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Josh had mentioned his girlfriend at least five or six times in their session. Julie hadn’t met the girl but it was obvious Josh was enamored of her.
“You’ve got Lyndsey. Many people in your life care about you and are here to help you get through this.”
“I know what I have. Just like I know what I have to protect.”
Julie mulled over his statement, finding his choice of words a little unsettling.
“What do you need to protect? And from whom? Your mother? Lyndsey?”
He became inordinately fascinated with the upholstered buttons on the arm of the easy chair, tugging at the closest one. “The people I love. I should have acted sooner. I should have protected my mom from Lloyd a long time ago.”
“How would you have done that? Your mother was a grown woman, making her own choices. What could you have done?”
After a long moment, he lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know. I should have figured something out.”
She pressed him on the point as much as she could before it became obvious he didn’t want to talk anymore. He became more closed-mouthed and distant. Though they technically still had five minutes, she opted to end the session a little earlier.
“Thanks for…this,” Josh said. “The talk and stuff. It helped a lot.”
She had no idea what she had possibly been able to offer, but she smiled. “I’m glad. Will you come again?”
He hesitated just long enough to make the moment awkward. “I guess,” he finally said. “I don’t think I really need therapy or anything but I don’t mind talking to you.”
“Great.”
She quickly wrote her cell number on a memo sheet from a dispenser on her desk. “I’m going to give you my mobile number. If you want to talk, I’m here, okay? Anytime.”
“Even if I called you at three in the morning?”
She smiled a little at his cynicism, the natural adolescent desire to stretch every boundary to the limit. “Of course. I might be half asleep for a moment at first, but after I wake up a little, I’ll be very happy you felt you could bother me at 3:00 a.m.”
She wasn’t sure he believed her, but at least he didn’t openly argue.
Ross was thumbing through a magazine in the reception area when they opened Julie’s office door. He rose to his feet and she was struck again by his height and the sheer solid strength of him.
With that tumble of dark hair brushing his collar and those deep brown eyes, he looked brooding and dark and dangerous, though she had come to see that was mostly illusion.
Mostly.
Her insides gave that funny little jolt they seemed to do whenever she saw him and she fought down a shiver. She had to get control of herself. Every time she was around the man, she forgot all the many reasons she shouldn’t be attracted to him.
“Hey, Uncle Ross. I’m going to go see if Ricky is still shooting hoops out back,” Josh said.
“Okay. I’ll be out in a minute. I’d like to talk to Ms. Osterman.”
Josh nodded, picked up his backpack and headed out the door. Josh had been her last appointment of the day and this was Susan’s half day, so no other patients waited in the reception area.
She was suddenly acutely aware that she and Ross were alone and she ordered her nerves to settle.
“How did things go in there?” Ross asked.
She sent him a sidelong look as she closed and locked her office door. “Just fine. And that’s all I can or will tell you.”
“Did he tell you he insisted on going back to school today, over all my well-reasoned objections?”
“He did.”
“Am I wrong in thinking he should take more time?”
She studied him, charmed despite all the warnings to herself by his earnest concern for his nephew’s well-being. She knew Ross was trying to do the right thing for Josh and she could also tell by the note of uncertainty in his voice that he didn’t feel up to the task.
She chose her words carefully, loath to give him any more reason to doubt himself. “I think Josh needs to set his own pace. He’s supposed to graduate in two weeks. Right now it’s important for him to go through the motions of regaining his life.”
“He didn’t say much about school today on the way over here, but I know it couldn’t have been easy.” His features seemed hard and tight for a moment. “I know how cruel kids can be, how they can talk, especially in small towns.”
He spoke as if he had firsthand experience in such things and she had to wonder what cruelty he might have faced as a child. She wanted to ask, but she was quite certain he would brush off the question.
“Josh can handle the whispers around school,” she answered. “He’s a very strong young man.”
“He shouldn’t have to go through any of this,” he muttered.
