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His sister smiled, though her eyes were plainly curious. “We could say the same. I haven’t seen you out since—”
“Jeremy,” Max said abruptly, not really wanting to have his sister announce in front of Emily just how long it had been since he’d been seen in public with any woman in his arms. He hadn’t dated in over a year. Back when he was thinking he was heading down the “family man” path, and his life was finally on the right track.
Until it derailed.
He let go of Emily so that she could see the other couple. “I guess you two don’t really need any introduction.”
“I guess we don’t,” Emily agreed. “Jeremy, how nice to see you.” Her gaze went from her cousin something-something-removed, to his wife, and she smiled wryly. “I should have connected the names.” She stuck out her hand toward Kirsten. “It’s good to see you again. I didn’t realize Max was your brother.”
Max suddenly felt like the odd man out. His sister was married to a Fortune and Emily was born a Fortune. While he was a guy just trying to make a place for himself in the world. “Our meal is probably getting cold,” he said.
“Why don’t you join us,” Emily suggested to his sister and her husband. “I’d love to get caught up, and we already have a table out in the courtyard.”
A table that only sat two people, and closely at that.
Max managed a smile, anyway. He and his sister had had their moments in the past, but she was his only family. He knew he could count on her, and more times than he wanted to admit, he’d had that point proven to him. She’d been the terminally responsible Allen, and for the past few years, he’d been working damn hard to prove to her—as well as himself—that he wasn’t the terminally irresponsible Allen. He loved her. And he respected Jeremy a hell of a lot. Both he and Kirsten had been there for him when he’d been at his lowest point.
He just didn’t want to share Emily with them at that particular moment.
“We’d love to,” Kirsten assured. Her hand was tucked around Jeremy’s arm.
And that was the end of that.
They headed back to their table, Emily chattering away easily with her something-removed cousin as they caught up with the family members they had in common, and the waiter managed to squeeze in two more chairs and place settings at their minuscule table.
She didn’t seem to show any remorse at all that she’d invited an interruption to their privacy. Which left Max figuring that she’d wanted an interruption.
Certainly wouldn’t be the first time he’d misread a woman, but usually—when it came to the physical matters—he wasn’t so far off the mark. It was just when it came to their emotions and honesty that he’d had a problem.
He ate his food, not really tasting any of it anymore. He guessed he smiled when he was meant to smile, and responded when he needed to smile, because by the time they’d finished eating and Jeremy slid his bank card to the waiter before Max could even get his hands on the check, not even Max’s sister was giving him any more curious looks.
“Here.” He pulled several twenties out of his wallet and tossed them on the table next to his brother-in-law’s elbow.
He saw Jeremy start to wave away the money, but Max gave him a hard stare. Jeremy was an orthopedic surgeon and a Fortune. He could buy and sell Max dozens of times over. But Max paid his own way now.
Fortunately, his brother-in-law seemed to take the unspoken hint and pocketed the cash along with his credit card when the waiter returned it.
There wasn’t even any need for him to hang around. Emily had her own car. And she and his sister were talking a mile a minute as if they were long-lost friends. Max caught snippets of their conversation. Talking and laughing about college and graduate degrees.
“Think I’ll call it a night,” he said abruptly.
The colored lights hanging around the courtyard reflected softly in Emily’s glasses when she turned toward him. It was only his own wishful thinking that she seemed to show some disappointment. “Do you want to set up a time now for me to meet with you again at the office, or should I call you in the morning? The only thing I have on my schedule is a conference call, but I’ll be finished with that by ten.”
“Call.” He realized how terse he sounded. “I don’t know what’s on my schedule from Tanner for tomorrow yet,” he added.
Her soft lips pressed together a little, but she smiled and nodded. “Okay. Thanks for dinner.”
“Sure.” Before she could say anything else, he leaned over and gave his sister a kiss on the cheek. He didn’t even consider a kiss for Emily—on her cheek or elsewhere. Not in front of his sister. Not when he’d already overstepped the lines of “business.”
He just gave a general wave meant to cover the whole table. “See y’all later.” And then he headed out of the restaurant.
Emily chewed the inside of her cheek, watching Max stride out of the courtyard. She suddenly dropped her napkin on the table. “Would you excuse me, too?” she said quickly to her cousin and his pretty wife. “I forgot to mention something to Max.”
“We’ll see each other again soon,” Jeremy said easily. Kirsten was nodding.
Emily smiled hurriedly and grabbed her purse before quickly following the path that Max had taken. When she reached the parking lot, she spotted him already at his truck and she broke into a trot to catch up to him. “Max,” she called as he unlocked his door. “Would you wait a minute?”
