Julie wasn’t like that. As he pulled up to her small, tidy house near the elementary school, he could see the proof of it.
He walked around and opened her door—manners instilled in him by his uncles. He walked her to the front door, past colorful terra-cotta containers full of bright flowers and a trio of birdhouses.
This was just the sort of house that made him nervous. The flower gardens spoke of settling in, of commitment and permanence, all the things that seemed so foreign to him. He couldn’t remember a single plant his mother had tried to grow. They had never been in one place long enough to see a seedling sprout anyway, so why bother?
He had been in his condo for five years, though. Why hadn’t he ever tried to grow anything on the patio? He had perfect light out there and it wouldn’t be a big deal to plant some tomatoes and maybe a pepper plant or two.
At her door, he paused, feeling intensely awkward, in light of all they had shared together the last few hours. She seemed to sense it, too, and fiddled with her purse and the keys she had used to unlock the door.
He struggled for something to say but everything sounded lame. Thanks for the most incredible night of my life sounded like it came right off the pathetic bachelor’s morning-after playlist.
“Let me know what happens with Frannie, okay?” Julie finally said.
“I’ll be sure to do that,” he answered. His chest ached a little as the morning sun lit a halo around her. She looked as pretty and bright as her flower gardens and he knew she wasn’t for him.
He was going to have to break things off with her. She was digging in too deep and he couldn’t let her. Not when she scared the hell out of him.
He hated being one of Those Guys, who slept with a woman and then brushed her off, especially when he had a feeling she expected more. But he also wasn’t willing to string her along, not when he already was coming to care far too much for her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ross’s heart ached in his chest. He wanted nothing but to pull her against him and hold on forever, which was more than enough reason to push her away.
“Julie, I…”
She shook her head and for just a moment, he thought he saw something like sorrow flicker there before it was quickly gone. “Ross, don’t say anything. What happened earlier was…wonderful. We both wanted it to happen. But I completely understand that it was only a one-time thing.”
He scratched his cheek. “Twice, technically.”
She laughed roughly, though again he thought he saw regret in those soft blue eyes. “Okay, twice. My point remains that I don’t expect anything more than that. You can put your mind at ease. I promise, I’m not going to be clingy or throw a scene or rush inside my house and cry for hours. Don’t worry about me, okay?”
He should be relieved. Wasn’t this what he wanted? So why did his chest continue to ache like he’d been punched?
“I’m not the kind of man you need, Julie. I wish I could be. You have no idea how much I wish I could be. But I’m not.”
“How did you become such an expert on what I need?”
“It’s my job to understand people. I have to be able to read things about people that even they don’t always see. I have to be able to understand their motivations, their triggers, their personality types.”
“And what’s my personality type?”
She asked the question with deceptive casualness but he heard the sudden tightness in her voice, in the way she compressed her lips just a little too hard on the last consonant so it popped. He was in quicksand here, he suddenly sensed.
He glanced at the car where Josh watched them curiously, too far away, thank the Lord, to hear their conversation.
He didn’t want to get into all this right now. But he had started things and he owed it to her to finish.
“You’re a nurturer. A natural healer. You take people who are hurting and broken and you try to fix them. It’s what you do with the kids you work with at the Fortune Foundation but I’ve seen you put the same effort into everyone. I saw you slip more than a few bills to anybody who looked like they had a sob story last night while we were looking for Josh.”
A tiny muscle flexed in her check. “And you don’t want to be healed.”
He bristled. “I’m not broken.”
“Aren’t you?”
Her psychoanalytical put-the-question-back-on-the-poor-patient crap suddenly bugged the hell out of him.
“I’m fine,” he snapped. “Absolutely fine. I’ve got everything I need.”
She said nothing, only continued to study him out of those eyes that saw entirely too much.
“Everything was going just great in my life until two weeks ago when somebody whacked my brother-in-law. Now that they’ve found whoever it was who did it and Frannie’s coming home, I can return to the life I had before and everything will get back to normal.”
“In my business, we call that self-delusion.”
“Call what self-delusion?”
“You’re supposed to be an expert on figuring out what makes everybody else tick. Their motivations, their triggers, their personality types. Isn’t that what you said? Can you really be so blind to your own?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Goodbye, Ross.”
She opened the door and though he knew Josh and Frannie waited for him, he couldn’t help himself. He followed her inside.
“Tell me what you meant,” he growled.
She studied him for a long moment, then she sighed. “You keep everyone away, don’t you? Because of the instability of your childhood, you’re so determined not to count on anybody else, to be so completely self-sufficient now that you’re an adult, that you close off everybody except your family. Frannie and Josh. And even then, you feel like you have to shoulder every burden for them, not share a single worry. As a result, you’re probably the most lonely man I’ve ever met.”
He stared at her, thunderstruck by the harsh analysis. Her words sliced at him with brutal efficiency. How did she know anything about his childhood? Fast on the heels of the shock and hurt came the sharp flare of anger. She had no right to think she could sum up his world in a few neat little sentences.
