Fortune's Woman / A Fortune Wedding: Fortune's Woman

He was quiet for a long moment. When she glanced over to gauge his expression and try to figure out what he was thinking about, she thought she detected a hint of color on his cheekbones.

“Should I take him to buy condoms, just to be on the safe side?” he asked, without looking at her.

The temperature between them seemed to heat up a dozen degrees and she knew it was not from the barbecue just a few feet away. She cleared her throat. “Maybe that’s a conversation you ought to have with his mother.”

“I can’t discuss my nephew’s sex life with my sister while she’s in jail!”

She supposed she ought to be flattered that he felt he could discuss such a delicate subject with her, but she couldn’t get past the trembling in her stomach just thinking about “Ross” and “condoms” in the same conversation.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said. “You’re going to have to make that decision on your own. But I will say that if Josh were my son or in my care, it’s certainly a conversation I would have with him, especially if he’s becoming as serious with his girlfriend as you seem to believe.”

He didn’t look very thrilled by the prospect, but he nodded. “I guess I’ll do that. Thanks for the advice. I can see why you make a good counselor. You’re very easy to talk to.”

She smiled. “You’re welcome.”

He gazed at her and she saw that heat flare in his eyes again. The world seemed to shiver to a stop and the night and the lovely gardens and the soft wind murmuring in the treetops seemed to disappear, leaving just the two of them alone with this powerful tug of attraction between them.

He was inches from kissing her.

Ross could feel the sweet warmth of her breath, could almost taste her on his mouth. He wanted her, with a fierce hunger that seemed to drive all common sense out of his head.

He tried to hang on to all the reasons he shouldn’t kiss her. This was not supposed to be happening right now.

His life was in total chaos, he had far too many people depending on him and the last thing he needed was to find himself tangled up with someone like Julie Osterman, someone soft and generous and entirely too sweet for a man like him.

One kiss wouldn’t hurt anything, though. Only a tiny little taste. He leaned forward and heard a seductive little catch of her breath, felt the brush of her breast against his arm as she shifted slightly closer.

His mouth was just a tantalizing inch away from hers when he suddenly heard the snick of the sliding door.

“Ross?” Josh called out.

Julie jerked away as if Ross had poked her with hot coals from the grill and the glider swayed crazily with the movement.

“Over here,” Ross called.

He didn’t like the way Josh skidded to a stop, his sizefourteen sneakers thudding against the tile patio, or the way his eyebrows climbed to find them sitting together so cozily on the glider.

He also didn’t like the sudden speculative gleam in his nephew’s eyes.

“Hi, Julie. I didn’t hear you come in.”

She was breathing just a hair too quickly, Ross thought. “I only arrived a few moments ago. Your uncle and I were just…we were, um…”

“Julie was helping me with the steaks. And speaking of which, I’d better turn them before they’re charred.”

He definitely needed to get a grip on this attraction, he thought as he turned the steaks while Julie and Josh set the table out on the patio.

She was a nice woman who was doing him a huge favor by helping him figure out how to handle sudden, unexpected fatherhood. It would be a poor way to repay her by indulging his own whims when he had nothing to offer her in return.

“I think everything’s ready,” he said a few moments later.

“We’re all set here,” Julie said from the table, where she sat talking quietly with Josh about school. They had set out candles, he saw, and Frannie’s nice china. It was a nice change from the paper plates he and Josh had been using while he was here.

He went inside for the russet potatoes he had thrown in the oven earlier while they were waiting for her to arrive, and he put the tomato salad Julie had brought into a bowl.

“Wow. I’m impressed,” Julie exclaimed as he set the foil packet containing her fish on her plate and opened it for her. The smell of tarragon and lemon escaped.

“Better wait until you taste it before you say that,” he warned her.

He knew only two ways to cook fish. Either battered and fried in tons of butter—something he tried not to do too often for obvious health reasons—or grilled in a packet with olive oil, lemon juice and a mix of easy spices.

