Her New Year's Fortune

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  Her cheeks went pink and her lashes swept down. He tried to remember the last time he’d spent so much time trying to...what? Get a woman into bed? He wasn’t going to kid himself into thinking that’s not where he wanted her. But it wasn’t the only thing he wanted of her. He liked her company. Liked the humor that peeked out at him. Liked her intelligence and her heart.

  Which left what to describe what he was doing with Sarah-Jane?

  Wooing.

  God help him.

  He shoved aside the foolish notion and opened up the sandwich only to realize she had her same, usual container of undressed rabbit food. “Still no useless carbs for you, I see.”

  “Just for you. But I added plenty of sliced turkey breast to make up for it.” She reached in her lunch container and pulled out a small, aqua-colored box. “Plus I brought you a treat.” She tipped up the lid so he could see four fat truffles snuggled inside. The gaze she shot him was full of sparkle. “Make your mouth water?”

  Hell yeah, his mouth was watering. But not because of the chocolate. “Looks good,” he managed, and bit into the turkey sandwich. It was huge, as if she were trying to make up for the plain salad from the day before. He wanted to tell her that it didn’t matter what she brought to eat for her lunch.

  He was there for her.

  Not for food.

  “You sure you don’t want some of this?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got turkey in my salad. Besides, if I ever were going to have a sandwich, I’d go whole hog and have peanut butter and jelly.” Her lips twitched before she closed her mouth around a piece of tomato. The tomato had looked considerably less succulent than he was guessing her lips would be.

  “I haven’t had PB&J since I was a kid,” he murmured. “It was always my favorite.” And he’d usually had to trade whatever the cook had sent with him for lunch with another kid just to get it.

  “Well,” she suddenly looked shy again, “if you want to come back sometime next week, I could probably come up with one for you.”

  “What if I don’t want to wait until next week?”

  Her pupils dilated. But then a cloud passed through her gaze and she frowned, shaking her head. “I can’t do anything this weekend. I’ll be in Houston. It’s my father’s fifty-fifth birthday. My mother is throwing a big party.”

  Not only had she left her hair down again, but it framed her face with the same loose curls she’d had when he’d taken her to San Antonio. And like then, they seemed to be screaming at him to swirl through his fingers. “When do you leave?”

  “Some time Saturday morning. My mother expects me around one or so.” She sucked in her lower lip for a moment. “I’ll be back Sunday night.”

  He would have to have been dead not to notice the way she’d left her lip moist and glistening. Some women would do that deliberately, but not Sarah-Jane.

  It only made things harder.

  Literally and figuratively.

  He shifted slightly and studied the turkey sandwich. “Felicity going with you?”

  She shook her head. “She’s putting in a lot of extra hours at the shop. Valentine’s Day is next month, and she’s already gearing up for it.”

  He looked at her again, frowning. “So you’re driving alone?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She crunched on a slice of yellow pepper. “I’ve done it loads of times.”

  He wanted to ask about her car. If it ran reliably. Did she take her cell phone with her.

  If she wanted company. Namely...him.

  He squelched all the questions and wondered where the hell they’d come from. “What kind of surprising stuff do you knit or crochet?”

  Her brows tugged together as she gave him a curious look. He almost felt his face flushing, knowing how abrupt he’d sounded. “You said I’d be surprised what all is—”

  “—hand-knit,” she finished. “I remember.” The smile on her face turned positively mischievous. “Besides things like this?” She plucked at her sweater. “A few years ago we had a Hollywood crew filming between Red Rock and San Antonio. One of the actresses ordered a custom crocheted bikini.”

  Immediately, he wondered if she’d ever made herself such a bikini. “Intriguing,” he drawled.

  Maybe she had a glimpse into his mind because her gaze shied away and pink bloomed on her cheeks. “Felicity told me I should go into business selling them.” Her tone made it plain what she thought of that. “I’d rather be in the business of selling the patterns.” She grinned suddenly. “And what do you know? I am.”