“But he does, unfortunately. Whether he should or shouldn’t have to face it, this is his reality now.”
“I wish I could make it easier for him.”
“You are. Just by being there with him, caring for him, you’re providing exactly what he needs right now.”
He studied her for a long moment, a warm light in his brown eyes that sent those nerves ricocheting around her insides again. She wanted to stay right here in her reception area and just soak up that heat, but she knew it was far too dangerous. Her defenses were entirely too flimsy around Ross Fortune.
“Shall we go find Josh and Ricky?”
Could he hear that slight tremble in her voice? she wondered. Oh, she dearly hoped not.
“Right,” he only said, and followed her outside into the warm May sunlight, where Josh was shooting baskets by himself on the hoop hanging in one corner of the parking lot of the Foundation.
“No Ricky?” Ross asked.
“Nope. He must have gone home while I was talking to Ms. O. Left the ball out here, though.”
Josh shot a fifteen-foot jumper that swished cleanly through the basket.
“Wow. Great shot,” Julie said.
“My turn,” Ross said and Josh obliged by passing the ball to him. Ross dribbled a few times and went to the same spot on the half-court painted on the parking lot. He repeated Josh’s shot, but his bounced off the rim.
Josh managed what was almost a smile. “Ha. You can never beat me at H-O-R-S-E. At least you haven’t been able to in years.”
“Never say never, kid.” Heedless of his cowboy boots that weren’t exactly intended for basketball, Ross rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “Julie, you in?”
She laughed at the pair of them and the suddenly intent expression in two sets of eyes. “Do I look crazy? This appears to be a grudge match to me.”
Her heart warmed when Josh grinned at her, looking very different from the troubled teen she knew him to be. “There’s always room for one more.”
“You’ll wipe the parking lot with me, I’m sure. But why not?”
She decided not to tell them she was the youngest girl in a family of five with four fiercely competitive older brothers. Sometimes the only time she could get any of them to notice her was out on the driveway with the basketball standard her father had nailed above the garage door.
H-O-R-S-E had always been her favorite game and she loved outshooting her brothers, finding innovative shots they couldn’t match in the game of elimination.
It had been years since she played basketball with any real intent, though, and she knew she would be more than a little rusty.
The next half hour would live forever in her memory, especially the deepening shock on both Ross’s and Josh’s features when she was able to keep up with them, shot for shot, in the first five rounds of play.
After five more rounds, Josh and Ross each had earned H and O by missing two shots apiece, while she was still hitting all her shots, despite the handicap of her three-inch heels.
“Just who’s wiping the parking lot with whom here?” Ross grumbled. “I’m beginning to think we’ve been hustled.”
“I never said I couldn’t play,” Julie said with a grin, hitting a one-handed layup. “There was no deception involved whatsoever.”
She had to admit, she was having the time of her life. And Josh seemed much lighter of heart than he had been during their session. She still sensed secrets in him, but for a few moments he seemed to be able to set them aside to enjoy the game, which she considered a good sign.
After another half hour, things had evened out a little. She had missed an easy free throw and then a left hook shot that she secretly blamed on Ross for standing too close to her and blasting away all her powers of concentration. But she was still ahead after she pulled off a trick bounce shot that neither Josh nor Ross could emulate.
“I’m starving,” Ross said. “What do you say we finish this another night?”
“You’re just saying that because you know I’m going to win,” Julie said with a taunting smile.
Ross returned it and she considered the game a victory all the way around, especially if it could help him be more lighthearted than she had seen him since they had found his brother-in-law’s body.
“Hey, Julie, why don’t you come to the house and have dinner with us?” Josh asked suddenly. “We could finish the game there after we eat.”
“Dinner?” She glanced at Ross and saw he didn’t look exactly thrilled at the invitation. “I don’t know,” she said slowly.
“Please, Julie. We’d love you to come,” Josh pressed her. “You don’t have other plans, do you?”
“Not tonight, no,” she had to admit.
