Fortune Found

by Victoria Pade

  They’d taken teaching Flint about rock collecting very seriously and tutored him during that portion of the outing. But since returning to the campsite for dinner Flint had become their audience for clumsy attempts to fool him with silly four-year-old tricks, bad jokes and—in the case of Adam—just plain showing off and periodically climbing onto Flint’s broad back and wrapping tiny arms around his thick neck in demands for piggyback rides.

  Which was how Flint finally got Adam to the van—offering a piggyback ride that got the three-year-old onto his back, legs wrapped around his middle, Adam’s arms choking the life out of Flint’s neck, at the same time that Flint hauled Bethany under one arm, and Braden under the other, while walking like a stiff-limbed robot and making monster noises that delighted them all.

  But at least he finally got them to the van. One by one he deposited each giggling child inside, laughing as they went to their respective seats to be securely belted in by Jessie.

  Once that was accomplished, she said, “Ella won the coin toss, so she gets to choose the movie for the ride home. What’s it going to be, El?”

  “Beauty and the Beast,” Ella said with a glare at Flint that was embarrassingly obvious.

  But Jessie merely said, “Beauty and the Beast it is.”

  Then she flipped down the small screen that came out of the van’s ceiling to face the rear seats, put the DVD into the player and turned it on.

  With all of the kids’ eyes on that, she got out of the van’s side door, slid it closed and faced Flint who was still standing nearby, watching.

  “Sorry about Ella,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay,” he assured. Then, as if to prove her daughter’s hostility was nothing to worry about, he dropped the subject and nodded toward the front of the silver van. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive home— I don’t mind.”

  “No, I’m fine. You’re probably more worn out than I am—the kids really ran you ragged.”

  “I’m fine, too,” he said, but she still insisted on driving.

  As Flint got into the passenger seat, Jessie went around and climbed behind the wheel. By the time she’d done that Flint was angled in her direction, his arm stretched across the back of the driver’s seat.

  It was slightly unnerving to have him looking at her as she turned the key in the ignition and put the van into gear, but it was also nice to have his undivided attention.

  She had to back out onto the nearby road that led to the highway, and as she did Flint looked out the rear window, too, apparently catching sight of the kids in the process.

  “Wow, they’re already asleep,” he marveled.

  Jessie laughed. “It always happens—the woods, the hiking, the rock collecting and then full tummies—they can’t stay awake for the trip home.”

  “Shall I turn off the movie?”

  “No, that’ll wake them up. Just let it play,” she advised as she turned onto the highway from the side road. Then, with a sideways glance at Flint, she said, “Sooo… Did you just hate all of this today and tonight?”

  He looked surprised by the question. “Are you kidding? I had a fantastic time!”

  “Even with all of Ella’s dirty looks and thinking you should have to eat the marshmallow that fell in the dirt?”

  Flint laughed. “Yeah, I’m sorry that Ella still thinks I’m an evil interloper who only deserves dirt-laced marshmallows. And I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m also a little sorry that I didn’t get to spend much time with you.”

  Despite the fact that he said the words as if he probably shouldn’t, they still sent a warm flush across Jessie’s face that she hoped he couldn’t see in the waning light. She also didn’t want to acknowledge the impact such a small thing could have on her, so she made a joke of it. “You did miss out on going with me on some really fun trips to the bathrooms with one kid or another.”

  Flint smiled as if he knew what she was doing, but he didn’t push it. Instead he said, “I just played with the kids, like one of the kids. You did end up doing most of the work—seems unfair.”

  “You were the marshmallow toaster—that helped. And you were right, you do toast a mean marshmallow,” she teased him.

  “Yeah, but that was just fun, too. And I suppose that made Ella’s point—I did drop the marshmallow in the dirt, so it would have served me right to have to eat it.”

  “A seven-year-old’s reasoning.”

  “And Beauty and the Beast?” he said with a grin. “I think there might be a message in that. And it isn’t that I’m the beauty.”

  “I really am sorry,” Jessie apologized again, unable not to laugh at her daughter’s barely veiled jibe.

  “I think I can take a little heat from a seven-year-old. And I’m actually glad to see that you aren’t trying to force her to act like she likes me—that’s what my mother would have done. It just made us hate whatever guy she was ramming down our throats even more.”

  Jessie flinched. “Does it seem like I’m ramming you down their throats?”

  “No!” he was quick to answer. “My mother would refer to some perfect stranger as Uncle So-and-So and expect us to act like they really were family. She’d fall all over them while we were there to see it. She liked to pretend that every man she ran through her life and ours was the be-all-and-end-all of existence, and God help us if we didn’t keep up the charade. I don’t think even Ella would say you did anything like that.”

  His mother was one of the people in his life Jessie was curious about, and now that he’d opened that door, she felt more invited to explore what was behind it. So she said, “I don’t know much about your mom, but Kelsey did say that you and Cooper are half brothers, not full brothers. And I know your mom was married more than once…”

  “Four times,” Flint said as if it were no secret and he didn’t have a problem with her asking. “There were no kids with Husband Number One. Ross and Cooper had the same dad—Husband Number Two. I came from Husband Number Three—Parker Anderson. And Frannie’s dad was Number Four—Elliot Jones. He was the best of the lot, but he died. The other three were divorces.”

