Fortune's Woman / A Fortune Wedding: Fortune's Woman
Kristin Hardy
RaeAnne Thayne
Fortune’s Woman RaeAnne ThayneClearing his sister of a murder charge is Ross Fortune’s most important mission. Falling for Julie Osterman is a complication he doesn’t need. As an explosive secret threatens everyone’s future, will Julie be willing to risk everything for the chance to be at Ross’s side…forever?A Fortune Wedding Kristin Hardy Roberto Mendoza swore he would never return to Red Rock – or to Frannie Fortune. So why is he charging to her rescue? When their passion reignites, Roberto knows he’d do anything to heal the past and build a future with the woman he’s never truly stopped loving.
Available in April 2010 from Mills & Boon
Special Moments
Fortune’s Woman
by RaeAnne Thayne &
A Fortune Wedding
by Kristin Hardy
Reining in the Rancher
by Karen Templeton &
His Brother’s Secret
by Debra Salonen
Healing the MD’s Heart
by Nicole Foster &
Welcome Home, Daddy
by Carrie Weaver
The Bravo Bachelor
by Christine Rimmer
The Nanny Solution
by Teresa Hill
An Ideal Father
by Elaine Grant
Not Without Her Family
by Beth Andrews
FORTUNE’S WOMAN
“I’m not the kind of man you need, Julie. I wish I could be. You have no idea how much.”
“How did you become such an expert on what I need?”
“It’s my job to understand people. I have to be able to read people, to understand their motivations, their personality types.”
“And what’s my personality type?”
“You’re a nurturer. A natural healer. You take people who are hurting and broken and you try to fix them.”
“And you don’t want to be healed.”
Ross bristled. “I’m not broken.”
“Aren’t you?”
A FORTUNE WEDDING
“We were so young,” Frannie whispered. “What we were feeling wasn’t real. It would never have worked.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe this is all about another chance.”
“How can we have another chance? I’m not the same person I was. Neither are you.”
“You think so?” Roberto murmured. “Let’s find
out.”
And he leaned in to press his mouth to hers.
Nearly two decades had passed and she’d forgotten a million and one things in that time. But she remembered his kisses, oh, she remembered his kisses.
Fortune’s Woman
By
RaeAnne Thayne
A Fortune Wedding
By
Kristin Hardy
MILLS & BOON®
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Fortune’s Woman
By
RaeAnne Thayne
RaeAnne Thayne finds inspiration in the beautiful northern Utah mountains, where she lives with her husband and three children. Her books have won numerous honours, including two RITA
Award nominations from Romance Writers of America and a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times BOOKreviews magazine. RaeAnne loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website at www. raeannethayne.com.
Chapter One
What was the punk doing?
Ross Fortune stood beside a canvas awning–covered booth at the art fair of the Red Rock Spring Fling, keeping a careful eye on the rough-looking kid with the eyebrow bolt and the lip ring.
The kid seemed out of place in the booth full of framed Wild West art—photographs of steely-eyed cowboys lined up on a weathered fence, tow-headed toddlers wobbling in giant Tony Lamas, a trio of horses grazing against a stormy sky.
Yeah, he might be jumping to conclusions, but it didn’t seem like the sort of artwork that would interest somebody who looked more wannabe rock star than cowboy, with his inky black hair, matching black jeans and T-shirt, and pale skin. But as Ross watched, the kid—who looked on the small side of maybe fourteen or fifteen—thumbed through the selection of unframed prints like they were the most fascinating things in the world.
Ross wouldn’t have paid him any attention, except that for the past ten minutes he couldn’t help noticing the kid as he moseyed from booth to booth in the gathering twilight, his eyes constantly shifting around. The punk seemed abnormally aware of where the artist-vendor of each booth stood at all times, tracking their movements under dark eyelashes.
Until the western photographs, he hadn’t seemed much interested in whatever wares the artists were selling. Instead, he had all the tell-tale signs of somebody casing the place, looking for something easy to lift.
Okay, Ross was rushing to judgment. But something about the way the kid’s gaze never stopped moving set all his alarm bells ringing. Even after the crowds started to abate as everybody headed toward the dance several hundred yards away, the kid continued ambling through the displays, as if he were searching for the perfect mark.