“I take back everything I said,” he snapped. “You’re not a nurturer. You’re just plain crazy. I’m absolutely not lonely. Hell, I can’t get people to leave me alone long enough for me to be lonely!”
“I guess we can both be wrong about each other, then,” she said, sounding so damn calm and reasonable, he wanted to punch something.
“I guess so. Better to find out now then sometime in the future after we’ve invested more than just a night with each other.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she murmured. “You’d better go, hadn’t you? Your sister’s waiting for you.”
He gazed at her for a moment, wondering how this whole thing had taken such a wrong turn, then he nodded. “Yeah. I guess I’ll see you around, then.”
She only smiled that impassive smile at him and opened the door, leaving him no choice but to stalk through it and down the sidewalk.
* * *
Julie watched Ross drive away, his white SUV suddenly anything but unobtrusive as its tires spit gravel and careened around the corner.
Apparently he couldn’t wait to get away from her.
Drat the man. She swiped at a tear trickling down the side of her nose and then another and another, grateful at least that she had the strength of will to hold them back until he was out of sight.
She wanted to rant and rave at Ross Fortune’s stubborn self-protectiveness, his apparent willingness to walk away from the magic and wonder they had shared, just so that he could guard his psyche.
A good tantrum would at least be an outlet for the wild torrent of emotions damming up inside her, but the hardest thing to accept was that none of this was Ross’s fault.
She walked into bed with him with her eyes open. She might not have consciously admitted she was alrea
dy in love with him but deep down she must have known, just as she had to have realized somewhere inside that Ross was completely unavailable to her, at least emotionally.
She had convinced herself she was strong enough to live in the moment, to seize the chance to be with him without regrets or recriminations later.
What a fool she was. And she called him self-deluded! How could she have ever believed she could share that intimacy with him, let him inside her soul and not feel battered and bruised when he walked away from all she was willing to offer?
This was goodbye then.
Their respective worlds weren’t likely to intersect again. With his sister on her way to freedom, Ross had no reason to stick around Red Rock. Frannie would be able to care for Josh from now on and accompany him to the Fortune Foundation for counseling sessions if he still needed them.
Ross would return to San Antonio and his private investigation practice and that lovely, impersonal apartment and his self-contained life that struck her as immeasurably sad.
She pressed her hands to her face for just a moment then dropped them to her knees. She would survive a broken heart. She had no choice. As Ross said, she was a healer, a nurturer, and she couldn’t do any of that if she turned inside herself and wallowed in her own pain.
* * *
He was an ass.
Ross sat in the reception area of the police station, replaying his conversation with Julie over and over in his head.
Had he really called her crazy? He burned with chagrin just thinking about it. He had reacted like some kind of little kid, lashing out first to protect himself from being wounded by her words.
She deserved better from him than that. Julie had always been nothing but warm and kind to him. She had just spent the entire night helping him look for Josh, for hell’s sake. And then when she gave him an opinion that he had solicited, he snapped back at her like a cornered grizzly. It was unfair and unnecessarily hurtful.
He had to make it right, somehow, but he had no idea where to start.
He still didn’t buy what she was selling. He had moved past his childhood a long time ago. Yeah, he might still have scars. The insecurity of growing up with Cindy Fortune would have been rough on any kid, he wouldn’t deny that. But he didn’t dwell on it anymore. He hadn’t for a long time.
And lonely. She said he was lonely. He didn’t buy that, either. He had plenty of friends, good ones. They went to basketball games together and had barbecues and fishing trips out on his boat.
Okay, he would admit she was right that he didn’t let too many people close. But that didn’t mean he was some kind of freaking hermit.
He thought of the nights alone in his apartment when he would stand at the window gazing down at the River Walk, at the lights and the activity and the people walking together, content and happy in their tidy little family units.
More often than not, he would attribute the nameless ache inside him as he watched them to heartburn. It sure wasn’t loneliness. Was it?
“Ross? You in there?”
He glanced up to find Josh staring at him with a quizzical look.
“Sorry. Did you say something?”
Josh rolled his eyes. “Only about a dozen times. I asked if I could borrow your cell phone to check on my friend.”
The same friend whose troubles had occupied him all night? Ross wondered. He wanted to push his nephew to finally come clean and explain what was going on. But since he had screwed everything else up this morning, he decided maybe he ought to keep his mouth shut for now.
He handed over his phone and wasn’t surprised when Josh walked outside to make his call. More secrets. He was getting pretty sick of them all.
Despite the fact that Frannie was to be released any moment now, Ross still didn’t know much more than when she called him two hours before.
Try as he might, he couldn’t manage to worm more information out of anyone in the department except what he already knew. A forty-year-old man was the new suspect in Lloyd’s death.
He didn’t understand why everyone was being so closed-mouthed about the whole thing, but he could guess. They were no doubt engaged in the age-old police game of CYA. Cover Your Ass. No doubt they realized they had rushed to judgment with Frannie without looking around for any other suspects and wanted to avoid making the same mistake again and possibly jeopardizing their case.