  “Your father wasn’t the best of the lot?”

  Flint shrugged fatalistically. “He’s kind of a fly-by-night, from what little I know about him.”

  “You don’t know him?”

  “Sure, I know him. Technically. But I was too young to remember him being around, so I’ve only known him through sporadic visits now and then, when he decides to pop in. It isn’t as if we have any kind of relationship—something I always envied of friends who had dads who were actually there for them.”

  He added that last part with a more solemn tone to his voice and Jessie knew that even though he didn’t have a problem telling her the facts about his parents, when he mentioned his own feelings of jealousy, it struck home for him.

  It also struck home for her, and she suddenly confessed one of her greatest fears and something she tried not to think might happen.

  “I worry that my kids will feel that way without Pete—envious of kids who have fathers around. I always hope that having my dad in their lives, and now Coop, too, will help fill the void a little.”

  Flint must have realized how much of a worry this was to her because his tone softened. “It should help. I know it would have helped us to have had a better, closer relationship with the Fortune men—Ryan before he died, Uncle William…”

  “None of the other men your mother brought into your life fit the bill?”

  “A few tried and sometimes for a while it would be nice, but… I don’t mean to make my mother sound malicious or anything, she’s just flighty and not really what you could call mature, even at seventy-two, and certainly not maternal in any way. So even the good guys, the ones she married, the ones we liked, were still in and out. And then Mom would be on to the search for the Man of Her Dreams, who she was sure she was going to find any day. To this day—although I imagine her fantasy of what he’ll provide has changed.”

&nbs
p; “What he’ll provide?”

  Flint chuckled mirthlessly. “She was always telling us that the right man would buy us a big house with a yard for us to play in, and a swimming pool and a wooden playground set—like your dad is building for your kids now.”

  There was sadness to those words and Jessie’s heart ached for the young Flint and his brothers and sister, for the dreams his mother had spun for them, for his early disappointments.

  “But it never happened?” Jessie asked to be sure, hoping she might be wrong.

  “Never happened,” he confirmed. “Instead there was just a string of men, a string of different places we moved to to find a new man, different schools, and always, always some sort of chaos and drama that revolved around Cindy Fortune that even her own kids had to accommodate.”

  “And she never considered bringing you all back to Red Rock to live? Where you could have had extended family and genuine father figures?”

  He smiled at her. “That’s the kind of thinking you do—what might be good for your kids. I admire that. Watching you with them today, the last few days? They don’t know how good they have it to have a mom like you. But I’m definitely impressed.”

  Which made Jessie feel very self-conscious. Even more so than having had his eyes on her throughout this whole drive.

  “But your mom…” she said to encourage him to go on to what he’d seemed to be about to say.

  “For my mom, factoring in what might be good for her kids when she made her own decisions wasn’t something she could do. Maybe it was the way she was raised or who knows what, but to her, kids were like pets or like the couch and the coffee table—she had her life to live and we were just part of the background.”

  “And none of you ever suggested to her that you might be better off here?”

  “Nah. We were here so seldom that we never felt like real Fortunes, even if we did carry the name.”

  “What about now?” Jessie asked as something else occurred to her. “Now that you know the truth about the medallions, now that you know the rest of your family didn’t think of you all as the black sheep, do you feel more a part of things? Because you and Cooper both seem to be fitting in pretty well with them all, from what I’ve seen…”

  “Actually,” he said in a much lighter tone, “since having this new perspective on things, yeah, it has been different for me here. I feel like I’m reconnecting with the family. I’m beginning to see that no one has really held my mother’s sins against any of us, that that was more in our own heads. And it’s nice.”

  They arrived home at that moment and when Jessie pulled into her driveway her parents came out the front door. Apparently they’d been watching for her.

  “Wow, curbside service,” Flint observed with a laugh.

  From the rearview mirror, Jessie saw that turning off the car engine was enough to wake Ella. When her eldest realized they were home, Ella roused Bethany and Braden.

  Braden instantly sat up straight and said, “I don’t want to go to sleep! I don’t want those bad dreams!”

  “It’s okay, Braden,” Jessie soothed as she and Flint unfastened their own seat belts simultaneously. “Braden has been having really bad nightmares,” she explained. “I guess he doesn’t realize he was already asleep and not having them.”

  “Poor guy,” Flint sympathized as they got out of the vehicle just as Jack and Jeannie Hunt reached the van and Jessie climbed into the back portion to get to the kids.

  Ella had released her own seat belt by then and was helping Braden and Bethany with theirs. Jessie’s father collected Adam. Only when his grandfather had lifted him out of his car seat did the boy wake up.

  Even still half-asleep, he searched for sight of Flint and said, “Can you come for game night?”

  Flint laughed. “They’re all a little punchy,” he whispered to Jessie as she climbed from the van and turned to help Ella, while Flint offered Braden and Bethany a steadying hand to jump down.

