Buying a lotto ticket with her two best friends didn’t change Zoe’s life. Only following her heart would do that …
Sure, winning the lottery allows Zoe Ferris to quit her job as a cutthroat corporate attorney, but no amount of cash will clear her conscience about the way her firm treated the O’Leary family in a wrongful death case. So she sets out to make things right, only to find gruff, grieving Aiden O’Leary doesn’t need—or want—her apology. He does, however, need something else from her. Something Zoe is more than willing to give, if only to ease the pain in her heart, a sorrow she sees mirrored in his eyes …
Aiden doesn’t know what possesses him to ask his family’s enemy to be his fake fiancée. But he needs a bride if he hopes to be the winning bid on the campground he wants to purchase as part of his beloved brother’s legacy. Skilled in the art of deception, the cool beauty certainly fits the bill. Only Aiden didn’t expect all the humor and heart Zoe brings to their partnership—or the desire that runs deep between them. Now he’s struggling with his own dark truth—that he’s falling for the very woman he vowed never to forgive.
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Books by Kate Clayborn
A Chance of A Lifetime
Beginner’s Luck
Luck of the Draw
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
Luck of the Draw
A Chance of A Lifetime
Kate Clayborn
LYRICAL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
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Copyright © 2018 by Kate Clayborn
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First Electronic Edition: April 2018
eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0512-0
eISBN-10: 1-5161-0512-5
First Print Edition: April 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0513-7
ISBN-10: 1-5161-0513-3
Printed in the United States of America
Prologue
Zoe
Like most of my dumb ideas, this one came from the internet.
Okay, the internet and insomnia.
Fine. The internet, insomnia, and wine.
I’d been lonely that night, stuck inside in deference to the miserable end-of-August heat and humidity, almost every day culminating in rolling thunder, heat lightning, flashes of pouring rain that did nothing to cool the air. My two best friends, Kit and Greer, were both unavailable for my proposed let’s-get-drunk-and-do-a-puzzle night—Kit was with her boyfriend Ben, newly reunited and too cute by half, and Greer had just left for a week-long Hawthorne family vacation. And I was still unwilling, over eight months since I’d quit in a blaze of jackpot-winning glory, to call up any of my friends from my former firm. Or maybe I was realizing, finally, that they hadn’t really been friends at all.
Lonely, a little drunk, and only a laptop for company? Truly, it was a recipe for disaster—or I guess for watching pornography—but instead I’d decided to try, once again, to get something going with my long-promised lottery-win project. An adventure, I’d told my friends on that night we’d bought the ticket, staking my claim for what I’d do with the cash. I’d imagined an around-the-world trip, something to take me away from everything familiar, something that would be different enough that I’d come out a whole new Zoe—more perspective, more peace, more something. But every time I’d tried to make a decision, every time I said to myself, Today, you plan your trip, I’d been paralyzed.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I’d said to Greer one night as we’d strolled through the travel section of the bookstore, a place—along with the gym, the park nearest my house, and my friend Betty’s restaurant—where I’d spent an embarrassing number of hours since leaving my job. “You’re in school. Kit’s bought the house. You’re doing it, doing what you said you’d do, and I’m—stuck.” Utterly and completely stuck.
“It’s a big change,” Greer had said. “Your whole life was your work. It takes time to recalibrate, right?” She’d paused, narrowed her eyes at the shelf in front of her. “‘Recalibrate’? I think I’ve been having dreams about Kit’s microscope. Let’s just buy a bunch of these books and see if we get any ideas.”
But the books hadn’t helped. Greer’s gentle encouragement hadn’t helped. Kit and Betty sticking labels to the dartboard at the bar with various place-names on it hadn’t helped, especially because I have superb aim. I was in a rut. I’d only ever felt like this once before in my life, and back then I’d dealt with it by doing something so insane and reckless that I knew I had to tread carefully this time, not fuck up my life—or someone else’s—again.
Maybe I’d been approaching it wrong, I told myself as I opened my laptop, smooshing myself into the corner of the couch, a lame, furniture-assisted cuddle that was the best I could get in my single state. Maybe I needed to stop thinking about a schedule, a set-in-stone path for this trip, and think about—inspiration. Pictures of places I wanted to see. Travel vibes, not travel plans.
So I’d navigated to some feel-good lifestyle site, the kind that shows you a bunch of food you should be cooking and crafts you should be doing to make your life fuller and happier and also more suitable for display on your Instagram. Never mind that my cooking is rudimentary and my last craft project was a noodle-jewelry box I made in third grade; never mind that I don’t even have an Instagram. Something about the possibility of such a lifestyle soothed me that night, and so there I was, clicking through a bunch of filter-heavy photos of artisanal kale and handwoven hammocks and fingerless-glove-clad hands wrapped around huge, latte-filled mugs, clever heart shapes foaming on top, forgetting, once again, all about my longed-for travel vibes.
