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But that set the tarp into motion and it began to slide, taking her with it until Flint lunged forward to catch her.
And in a split second Jessie found herself with Flint Fortune’s handsome face scant inches from hers, his arms on either side of her, his hands flat against the tarp but so close to her rear end that she thought she could almost feel them.
And her own hands somehow clasped to his powerhouse shoulders to catch herself.
Wide-eyed, she stared into his dark eyes and wasn’t quite sure whether it was the near fall from the drier or Flint that had stolen her breath. But one way or another, for a moment she was frozen there, so close that they could have kissed had either of them moved an inch.
And why that went through her mind, she had no idea.
“Mama?” Ella said with some shock in her voice.
It took Jessie a moment to remember herself, to breathe, to veer away from Flint and pull her hands from shoulders she was enjoying the feel of much too much …
“Whoops,” she said feebly.
“Mama aw-most fawed off—tha’s funny,” Adam said with a giggle.
“Thanks for the catch,” Jessie muttered, leaning as far back from Flint as she could.
But still he stayed where he was, anchoring the tarp, looking into her eyes, while a much more intimate smile slowly spread agile lips. So intimate that it made something skitter across the surface of Jessie’s skin—a sensation she hadn’t had in longer than she could remember.
“No problem,” he said in a voice that had a deeper, almost sensual timbre.
Then he pushed off the drier and took hold of the tarp from behind her. “Okay, now slide off,” he advised.
Under the watchful eye of two of her children, Jessie did, wondering at the scowl that had come onto Ella’s pretty, freckled face as the little girl glared at Flint as if he’d done something wrong.
“Okay, we better get going before Gramma sends more troops,” Jessie said in a tone she hoped sounded normal. Inside, though, she was a jumble of excitement and confusion and something that seemed to remind her she was a woman—a feeling she hadn’t experienced in a very, very long time.
As she guided her kids out of the laundry room she couldn’t help glancing back just once because she thought she could feel Flint watching her.
He stood with his hips leaning against the front of the drier, his arms crossed over his wide chest. And he wasn’t merely watching her—there was something else in those eyes that almost seemed appreciative …
Why that again set off that tingling-across-the-surface-of-her-skin feeling, that reminder that she was a woman, she didn’t know.
She only knew that it needed to stop.
And it needed not to happen again.
She was a mother, first and foremost, and she couldn’t let herself be distracted from that. She already had her hands full.
And yet just the thought of having her hands full made her mind wander back to the feel of Flint’s rocksolid shoulders.
And whether she wanted to admit it or not, she’d liked the way they’d felt.
Chapter Three
Flint stood high atop his brother’s roof early Tuesday morning. He was supposed to be checking for loose shingles. Instead he was so intent on watching Jessie cross from her backyard into Cooper’s through the connecting gate that he was late in realizing that a car had pulled up in front of the house.
Only when Jessie had disappeared from sight was Flint’s attention drawn in the opposite direction, just as his other brother Ross was getting out from behind the wheel.
“Hey, down there! This is a surprise!” Flint called.
No one had said anything about Ross coming by today, or about his bringing their uncle William and William’s fiancée, Lily. But there they all were.
“I have some news,” Ross yelled back as he closed the driver’s side door.
Growing up, Ross, the oldest of Cindy’s children had looked out for his siblings and in that same vein, Flint saw him making sure that the elderly couple got safely out of his car as Flint climbed down the ladder and met them at the front porch.
William and Lily were supposed to be married in January. The match between William and his late-cousin Ryan’s widow had been kept quiet until they’d both felt the family could accept their relationship. The relationship that had come about despite the fact that William and Ryan had been close, despite the fact that Lily had adored her husband until his death six years before from a brain tumor. Two years ago, the also-widowed William and Lily had found their way to each other, and what had begun as a family connection turned into a friendship that had blossomed into love.
Their wedding had been set for January first—a New Year’s Day celebration. But William had never made it to the church. There had been speculation that he’d run off with another woman, that he’d been kidnapped, that any number of things had caused him to leave Lily at the altar voluntarily or involuntarily. His car had been discovered days later, having gone off a road near the neighboring town of Haggerty, almost completely concealed in a wooded ravine. William was nowhere around.
For months it hadn’t been known where he was, or whether he was dead or alive. Then, just a few weeks ago, he was located living on the streets in Haggerty, suffering from amnesia, not even aware of who he was.
Since being returned to Red Rock, to his family, to Lily—who had always believed William would return to her—he was getting better at recognizing the people who cared about him. And because he had a particular soft spot for Anthony—for no reason anyone could explain—Flint knew that whenever she got the chance, Lily liked to expose William to the baby in hope that something about Anthony was reaching William’s deeply buried recollections and helping to draw them to the surface.