He turned to wait.
She felt breathless when she reached him and knew it wasn’t owed entirely from her sprint across the parking lot. But now that she’d caught up to him, she felt completely tongue-tied. “Thanks for dinner.”
“You already thanked me.”
“I know, but … I—” She broke off, shaking her head a little. “I just really enjoyed myself.”
“Catching up with your cousin?”
“No.” Seemingly of its own accord, her fingers touched his arm. Which was strange, because she wasn’t generally a touchy sort of person. “Well, yes, I mean it was good to see Jeremy. Of course. And your sister. She and Jeremy seem so perfect for each other. I meant I really enjoyed dinner with you.”
His right eyebrow lifted slightly. “You were pretty quick to add more company.”
Her lips parted. “She’s your sister. How could we not invite them to sit with us? Would you rather have had me be rude?”
“I’d rather have had you to myself,” he said bluntly.
That dark and sensual something that had wakened while they’d danced reared again, clenching hard inside her belly. “I’d have liked that, too,” she admitted and gave a little blessing to that margarita or she’d never have had the guts to say the words aloud. “Maybe we could do this again,” she added boldly. “Have dinner. Just … just the two of us.”
The parking lot was too dark for her to see the expression in his eyes. “Maybe.”
Maybe was just another word for no.
She swallowed hard and while she still had some nerve, leaned up and pressed her lips to his cheek. “That’s for being there after the tornado that day,” she said when she went back down on her heels.
He watched her for a moment that was so tight she felt almost sure that he was going to kiss her back.
Really kiss her.
But he didn’t. He just nodded and pulled open his truck door. “You know your way back to your sister’s from here?”
“Yes.”
“Drive carefully.”
“You do the same.” Her voice was faint.
He started up the truck engine and she backed away several feet and watched him drive away.
She wasn’t sure what had just happened.
All she knew was that she felt shaky.
And ridiculously disappointed.
“You were out late last night.”
Emily looked up from the coffee she was pouring into a mug when Wendy padded silently into the kitchen the next morning. “Not terribly.”
“It was practically ten.” Wendy reached around her for a coffee mug of her own. “What were you doing?”
Mildly amused, Emily filled her sister’s mug and replaced the pot on the coffeemaker’s burner. “Maybe I was going wild and crazy like my little sister used to do.”
Wendy made a face. “Ha-ha. Your idea of wild and crazy is leaving the house without a bra on under your tailored shirt.” She twisted her hair up in a deft twist and stuck a clip in it that she pulled out of the pocket of her silky red robe. Then she poured some cream into her coffee and carried it over to the kitchen table that sat in a sunny little alcove. She sank down onto a chair and stretched out her long, shapely legs before sipping her coffee with catlike pleasure.
Emily just shook her head. Her sister could roll out of bed and look like a magazine spread for lingerie. She, though, would have to fuss with her hair for two hours just to get some semblance of style into the stubbornly straight strands and she’d have had to have some serious surgery to gain some of the curves that Wendy came by naturally.
And sad to say, Wendy had her pegged when it came to the whole “wild and crazy” thing.
“You’re the kind of woman who makes women like me feel like dish rags,” she muttered.
Wendy rolled her eyes. “So says the epitome of strikingly beautiful Nordic blondes,” she returned. “I know why I’m feeling sleepy this morning. Because my beautiful daughter woke up twice last night. But what’s got you so cranky this lovely morning? Anything to do with whatever mischief you were getting up to last night?”
“I’m not cranky. And there was no mischief. I had dinner with Max Allen.” Emily sat down across from her sister and sank her nose into her coffee mug. “This decaf stuff is for the birds.” She got back up and added a hefty dose of cream to it.
“Not cranky my hind end,” Wendy observed. “Open up that plastic container there next to the stove. Maybe you’ll find something in there that’ll help.”
Emily opened the container and stared almost lasciviously at the pastries inside. “Did you make these?”
“I did.”
She plucked one flaky croissant-shaped item out of the container and set it on a paper napkin. “I still can’t believe you can cook.”
Wendy laughed. “Baking isn’t cooking,” she said.
“It’s harder,” Marcos said, entering the kitchen just then. He leaned over his wife, planting a kiss on her lips that seemed to raise the temperature in the room by a good five degrees.
Emily just focused on her flaky pastry that tasted a little like almonds and a lot like something sinful. She couldn’t very well tell her brother-in-law and sister to “get a room” when they were right in their very own home.
Emily was the interloper here.