Looking back, I wonder if I’d not only been drunk, but also perhaps stunned into some kind of nectarous, curated-lifestyle coma, because why in God’s name would I, Zoe No-Time-for-Bullshit Ferris, click on a picture of a “gratitude jar”? But there it was: a rustic-looking Ball jar, weathered pastel slips of paper with rough-hewn edges folded and tucked inside, and, so far as I could tell, several strands of completely unserviceable pieces of jute twine wound around the outside. Each day, the idea was, you record a good memory on a small slip of paper, fold it up, and put it in the jar. Then, when you’re feeling low, you extract one of those little shabby-chic scraps of joy from your jam jar and get on with feeling grateful about what life has handed to you.
Well. I certainly had well over a million reasons to be grateful, didn’t I? So why didn’t I feel any joy? Why could
n’t I just get on? Maybe, drunk-lonely Zoe had thought, I need the jar.
Of course, I didn’t have a jar, or twine, or antique-looking paper. I had a Baccarat Tornado vase and a stack of Smythson stationery. And somewhere between me cutting my cardstock into squares (not rough-hewn; are you kidding, I wasn’t that drunk) and actually putting pen to paper, the real idea—the dumb idea—had hit me.
What I need is a guilt jar.
It seemed so clear. It was the guilt that was keeping me from doing the trip, or from doing anything, really, since I’d taken home my share of the winnings. It was the guilt that was always there, ever since I was nineteen years old, piling on year after year, but now that I wasn’t working seventy hours a week, now that I wasn’t scheduling my free time down to the second, now that I’d been the beneficiary of the kind of luck I knew I didn’t deserve, I actually had time to really wallow in it. Sure, the wine wasn’t helping, but that night, I was brutally honest with myself: You’ve done wrong. And you need to fix it to move on.
After that, it’d been easy. On those little scraps of cardstock, I’d recorded my failures, starting with the comparatively minute. The time I made Dan cry at work. When I snapped at the Starbucks barista for not knowing my regular order. When I parked in one of those For New Moms Only spots at the grocery because I had menstrual cramps and it felt close enough. Forgetting my assistant’s birthday (2x). Avoiding eye contact with the homeless man who always sits outside Betty’s, even when I give him money. On and on, until it’d gotten trickier, until I’d had to get to the truly painful, did-you-even-drink-that-wine sobering ones. The ones I confined to names: first, names from the cases I was having such trouble forgetting. Then, names I wouldn’t ever forget:
Dad.
Mom.
Christopher.
At first I wasn’t exactly sure how the guilt jar would work. The gratitude jar was for contemplation’s sake, but the problem with my guilt was that I contemplated it pretty much every fucking night of my life, and so if I was going to get any joy out of this thing, I was going to have to do something other than simply look at my recordings. I was going to have to fix what I’d broken, or at least I was going to have to try.
Thanks to the lottery, I had means.
Thanks to my unemployment, I had time.
And that jar, it was going to give me the will.
Chapter 1
Zoe
I choose a Wednesday morning to draw my first guilt slip.
That’s far enough away from the night I came up with the idea to give me perspective, but not so far that I seem like I’m avoiding it. I try not to be weird about it, but the slip-drawing does take on this ritualistic quality, even though I’m wearing monkey pajamas and an antiaging face mask. The worst thing about leaving my job since the lottery win has been what’s happened to my days—or, I guess, what’s not happened to them. Before, when I was working, my days were so regimented that they were almost comical; once I asked my assistant to set a timer every time I went to pee to see how many minutes my bladder was costing me (too many minutes, so I cut back on coffee). Now I spend a lot of time drifting around, wondering what to make of my time, wondering whether I’ll ever go back to some kind of work, wondering how I managed to become the kind of person who isn’t working at all, who hasn’t worked in well over half a year.
But the guilt jar, much as it contains my most painful flaws, is giving me a sense of purpose I haven’t felt in a while, and so I put it in the center of my dining room table and take a seat, setting my mug of tea in front of me. There’s a familiarity to this setup, sort of like the Sunday mornings I’d get up early and work on briefs before meeting Kit and Greer, and I try to let that familiarity blanket the contrasting feeling of unease. The steam rising out of my mug isn’t helping, though—the vase is starting to take on magic cauldron-like qualities. Maybe one of those slips is going to fly out and hit me in the face.
I take a deep breath, cut the bullshit, and reach in.
And…well. Not that a lottery winner is going to get a lot of sympathy here, but rotten luck that I couldn’t have drawn the Starbucks barista first. Instead, I’ve drawn a name—or, rather, two names: Robert and Kathleen O’Leary.
Damn.
