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And just as suddenly all those kids seemed to fade into the background as he honed in on her as if she were out there alone, her hair drinking in the morning sunshine and reflecting it.
She was wearing better-fitting jeans today, with a tank top tucked into the jeans. And when she leaned over to check a tag on whatever it was that had been delivered, her well-shaped backside was impossible for him not to look at.
Flint’s hand actually tingled with the urge to cup that great little bum, and suddenly being a good role model was the last thing on his mind. Only Jessie was. And the fact that in just a while she was scheduled to come over here and work …
Knock it off! he commanded himself, refocusing his eyes, making sure his view again took in those four kids running around, climbing on things, making a ruckus.
She has four kids, he told himself once more, firmly, sternly, determined to brand it into his brain so that he never lost sight of it.
But then she stood up straight again, turned enough to be in profile, slipped her hands into the rear pockets of those jeans and this time it was the sweet, sweet swell of her breasts that made his hands ache to touch.
But it didn’t matter, he swore to himself. She was a no-go.
And he meant it. If he had to dredge up every lousy memory he had of his own childhood to stick to it, that’s what he’d do.
But one way or another he wasn’t getting involved with The Mom Next Door.
“I don’t think I know your last name—or is it Hunt, like Kelsey’s?”
It was not easy for Jessie to be in her sister’s laundry room, sharing the painting duties with Flint late Monday afternoon after he and Cooper had returned from buying supplies for that day’s project.
The space was small—only big enough for a side-by-side washer and drier with enough room in front of them to open their front-loading doors. And if Flint had seemed to fill Kelsey’s entire living room the day before with his mere presence, it was nothing compared to the laundry room.
In close quarters, alone, with a potently attractive man—how was she supposed to keep her mind on painting, let alone small talk?
There was nothing Jessie could do but try to make the best of it. And because Flint was going to be her sister’s brother-in-law, she decided she might as well get to know him.
“I’m Hunt-Myers,” Jessie answered, hoping it wasn’t unduly belated and also hoping that the fact that she’d been climbing to sit cross-legged on the tarp covering the drier so she could paint the wall behind it offered a reason for the delay. “I hyphenated when I got married. I guess it was a way of maintaining some independence and then it stuck.”
They’d begun painting at the door, gone in opposite directions but were now both working on the long wall behind the appliances. The lower half of the wall was tiled and so didn’t need paint, and unlike Jessie, Flint was tall enough to reach the half above the appliances just by leaning over the washing machine.
He was dressed in a pair of old, ragged, torn jeans, and an equally as worn chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. They were clearly work clothes and yet they still managed to look good on him—and to accentuate his every asset. Assets that Jessie was all too aware of when his well-shaped rear end, or muscular jean-encased thighs, or broad shoulders or expansive chest were always mere inches away from her.
“What about you?” she countered. “You and Coop are both Fortunes, but you’re Fortunes on your mother’s side, aren’t you?”
“We are,” he said amiably. “My mother never took any of her husband’s last names. Maybe she knew none of her marriages would last.”
Beyond the fact that Cindy Fortune was not well thought of, Jessie knew nothing about Flint and Cooper’s mother. But even though she was curious—especially about that comment about multiple marriages—it seemed beyond the realm of small talk to ask for details. So with the name-related questions answered, she opted for moving on.
“You live in Denver, right?” she said then.
“Right. Just outside of the city itself.”
“Do you have a house or—”
“I rent an apartment. I like to have a home base, but not with roots that are too deep. If I end up with a neighbor I don’t like, or the grass looks greener somewhere else, I want to be able to pack my stuff and move on without much fuss. That’s what I grew up with, and I guess it stuck.”
“The Fortune family are staples around here—ranchers, businessmen, philanthropists—they’re pillars of the community. But you grew up rootless?”
“Oh, yeah,” he answered with a mirthless laugh.
But again he didn’t offer an explanation beyond that and again Jessie thought that to push him for more might be prying.
He didn’t let there be an awkward silence, though, before he said, “What about you? Do you own the place next door?”
