Fortune Found

by Victoria Pade

The space wasn’t large and with the exception of a bathroom and closet at the far end, it was just one big open room with the separate sections defined by the small refrigerator, stove and sink against one wall; a double bed and dresser near the bathroom and closet end; and a sofa, easy chair and two end tables riding the wall that ran beside the door.

  When Jessie had taken it over as an art studio she’d added a huge worktable smack-dab in the center of the place. The worktable was laden with stones and supplies, while sections of the floor, all the counters, the small kitchen table, the end tables and every shelf of the bookcase held finished sculptures.

  “Ta-da!” she said with forced flourish as she crossed the space to flip another switch and flood the place with even more light.

  She’d shown her sculptures to people other than family and friends before, and while she was never completely comfortable with it, it hadn’t ever made her feel as vulnerable as she did now. But there was no stopping Flint as he began to examine her work with all the somber study of an art lover at the Louvre.

  Her discomfort wouldn’t allow her to keep quiet, though, so she said, “It’s sort of like people who put up easels in the countryside and paint landscapes—I see rock formations and waterfalls and things in the woods, and then come home and try to reproduce them. Like little pieces of nature that can be brought indoors.”

  Flint nodded that handsome head of his, but he wouldn’t be distracted from studying sculpture after sculpture.

  And Jessie still couldn’t merely stand there and watch him.

  “The kids and I wash most of the rocks,” she continued to babble. “But if we’ve found some with moss growing on them, I wait till any mud or dirt is dry enough to brush off so I can leave the moss undisturbed—I think it adds a little something. And a few of the pieces have water—a guy at the hobby shop showed me how I could hide small reservoirs in some of them and pump the water up and over the top like waterfalls.”

  “This one?” Flint asked, pointing to the first of those that he’d reached. “Will you show me?”

  She went to where he was standing and leaned in front of him to turn on the water feature, catching a whiff of his cologne as she did, and making her all the more aware of him and the effect he had on her. It didn’t help her composure.

  Which launched her into more chatter.

  “The kids love it when I use the rocks they’ve picked up. They feel like they have their own part in the sculptures. Of course sometimes that means they get competitive and insist that the sculpture with their particular rocks are better than the other ones and then I take the brunt of it because they’ll say the other ones are ugly.”

  “I don’t see anything ugly here,” Flint said without taking his eyes off her work. And the fact that he sounded as if he genuinely meant it gave her a tiny wave of elation.

  “Kelsey chose that one as a housewarming gift,” she said when he had circled the entire place and ended at the door where she’d set another of the fountain sculptures on the end table there. “I thought I’d bring it on Sunday to the party. So, now that I think of it, I guess you would have seen what I do with the rocks then…”

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to wait.”

  Flint had seen how to turn on the water on the other fountain and so he did it with the one that would be Kelsey and Coop’s.

  Jessie busied herself shutting down the first one.

  “You really don’t know what you have here, do you?” he asked then.

  “A whole bunch of rock piles?” Jessie joked as she pivoted in his direction, watching him watch the miniature wall of water cascade over moss rocks into a replica of a pond that was lined with mica rock to reflect blues and greens from beneath and make the water appear to shimmer.

  “These are beautiful,” he declared.

  Then he stopped the water feature on the sculpture and switched his focus to Jessie, catching her staring as he crossed to her big square worktable.

  “Honestly,” he said as he did. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” she responded quietly to his reiteration of the compliment, ill at ease with it.

  There were bar stools around the worktable that she sat on when she worked, that the kids used when they came to watch her. Flint perched a hip on one of them, stretching a long leg far out from it and hooking his other boot heel over the front rung, obviously having no intention of leaving now that they’d done what they’d come out there to do.

  Not that Jessie was sorry to see that. Much as she knew she should avoid it, a little time alone with him seemed like a treat…a reward. So she joined him, sitting around the corner from him so she could face him.

  Flint used his index finger to indicate the three unoccupied bar stools. “Do you have help putting your sculptures together?”

  Jessie laughed. “No, but sometimes I have an audience. I think the kids come here when I’m working because it’s like a session with a therapist for them. So even when I think that the income from renting the place again would help give me a cushion, I don’t do it because the money isn’t as important as the closeness I get from that alone time with the kids when they come out here with me on their own to talk. Sometimes I get to see a whole different side to them.”

  “But all this—” Flint motioned to the rock sculptures on the table. “This shows that their mom has a whole other side herself. An alter ego who’s an artist. And they get to see that.”

  Back to being embarrassed. “I don’t think of myself as an artist.”

  “You should. I’m telling you, these are really wonderful. So why don’t you let this space make you some money after all?”

  “You lost me,” Jessie said, frowning in confusion.

  “Why not sell the sculptures?”

  She laughed and something about that caused him to smile.

  “I’m serious, Jessie,” he said, his eyes so intently on her that she was afraid she might blush. “These are good. You’re good. I know I can either sell them outright to some of the shops I deal with or place them in a few of the galleries for sale.”

  “No,” she demurred in disbelief. “They’re just…my little rock piles.”