I saw a lot of unhappy people in conference room four, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget Robert and Kathleen O’Leary. Their settlement mediation was the last I’d sat in on, and I like to believe that even if I hadn’t won the jackpot that night, it still would’ve been my last day at Willis-Hanawalt. That I would have said to myself, Enough is enough, and never gone back again. They’d been gray haired and slight, Mrs. O’Leary barely over five feet, her husband only a couple of inches taller—though between the two of them, he’d been the more diminished, the more fragile. Mrs. O’Leary’s eyes had been puffy and red, but focused; she tracked the conversation with a sad, knowing acuity—well aware her lawyer was outmatched, well aware that whatever money she walked away with, she’d never get what she really wanted.
An admission of guilt.
But Mr. O’Leary—he’d barely been more than a bodily presence. At one point, I’d wondered if he’d had a stroke, or some other kind of catastrophic medical event that kept him from moving or speaking. I still don’t know if he had. But I do know that he cried: silent tears that tracked down his cheeks and dripped off his jawline onto the conference table.
“What a performance,” my boss had muttered, when the O’Learys had finally gone.
I swallow thickly, rubbing the slip of paper between my fingers. It’s so uncomfortable thinking about those days when we were doing the settlements, thinking about how clear I’d been that something was off, thinking about how many opportunities I’d had to say something. And yet I think about those days a lot, too much, when—as my guilt jar is reminding me—I should be doing something.
And so I do: I grab my laptop, spend a few minutes getting the information I need. I take off the mask, I shower, I dress carefully. When I walk out to my car, I’m doing so with purpose. When I drive, I keep the radio off, so I can focus, so I can keep that little slip of paper in my mind.
The O’Leary house is a small, brick rambler, tidy at first glance, but there are signs of neglect—the two clay pots on the front porch are full of leafless, tangled twigs, the bushes that line the bed underneath the shutters are shaggy, a few aggressive limbs of growth reaching up past the windows. The left side of the iron railing leading up to the front porch is listing to the side, two newspapers still in their bags beneath it.
I think, briefly and nonsensically, about whether I’ll pick up those papers when I knock on the door, whether I’ll have to start by saying, Oh, I just picked up these papers that were here, and it’s this stray, silly thought that finally gives me pause, pause that I should have had about ten thousand times before I got here: if they aren’t picking up their papers, maybe they aren’t around, or maybe they don’t open the door for anyone; maybe they don’t want to be bothered.
They wouldn’t want to be bothered, not by me of all people. Even if they don’t remember me, I’ll have to explain in order to apologize. I’ll either be poking at a festering wound or reopening one that can only be, even under the best of circumstances, barely healed. I grip my steering wheel, so hard that it hurts my fingers, in plain, simple frustration at myself. The real me—the smart, sharp, ambitious me, the me who proofreads everything six times, reading both forward and backward, the me who practiced presentations until notes were a distraction rather than an aid—that me would’ve thought of this. Instead, I’ve come over here thinking only of my own guilt, my stupid internet jar, and my stupid, lazy sense of purposelessness driving me.
If I really mean to make up to people, I have to do better than ambush apologies that they may not even want to hear.
My hand is back on the key, ready to turn, ready to back out and go home where I can rethink this.
But then the front door opens.
It’s not Mr. or Mrs. O’Lear
y there, that’s for damn sure, because this is about six feet two of muscled, fully alert dude, his thick, dark brown hair messy, his square jaw stubbled.
And he definitely does not look happy to see me, though I suppose he’d have that in common with the O’Learys.
It’s still possible to turn the key, wave an apology like I’ve found myself at the wrong house or something. But there’s something that stops me—something about the way this man stands so still, watching me, and something about that heavy fatigue I feel, all the time, pulling at my shoulders. Maybe this man knows something about the O’Learys. Maybe he can help me get some of this fucking weight off.
So I take my keys from the ignition, inhale, exhale—even doing the noisy puff of breath that my yoga teacher is always suggesting—and get out of the car. My heel wobbles a bit on the cracked pavement, and I steady myself on the top of the car door before shutting it behind me, smoothing the front of my dress, which is another terrible choice I made this morning. It’s a gray herringbone, sleek and tailored, a jewel neckline, and sharply cut cap sleeves. It’s a dress I’d wear to work, a dress that makes me look as cool and detached as I probably did on that day. It appalls me how little I thought this through, what a massive, selfish mistake I made this morning. I think of making a new slip, later: Bothered a man at his home, because of my narcissism.
“Hello,” I manage, surprised that my voice sounds very much like it always does when I meet new people, which is to say: it sounds detached and professional, when I came here to be anything but that. When I came here to show them that I do, in fact, have a heart.
A heart that is beating so fast that I suspect this man can see it pulsing in my neck.
“What can I do for you?” he asks, and however harmless the question is, however polite seeming, it is clear he does not mean it to seem so. His voice is gruff, clipped. He stands, feet slightly apart, arms crossed over his chest, like he’s here working security.
“I was looking for Robert and Kathleen O’Leary,” I begin. “But I believe I’ve—”
Luck of the Draw Page 1