He knew he shouldn’t care so much what she thought but he still found it immensely gratifying when she closed her eyes with sheer delight at the first forkful. “Ross, this is delicious!”

He was becoming like one of the teens she worked with, desperate for her approval. “Glad you like it. How’s the steak, Josh?”

His nephew was still studying the two of them with entirely too much interest. “It’s good. Same as always.”

“Nothing like family to deflate the old ego,” Ross said with a wry smile.

“Sorry,” Josh amended. “What I meant to say is this is absolutely the best steak I have ever tasted. Every bite melts in my mouth. I think I could eat this every single day for the rest of my life. Is that better?”

Julie laughed and it warmed Ross to see Josh flash her a quick grin before he turned back to his dinner. He didn’t know what it was about her, but when she was around, Josh seemed far more relaxed. More like the kid he used to be.

“What are your plans after the summer?” she asked.

Josh shrugged. “I’m not sure right now.”

Ross looked up from dressing his potato and frowned. “What do you mean, you’re not sure? You’ve got an academic scholarship to A&M. It’s all you could talk about a few weeks ago.”

His nephew looked down at his plate. “Yeah, well, things have changed a little since a few weeks ago.”

“And in a few more weeks, this is all going to seem like a bad dream.”

“Is it?” Josh asked quietly and the patio suddenly simmered with tension.

“Yes. You’ll see. These ridiculous charges against your mom will be dropped and everything will be back to normal.”

“My dad will still be dead.”

He had no answer to that stark truth. “You’re not giving up a full-ride academic scholarship out of concern for your mother or some kind of misguided guilt over your dad’s death.”

Josh’s color rose and he set his utensils down carefully on his plate. “It’s my scholarship, Uncle Ross. If I want to give it up, nobody else can stop me. You keep forgetting I’m not a kid anymore. I’ll be eighteen in a week, remember?”

“I haven’t forgotten. But I also know that you have opportunities ahead of you and it would be a crime to waste those. I won’t let you do it.”

“Good luck trying to stop me, if that’s what I decide to do,” Josh snapped.

Ross opened his mouth to answer just as hotly but Josh’s cell phone suddenly bleated a sappy little tune he recognized as being the one Josh had programmed to alert him to Lyndsey’s endless phone calls.

He didn’t know whether to be annoyed or grateful for the interruption. He had dealt with his own stubborn younger brothers enough to know that yelling wasn’t going to accomplish anything but would make Josh dig in his heels.

“Hey,” Josh said into the phone. He shifted his body away and pitched his voice several decibels lower. “No. Not the best right now.”

Ross’s gaze met Julie’s and the memory of their conversation earlier—and all his worries—came flooding back. Was it possible Lyndsey was part of the reason Josh was considering giving up his scholarship?

Josh held the phone away from his ear. “Uncle Ross, I’m done with dinner. Do you care if I take this inside, in my room? A friend of mine needs some help with, um, trig homework. I might be a while and I wouldn’t want to bore you two with a one-sided conversation.”

He and Julie both knew that wasn’t true. He wondered if he should call Josh on the lie, but he wasn’t eager to add to the tension over college.

“Did you get enough to eat?”

Josh made a face. “Yeah, Mom.”

Ross supposed that was just what he sounded like. Not that he had much experience with maternal solicitude. “I guess you can go.”

The teen was gone before the words were even out of his mouth. Only after the sliding door closed behind him did Ross suddenly realize his nephew’s defection left him alone with Julie.

“You know, lots of parents establish a no-call zone during the dinner hour,” Julie said mildly.

He bristled for about ten seconds before he sighed. Hardly anybody had a cell phone twenty years ago, the last time he’d been responsible for a teenager. The whole internet, e-mail, cell phone thing presented entirely new challenges.

“Frannie always insisted he leave it in his room during dinner.”

She opened her mouth to say something but quickly closed it again and returned her attention to her plate.

“What were you going to say?” he pressed.

“Nothing.”

“You forget, I’m a trained investigator. I know when people are trying to hide things from me.”

