint suggested, ushering the threesome up the porch steps and hollering “We have company,” as he went in behind them all.
From upstairs came Coop, and from the kitchen at the rear of the house came Kelsey and the newly arrived Jessie.
And while Flint had no explanation for it, he only had eyes for Jessie, whom he said good morning to.
More greetings made the rounds and then Kelsey got everyone out to the picnic table in the backyard for coffee because no single section of the house could comfortably seat so many at once yet.
“I’m glad to see you back with us, Flint,” William said as they all settled. “I do remember that you were leaving after Anthony’s party for a business trip.”
Fortune Found Page 3