Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  Cover Copy

  When three friends impulsively buy a lottery ticket, they never suspect the many ways their lives will change—or that for each of them, love will be the biggest win of all.

  Kit Averin is anything but a gambler. A scientist with a quiet, steady job at a university, Kit’s focus has always been maintaining the acceptable status quo. Being a sudden millionaire doesn’t change that, with one exception: the fixer-upper she plans to buy, her first and only real home. It’s more than enough to keep her busy, until an unsettlingly handsome, charming, and determined corporate recruiter shows up in her lab—and manages to work his way into her heart . . .

  Ben Tucker is surprised to find that the scientist he wants for Beaumont Materials is a young woman—and a beautiful, sharp-witted one at that. Talking her into a big-money position with his firm is harder than he expects, but he’s willing to put in the time, especially when sticking around for the summer gives him a chance to reconnect with his dad. But the longer he stays, the more questions he has about his own future—and who might be in it.

  What begins as a chilly rebuff soon heats up into an attraction neither Kit nor Ben can deny—and finding themselves lucky in love might just be priceless . . .

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Books by Kate Clayborn

  Beginner’s Luck

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Beginner’s Luck

  A Chance of a Lifetime Romance

  Kate Clayborn

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Copyright

  Lyrical Press books are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Kate Clayborn

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  First Electronic Edition: October 2017

  eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0510-6

  eISBN-10: 1-5161-0510-9

  First Print Edition: October 2017

  eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0511-3

  eISBN-10: 1-5161-0511-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue

  They never could remember whose idea it had been, finally, to buy the ticket.

  This was frustrating for them all, not because any one of them wanted to have special claim on the ticket—whatever else they’d forgotten about the night, none of them ever questioned the fact that the ticket had been for all three of them, that they’d split the winnings on the off-chance they won. It was frustrating because it seemed so unlike all of them to even think of buying a lottery ticket.

  Kit wasn’t the type to quote you statistical unlikelihoods, but she was one of the most talented observational scientists around, and anyone with a shred of observational talent knew going in for a lottery ticket wasn’t altogether sensible. Plus, of the three of them, she was the most practical about money. She still lived in a shitty one-bedroom above One-Eyed Betty’s Bar and Restaurant, swearing that she wouldn’t buy a place of her own until she had a certain percentage of her student loans paid off and at least a twenty percent down payment for a house. No way could it have been Kit.

  Zoe was the most impulsive of their group; she sang karaoke and threw darts with whatever bearded hipster dude at the bar asked her and always ordered the special and also jetted off to exotic locales every year for vacation. But Zoe was also the most successful, and she didn’t need the money, and she wasn’t the kind of woman to want more of what she already had enough of. Zoe wouldn’t have thought to buy herself a ticket.

  And Greer thought the lottery was bad luck. She thought lots of things were bad luck, actually—the usual stuff, like black cats and walking under ladders and hats on the bed. But she had other ones too: goldfish, old brooms in new houses, opals, candles with two wicks. Mostly she accepted teasing about these superstitions, but Zoe and Kit both remembered clearly that Greer had once said lottery bad luck was real—she’d watched a whole show about it on TLC. Greer wouldn’t schedule a doctor’s appointment on the thirteenth of any month, so there was no way she’d buy a lottery ticket without some real coaxing.

  And yet—they’d bought a lottery ticket. There was even grainy surveillance video of their purchase, all three of them at the Seventh Street Quick Mart, looking like they’d had a bit too much to drink (they had—Betty ran a good happy hour), which was embarrassing, but maybe not quite as embarrassing as the fact that they were also purchasing twelve Snickers bars, a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and a box of tampons. One of the local news blogs had run a headline under a screenshot of the video: “Gal pals find best cure for PMS is a jackpot.” Zoe wanted to sue over that quip, and knowing Zoe, she would have done her hot-shot lawyer thing until the blog was wiped off the internet forever, but Kit—who was more concerned about keeping it quiet than any of them—had reminded her that it would just draw more attention to the whole thing.

  What they wanted, once they learned of their winnings—Gary from the Quick Mart called Betty, Betty called Kit, and Kit called Zoe and Greer—was to absorb the shock, to the collect their shares as privately as possible, and to make sense of their new lives.

  But that all came later.

  What came first was the three of them at Betty’s on a Wednesday night, where and when they’d met almost every week for the last four years. Seven total alcoholic beverages, two total plates of nachos, and three terrible days between them, and someone, at some point, brought up that night’s lottery.