And suddenly he must have found it.
As Ross watched, the kid’s gaze sharpened on a pink flowered bag somebody had carelessly left on a folding chair.
He moved to take a step forward, his own attention homing in on the boy, but just at that moment somebody jostled him.
“Sorry,” muttered a dark-haired man in a Stetson who looked vaguely familiar. “I was looking for someone and wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“No problem,” Ross answered. But when he looked back, the kid was gone—and so was the slouchy flowered bag.
Adrenaline pumped through him. Finally! Chasing a shoplifter was just what he needed right now.
He had been bored to tears all day and would have left hours ago and headed back to San Antonio if he hadn’t been volunteered by his family to help out on security detail for the Spring Fling, which was Red Rock’s biggest party of the year.
At least now, maybe he might be able to have a little something to relieve the tedium of the day so he couldn’t consider it a complete waste.
He stepped out of the booth and scanned the crowd. He saw his cousin J.R. helping Isabella Mendoza begin to pack away the wares at her textiles booth down the row a ways and he saw the Latino man in the Stetson who had bumped into him standing at a corner of a nearby watercolor booth.
He also spied his despised brother-in-law, Lloyd Fredericks, skulking through the crowd, headed toward a section behind the tents and awnings, away from the public thoroughfare.
No doubt he was up to no good. If Ross wasn’t on the hunt for a purse snatcher, he would have taken off after Lloyd, just for the small-minded pleasure of harassing the bastard a little.
He finally spotted the kid near a booth displaying colorful, froufrou dried-flower arrangements. He moved quietly into position behind him, his gaze unwavering.
This had always been his favorite moment when he had been a detective in San Antonio, before he left the job to become a private investigator. He loved that hot surge of energy before he took down a perp, that little thrill that he was about to tip the scales of justice firmly on the side of the victim.
He didn’t speak until he was directly behind the boy. “Hey kid,” he growled. “Nice purse.”
The boy jumped like Ross had shoved a shiv between his ribs. He whirled around and shot him a defiant look out of dark eyes.
“I didn’t do nothing. I was just grabbin’ this for my friend.”
“I’m sure. Come on. Hand it over.”
The boy’s grip tightened on the bag. “No way. She lost it so I told her I’d help her look for it and that’s just what I’m doin’.”
“I don’t think so. Come on, give.”
“You a cop?”
“Used to be.” Until the politics and the inequities had become more than he could stomach. He didn’t regret leaving the force. He enjoyed being a private investigator, picking his own cases and his own hours. The power of the badge sometimes had its privileges, though, he had to admit. Right now, he would have loved to be able to shove one into this little punk’s face.
“If you ain’t a cop, then I got nothin’ to say to you. Back off.”
The kid started to walk away but Ross grabbed his shoulder. “Afraid I’m not going anywhere. Hand over the bag.”
The kid uttered a colorful curse and tried to break free. “You got it wrong, man. Let me go.”
“Sure. No problem. That way you can just run through the crowd and lift a few more purses on your way through.”
“I told you, I didn’t steal nothin’. My friend couldn’t remember where she left it. I told her I’d help her look for it so she could buy some more stuff.”
“Sure kid. Whatever you say.”
“I ain’t lyin’!”
The boy wrestled to get free, and though he was small and slim, he was wiry and much more agile than Ross had given him credit for. To his chagrin, the teenager managed to break the grip on his arm and before Ross could scramble to grab him again, he had darted through the crowd.
Ross repeated the curse the kid had uttered earlier and headed after him. The punk might be fast but Ross had two major advantages—age and experience. He had chased enough desperate criminals through the grime and filth of San Antonio’s worst neighborhoods to have no problem keeping up with one teenage boy carrying a bag that stood out like a flowery neon-pink beacon.
He caught up with him just before the boy would have slipped into the shadows on the edges of the art fair.
“Now you’ve pissed me off,” Ross growled as he grabbed the kid again, this time in the unbreakable hold he should have used all along.
If he thought the boy’s language was colorful before, that was nothing to the string of curses that erupted now.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ross said with a tight grin. “I’ve heard it all before. I was a cop, remember?”