“Then why not come for dinner? Uncle Ross said he was going to barbecue steaks and there’s always an extra we can throw on the grill.”
“Well, that’s a bit of a problem,” she answered. “I’m afraid I’m not really much of a meat eater.”
“Really?” Josh said with interest. “Lyndsey is a vegetarian.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m a vegetarian. I just don’t eat a lot of red meat.”
“Those are fighting words here in cattle country,” Ross drawled.
She laughed. “I know. That’s why you won’t hear me saying them very loudly. I would prefer if the two of you would just keep it to yourselves.”
“Okay, we won’t blab your horrible dark secret to everyone—” Josh gave her a mischievous smile “—as long as you have dinner with us.”
She was delighted that he felt comfortable enough to tease her. “That sounds suspiciously like blackmail, young man.”
“Whatever it takes.”
She returned his smile, then shifted her gaze to see Ross watching both of them out of those brown eyes of his that sometimes revealed nothing.
“I suppose we could throw something else on the grill for you,” Ross said. “You eat much fish? We’ve still got bass from the other day.”
If she were wise, she would tell Josh ‘thanks but no thanks’ for his kind invitation. She already felt too tightly entangled with Ross and his nephew. But the boy was reaching out to her. She couldn’t just slap him down, especially if it might help her reach him better and help him through this grief.
“In that case, I would love to have dinner with you, as long as you let me pick up a salad and dessert from the deli on the way over.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Ross said.
She smiled and tossed the basketball at him. “I don’t mind. It’s a weird rule in my family. The winner always buys the loser’s dessert. You can consider the salad just a bonus.”
He was still laughing as she climbed into her car and drove away.
Chapter Six
By the time she left the deli with her favorite tomato salad and a Boston cream pie, her stomach jumped with nerves and she could barely concentrate on the drive across town to the Fredericks’ luxurious home.
She let out a breath. It was only dinner. This jittery reaction was absurd in the extreme. It was only a simple dinner with a client and his uncle.
Nothing more than that.
Still, she couldn’t deny that Ross affected her more than any man had in recent memory. It had been seven years since her husband’s death. Seven long, lonely years. She had dated occasionally since then but only on a casual basis. She knew she was the one who always put roadblocks up to avoid things becoming more serious. The time and the person never felt right.
For a long time, she had been too busy trying to glue together the shattered pieces of her life. Then she had been too wrapped up in her new career as a child and family therapist and the new job at the Fortune Foundation to devote much time or energy to a relationship.
For the past year or so she had begun to think that she was finally in a good place to get serious about a man again, to try again at love. She had dated a few possibilities but nothing had ever come of them.
Ross Fortune was definitely not serious relationship material. Despite the attraction that simmered between them—and she knew she was not misreading those signs—Ross Fortune came with complications she wasn’t prepared to deal with. Beyond his current family turmoil, she sensed he was a hard man, not very open to warmth and tenderness.
She tried to picture him being content spending a quiet evening at home with a child on his lap and couldn’t quite manage it. But maybe she wasn’t being fair to him. Maybe that restlessness she sensed was a result of his brother-in-law’s murder and the subsequent fallout from it.
Julie sighed as she approached the Fredericks’ large house that gleamed a pale coral in the fading sunlight. That unspoken attraction between them was real and intense, but for now that was all it could remain.
She wasn’t sure she could afford to see what might come of it, not when she had the feeling Ross Fortune was the kind of man who could easily break her heart like a handful of twigs.
Josh, she reminded herself.
She was here only because he asked her, because she wanted to think they had formed a connection since his father’s death and she wanted to help him sort through his jumbled mix of feelings.
Her own weren’t important right now.
The evening was warm and pleasant as she closed her car door. In other neighborhoods, she might have heard the happy sounds of children playing in the last golden twilight hours before bedtime, but the Frederickses lived in Red Rock’s most exclusive neighborhood. All she could manage to hear was the whir of air conditioners and a few well-mannered birds tweeting in the treetops.