  Maybe it was that others at the bar had been discussing it—last week’s jackpot had reached record proportions owing to a long stretch of no winners, but a group of twenty postal workers from the next state over had claimed the four hundred million, doing a press conference over the weekend all together, looking stunned and joyful and a little uncomfortable on camera. It was a big news story, and it seemed as if everyone was devoting at least a brief amount of dinner conversation to the life-changing implications of winning that kind of money.

  “Six of them said they’re going back to work,” said Greer, going straight for the newly deposited plate of nachos. “Can you imagine? You win four hundred million dollars and go back to delivering the mail.”

  “It’s really only around two-hundred-forty-eight million,” Zoe said. “Taxes.”

  “I’d go back to work,” said Kit.

  “We know, honey,” Greer said, patting Kit’s arm affectionately. “It’s you and that big microscope until the end of time. The greatest love story of th
e century.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Zoe, more firmly than perhaps any of them would have anticipated, since Zoe seemed to both love her work and do amazingly well at it. Zoe waved a hand dismissively. “It’d be just—a lifetime of spa treatments and male strippers, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Jesus, Zoe,” Kit said, on a laugh. “Why does your mind always go to male strippers?”

  “I think that Magic Mike movie rewired my brain.”

  “At least one of those twenty will do something like that, though,” said Greer. “I mean, maybe not the male strippers. But you’ll read about one of them buying a six-million-dollar RV and a gold-plated pickup truck or something.”

  “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” said Betty, snaking her tattooed arm between them to refill Greer’s beer. Betty winked at them, her trademark move when she served a drink. Betty actually, literally only had one natural eye, the left one a very convincing prosthetic, and all the regulars here had heard a different story from Betty herself on how she came to have it. “I saw that on a fridge magnet,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m not judging,” Greer said, embarrassed, though it’s not as though Betty herself had a multi-million-dollar RV or a gold pickup truck. “I mean, people can—you know, do whatever. I’m not judging!”

  This was classic Greer—quick to feel as if she’d said the wrong thing, always apologizing. Zoe kept telling her she needed to let her balls drop, but so far this hadn’t worked to make Greer any more assertive.

  Betty smiled, bright red lips passing over her white teeth. “I’m teasing. So what would you ladies do if you won the lottery?”

  There’d been a pause, a too-long one, because then Betty had shrugged and said, “Well, you three sort that out while I go serve some more drinks,” shimmying away in her vintage dress, little lemon and lime and orange slices printed all over it, her jet-black hair stiff in its pompadour. Except for the tattoos, Betty could’ve walked straight off a vintage poster, the kind that’d keep soldiers going.

  “She must not have heard me about the strippers,” Zoe said.

  “Seriously, though,” said Greer. “What would we buy?”

  Another pause, while they all took a drink. Maybe on another day, they would have taken Zoe’s lead and riffed on all their ridiculous, overindulgent ideas—the ones where you speculate on how many shoes you could fit in a walk-in closet the size of your current apartment, on whether you could afford a private plane, on the likelihood of being able to purchase some rare piece of historically important jewelry.

  But on that day—when Kit had spent two hours cleaning up after a pipe burst in her apartment, when Zoe had, not for the first time, watched a grown man cry at a conference table, and when Greer had, for the third time in a single calendar year, decided to quit a job—not a single one of them was feeling all that overindulgent.

  Kit said, “A house,” but what she thought was, home.

  Zoe said, “An adventure,” but what she thought was, forgiveness.

  Greer said, “An education,” but what she thought was, freedom.

  So in the end, it didn’t matter all that much who had said, at the Quick Mart, to add the ticket to their bill. What mattered was that the three of them had heard each other’s desire.

  And not a single one of them was going to see the other waste the opportunity.

  Chapter 1

  Kit

  So the thing is, I haven’t quite worked out how to live like a millionaire.

  Not that I have much acquaintance with millionaires, really, except for Greer and Zoe, but they’re new to the game too. In my mind, millionaires probably do not keep wearing a pair of black pants long after they don’t really look black anymore. They probably buy new glasses instead of buying tiny screw kits to fix old ones. They probably do not drive a fourteen-year-old hatchback with no radio, nor do they live in one-bedroom apartments above bars, even really nice bars.

  Millionaires also probably do not spend four hours of a workday wiping what was about fifty years of accumulated dirt off lab equipment, because millionaires probably have people they pay for that sort of thing.

  I tip a bit more ethanol onto my rag to polish one last spot on the steel creep frame we’ve recently inherited—it’s old, but it’ll still do the job for some of our most aggressive stress testing. At this point, it’s started to gleam under my attentions, and I get a little thrill of pride at seeing things coming together. This morning when I’d come in, I’d hoped to steal some time on the microscope, especially since in these early weeks of summer, most of the graduate students who use the scopes, untethered from their teaching assignments, are working irregular hours, sometimes coming out of the building rumpled and bleary-eyed at seven a.m. when I’m usually arriving. But when Dr. Singh had asked if I could spare some time getting the lab in shape for the campus photographer, I hadn’t hesitated. This lab is where I’d done most of the work for my master’s thesis, and it’s where I still, almost four years later, train some of the newcomers.

