“Game night, huh?” he said, his voice deeper, more gravelly than it had been before.
“Once a week we have game night,” she confirmed, recalling that Adam had essentially extended an invitation. “Is that something you’d be interested in?” she asked with some disbelief.
His smile stretched mischievously. “I’d hate to disappoint Adam. But then there’s Ella,” Flint pointed out.
“We can have Kelsey and Coop and Anthony come, too, and make it a whole-family game night this week. Ella likes it when we do that.”
“Then everybody would be happy?”
Jessie knew she was suddenly looking forward to game night more than she had on other weeks. But she only said, “It would make Ella happier anyway.”
“And you?”
He wanted to know if she wanted to see him again. It made Jessie smile. “It would be nice if you came,” she confessed quietly, as if someone other than Flint might hear her.
“So tomorrow night we play games,” he joked.
I think we might be playing one right now, she thought. But she said, “And eat hoagie sandwiches and chips and my mom’s homemade chocolate cookies, and sit around on the living room floor to do it all—I have to warn you that it isn’t fancy.”
He was still holding her gaze and his smile seemed more intimate than it had been. “I don’t care,” he assured her, as if letting her know that what they did together didn’t matter.
And again what washed through Jessie had no business washing through her.
Then he bobbed forward and kissed her again—so quickly this time that she didn’t see it coming, didn’t respond and—worst of all—barely got to enjoy it, before he said, “Tomorrow working on the house, tomorrow night for game night. I’ll see you then.”
Jessie nodded and they finally said good-night—without any more kissing—and went in opposite directions.
But as she stepped over the threshold, she couldn’t keep herself from looking in the direction of her sister’s house to catch a last glimpse of Flint.
Who stood with a booted foot on the bottom step of Kelsey’s front porch, his hand on the railing, watching her, maybe waiting to make sure she got safely inside.
And without thinking that it might be juvenile or adolescent or silly, Jessie found herself waving to him, feeling a thrill at the sight of him raising a single, big hand in the air to return it.
Just before she went into her house, thinking that if this wasn’t “clicking,” she didn’t know what was.
Chapter Six
“Mama, you overseeped! Gramma says you bey’er ge’ up.”
Jessie almost never overslept. But Adam was right—when she opened her eyes on Friday morning at the sound of her youngest’s voice coming from her doorway and looked at the clock, she realized that that was exactly what she’d done.
It was Flint’s fault. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep after he’d kissed her the night before. Because even if that kiss hadn’t been earth-shattering, it had still been enough to get Jessie’s long-slumbering motor running just a little bit.
And she’d gone to bed with that excitement jockeying for position with guilt at the thought that she’d kissed another man and been unfaithful to Pete—because that was how it had felt.
Then somehow the guilt had faded and she’d found herself fantasizing about kissing Flint again, imagining kisses that weren’t as innocent as that one had been. Imagining kisses that were longer, deeper, more passionate. Imagining more than kisses…
And then another wave of guilt had come on the heels of that.
It had been a long time before she’d been able to sleep.
But then she’d dreamed that Pete was okay with her kissing Flint…
She remembered it suddenly—a split second before Adam bounded onto her bed, and Ella, Braden and Bethany all came charging into her room.
“Good morning,” she said, greeting the four reasons why—even if she had dreamed that Pete was okay with her kissing Flint—it still wasn’t so okay.
“Gramma wants to know are you sick?” Ella asked.
Jessie sat up against her headboard. “No, I just slept through my alarm.”
“She’s not sick, Gramma,” Ella shouted in her loudest voice.
Braden piped up, “I told her you wasn’t—”
“Weren’t,” Jessie corrected his grammar.
“I told her you weren’t sick when you came in to make me wake up from the bad dream last night.”
“Is that why you’re so tired?” Ella asked. “’Cuz Braden woke you up with the nightmares again?”
Jessie had been wide awake when that had happened, and long after she’d gotten Braden back to sleep and returned to her own bed. And to her thoughts of Flint.
But it was easier to let them all think she was tired from being up with Braden than to tell them the truth, so she mussed up Braden’s hair and said, “I’m sorry you had bad dreams again last night.”
“Me, too!” Braden lamented.
“Gramma says Aunt Kelsey and Coop and Anthony and Flint are gonna come for game night tonight,” Bethany said then. “Are they?”
“I don’t know. I talked to Gramma about it before we went to bed last night. Did she talk to Aunt Kelsey?”
“They’re coming,” Ella said fatalistically.
“Fwint’s comin’!” Adam confirmed, causing his oldest sister to glare at him.
“And so are Aunt Kelsey and Coop and Anthony, right?” Jessie said to defuse Ella’s disapproval.
“Yeah, they’re coming, too,” Ella conceded as if that was the only redeeming factor.
“With Fwint!” Adam just couldn’t get past that.
“I like Flint,” Braden said, clearly siding with Adam against Ella.
“He’s funny and nice,” Bethany chimed in, too.
Although Jessie knew this was becoming the kind of three-against-one struggle her kids often engaged in, their sentiments made Jessie recall the conversation she’d had with Flint on the drive home from rock hunting the previous evening. And that caused her decision to act on something that had troubled her along with thoughts of Flint kissing her.
