Fortune's Woman / A Fortune Wedding: Fortune's Woman

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.