  Millionaires like me, I guess, get a little thrill from this kind of thing, and if I wish that some of the graduate students around here shared in my sense of protectiveness about this lab—well, that’s okay.

  Once I feel the rag slide easily over the steel, I take a step back and turn in a slow circle, admiring my work. I may need to hit the windows one more time—a few are looking a little streaky still. Dr. Singh’s lab is the most modest in the materials science department, but damn if I didn’t get it the cleanest. It probably won’t even make the cut for the photographer, but it’s the principle of the thing.

  I snort a little, just thinking this. Principles, I suspect, are also part of the reason I have so far been a shitty millionaire. Aside from the fact that I’d lived in a state of near-panic right after the win, begging Zoe and Greer to be the ones to do the Virginia state lottery’s mandated press appearance so my name could be left out of it as much as possible, I’d also second-guessed almost every purchase I even thought about making, and consequently made hardly any at all. Three months ago, Greer, newly thrilled by every single college course she was enrolled in, told me I was acting like Silas Marner. Which I found very offensive, once I googled Silas Marner.

  But no more miserly Kit, not after today. Today, I’m taking the afternoon off and finally, officially—six months after winning the jackpot—making my biggest dream come true. Thinking about it puts a wide smile on my face, which I can see reflected in those shiny windows I cleaned all morning.

  “Excuse me,” comes a deep voice from behind me, and it’s so unexpected that I jump a little, hitting my elbow on the creep frame I’ve just finished cleaning.

  “Ow,” I mutter, turning to meet—oh, only the most attractive person I have ever actually seen in real life, unless something is happening to my vision. I raise a hand immediately to my face, noting the lab goggles I am wearing—right, this is ideal—over my actual glasses. I pull them off, the rubbery strap getting a little stuck in my hair, and wince when a few strands come out. Once I’ve got my glasses straightened, I have another look.

  And, yeah. Still the most attractive person I’ve ever seen, tall and broad-shouldered with sandy-blond hair and a square, set jaw, eyes so blue I can see them even from several feet away, where he’s standing in the doorway. I don’t usually go for guys in suits, probably because most of the men in my line of work are more the rumpled-khakis or jeans type, but damn. This guy wears a suit like it’s his job. Which, it probably is his job, since it’s noon on a Friday.

  “I’m looking for E.R. Averin.” Excellent voice too—deep and smooth, and I had not really realized until this moment that I am so hard up if I am noticing this man’s voice so forcefully. Maybe there was something to Zoe’s constant haranguing about my nonexistent dating life.

  “Well, you found her,” I say, glad to hear that my own voice, at least, sounds normal.

&
nbsp; “I—” He paused, looked back over his shoulder. “I have?”

  “You have.” He blinks, unbuttons and then rebuttons his jacket. It is awkward to a high degree, and let me tell you what, you don’t spend your life around a bunch of experimental scientists without getting a real skewed sense of what’s awkward. This guy seems completely thrown.

  “You’re E.R. Averin?” he says, a little edge of doubt in his voice, and it’s at this point that I get almost relieved to know what I’m dealing with. Not for nothing am I the only female—not to mention the youngest—lab technician to ever work in this department, and in fact the only woman working in a lab tech role in the College of Engineering. I’ve dealt with a lot of dudes who have doubted me.

  “I think I’ve made that clear, Mr.…?”

  He has the decency to look genuinely chastened. “My apologies, Professor Averin. I’m Ben Tucker.”

  He steps forward, holding out his—well, very nice, very large—hand, but I hold up the bottle of ethanol and my rag, shrugging in half-hearted apology. “Hello, Mr. Tucker. I’m not a professor.”

  “Right, yes. I apologize.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, and I almost feel sorry for him. There’s something about him, some weary feature behind his handsomeness, that gives me the sense I’m getting him on a bad day.

  “Please, call me Ben.”

  “Okay, Ben. Call me Ms. Averin.”

  He smiles at that, and I suspect on anyone else it would seem condescending, that smile. But his seems genuine—wide and a little crooked on the left side, chasing a dimple that appears in his cheek. “Right,” he says again.

  There’s a beat of silence, while I take in that smile of his, that dimple. I probably smile back a little, despite my best efforts to look stoic and completely unaffected by him.

  “How can I help you, Ben?”

  “I’m here representing Beaumont Materials.”