“I think we should talk about Flint,” she said then, not wanting her kids to feel any of what he’d felt as a child when his mother had brought men into their family; and also wanting to make sure that any blossoming attachments her own kids might have to him were tempered with some realities.
“You all know that Flint is Coop’s brother and that he’s only visiting Aunt Kelsey and Coop, right? He doesn’t live in Red Rock—”
“Where does he live?” Braden asked.
“In Denver, Colorado. And that’s where he’ll go back to when his visit is over.”
“I wan’ him to stay here,” Adam decreed.
“But he won’t be staying here,” Jessie said gently but firmly. “He’s only a visitor and I want you all to remember that. When his visit is over, he’ll go back to his own home and we might not ever see him again.”
Which was something she needed to keep in mind for herself, too. But why Flint’s temporary stay in Red Rock caused her a twinge of regret, Jessie didn’t know.
Still, she was focused on her kids—exactly where she wanted her focus to be—and she ignored it.
“I hope he goes home soon,” Ella grumbled.
“I don’t!” Bethany countered. “I like him!”
“I love ’im!” Adam said, not to be outdone.
“You do not love him,” Ella insisted. “We loved Daddy. Flint is just a big fat—”
“Flint is a perfectly nice man,” Jessie cut her eldest off before Ella went off on a tangent. “And he’s a guest when he’s with us. So we can have fun with him and enjoy his company—and we need to treat him the way we treat guests—” she said pointedly to Ella “—but I want you all to be clear that that’s all he is. A friend. A visitor. A guest.”
“And he’s gonna leave sometime,” Ella said, apparently needing to hang on to th
at.
“And, yes,” Jessie confirmed, “he will leave.”
“I’m gonna ast ’im to stay for-eber.” Another of Adam’s decrees.
“I want him to stay,” Braden said.
“Me, too,” Bethany added as if they all had a vote.
Jessie sighed, then she repeated herself for effect. “Flint doesn’t live here. He’s only visiting. We need to be nice to him. You can enjoy spending time with him while he’s here. But I want you all not to forget that he won’t be here for long.”
“Good!” Ella managed to get in at the same time Jessie’s mother called for the kids to bring their laundry downstairs the way she’d asked them to.
“Go on and tell Gramma I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Jessie urged.
“We still gets to see Fwint tonight,” she heard Adam mutter to Braden and Bethany as they got off her bed.
“Too bad!” Ella couldn’t seem to resist putting in just before the four of them left Jessie’s bedroom.
Jessie just hoped that she’d gotten through to them about Flint—and that her words might entice Ella to be nice.
But she had to admit that if truth be told, she wasn’t sure on which side of the Flint-leaving issue she would cast her own vote.
Because while she knew he would be leaving soon and that it was for the best, because she couldn’t seem to contain her attraction to him, there was also a part of her that was clinging to every single minute she got to spend with him. A part of her that couldn’t help feeling a little like Adam, Bethany and Braden did about how terrific he was.
A part of her that wanted him to stay around, too, probably more than her hero-worshipping kids did.
But for such different reasons.
“Hang on just a minute.”
Game night had been enough of a success that Jessie thought she’d even seen Ella fight a smile or two during the course of it. But Kelsey and Coop had taken Anthony home an hour earlier, the last of the popcorn and cookies had been eaten, and her parents had offered to put the kids to bed while Jessie cleaned up downstairs. That was when Flint halted the process of urging Adam, Braden, Bethany and Ella to their rooms.
“I didn’t want to distract them from their fun before, but I brought them each something,” Flint said to Jessie when she tossed him a quizzical glance.
“Presents?” Adam said excitedly.
“Just a little something,” Flint said.
Jessie had seen her sister slip him a brown paper sack from Anthony’s diaper bag just before they’d left, but she’d had no idea what was in it. Flint had discreetly set it alongside the easy chair he’d been sitting in to play Candy Land. Now Flint had the sack in hand as three of her kids charged him and Ella looked on with barely veiled curiosity from a distance.
Flint opened the bag and took a small replica of a totem pole from it.
“Adam, this is for you—it’s a totem pole to watch over you.”
“It gots a face like a man with a bird thingy for a nose,” the three-year-old marveled. “The thingy is a beak,” Jessie said from where she looked on as curiously as Ella did.
“Can I play wis it, too?”
“You can. You can ward off all sorts of aliens and attackers with that,” Flint assured before he took a beaded bracelet out for Bethany.
“This will bring you good luck, Bethany, and I thought the beads were the color of your pretty eyes,” he said to the four-year-old.
“Look, Mama, are they the color my eyes are?”
“They are,” Jessie assured, watching her daughter beam.
“This is for Braden,” Flint said then, taking out a small, leather-wrapped hoop with webbing laced on the inside like an ornate spiderweb. “This is a dream catcher,” he explained. “If you put it near your bed it should help to catch some of the bad dreams before they can come to you in your sleep, so you won’t have so many of them.”
“Is that true, Mama?” Braden asked hopefully.