  He couldn’t help but chuckle. She was so obviously pleased with herself. The fact that she loved what she did was as plain as the nose on her face.

  Until his father’s unwelcome decision, Wyatt had felt the same way.

  He tried pushing aside the thought. He’d already had his fill earlier that day of talk about JMF. Shane—despite every argument that Wyatt and his brothers could think of—had returned to Atlanta that morning. He claimed he wasn’t returning to JMF as well, but Wyatt figured it was only a matter of time before he did. His brother wouldn’t be able to stay away, anymore than the rest of them could.

  That was the advantage of relocating all the way to Red Rock. No proximity to JMF’s offices.

  The other advantage was sitting on the park bench next to him, turning his guts into a knot and smelling like warm vanilla on a blustery afternoon.

  “Your dad’s only turning fifty-five? What’s he do?”

  “He’s an assistant bank manager.” She shook her head against a lock of hair that the breeze nudged into her eyes.

  “And your mom?”

  “Stay-at-home mom. Always has been, always will be.” She looked down at her salad and jabbed a chunk of turkey. “She and my dad married right after he graduated from college, and she promptly quit school to become the perfect wife and hostess.”

  “You don’t think she should have quit school?”

  She shot him a look. “Why would you ask that?”

  He shrugged. “Something in your voice.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether I think that or not. What matters is what she thinks.”

  “And what does she think?”

  Her brows tugged together for a moment. “You know,” she said slowly, “I really have no idea.” She squinted out at the birds. Only a few had remained, staunchly optimistic that a morsel would be forthcoming. The other dozen or so had departed for more fertile grounds around the nearby lake. “She certainly pushed me to get my college degree,” she finally said.

  “Maybe because she didn’t get one herself.”

  She snorted softly. “More like because she thinks at least I’ll to be able to support myself, since no man is ever likely to want to do it for me.” She slid him a look. “In my mother’s world, a woman only finishes her education if she hasn’t caught a husband by then.”

  “Seems to be the way a lot of our parents’ generation thought.”

  “Yeah, well—” she jabbed another chunk of meat “—it’s a new generation,” she muttered, and bit the meat off the fork with her perfectly even, white teeth. After she swallowed, she looked at him. His sandwich.

  He quickly took another bite. It was a good sandwich, no question. He just kept getting distracted by her. “How’d you end up living in Red Rock?”

  Her demeanor brightened as if a cloud had drifted beyond it. “Maria Mendoza. After I’d discovered knitting in college, I heard about her store and came to see it. I fell in love with the place. I didn’t expect to fall in love with Red Rock, too, but I did. Once I finished my MBA, I knew I wanted to live here, too.” She gave a wry smile. “Actually, I initially applied for a position with the Fortune Foundation.”

  The Fortune Foundation, Wyatt knew, had been founded in memory of one of his father’s distant relatives, Ryan Fortune, when he’d died nearly ten years earlier. A number of far-flung extended family members worked at the ever-growing, philanthropic concern. “But no go?”

  “Not at all. I
would have had the job if I hadn’t decided to go to work full-time for Maria instead.” She smiled and mischief was back in her expression. “My mother had a fit.”

  “What about your dad?”

  She shrugged. “As long as I keep putting away money into my savings on a regular basis, I don’t think my dad cares much one way or the other how I’ve earned it.” Her smiling gaze skipped over him. “Long as it’s legal, of course.”

  With a sort of detached interest, he noticed his hand sliding through her hair, moving it away from her cheek again. “I’ll jump in that cold lake over there if you’ve ever done anything illegal in your life.”

  Her gaze had gone shy again, but not shy enough to look away from him. “Well, I guess your clothes are safe enough from getting wet today.” Then her chin tilted a little challengingly. “I’m sure you’ve never done anything illegal, either.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, necessarily.”

  She gave him a skeptical look. “Okay, then what?”

  “Just stupid college stuff.” He grinned wryly. “Mostly involving fast cars.”

  She laughed. “And overflowing testosterone, no doubt.”