He didn’t care who killed Lloyd, as long as it meant his sister could return home where she belonged and he could go back to San Antonio where he belonged.
Josh returned a few moments later and handed his phone back.
“Everything okay with Lyndsey?” Ross hazarded a guess.
“Yeah, she’s doing tons bet—” Better. Josh cut his word off but Ross completed the word for himself, even as his nephew frowned at being tricked into revealing more information than he wanted.
“What happened to her?” Ross asked. “Has she been sick?”
For an instant, he thought Josh would confide in him. He opened his mouth and Ross sensed he wanted to tell someone whatever was bothering him. Ross sat forward with an encouraging look, but before Josh could say anything, the door leading to the jail opened.
He and Josh both turned to look and found Frannie standing in the doorway, looking frail and exhausted, with no makeup and her blond hair scraped back in a ponytail.
Despite the outward signs of fatigue, her eyes glowed with joy.
“Josh. Oh sweetheart.”
Josh rose from his seat, stumbled forward and then swept his mother into his arms. Both of them were crying a little, even his tough-guy, eighteen-year-old nephew. Ross watched their reunion, aware of a niggle of envy at the love the two of them shared, a love with no conditions or caveats.
Josh had probably never spent one moment wondering at his place in his mother’s heart. Frannie loved him with everything she had.
Frannie touched Josh’s face as if she couldn’t quite believe he was there in front of her and then after a moment she remembered Ross and turned to hug him, as well. She felt like nothing more than fragile bones.
“You’re fading away, Frannie,” he growled. “Have you been on some kind of hunger strike in here?’
She shook her head. “I just…I haven’t been very hungry. It was too hard to drum up an appetite when I could only think about how afraid I was.”
If you were so blasted afraid, why didn’t you defend yourself? Who were you covering for? Ross wanted to rail at his sister but he knew this wasn’t the time. “We need to get you out of here and get some good cooking into you. What do you say we stop at Red on the way home for a huge brunch? We’ll break out the champagne.”
“That sounds delicious.” She gave him a tremulous smile just as Loraine Fitzsimmons walked through.
“Hey, Ross.” She smiled.
“Hi, Loraine. Thanks for the information earlier.”
She looked around to make sure no one else could overhear them.
“Just thought I’d give you a heads up. They’re questioning him again.”
“Who is it?”
She cast another furtive look at the doorway. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s one of Mendoza boys. Says here it’s Roberto. Isn’t he the one who’s been living in Denver?”
Ross had just half a second to wonder why the man had hated Lloyd enough to kill him and to entertain the possibility of trying to post bail for the guy, whoever he might be, when suddenly he was aware of Frannie’s small sound of distress. A moment later his sister’s eyes fluttered back in her head and she started to fall.
“Mom!” Josh exclaimed. He dived for her and though he wasn’t in time to catch her completely, he slowed the momentum of her fall.
Josh lowered her to the carpet and both he and Ross knelt over her.
Loraine hovered over them, her eyes wide with shock. “Do you want me to call a medic?” she asked.
“Give us a minute,” Ross said. Frannie had looked so weak when she came out. Was it any won
der she had succumbed to exhaustion and nerves and fainted?
“Come on, Frannie. Come on back, sis.”
“Come on, Mom,” Josh added his voice. “You’re scaring us.”
She blinked her eyes open, then a moment later she scrambled to sit and looked around, trying to regain her bearings.
“Are you all right?” Ross asked. Her pulse seemed a little thready to him and he wondered if he ought to let Loraine go ahead and call a medic.
Frannie blinked a few more times, then her gaze met Loraine’s and Ross saw full awareness come back in a rush. Frannie tried to stand but couldn’t make it to her feet without his help.
“Take it easy,” he said, but Frannie seemed to barely hear him.
“Who did you say they’re holding?” she asked Loraine, and Ross couldn’t miss the sudden urgency in her voice.
“Mendoza. Roberto Mendoza.”
Frannie inhaled a ragged breath and, for a moment, Ross was afraid she would pass out again. “Do you know the guy?” he asked.
“I…no.”
She was lying. No doubt about it. Frannie had always been a lousy liar. Maybe that was why she had opted instead to keep her mouth shut when she had been accused of killing her husband.
He knew most of the Mendozas on a casual basis, mostly because they were good friends with his family here in Red Rock. He tried to remember if he had ever met Roberto Mendoza and had a vague memory of bumping into the guy years ago on one of his visits to Red Rock.
What was his relationship with Frannie?
He was royally sick of all these Fortune family secrets. Though he wanted to drag his sister to one of the interview rooms in the police station until he got to the bottom of all this, he knew this wasn’t the time. This should be a celebration for Frannie, a chance for her to start taking back her life.
As soon as things settled down for his sister, his own life could get back to normal. To stakeouts and paperwork and catching up on cases. He would be far too busy to pay any attention to those moments standing at his window in San Antonio, watching life go on below without him.
Change of Fortune Page 16