“I don’t know what news you have, but it’s good to see you all,” Flint greeted the small group. “How are you feeling, Uncle William?”
“A little like I’m walking through a fog, but okay,” the older man answered, still sounding slightly befuddled.
“I thought it might be better if I brought Lily and Uncle William with me rather than tell what I have to tell twice,” Ross said then.
“Sure. Why don’t we go inside?” Flint suggested, ushering the threesome up the porch steps and hollering “We have company,” as he went in behind them all.
From upstairs came Coop, and from the kitchen at the rear of the house came Kelsey and the newly arrived Jessie.
And while Flint had no explanation for it, he only had eyes for Jessie, whom he said good morning to.
More greetings made the rounds and then Kelsey got everyone out to the picnic table in the backyard for coffee because no single section of the house could comfortably seat so many at once yet.
“I’m glad to see you back with us, Flint,” William said as they all settled. “I do remember that you were leaving after Anthony’s party for a business trip.”
“And I’m glad to see that you know who I am,” Flint teased his uncle.
With a nod in the direction of Jessie, William added, “And this beauty? She must be your wife?”
They were sitting beside each other—at Kelsey’s suggestion. But Flint was slightly discouraged by this lapse in his uncle’s recall.
“No, this is Jessie, Kelsey’s sister,” Flint explained as if it were no big deal that William had made the mistake. “I’m not married anymore.”
As if to get past William’s lapse, Lily jumped in then to ask where Anthony was.
“Coop just put him down for his morning nap,” Kelsey answered. “But you can look in on him later if you want.”
After a drink of his coffee, Ross took the lead. “I had a call from the police today,” he began.
As a private detective, Ross was the family’s closest link to law enforcement. He’d done all he could to try to find William when he was missing, as well as to look into the whereabouts of Lulu Carlton—Anthony’s birth mother—for Cooper.
After having it confirmed that Anthony was Coop’s son, Coop had done the math—he’d been involved with Lulu at the time Anthony would have been conceived. He hadn’t had any idea that she was pregnant when they’d broken up and he’d left her in Minnesota, but Ross had discovered that she’d come to Texas.
Ross had also discovered that there had been a car accident near where William’s car had gone off the road, on the same day William had disappeared, that a woman had been killed in that accident but that without identification, she was in the Haggerty morgue, listed as a Jane Doe.
The time lapse between when Jane Doe’s accident had been reported and when William’s car had been discovered in the ravine days later had raised questions about whether the two incidents were related. No one had yet to answer those questions. But the coincidence had made Ross suggest that Cooper take a look at Jane Doe.
Sure enough, Coop had identified her as Lulu Carlton and provided his son’s mother with a proper burial.
In the course of all that, Ross had had several dealings with state and local police, so it was no surprise that news coming through those same channels that involved the Fortune family would still go to Ross first.
“It seems,” he was saying, “that the man who was working at the church as the groundskeeper in January was arrested for stealing a car and robbing a convenience store in Dallas a couple of days ago. His name is Charlie something-or-other. He wasn’t alone, he had that Courtney woman with him—the one who brought Anthony to Max Allen—”
“Max Allen?” William asked, obviously lost.
Lily placed a reassuring hand over William’s where it rested on the picnic table. “Remember you met him—he’s Kirsten’s brother?”
“Oh, that’s right—that pretty girl my son Jeremy is going to marry. Max is her brother.”
“Right,” Ross confirmed. And apparently because William was drawing a blank, he explained what everyone else knew. “Courtney was Max Allen’s old girlfriend. She showed up on his door with Anthony, saying he was Max’s baby. Max didn’t believe her, and it was because he brought Anthony to the attention of the authorities that we figured out that Anthony belongs to Coop.”
“Ah,” William said.
Because the older man seemed to have grasped that, Ross continued. “Police in Dallas came down pretty hard on both the church’s former groundskeeper and this Courtney, looking for prior bad acts. Courtney broke down, gave enough information for the cops to use as leverage with the groundskeeper and—between the two of them—got the whole story. Apparently the groundskeeper found Anthony on the back doorstep of the church on what would have been the wedding day.”
“And all this time we’ve been thinking that Anthony must have been in the accident with Lulu? That someone took him from the scene?” Coop said.
Ross shrugged. “No one knew where else he might have come from.”
“But now it seems as if Lulu left him at the church?” Flint asked.
“We’re thinking that maybe she saw the announcement of Uncle William and Lily’s wedding somewhere, and thought that if she left him there that day, one of us would find him. That when we saw the medallion strung around him, we’d figure he belonged with us.”
“But none of us did find him,” Coop put in.