  Her hair slid through his fingers, a curl winding around his thumb. He closed his fingers and tugged gently.

  Her lips parted slightly, her eyes widening as she looked up at him.

  It would be so easy to kiss her.

  And too damn hard to stop, he feared.

  Instead, he tugged her hair again, the same way he used to tug on Victoria’s, and let her loose.

  Sarah-Jane blinked, trying to bring her scrambled thoughts back together again. Had she imagined that he was going to kiss her?

  “Do you have your cell phone with you?”

  Evidently, she had imagined it.

  Foolish, Sarah-Jane. She never learned.

  “Yes. I have my cell phone. Why?”

  “Can I see it?”

  She didn’t know what to make of the man, but slid the small phone out of a pocket on the side of her insulated lunch bag. He took it from her and began tapping on it. “I want you to call me when you get back from your parents’ house.” He finished tapping and handed back the phone. “My private number’s saved in there now.”

  Her thumb roved over the face of the phone. She eyed him, but he was already sinking his strong teeth into the sandwich again.

  “It’ll be late Sunday night before I get back.”

  “Doesn’t matter how late. Otherwise I’ll worry about you driving all that way on your own.”

  Okay. It wasn’t a kiss. But the fact that he’d worry about her was pretty darn bemusing. “What, um, what are you doing this weekend?” One portion of her mind wished that he’d tell her he wanted to come with her to Houston. The rest of her logic flatly squashed the wish. Even if he did suggest it—which he wouldn’t—she didn’t particularly want him witnessing the way she really was. And if he saw her with her parents—one of whom was never satisfied, and the other who hardly noticed her at all—he would definitely be seeing Sarah-Jane as she really was.

  He polished off the sandwich with one more bite, then wiped his mouth and hands on one of the paper napkins she’d brought. “Victoria has a property she wants us to see. We’ll probably spend some time out at her place, too. Give Jace a chance to race around outside and play with the dogs.”

  She knew Jace was his nephew. He’d mentioned him a few times the night they’d gone to San Antonio. “Are his parents divorced?”

  Wyatt nodded. “Lynn’s out of the picture. Ash raises him on his own.” He picked up the bag of birdseed, weighing it in the palm of his long-fingered hand. “Red Rock will be good for them, too. Change of scene.” He tossed a small handful of seeds out and birds dove squawking and screeching from every corner. “Jace insists he wants a horse.”

  She believed it was the most he’d ever spoken about anyone in his family. Holding the pleasure close, she curtailed the impulse to ask if he wanted children of his own someday, and smiled instead. “Doesn’t every child want a horse? I certainly did.”

  “Did you get one?”

  She made a rueful face. “I couldn’t even get a dog or a cat.”

  “You had no pets?” He frowned hard.

  It was a good thing her hands were occupied holding her salad on her lap or she would have wanted to smooth away that frown with her fingertip. “I had a goldfish once.” She smiled into his face. “Won it at the state fair, tossing nickels onto a tower of glass dishes. My dad took me there once when I was in high school. It was the only time he’d ever done anything like that.” She liked to believe that it was because he’d been trying to cheer her up after the humiliating prom incident—which he’d had no way of knowing just how humiliating.

  Now, instead of frowning, Wyatt looked indulgent. “What else did you do in high school?”

  “Played clarinet—badly—in the band.” She shrugged, excruciatingly aware that his hand behind her on the bench had strayed to her hair again. “Studied a lot. You know. Usual stuff.” Usual stuff for the shyest girl in school, at any rate. But she didn’t want to talk about those years, which had been capped off by the most mortifying experience of her life. “What about you? What’d you do in high school?”

  His lips twitched. “Studied a lot. You know. Usual stuff.”

  She huffed and rolled her eyes.

  He laughed softly, stroked his fingers through her hair, and tossed the birds some more seed.

  And just that simply—and that alarmingly—Sarah-Jane realized how easily she could love this man.

  The realization didn’t diminish at all over the next twenty minutes, until her lunch break was at an end and Wyatt insisted on walking her back to the knitting shop.