He knew he probably shouldn’t be enjoying this so much. He was out of breath and working up a sweat, trying to keep the boy in place with one arm while he reached into his pocket with the other hand for the flex-cuffs he always carried. He had just fished them out and was starting to shackle the first wrist when a woman’s raised voice distracted him.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Let go of him right this minute!”
He shifted his gaze from the boy to a woman with light brown hair approaching them—her eyes were wide and he briefly registered a particularly delectable mouth set in sharp, indignant lines.
He thought she looked vaguely familiar but that was nothing unusual in a small town like Red Rock, where everybody looked familiar. Though he didn’t spend much time here and much preferred his life in San Antonio, the Fortune side of his family was among the town founders and leaders. Their ranch, the Double Crown, was a huge cattle spread not far from town.
The Spring Fling had become a large community event, and the entire proceeds from the art festival and dance went to benefit the Fortune Foundation, the organization created in memory of his mother’s cousin Ryan, that helped disadvantaged young people.
Ross was a Fortune, and even though he was from the black-sheep side, he couldn’t seem to escape certain familial obligations such as weddings and funerals.
Or Spring Flings.
He might not know the woman’s name, but he knew her type. He could tell just by looking at her that she was the kind of busybody, do-gooder sort who couldn’t resist sticking her lovely nose into things that were none of her business.
“Sorry. I can’t let him go. I just caught the kid stealing a purse.”
If anything, her pretty features tightened further. “That’s ridiculous. He wasn’t stealing anything! He was doing me a favor.”
Despite her impassioned words, he wasn’t releasing the boy, not for a moment. “I’m sure the Red Rock police over at the security trailer can sort it all out. That’s where we’re heading. You’re welcome to come along.”
He would be more than happy to let her be somebody else’s problem.
“I’m telling you, he didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then why did he run from me?”
The slippery kid wriggled more in his hold. “Because you wouldn’t listen to me, man. I tried to tell you.”
“This is my purse!” the woman exclaimed. “I couldn’t remember where I left it so I asked Marcus to help me find it so I could purchase some earrings from a folk artist on the next row over.”
Ross studied the pair of them, the boy so wild and belligerent and the soft, blue-eyed woman who looked fragile and feminine in comparison. “Why should I believe you? Maybe you’re in on the heist with him. Makes a perfect cover, nicelooking woman working together with a rough kid like him.”
She narrowed her gaze, apparently unimpressed with the theory. “I’ll tell you why you should believe me. Because my wallet, which is inside the bag, has my driver’s license and credit cards in it. If you would stop being so cynical and suspicious for five seconds, I can show them to you.”
Okay, he should have thought of that. Maybe two years away from the job had softened him more than he wanted to admit. Still, he wasn’t about to let down his guard long enough for her to prove him any more of a fool.
He tossed the purse at her. “Fine. Show me.”
Her look would have scorched through metal. She scooped up the purse and pawed through it, then pulled out a brocade wallet, which she unsnapped with sharp, jerky movements and thrust at him.
Sure enough, there was a Texas driver’s license with a pretty decent picture of her—a few years younger and with slightly longer hair, but it was definitely her.
Julie Osterman, the name read under her picture. He gazed at it for a full ten seconds before the name registered. He had seen it on an office door at the Foundation, next to his cousin Susan’s. And he must have seen her there, as well, which explained why she looked slightly familiar.
“You work for the Fortune Foundation, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’m a counselor,” she tilted her head and looked more closely at him. “And you’re Ross Fortune, aren’t you?”
He should have recognized her. Any good cop—and private investigator—ought to be more tuned in to that sort of thing than the average citizen and be able to remember names and faces.
“I don’t give a crap who you are,” the wriggling teenager in his grip spat out. “Let go of me, man.”
He was still holding onto the punk, he realized. Ross eased his grip a little but was reluctant to release him completely.
“Mr. Fortune, you can let go anytime now,” Julie Osterman said. “It all happened exactly as he said. He was helping me find my purse, not stealing anything. Thank you so much for your help, Marcus! I’m so relieved you found it. You can go now.”
Ross pulled his hand away, surrendering to the inevitable, and Marcus straightened his ratty T-shirt like it was two hundred dollars’ worth of cashmere.