“So the groundskeeper took him,” Ross went on, “and pawned Anthony off on this Courtney woman. She actually got attached to the baby, which was why she wanted to make sure he got to someone she thought might do right by him when it occurred to her that she couldn’t keep him herself. That was when she went to Max Allen.”
“And if I’m remembering right,” Kelsey interjected, “First Courtney claimed that Anthony belonged to her and Max, then her story changed and she swore Anthony was her son with the groundskeeper.”
“Right. But like I said, Max Allen got suspicious,” Ross repeated. “And thanks to that and the medallion that these two less-than-upstanding citizens didn’t take from Anthony, we were able to do the DNA test that connected him with Coop.”
“We’re so lucky this worked out the way it did,” Coop said, choking up.
“It could have been so much worse,” Kelsey said.
“But he ended up with the two of you,” Flint reminded to soothe his brother and Kelsey’s fears before they got unduly out of control with what might have been.
“Anthony ended up with his family,” William confirmed victoriously. “That’s all that matters.”
“That and that we have you safely back, too,” Lily put in, squeezing William’s hand on the picnic table.
“Even if my memory is full of more holes than Swiss cheese,” William joked.
They all laughed at that before assuring the older man that everything would come back in time—what Flint knew was just wishful thinking at that point.
Then, to Kelsey, Lily said, “We shouldn’t keep you when you have so much work to do. Maybe we could just take that little peek at Anthony while he’s sleeping and we’ll get out of your way.”
“I know I could use a peek at him,” Coop said, still sounding unnerved by the thought of the complicated path his son had taken to get to him.
As everyone stood up from the picnic table, Kelsey turned to Flint and said, “Don’t get back on the roof. I have jobs for you to do with Jessie today.”
That brought a jab of Jessie’s elbow into Kelsey’s ribs that made Flint wonder if Jessie was unhappy with the prospect of working side by side with him.
But as Jessie began to gather empty coffee cups to take into the house, he hoped that that wasn’t the case.
And not just because the morning sunshine glistened off her hair like spun copper.
But because as home repairs went, doing them side by side with her took all the chore out of it for him.
“When I says g’night to my grampa I kisses his cheek. But Grampa says that when other mens says g’night they pro’bly shakes han’s.”
And with that explanation, Adam held out his tiny hand for Flint to shake.
Jessie watched Flint fight to keep from laughing, smiling instead as he accepted Adam’s outstretched hand and shook it. “Good night, Adam. Sleep tight.”
“Tha’s what my mama says,” Adam exclaimed before he ran off to join his brother, sisters and grandparents as they all went in the rear door of Jessie’s house.
“Your son cracks me up,” Flint said, releasing the laugh he’d been so obviously holding in.
Jessie smiled at Flint’s comment as she watched her youngest disappear inside.
The day had ended the way it had begun—at a picnic table. Only tonight it was the picnic table in Jessie’s backyard where she, her four kids, her parents and Kelsey, Coop, Anthony and Flint had all shared the grilled chicken that Jeannie Hunt had prepared for dinner.
It was nearly nine o’clock now, however, and much the way the rest of the day and evening had gone, Kelsey had orchestrated things so that she and Coop took Anthony home at the same time that Jack and Jeannie Hunt were dispatched to put Ella, Braden, Bethany and Adam to bed, leaving Jessie and Flint sitting directly across from each other at the picnic table. Alone.
“They’re all great kids,” Flint added. “And every one of them looks like you. Especially Ella—she’s a miniature version of you.”
“I can see their father in each of the kids in small ways,” Jessie answered Flint’s observation, trying to hide her embarrassment at her sister’s less-than-subtle manipulations to put them together. “She’s also taller than I was at her age, and lanky, the way Pete was. And when she frowns—”
“Which she seems to do a lot,” Flint remarked. “Especially when she sees me.”
“I’m sorry about that. I know she’s sort of treating you like the enemy. There was something about your catching me when I nearly fell off the drier yesterday …” Something that had also imprinted every tiny nuance on Jessie’s brain to relive over and over again. “Well, whatever it was, Ella didn’t like the look of it and you seem to be getting the full blame. I think she’ll get over it in a day or two, but for now—”
“I’m not the guy who just kept you from falling, I’m the guy who got too up close and personal with her mom.”
Up close and personal enough for Jessie to smell the clean, woodsy scent of his cologne. To see even more clearly the flecks of gold that illuminated his dark eyes. To have felt those steely shoulders in the grip of her own hands …
She swallowed hard, feeling as breathless as she had in the moment.
“Anyway, give her a day or two, and Ella will probably come around,” Jessie finally managed to say when she’d dragged herself out of her split-second reverie.