  “Remember,” he prompted, when they reached The Stocking Stitch. “Call me when you get back from Houston.”

  “I will.”

  He pulled open the shop door for her and she almost thought he’d accompany her inside. But he didn’t. All he did was hand her back the lunch bag that he’d carried for her and tug on a lock of her hair. “Drive carefully.” Then he was walking away.

  Sarah-Jane stared at him through the slowly closing glass door of the shop.

  “Ah,” Maria sighed behind her. “I can see you had a perfect time, didn’t you, Sarah-Jane?”

  Sarah-Jane couldn’t deny it. But as she watched Wyatt disappear from view, she also couldn’t help but wonder how long something this perfect could possibly last.

  * * *

  The drive to Houston the next day took Sarah-Jane almost exactly three hours. When she turned on to the tree-filled cul de sac where she’d grown up, the street in front of her parents’ house was already congested with cars. She frowned a little. There wasn’t even parking available in the driveway that led up to the spacious, four bedroom ranch-style house. She wasn’t late. If anything, she was a little early.

  She parked at the end of the street and around the corner, but instead of carrying her overnight bag all that way, she left it locked in the car. She grabbed the gift bag holding the Houston Texans football jersey she’d gotten her dad from the backseat, and then, brushing her hands down the skirt of the new swirly dress that Felicity and Charlene had talked her into, she walked back up the street to the house.

  Before she got even close to the door, she could hear the music. The Beatles, which was her father’s favorite.

  She couldn’t help but smile a little. Her mother detested The Beatles, but evidently, even Yvette Early could bend a little when she was celebrating her husband’s birthday.

  Nobody gave Sarah-Jane any notice as she entered through the unlocked front door and headed straight through to the back of the house, through the kitchen, and on out to the block-fenced backyard. The party was in full swing; guests were milling about everywhere she looked. She spotted her father right off; he was standing at the grill, wearing a red-and-white-checked barbecue apron and waving a long-handled fork around as he talked with a couple of men she
recognized from his bank. Racks of ribs sizzled on the grill alongside chicken legs and hot dogs and the air was redolent with the mouthwatering scents. She dropped off her gift bag on the table loaded down with gifts on her way toward him.

  “Happy birthday, Dad,” she greeted, stepping up behind him.

  He turned and gave her his typically absent smile. “Hi, honey. Glad you made it.” He accepted the hug she gave him even as he was looking over her head. “Your mom is around here somewhere.”

  She hid a little sigh. Aside from that one trip to the state fair that had netted her the goldfish that had lived for all of two months and his continued interest in the state of her savings account, Howard Early had never been a particularly involved parent.

  He’d always been off working. Or playing golf. Or working. Or working some more.

  “I’ll find her,” she assured him, and gave a smiling greeting to his companions. They, at least, were eyeing her with a bit of surprise that her ego found shamefully gratifying.

  If it hadn’t been for Charlene’s and Felicity’s insistence that the kaleidoscope-colored halter dress looked as if it had been made for her, she never would have had the nerve to purchase something so outrageously colorful, or that left her shoulders and arms completely bare. As it was, she was wearing a thin white cardigan with it, but considering the bright sunlight overhead, she wasn’t sure if she wouldn’t get too warm for it. The weather had to easily be in the seventies.

  She left her father to his grilling and conversation and made her way among the guests until she found her mother at the buffet tables where she was rearranging stacks of stark white plates next to a towering display of cascading fruit.

  Yvette spotted Sarah-Jane as she was crossing the lawn, and she straightened up from her task, propping her hands on her hips. “It’s about time you got here,” she greeted, looking cross. “Your father was beginning to wonder if you’d forgotten all about his birthday.”

  Sarah-Jane sighed inwardly and gave her mother a kiss on the cheek. As far as she could tell, her father typically hadn’t seemed bothered by her presence one way or another. It was her mother who was the one with her nylons in a knot. “Of course I didn’t forget.”