“I think we should give it a try,” Jessie said somberly, hoping anything would work.
“And last but not least,” Flint said as he handed the dream catcher to Braden and took a very small hand-painted oval box from the lunch sack, “this is for Ella.”
The seven-year-old still might not have liked him, but she couldn’t resist a gift. Showing some reluctance, she stepped up and accepted it.
“What is it?”
“Open the box,” Flint advised.
When she did, she removed tiny stick dolls wrapped in brightly colored string.
“They’re Worry People,” Flint explained. “You can give all your troubles to them, put them under your pillow when you sleep and forget everything that’s bothering you so you can rest.”
Ella frowned suspiciously but seemed intrigued nonetheless. And to her credit, without her mother’s encouragement, she said a very solemn, “Thank you,” as if she had need to share her burdens and actually was grateful. Which made Jessie’s heart ache just a little.
But all she could do was remind her other children to thank Flint before her parents finally did get them to go upstairs with their new treasures.
“That was very nice of you,” she told Flint when everyone was gone. Nice and touching and so thoughtful of him to have personalized each gift to each child. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I did it because I wanted to,” he said, using the empty bag as a trash receptacle to collect stray popcorn kernels and discarded napkins. As he did, Jessie tried not to notice for the millionth time tonight that the man could rock a pair of jeans like nobody’s business.
But it wasn’t easy.
Still, she tore her eyes away from his derriere and began to gather plates, bowls and glasses as Flint said, “I had nightmares as a kid. I hated to hear that Braden is suffering through that. And Ella… I think Ella has more worries than she should have. I wasn’t sure what to do for Adam and Bethany, so I just played it safe.”
“It was still really nice,” she said. Then, even though she had no desire to see him go, she said, “You don’t have to help with this stuff, too. If you want to get home or if you have somewhere else to be…”
“Actually, I was kind of hoping that if we got this cleared away in a hurry I might be able to talk you into showing me your studio.”
“Oh, you don’t want to see that,” Jessie demurred self-consciously.
“Yes, I do. What do you say? Can I earn my way into a private showing by emptying the trash?” He held up the small sack he’d been filling and she drank in the sight of him in a form-fitting white crew-necked T-shirt that accentuated his muscular, V-shaped torso divinely.
And between how appealing he looked, the fact that he always managed to lighten her mood, and having brought her kids such kind and caring gifts, how could she say no to him?
“Okay, but don’t have high expectations. I took art in middle and high school, but I’ve taken only a few adult classes at night school over the years, so it isn’t as if I’m trained or anything. I’m just a putterer.”
“Then I want to see your putterings.”
“Why don’t you work on clearing up the games while I do the dishes, then I’ll show you my putterings?”
Had that come out sounding suggestive?
It had to her.
And it must have to him because he grinned devilishly.
But he also must have realized that she hadn’t intended to say anything suggestive because he let her off the hook with a simple, “It’s a deal.”
She took the paper bag he offered and the dinnerware she’d stacked into the kitchen. With the trash disposed of, she stood at the sink to rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher.
As she did, she took stock of her own appearance in her reflection of the window above the sink.
She was wearing jeans, too, and a simple navy blue shirt that she’d chosen for the princess seams that allowed the blouse to hug her curves just a bit. Luckily she’d managed to spend an entire evening with her kids wit
hout having anything spilled on her, so there were no spots to worry about.
She’d twisted her hair into a French knot in the back and left the ends to erupt in a bundle of curls at her crown, and that was still neat and tidy. And although the dark glass didn’t reflect too many details, she thought the lip gloss she’d reapplied after dinner had stayed on and she didn’t see any mascara smudges under her eyes.
Not that it mattered how she looked, she told herself. This had been a purely aboveboard family game night that would end with her showing Flint her rock sculptures before he went home. Simple as that. Without any kind of good-night kiss being called for because this hadn’t been a date.
Of course, yesterday’s rock-collecting outing had also been a family event and not a date.
But still, she lectured herself, she needed to not let anything develop between herself and Flint.
And yet the fact that Flint had hung back when he could have left earlier with Kelsey and Cooper or when the kids went up to bed… Well, did that mean he’d had a plan for getting a few minutes alone with her?
Jessie couldn’t stifle the little rush of excitement at that thought.
And that little rush of excitement felt so good.
“All done. How about you?”
Jessie startled at Flint’s voice, but recovered quickly.
“I’m done, too,” she said, turning off the water and closing the dishwasher.
“Then lead me to the putterings.”
He’d put a wicked twist to the word that time and she knew he’d done it on purpose to tease her. It made her smile, but she didn’t acknowledge his goading; she merely led him out the rear door.
As they crossed the yard—careful to step around the jungle gym parts and pieces that had yet to be put together—Jessie said, “When we rented the apartment it was furnished and everything is still in it, just pushed against the walls. It looks kind of messy—”
“I’ve never been in an art studio that didn’t look messy.”
“I’m just saying that it’s kind of a mishmash.”
When they reached the studio, Jessie opened the door and flipped on the light. She went in ahead of Flint.
Fortune Found Page 8