“Dude’s a psycho,” he said to no one in particular but with a fierce glare for Ross. “I tried to tell you, man. You should have listened. Stupid cop-pig.”
“Marcus,” Julie said. Though the word was calm enough, even Ross recognized the steel behind it.
Marcus didn’t apologize, but he didn’t offer more insults, either. “I got to fly. See you, Ms. O.”
“Bye, Marcus.”
He ambled away, exuding affronted attitude with every step.
When he was out of earshot, Julie Osterman turned back to him, her mouth set in those tight lines again. He was so busy wondering if she ever unbent enough to genuinely smile that he nearly missed her words.
“I hope you haven’t just undone in five minutes here what has taken me weeks to build with Marcus.”
It took him a few more seconds longer than it should have to realize she was wasn’t just annoyed, she was fuming.
“What did I do?” he asked in genuine bewilderment.
“Marcus is one of my clients at the Foundation,” she said. “He comes from, well, not an easy situation. The adults in his life have consistently betrayed him. He’s never had anyone to count on. I’ve been trying to help him learn to trust me, to count on me, by demonstrating that I trust him in return.”
“By throwing your purse out there as bait?”
“Marcus has a history of petty theft.”
“Just the kind of kid I would send after my purse, then.”
She fisted her hands on her hips and the movement made all her curves deliciously visible beneath her gauzy white shirt. “I wanted him to understand that when I look at him, I see beyond the mistakes he’s made in the past to the bright future we’re both trying to create for him.”
It sounded like a bunch of hooey to him but he decided it might be wise to keep that particular opinion to himself right now, considering she looked like she wanted to skin him, inch by painful inch.
“Instead,” she went on in that irritated voice, “you have probably just reinforced to a wounded child that all adults are suspicious and cynical, quick to judge and painfully slow to admit when they’re wrong.”
“Hey, wait a second here. I had no way of knowing you were trying for some mumbo-jumbo psychobabble experiment. All I saw was a punk lifting a purse. I couldn’t just stand there and let him take it.”
“Admit it,” she snapped. “You jumped to conclusions because he looks a little rough around the edges.”
Her hair was light brown, shot through with blond highlights that gleamed in the last few minutes of twilight. With those brilliant blue eyes, high cheekbones and eminently kissable mouth, she was just about the prettiest woman he had seen in a long, long time. The kind of woman a man never got tired of looking at.
Too bad such a nice package had to be covering up one of those save-the-world types who always set his teeth on edge.
“I was a cop for twelve years, ma’am,” he retorted. “When I see a kid taking a purse that obviously doesn’t belong to him, yeah, I tend to jump to conclusions. That doesn’t mean they’re usually wrong conclusions.”
“But sometimes they are,” she doggedly insisted.
“In this case, I made a mistake. See, I’m man enough to admit it. I made a mistake,” he repeated. “It happens to the best of us, even ex-cops. But I’m willing to bet, if you asked anybody else in the whole damn art fair, they would have reached the same conclusion.”
“You don’t know that.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re right. I completely overreacted. The next time I see somebody stealing your purse, I’ll be sure to just watch him walk on by.”
The angry set of her features eased a little and after a moment, she sighed. “I hope I can convince Marcus you were just being an ex-cop.”
Despite his own annoyance, he could see she genuinely cared about the boy. He supposed he could see things from her point of view. He had a particular soft spot for anybody who tried to help kids in need, even if they did tend to become zealots about it.
“I can try talking to the kid if that would help,” he finally offered, though he wasn’t quite sure what compelled him to make the suggestion. Maybe something to do with how her eyes softened when she talked about the punk.
“I appreciate that, but I don’t think—”
A woman’s frantic scream suddenly ripped through the evening, cutting off whatever Julie Osterman had intended to say.
Julie’s heart jumped in her chest as another long scream echoed through the fair. She gasped and instinctively turned toward the source of the sound, somewhere out of their view, away from the public areas and the four long rows of vendor tents.
Before she could even draw a breath to exclaim over the noise, Ross Fortune was racing in the direction of the sound.
He was all cop now, she couldn’t help thinking.