She gave him a sidelong look, then sighed. “Fine. But feel free to tell me to mind my own business.”

“Believe me. I have no problem whatsoever telling people that.”

She gave a slight smile, but quickly grew serious. “I was only thinking that a little more consistency with the house rules he’s always known might be exactly what Josh needs right now. He’s in complete turmoil. He’s struggling with his mother’s arrest and his father’s death. Despite their uneasy relationship, Lloyd was his father and having a parent die isn’t easy for anyone. Perhaps a little more constancy in his life will help him feel not quite as fragmented.”

“So many things have been ripped from his world right now. It’s all chaos. I was just trying to cut him a little slack.”

She stood and began clearing the dishes away. “Believe it or not, a little slack might very well be the last thing he needs right now. Rules provide structure and order amid the chaos, Ross.”

He could definitely understand that. He had craved that very structure in his younger days and had found it at the Academy. Police work, with its regulations and discipline—its paperwork and routine—had given him guidance and direction at a time he desperately needed some.

Maybe she was right. Maybe Josh craved those same things.

“Here, I’ll take those,” he said to Julie when she had filled a tray with the remains of their dinner.

After he carried the tray into the kitchen, he returned to the patio to find Julie standing on the edge of the tile, gazing up at the night sky.

It was a clear night, with a bright sprawl of stars. Ross joined her, wondering if he could remember the last time he had taken a chance to stargaze.

“Pretty night,” he said, though all he could think about was the lovely woman standing beside him with her face lifted up to the moonlight.

“It is,” she murmured. “I can’t believe I sometimes get so wrapped up in my life that I forget to enjoy it.”

They were quiet for a long time, both lost in their respective thoughts while the sweet scents from Frannie’s garden swirled around them.

“Can I ask you something?” Ross finally asked.

If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he might have missed the slight wariness that crept into her expression. “Sure.”

“How do you know all this stuff? About grieving and discipline and how to help a kid who’s hurting?”

“I’m a trained youth counselor with a master’s degree in social work and child and family development.”

She was silent for a long moment, the only sound in the night the distant hoot of an owl and the wind sighing in the treetops. “Beyond that,” she finally said softly, “I know what it is to be lost and hurting. I’ve been there.”

Her words shivered through him, to the dark and quiet place he didn’t like to acknowledge, that place where he was still ten years old, scared and alone and responsible for his three younger siblings yet again after Cindy ran off with a new boyfriend for a night that turned into another and then another.

He knew lost and hurting. He had been there plenty of times before, but it didn’t make him any better at intuitively sensing what was best for Josh.

He pushed those memories aside. It was much easier to focus on the mystery of Julie Osterman than on the past he preferred to forget.

“What are your secrets?” he asked.

“You mean you haven’t run a background check on me yet, detective?”

He laughed a little at her arch tone. “I didn’t think about it until just this moment. Good idea, though.” He studied her for a long moment in the moonlight, noting the color that had crept along the delicate planes of her cheekbones. “If I did, what would I find?”

“Nothing criminal, I can assure you.”

“I don’t suppose you would have been hired at the Foundation if you had that sort of past.”

“Probably not.”

“Then what?” He paused. “You lost someone close to you, didn’t you?”

She gazed at the moon, sparkling on the swimming pool. “That’s a rather obvious guess, detective.”

“But true.”

Her sigh stirred the air between them.

“Yes. True,” she answered. “It’s a long, sad story that I’m sure would bore you senseless within minutes.”

“I have a pretty high bore quotient. I’ve been known to sit perfectly motionless on stakeouts for hours.”

She glanced at him, then away again. “A simple background check would tell you this in five seconds but I suppose I’ll go ahead and spare you the trouble. I lost my husband seven years ago. I’m a widow, detective.”

Chapter Seven

For several moments, he could only stare at her, speechless.

She was a widow. He would never have guessed that, not in a million years, though he wasn’t quite sure why he found the knowledge so astonishing—perhaps because she normally had such a sunny attitude for someone who must have lost her husband at a young age.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you to talk about something you obviously didn’t want to discuss, especially after you’ve done nothing but help Josh and me.”