“I do,” she answered, liking that he didn’t put her in a position of quizzing him, that he asked questions of his own. Although she tried not to think that he might actually be interested in her, and told herself he was likely just being polite.
“Owning a house of our own was my late-husband’s and my biggest goal when we got married,” she went on. “It took us five years of saving, but we celebrated our fifth anniversary by moving into that house.”
“And you’re still there after how long?”
“Eight years.”
“That’s an eternity to me. You must be all about deep roots.”
“Stability is important to me.”
“And family, too, I’m guessing—because your parents live with you and now you have Kelsey right next door.”
“You could definitely say I’m all about family,” she confirmed. “I don’t know what I would do without them.”
“That’s nice,” he said just when she was wondering if he was approving or disapproving of her closeness to her family. But he sounded as if he honestly did think it was nice and she wondered if he regretted that he wasn’t closer to his own family.
But again he kept their chat going by saying, “It was you who gave Coop the heads-up when this place became available, wasn’t it?”
“It was. That’s how it all came about so fast.”
“And they’re renting with an option to buy, right?”
“With the first three months rent-free because none of this work is being hired out.”
“That’s a big change for Coop, too—that putting down roots thing. But he seems really happy.”
“I think he is. I know Kelsey is.”
“Good for them!” Flint decreed. “And Kelsey is okay raising Anthony?”
“She is. I don’t think she would love him any more if he were her own.”
Jessie knew that Anthony was the product of an earlier relationship Cooper had had with a woman named Lulu. There were many questions about Anthony turning up in Red Rock at the same time Flint and Cooper’s Uncle William had had his car accident in January. Ultimately Anthony had been linked to the Fortunes through a small gold medallion that had been draped around his blanket-cocooned little body by a fragile chain. A medallion that had been traced back to Cindy Fortune’s children, narrowing the possibilities for Anthony’s father to Cooper or Flint.
“I’m really glad it all worked out for them the way it did,” Flint said. “It looks like Anthony will have a good home.”
“Were you disappointed that he wasn’t yours?” Jessie asked.
Flint laughed spontaneously. “No,” he answered forcefully. “I was a wreck thinking he might be mine and wondering what I was going to do with him if he was. I can’t even keep plants alive. Believe me, this was a much better way for things to turn out.”
“What would you have done if he’d been yours?” Jessie ventured, challenging him just a bit.
He laughed again. “I probably would have cried like a baby myself,” he joked.
Jessie smiled at the wall she was painting, amused by the thought of the man she’d been thinking of as supermacho quaking at the mere possibility that he might be a father.
“I would have stepped up,” he said then, without hesitation, winning him points. “But I’m afraid poor Anthony would have suffered for it.”
Jessie laughed at him. “Well, I know you travel for work and that would have made it a lot more complicated, so you’re probably right—it’s for the best that things ended up the way they did.”
But what she didn’t know was much about his work and that seemed like another avenue for conversation, so she said, “You’re in sales, aren’t you?”
“Buying and selling, yeah.”
“What is it that you buy and sell?”
“I buy Western-themed arts and crafts and novelty items, and I sell them to gift shops and galleries and some private clients all across the country.”
That piqued her interest. “When you say that you buy arts and crafts and novelty items, do you mean from manufacturers or—”
“I have accounts with some wholesale houses that bring up trinket-type things from Mexico. But whenever I can I buy from artists and craftsmen. I like to deal in the unique and original more than in the mass-produced stuff.”
“Do you work for a company or something?”
“The business is mine. But business sounds more … I don’t know, corporate than I am. I’ve just come up with a name—Fortune Fine Arts and Crafts—because I’m in the process of having a website set up so I can do more selling over the internet. But really, I’m just a middleman—I hunt down stuff to sell, usually buy it outright myself and then resell it at a profit. Or sometimes I find a gallery or shop that will let me place a piece there and if it sells, the money gets split three ways—between whoever produced it, whoever’s shop or gallery it was sold from, and me.”
“That would make you an agent or an artist’s representative, then, wouldn’t it?”