Hard and alert and dangerous.
She was too startled to do more than watch him rush toward the sound for a few seconds. It always managed to astound her when police officers and firefighters raced toward potentially hazardous situations while people like her stood frozen.
She knew a little about Ross Fortune from her friend Susan, his cousin. He had been a police officer in San Antonio but had left the force a few years ago to open his own private investigation company.
He was a trained detective, she reminded herself, and she would probably do wise to just let him, well, detect.
But as another scream ripped through the night, past the happy laughter of the carnival rides and the throbbing bass coming from the dance, Julie knew she had to follow him, whether she was comfortable with it or not.
Someone obviously needed help and she couldn’t just stand idly by and do nothing.
Ross had a head start on her but she managed to nearly catch up as he darted around the corner of a display of pottery she had admired earlier in the evening.
Probably only ten seconds had elapsed from the instant they heard the first scream, but time seemed to stretch and elongate like the pulled taffy being sold on the midway alongside kettle corn, snow cones and cotton candy.
She ran after Ross and stumbled onto a strange, surreal scene. It was darker back here, away from the lights and noise of the Spring Fling crowd. But Julie could still tell instantly that the woman with the high-pitched scream was someone she recognized from seeing her around town, a blowsy blonde who usually favored miniscule halter tops and five-inch high heels.
She was staring at something a dozen yards away, illuminated by a lone vapor light, high on a power pole. A figure was lying motionless on the ground, faceup, and even from here, Julie could see a dark pool of what she assumed was blood around his head.
A third person stood over the body. It took Julie only a moment to recognize Frannie Fortune Fredericks, a frequent volunteer at the center.
And Ross’s sister, she remembered with stunned dismay that she saw reflected in his features.
Frannie was staring at her hands. In the pale moonlight, they shone much darker than the rest of her skin.
“It’s her. She killed him!” the other woman cried out stridently. “Can’t you see? The bitch killed my Lloyd!”
Her Lloyd? As in Lloyd Fredericks, Frannie’s husband? Julie looked closer at the figure on the ground. For the first time, she registered his sandy-blond hair and those handsome, slightly smarmy features, and realized she was indeed staring into the fixed, unblinking stare of Lloyd Fredericks.
This couldn’t be happening…
Ross quickly crossed to Lloyd’s body and knelt to search for a pulse. Julie knew even before he rose to his feet a moment later that he wouldn’t have been able to find one. That sightless gaze said it all.
That was definitely Frannie’s husband. And he was definitely dead.
Ross gripped his sister’s arm and Julie noticed that he was careful not to touch her blood-covered hands. How did he possibly have the sense to avoid contaminating evidence under such shocking circumstances? she wondered.
“Frannie? What’s going on? What happened?”
His sister’s delicate features looked pale, almost bloodless, and she lifted stark eyes to him. “I don’t…It’s Lloyd, Ross.”
“I can see it’s Lloyd, honey. What happened to him?”
The screaming woman wobbled closer on her high heels. “She killed him. Look at her! She’s got blood all over her. Oh, Lloyd, baby.”
She began to wail as if her heart were being ripped out of her cosmetically enhanced chest. Julie would have liked to be a little sympathetic, but she didn’t fail to notice the other woman only began the heartrending sobs when a crowd started to gather.
Ross turned to her. “Julie, do you have a phone? Can you call 911?”
“Of course,” she answered. While she pulled her phone out of her pocket and started hitting buttons, she heard Ross take charge of the scene, ordering everybody to step back a couple dozen feet. In mere moments, it seemed the place was crawling with people.
The 911 operator had just answered when Julie saw a pair of police officers arrive. They must have been drawn to the commotion from other areas of the Spring Fling.
“This is Julie Osterman,” she said to the 911 dispatcher. “I was going to report a…an incident at the Spring Fling but you all are already here.”
“What sort of incident?” the dispatcher asked.
Julie was hesitant to use the word murder, but how could it be anything else? “I guess a suspicious death. But as I said, your officers are already here.”
“Tell me what you know anyway.”
The woman took what little information Julie could provide to relay to the officers, who were pushing the crowd even farther back.