She took another huge bite of the pastry and added a spoon of sugar to her coffee. Maybe if she went into a sugar coma, she’d be able to forget about the way she’d practically thrown herself at Max the evening before. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said to nobody in particular, before leaving the room with her creamy, sweet coffee and a second pastry.
“What’s eating her?” she heard Marcos ask.
She reached the guestroom she’d commandeered before she heard her sister’s reply. But if she’d thought she’d avoid her sister’s curiosity entirely, she was wrong, which she learned when Wendy boldly walked into the bathroom a while later while hot water poured down on Emily’s head.
“So …” Wendy flipped down the lid on the commode, blithely ignoring the glare that Emily gave her from around the shower curtain, “Max Allen?”
“It was business,” Emily said shortly, yanking the shower curtain back in place and sticking her face into the spray of water.
“Until ten o’clock business?”
Emily turned her back to the water and rinsed the shampoo out of her hair. “You knew I was meeting with him for Tanner.”
“And again … until ten o’clock?” Wendy’s voice was full of laughter.
Emily yanked the curtain back enough to eye her sister. “It was just business.”
“Methinks you sound a little defensive, sister dear.”
Emily shut off the water and stuck her hand out. “Make yourself useful and hand me a towel.”
Wendy dutifully pressed a fluffy white towel into her hand. Emily swiped it over herself and wrapped it around her torso before fully pulling back the shower curtain and stepping out. “We had a lot to go over,” she said. She found a comb in her toiletry bag and began dragging it through the tangles in her hair. “So we worked through dinner at Red.”
“My favorite restaurant,” Wendy inserted, grinning. “For obvious reasons.” Not only did Marcos manage the place, but Wendy was the pastry chef there. “And very romantic.”
Emily ignored that. “Excellent food was the goal. But we did run into Jeremy and Max’s sister, Kirsten, there.” She slid a glance toward her sister. “Why didn’t you remind me that Max was her brother?”
Wendy shrugged. “I didn’t think about it, to be perfectly honest. Why is it a big deal?” Her gaze was still sharp. “I mean, since your interest in Max is just business, anyway?”
Emily slapped her comb down on the vanity before she tore out her hair by the roots and picked up a tube of face cream instead. “I just felt sort of like an idiot.” She squeezed out a few drops of cream and worked it in. “He’s practically a relation.”
Wendy picked up the tube that Emily had set down and took the top off, smelling it. “Hardly. Jeremy Fortune is a distant cousin which means his brother-in-law is perfectly free game for an interested woman.”
Emily exhaled noisily. “Wendy, I am not interested that way.”
“Lies’ll give you wrinkles,” Wendy advised. She held up the expensive cream. “Better use a little more of this.”
Emily snatched the tube out of her sister’s hand and capped it again. Then all of her irritation seemed to fizzle out of her. She stared at herself in the mirror but was only seeing Max in her mind’s eye. “Do you know much about him?”
“Some.” Wendy picked up the comb and stood behind Emily. “Don’t you have conditioner or something to keep your hair from tangling like this?”
“I’m out. Please don’t tell me you dated him, too.” Until she’d fallen for Marcos, Wendy had been quite the social butterfly.
Wendy tsked and started working gently at the snarls. “I never dated Max Allen,” she assured. “I do know that he’s sown some of his own wild oats, though. But then, after all that mess with little Anthony—” She broke off, shaking her head.
Emily studied her sister’s reflection in the mirror over the sink. “Who’s Anthony?”
Wendy’s gaze met hers in the mirror. “He was Max’s baby. At least that’s what everyone thought for a while.”
Wendy couldn’t have shocked her more if she’d tried. “Max has a child?”
Wendy shook her head. “No. It’s a long story. But you remember when William and Lily were supposed to have gotten married last year?”
Emily nodded. She’d heard the story more than once about how William had gone missing on his and Lily’s wedding day. All of William’s sons—Jeremy being one of them—had been frantic to find him. But it had been months before he’d been found, recovering from an automobile accident, and a while after that before his memories of Lily and his family had fully returned to him.
“Well, while everyone was worrying over why William hadn’t shown up at the church that day, an old girlfriend of Max’s had basically dumped a baby on him, telling him it was his. He was living with Kirsten at the time and she helped him take care of the baby for a while. But the baby wasn’t Max’s. It was Cooper Fortune’s—did you ever meet Cindy Fortune?” Wendy shook her head before Emily could answer. “Coop’s mother. Anyway, it turned out that the baby had actually been left at the church the day of the wedding.”
Emily turned around, staring at her sister. “Someone abandoned a baby at the church?”