“It’s okay, Ross. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t wanted you to know. I don’t talk about it often, only because it was a really dark and difficult time in my past and I don’t like to dwell on it. I prefer instead to enjoy the present and look ahead to the future. That’s all.”

“What happened?” he asked after a long moment.

He sensed it was something traumatic. That might help explain her empathy and understanding of what Josh was dealing with. He braced himself for it but was completely unprepared for her quiet answer.

“He shot himself.”

Ross stared, trying to make out her delicate features in the dim moonlight. “Was it a hunting accident?”

The noise she made couldn’t be mistaken for a laugh. “No. It was no accident. Chris was…troubled. We were married for five years. The first two were wonderful. He was funny and smart and brilliantly creative. The kind of person who always seems to have a crowd around him.

“After those first two years, we bought a home in Austin,” she went on. “I was working at a high school there and Chris was a photographer with an ad agency. Everything seemed so perfect. We were starting to talk about starting a family and then…everything started to change. He started to change.”

“Drugs? Alcohol?”

“No. Nothing like that. He became moody and withdrawn at times and obsessively jealous, and then he would have periods where he would stay up for days at a time, would shoot roll after roll of film, of nothing really. The pattern on the sofa cushions, a single blade of grass. He once spent six hours straight trying to capture a doorknob in the perfect light. Eventually he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, with a little manic depression thrown in for added fun.”

Ross frowned. He knew enough about mental illness to know it couldn’t have been an easy road for either of them.

“You stayed with him?”

“He was my husband,” she said simply. “I loved him.”

“You must have been young.”

“We married when I was twenty-four. I didn’t feel young at the time but in retrospect, I was a baby. I suppose I must have been young enough, anyway, that I was certain I could fix anything.”

“But you couldn’t.”

“Not this. It was bigger than either of us. That’s still so hard for me to admit, even seven years later. For three years, he tried every possible combination of meds but nothing could keep the demons away for long. Finally Chris’s condition started a downward spiral and no matter what we tried, we couldn’t seem to slow the momentum. On his twentyeighth birthday, he gave up the fight. He returned home early from work, set his camera on a tripod with an automatic timer, took out a Ruger he had bought illegally on the street a week earlier and shot himself in our bedroom.”

Where Julie would be certain to find him, he realized grimly. Ross had seen enough self-inflicted gunshot wounds when he had been a cop to know exactly what kind of scene she must have walked into.

He knew her husband had been mentally ill and couldn’t have been thinking clearly, but suddenly Ross was furious at the man for leaving behind such horror and anguish for his pretty, devoted young wife to remember the rest of her life. He hoped she could remember past that traumatic final scene and the three rough years preceding it to the few good ones they had together. “I’m so sorry, Julie.”

He wanted to take it away, to make everything all better for her, but here was another person in his life whose pain he couldn’t fix.

The unmistakable sincerity in Ross’s voice warmed the small, frozen place inside Julie that would always grieve for the bright, creative light extinguished far too soon.

She lifted her gaze to his. “It was a terrible time in my life. I can’t lie about that. The grief was so huge and so awful, I wasn’t sure I could survive it. But I endured by hanging on to the things I still had that mattered—my faith, my family, my friends. I also reminded myself every single day, both before his death and in those terrible dark days after, that Chris wasn’t responsible for the choices he made. I know he loved me and wouldn’t have chosen that course, if he could have seen any other choice in his tormented mind.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time and she couldn’t help wondering what he was thinking.

“Is that why you work with troubled kids?” he finally asked, his voice low. “To make sure none of them feels like that’s the only way out for them?”

She sighed. “I suppose that’s part of it. I started out working on a suicide hotline in the evenings and realized I was making an impact. It helped me move outside myself at a time I desperately needed that and I discovered I was good at listening. So I left teaching and went back to school to earn a graduate degree.”

“Do you miss teaching?” he asked.