“Again, sounds a lot fancier than I am. What I am is an old-fashioned horse trader. Except that I don’t deal in horses, I deal in brass sculptures of horses and kachina dolls and hand-sewn moccasins and tribal headdresses and authentic totem poles.”
“Hmm. I never considered that there would be a market for tribal headdresses or totem poles.”
“They aren’t my best sellers, but they’re fairly popular for decorating hunting and fishing lodges and hotels that want a rustic appeal.”
“And I guess you can’t call yourself a totem pole seller,” she teased him a little.
“That’s why we just say that I’m in sales,” he concluded, pleasing her with the fact that he’d grasped her gentle gibe.
“Is the goal of the new website to reduce the amount of travel you have to do?” she asked.
“I guess potentially it could, but the traveling doesn’t bother me. I don’t have anything tying me down, and I like getting around, seeing the country. The life of a traveling salesman suits me.”
Their painting met at the center of the wall behind the washer and drier then, and while Flint stepped back to survey their handiwork, Jessie used one final application of her roller to blend that meeting line seamlessly.
And with that, she sat back and looked around, too.
“That didn’t take long,” she admitted, thinking that the time had actually seemed to fly.
“Apparently we work well together,” Flint said just as Adam burst through the door with an excited, “Hi, Fwint!”
“Hi, Adam,” Flint greeted the three-year-old with a mirroring of Adam’s enthusiasm. “Where’ve you been today?”
“He’ppin my grampa wis our new junger gym. We digged howes for plantin’ the powes so it don’t fauw over.”
“They dug holes to cement the poles into the ground so the jungle gym doesn’t fall over,” Jessie translated. “Sometimes the L’s come out and sometimes they just don’t.” Then to her son, she said, “What are you doing here now?”
Before Adam answered that Jessie heard the voice of her oldest daughter, Ella, calling for Adam.
“We’re in the laundry room, El,” Jessie called back.
The seven-year-old bounded in, much the way Adam had except rather than joyfully having discovered Flint, the much more serious Ella scowled at her brother. “Gramma said you could only come with me if you held my hand, and you didn’t!”
“I had to find Fwint,” Adam answered as if his sister should have known that.
“Ella, you remember Flint, don’t you? Coop’s brother?” Jessie interjected, both to remind her daughter of her manners and to avoid a fight between her oldest and youngest.
“I remember,” was all Ella said to Flint because she was still more intent on wrangling with her brother. And to Adam she goaded, “Flint. His name is Flint.”
“Okay, okay,” Jessie said before war broke out. “What’s up, El?”
“Gramma says it’s almost dinnertime and she needs a pan she can’t find to cook. Can you come home and show her where it is?”
“I think I can probably do that. We’re finished here, aren’t we?” Jessie said, trying not to analyze why she was sorry that that was true, and why she was also sorry to be pulled away so suddenly.
“Looks finished to me,” Flint confirmed.
To Ella, Jessie said, “You can tell Gramma I’ll come home as soon as I wash out these paint things.”
“Come on, Adam, let’s go,” Ella said as if she’d just been given the upper hand.
“Ouw go wis Mama when she goes.”
“Adam …” Ella said in the warning tone she always took when she was in the mode of oldest-child-as-boss.
This time it was Flint who stepped in before a fight broke out. To Jessie, he said, “I’ll take care of the cleanup, go ahead and go home.”
Jessie laughed. “Be careful. I’m the mother of four—I don’t get offers for other people to cleanup too often and I never turn them down when I do.”
That made him smile back at her—a wide grin that showed perfect white teeth and drew ever-so-appealing lines around the corners of his mouth. And the very fact that his smile made her flush was a phenomenon Jessie didn’t want to delve into.
“Go,” he urged with a nudge of that sexy, slightly dimpled chin.
“If you’re sure …”
“I’m sure. It’s nothing.”
So he’s not only hot, but he’s also a nice guy, Jessie thought, remembering the previous day’s conversation with her sister.
But that, too, wasn’t something she should be caring about and she decided that before she started to actually like this guy, she’d better go home where she belonged.
“Okay, I’ll take you up on that, then,” she announced, scooting around on the drier so that she could get down.