  Flint chuckled at that. “Your little rock piles are intricate and multifaceted little natural wonders of their own. Haven’t you ever sold one?”

  “I don’t even give them away unless someone asks for one. I don’t want anyone to have to hide them in a closet and then try to remember to take them out when I visit to make me think they don’t hate the weird gift I gave them.”

  Flint shook his head. “I’m telling you that I can sell them. Why don’t you let me put out some feelers and prove it to you?”

  Flattered, Jessie was still hesitant. She found it difficult to believe that her sculptures were as good as he said and could actually bring in money.

  But there was another facet to his suggestion—doing business with Flint would mean more of a continuing connection with him.

  And in the midst of her strongest attractions to him, her most potent fantasies about him, her daydreams and inability to stop thinking about him almost every waking minute, it was the fact that he wouldn’t be staying in Red Rock that made that all seem not so dangerous. The fact that he would leave and that from then on her contact with him would be rare, gave her hope that what seemed like it might be a tiny crush on him would just resolve itself.

  But if he sold her sculptures?

  There would definitely be maintained contact. And it wouldn’t merely be from a distance on an occasional visit he might make to his brother next door. It would be a continuing arrangement just between the two of them. Complete with the potential that she would go on harboring this ever-growing attraction to him while he dropped in, poured fuel on the fire, and then sauntered out again to get on with the rest of his life.

  That didn’t seem like something that would be good for her in the long run. So she tried to decline.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said.

&
nbsp; “Jessie, you could be sitting on Ella’s entire college education right here in this room.”

  “Come on, that isn’t true,” she said, actually leery of believing that, because putting anything in terms of her kids was her weakest spot and she knew it would be all the more difficult to resist what he was suggesting.

  “It is true,” he insisted. “You can make some serious bank here, lady.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  He reached across the corner of her worktable and took her hand, rubbing the back of it with his thumb. “Like I said, let me prove it to you. Let me take some pictures of the pieces and show them to my people. If I’m right—”

  “If you’re wrong it will be humiliating.”

  He smiled gently, patiently. “I’m not wrong. I know my business, my buyers, my market. And when I come back to you with facts and figures, then you can tell me what you want to do. Or not.”

  He could be wrong, Jessie thought. Which would solve the problem. Or if he was right, by the time what he was proposing actually happened, maybe she would have found some fatal flaw in him that totally turned her off. And any amount of contact she might have to have with him wouldn’t matter…because he wouldn’t be so enticing.

  “You don’t have anything to lose,” he said.

  His hand was big and strong and warm, and hers seemed to fit into it as if it were made to be there. Plus his eyes were holding hers so tenderly that they were making it impossible not to trust him.

  And heaven help her, she heard herself say, “Okay, you can take pictures. Then we’ll see.”

  Flint grinned and Jessie felt much, much too happy to have pleased him.

  “You won’t be sorry,” he promised, squeezing her hand, still gazing into her eyes, making her think for the millionth time about that kiss they’d shared the night before.

  Then he let go of her hand and got up from the bar stool, and Jessie had the oddest yen to reach out and take his hand back, to keep him from leaving.

  Of course she didn’t do that. Instead, as she stood, too, she heard him say, “We’ve been warned that tomorrow will be jam-packed—”

  “Right. Everything needs to be finished, the house needs to be cleaned, and we have to get set up for the housewarming party on Sunday,” Jessie confirmed.

  “So I’d better let you get some rest. I heard Kelsey tell you to come over at seven tomorrow morning.”

  “We’re even putting the kids and Mom and Dad to work, but they’ll be over later.”

  While Flint went to the studio door and opened it, Jessie turned off the light switch on the opposite wall. Just as she was joining him at the door he flipped off that light switch, too.

  The moon was nearly full and very bright, illuminating the dark studio.

  “This is kind of like being out in the woods with you again,” Flint said.

  He was standing in the doorway, facing the shelves inside. Jessie took a look over her shoulder at what he was seeing as her backdrop. Somehow the stone sculptures drank in the moonlight and reflected it back, making them stand out in the milky glow more than any of the furniture.

  “I suppose if you put enough of them around it is like being out in the forest,” she agreed.

  “Only here I get you all to myself. I’m beginning to see the appeal of the studio.”

  Jessie wasn’t too sure what to say to that. And because he was blocking the exit she couldn’t get past him to go outside. So there she was, standing in the moon glow, facing Flint.

  And again thinking about that kiss from the night before.

  “Early day tomorrow,” she said in a voice far softer and more breathy than she’d intended it to be.

  “Early day tomorrow and I should get going. I shouldn’t be…” He muttered to himself as he took a step toward her, raised that same big, strong hand that had held hers earlier and placed it gently to the side of her face.

  She had to tilt her head up to see him when he closed the distance between them. Or at least that’s what she told herself, not wanting to admit that the movement could also be interpreted as an invitation. And certainly letting his hand stay on her face was not a rebuff, even though in her mind she was checking off the reasons why she shouldn’t let this happen again and adding to the list the fact that they could be working together in the future.