  “Game night,” Bethany managed to explain in the process, as if Flint required enlightenment. “Tomorrow night is game night.”

  “Yeah. Can Fwint come?” Adam repeated.

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Jessie said. “For now you all just need to get to bed.”

  “We’ll do that,” Jeannie Hunt assured, wasting no time heading all the kids toward the house.

  “I’ll be in in a minute to say good-night,” Jessie called after them as she slid the van’s side door closed again.

  “Let me help you unload,” Flint offered as she tugged her T-shirt down to the waistband of her jeans to adjust things that had gone awry in the transfer of children.

  “I’ll just leave everything for the morning,” she said. “Between my parents, the kids and me, we’ll do it all in one trip.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive,” she confirmed.

  Flint didn’t just say good-night then, though, and go next door. Instead he stood beside the van, looking at her in the distant glow coming from the porch light, making her wonder suddenly—and for no reason that made any sense—if her ponytail was still neat and if the blush and mascara she’d applied just before leaving today had stayed on.

  “I really did have a great time,” he said, stretching a long arm to the roof of the van and leaning slightly in that direction. Which also brought him somewhat closer to Jessie.

  Since he’d joined them this afternoon she’d been secretly admiring the way he looked in his cowboy boots, jeans and a lightweight V-necked sweater that exposed a deep hollow in his throat below his Adam’s apple. Now that sexy hollow caught her gaze for a moment before she forced herself to look up again, wondering why the sight of just a hint of beard shadowing that holy-hell-handsome face should add to his allure.

  Then she reminded herself that he’d said he’d had a good time and was probably waiting for a response. “I’m glad,” she answered, hoping it wasn’t noticeably slow in coming.

  “Your kids really are lucky to have a mom like you,” he added, harking back to what they’d been talking about on the drive home.

  Jessie laughed slightly. “I think I’m lucky to have them.”

  “Yeah, it shows.”

  She could tell that he was again recalling his mother’s shortcomings and she felt bad for him, for the childhood he’d had. But she didn’t know what to say about that, so instead she said, “I don’t know if it matters to you, but you’re pretty good with kids yourself—with Anthony and with my kids.”

  It was his turn to laugh. “I don’t really do much.”

  “Still, you’re not standoffish at all, the way a lot of people who don’t have kids of their own are. I appreciate that you’re patient with them, especially with Ella being kind of nasty and Adam wanting to crawl all over you. And I saw you pointing out the best rocks, so the kids could be the ones to pick them up and take the credit—you put them and their little egos ahead of yourself to make sure they had a good time and got to be proud of themselves—”

  He laughed again. “Yep, that’s me,” he demurred, “not the glory seeker when it comes to rock hunting.”

  She hadn’t seen anything about him that would have caused her to think of him as a glory seeker and she liked that humility in him, too. But she didn’t say it because she thought she’d already embarrassed him a little by praising the way he was with the kids.

  “I’m just glad you had a good time. Or, if you’re only saying you did to be polite, I hope it wasn’t too awful.”

  Rather than answer that immediately, he merely studied her with a small, thoughtful smile that might have made her uncomfortable coming from someone else. But from Flint that scrutiny, that smile, somehow just wrapped around her like a warm blanket.

  Then he said, “So far, I haven’t spent five minutes with you that were awful, and I can’t imagine that that’s even possible. What was kind of lousy—and also one of the toughest lies I’ve ever told—was telling my brother this morning that we didn’t hit it
off.”

  Oh.

  Jessie was really at a loss for what to say to that. Especially because hearing it from him had set something inside her jumping for joy. And trying to contain it only complicated her attempts to come up with a verbal response.

  Then she heard herself say in a much more flirtatious tone than she’d intended, “Have you told a lot of lies in your lifetime?”

  His smile went crooked. “Not too many whoppers like that one, no.”

  She could only stand there grinning up at him, lost in dark eyes that were trained on her with such intensity that she couldn’t seem to tear her own eyes away.

  Then, suddenly, without even knowing how she knew it, she knew he was going to kiss her.

  And just as certainly, she knew he shouldn’t, that she shouldn’t let him. And that she could keep it from happening if she just took a step backward, away from the van and him, if she stopped answering his stare with one of her own, if she dropped her chin, if she just said good-night and went into the house…

  But she didn’t do any of that.

  In fact, she tipped her chin upward just a bit, even as she told herself not to. Even as she thought about how she’d only ever kissed two people besides Pete—one boy in junior high, one in high school—and no one since him. Even as she worried that she might not remember how, or be really bad at it, or at least really, really rusty…

  You shouldn’t, Jess…

  But when Flint began to lean toward her, she held her ground with her chin already up.

  And when his mouth first met hers she wasn’t thinking about the how-to’s—she didn’t need to. It felt perfectly natural to answer the sweet warmth of his lips as they brushed hers so lightly it was as if they almost weren’t there at all.

  And then to wish it wasn’t over so quickly—that she didn’t get to do even more.

  But it was over so, so quickly. Too quickly for her to have closed her eyes. Almost too quickly to have happened at all, except that she could still feel his mouth on hers even after he’d pulled away and was just smiling down at her once more.