“Sometimes. But when I was teaching six different classes, with thirty kids each, I didn’t have the chance for the one-on-one interaction I have now. I can always go back to teaching if I want. I still might someday, if that seems the right direction for me. I haven’t ruled anything out yet.”

“Do you ever wonder if anything you do really makes a difference?”

How in the world had he become so cynical? she wondered. Was it his years as a police officer? Or something before then? It saddened her, whatever the cause.

“I have to give back somehow. I’ve always thought of it as trying to shine as much light as I can, even if it only illuminates my own path.”

He gazed at her, his dark eyes intense, and she was suddenly painfully aware of him, the hard strength of his shoulders beside her, the slight curl of his hair brushing his collar.

“You’re a remarkable woman,” he said softly. “I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone quite like you.”

He wanted to kiss her. She sensed it clearly again, as she had earlier in the evening. She could see the desire kindle in his eyes, the intention there.

This time he wouldn’t stop—and she didn’t want him to. She wanted to know if his kiss could possibly be as good as she imagined it. Anticipation fluttered through her, like the soft, fragile wings of a butterfly, and she caught her breath as he moved closer, surrounding her with his heat and his strength.

The night seemed magical. The vast glitter of stars and the breeze murmuring through the trees and the sweet scents of his sister’s flower garden. Everything combined to make this moment seem unreal.

She closed her eyes as his mouth found hers, her heart pounding, her breath caught in her throat. His kiss was gentle at first, as slow and easy as the little creek running through her yard on a hot August afternoon. She leaned into it, into him, wondering how it was possible for him to make her feel shattered with just a kiss.

She was vaguely aware of the slide of his arms around her, pulling her closer. She again had that vague sensation of being surrounded by him, encircled. It wasn’t unpleasant. Far from it. She wanted to savor every moment, burn it all into her mind.

He deepened the kiss, his mouth a little more urgent. Some insistent warning voice in her head urged her to pull away and return to the safety of the other side of the patio, away from this temptation to lose her common sense—herself—but she decided to ignore it. Instead, she curled her arms around his neck and surrendered to the moment.

She had dated a few men in the seven years since Chris’s suicide. A history teacher at the high school, a fellow grad student, an investment banker she met at the gym.

All of them had been perfectly nice, attractive men. So why hadn’t their kisses made her blood churn, the lassitude seep into her muscles? She supposed it was a good thing he was supporting her weight with his arms around her because she wasn’t at all sure she could stand on her own.

In seven years, she hadn’t realized how truly much she had missed a man’s touch until just this moment. Everything feminine inside her just seemed to give a deep, heartfelt sigh of welcome.

They kissed for a long time there in the moonlight. She learned the taste of him, of the wine they’d had with dinner and some sort of enticing mint and another essence she guessed was pure Ross. She learned his hair was soft and thick under her fingers and that he went a little crazy when she nipped gently on his bottom lip.

His tongue swept through her mouth, unfurling a wild hunger for more and she tightened her arms around him, her hands gripping him closely.

She didn’t know how long the kiss lasted. It could have been hours, for all the awareness she had of time passing. She only knew that in Ross’s arms, she felt safe and desirable, a heady combination.

They might have stayed there all night, but eventually some little spark of consciousness filtered through the soft hunger.

This was dangerous. Too dangerous. His nephew could come outside to the patio at any moment and discover them in a heated embrace.

Although Josh was almost eighteen, certainly old enough to understand about sexual attraction, she had a strong feeling Ross wouldn’t be thrilled if his nephew caught them kissing.

She wasn’t sure how, but she managed to summon the energy and sheer strength of will to pull her hands away and step back enough to allow room for her lungs to take in a full breath.

The kick of oxygen to her system pushed away some of the fuzzy, hormone-induced cobwebs in her brain but for perhaps an entire sixty seconds she could only stare at him, feeling raw and off balance. Her thoughts were a wild snarl in her head and she couldn’t seem to untwist them.

An awkward silence seethed around them, replacing the seductive attraction with something taut and clumsy. She struggled for something to say but couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound silly and girlish.