  But his fingertips were in her hair, his palm followed the curve of her jaw, and the scent of his cologne went right to her head. And in the backdrop of moonlight his dark handsomeness was all the more stark.

  So when he leaned in, when his mouth first pressed to hers, all those reasons fled, her eyes closed, and she just gave herself over to that kiss that she’d been wishing for since the moment the last one had ended.

  This kiss was different though. Flint’s lips lingered, parting over hers, beckoning hers to part, too. And when his big hand caressed her face and pulled her closer, that kiss grew deeper and deeper.

  On its own, her hand rose to his chest, feeling the hardness of honed muscle that his white T-shirt hinted at, and Jessie immersed herself for a moment in the feel of him as he went on kissing her so soundly that she couldn’t think about anything else.

  His other arm went around her, pulling her nearer with a hand splayed against her back. Even as she was drawn in by his strengths, she considered that she was alone in a dark, somewhat secluded place with him. Kissing him, letting him kiss her. Giving signs of encouragement that she knew shouldn’t be given….

  Maybe there was something in her response that sent that message, because he suddenly took his arm away and gave her more breathing room. It was only a moment before he brought it to an end, before they were merely standing there in the moonlight again, his hand still on her cheek.

  “Early day tomorrow,” he said, belatedly parroting her words.

  Jessie nodded, her lips still tingling from that kiss. That kiss that—even though she’d initiated ending it—she wished he would start all over again.

  But he slowly drew his hand from her cheek, stopping before he’d abandoned it completely to cup her chin, tilt it upward once more, and kiss her again, more gently this time.

  Then he stepped through the door, waiting outside for her to follow.

  Which she did—a split second after winning a battle with her inclination to yank him back into the studio for more kissing.

  “I’ll go through the gate,” Flint said as Jessie set off for her house.

  She paused when she realized he wasn’t going with her, that he was pointing to the gate that connected her yard and Kelsey’s.

  “Okay. Then I’ll just see you tomorrow,” she said.

  “Bright and early,” Flint confirmed as he aimed for the fence.

  Jessie went the rest of the way to her house, glancing over her shoulder as she opened the screen door to see Flint headed for her sister’s place—tall, straight-backed and broad-shouldered.

  And she was wishing with a horrible ferocity that he’d walked her to her door and kissed her at least once more, which was when she knew that she definitely had a crush on the man.

  A crush that she needed to squelch.

  But that wasn’t shaping up to be an easy task.

  Not when it seemed resilient enough to even grow under the onslaught of her widow’s guilt, her devotion to her kids and the sure and certain knowledge that there was no future for a mother of four with a man like Flint.

  Chapter Seven

  On Saturday morning. Jessie went to her sister’s house at 7:00 a.m. sharp. While Flint, Coop and eventually Jessie’s father finished construction details and cleanup, Jessie, Kelsey, the kids and Jeannie cleaned, vacuumed, hung curtains and pictures and arranged furniture before using the evening to get things set up for Sunday’s housewarming party.

  At about nine o’clock that evening Flint’s services were no longer needed and when Coop let him off the hook from party preparations, Flint went upstairs to shower. By the time he was finished, Kelsey had suggested that Jessie t
ake her four very tired kids home and call it a day, too. Jeannie and Jack assured Jessie that they would stay and help Kelsey and Coop, encouraging Jessie to go.

  And when Flint offered his help in taking the kids home and putting them to bed…? Adam literally jumped for joy, Bethany and Braden chimed in with their approval, all four other adults enthusiastically supported the idea, and Jessie was too worn-out to argue.

  Not that she had any inclination to, despite the fact that she knew she should. The day had been so busy that she and Flint had barely crossed paths or exchanged glances, and while that should have been just fine, she somehow felt cheated. No amount of reasoning with herself changed that; and while his assistance in putting four kids to bed was still not exactly the sort of togetherness she had in mind, she wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to have even a few more minutes with him.

  So off they went to Jessie’s house, as she tried not to think that any outsider looking in might have thought that they were a family.

  She didn’t typically give the kids communal baths, but because it was long past their bedtimes and she was beat, she dispatched the boys to one tub and the girls to the other. Flint kept an eye on the boys, while Jessie ran between bathrooms to actually oversee and aid the bathing.

  Flint cleaned out the tubs while Jessie tidied up after the kids.

  Then he made a suggestion.

  “I can crack the whip with the teeth brushing and read the bedtime story. Why don’t you go shower?”

  “Do I look that bad?” she joked. She knew that she did look the worse for wear, that her hair was stringy, the light makeup she’d applied that morning was long gone and her clothes were smudged and dirty.

  Flint just grinned in response.

  Of course there was the possibility that he had come home with her solely to help with the kids and would disappear the minute those services were rendered. Jessie couldn’t blame him if he did, because he had also worked like a dog all day and evening. And while his shower had washed away the grime and left his hair slightly damp, and he’d put on a clean pair of jeans and a plain white T-shirt, he hadn’t gone so far as to shave the dark shadow of beard that had reappeared as the day and evening had worn on, which seemed like a dead giveaway that he didn’t have too much energy left either.