When she hung up the phone with the dispatcher, she stood for a moment, not sure what to do, where to go. She disliked this sort of crowd scene, the almost avaricious hunger for information that seemed to seize people when something dramatic and shocking occurred nearby.
She wanted to slip away but it didn’t feel quite right, especially when she had been one of the first ones on the scene. She supposed technically she was a witness, though she hadn’t seen anything and knew nothing about what had happened.
Julie scanned the crowd, though she didn’t know what she was seeking. A familiar face, perhaps, someone who could help her make sense of this shocking development.
In the distance, she saw someone in a black Stetson just on the other side of the edge of light emanating from the art fair. He made no move to come closer to investigate the commotion, which she found curious. But when she looked again, he was gone.
“Oh, Lloyd! My poor Lloyd.”
The woman who had alerted them with her screams was nearly hysterical by now, standing just a few feet away from her and gathering more stares from the crowd. Julie watched her for a moment, then sighed and moved toward her.
Though she wanted to slap the woman silly for her hysterics—whether they were feigned or not—she supposed that wasn’t a very compassionate attitude. She could at least try to calm her down a little. It was the decent thing to do.
She reached out and took the other woman’s hand in hers. “Can I get you something? A drink of water, maybe?”
“Nooooo,” she sobbed. “I just want my Lloyd.”
Lloyd wasn’t going to belong to anyone again—not his pale, stunned-looking wife and not this voluptuous woman who grieved so vociferously for him.
“I’m Julie,” she said after a moment. “What’s your name?”
“Crystal. Crystal Rivers. Well, that’s not my real name.”
“Oh. It’s not?” she asked, with a perfectly straight face.
“It’s my stage name. I’m a dancer. My real name is Christina. Christina Crosby.”
“How about if I call you Chris?”
“Christy. That’s what people call me.”
Julie offered a smile, grateful that their conversation seemed to soothe the woman a bit—or at least distract her from the hysterics. “Okay, Christy. What happened? Can you tell me? All I know is that we heard you scream and came running and found him dead.”
“I’ll tell you what happened. She killed him. Frannie Fredericks killed my Lloyd.”
Chapter Two
Julie frowned as the woman’s bitter words seemed to ring through the night air.
She still couldn’t quite believe it. She had always liked Frannie. The woman seemed to genuinely care about her volunteer work at the Foundation and she had always been friendly to Julie.
She supposed no one could really see inside the heart of someone else or know how they would respond when provoked, but Frannie had always seemed far too quiet and unassuming for Julie to accept that she had murdered her husband.
“How can you be so certain? Did you see her do it?”
“No. He was already dead when I came looking for him.” She sniffled loudly and pulled a bedraggled tissue from her ample cleavage. “We were supposed to meet here and take off to my place after his obligations at the stupid Spring Fling. He didn’t even want to come, but Lloyd had business tonight he had to take care of.”
Business at the Spring Fling? Who on earth tried to conduct business at a community celebration?
“What kind?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Something important. Someone he had to talk to, he said. Maybe Frannie. Maybe he told her he was going to divorce her for me. I don’t know. I just know she killed him. Now watch—her brother Ross and the rest of the Fortunes are going to cover it all up. They think they own this whole damn town.”
Julie shifted, uncomfortable with the other woman’s antagonism. She liked and respected all the Fortunes. Susan Fortune Eldridge was one of her closest friends and she adored Lily Fortune, who was the driving force behind the Fortune Foundation that had been founded in memory of her late husband.
“Ma’am? Are you the one who found the body?”
Julie turned and found Billy Addison, a Red Rock police officer with whom she had a slight acquaintance through the Foundation.
“I did,” Crystal waved her scarlet red nails like she was rodeo royalty riding around the arena. “My poor Lloyd. Have you arrested Frannie Fredericks yet?”
“Um, not yet. Let’s not jump the gun here, miss. We’re going to be taking statements for some time now. I’m going to need to ask you a few questions.”
“Anything. I’ll tell you whatever you need to know. But I don’t know why you need to ask anybody anything. It’s plain as my nose job that Frannie did it. Look at her—she’s got blood all over her.”
She let out a dramatic sob, more for effect than out of any real emotion, Julie thought, with unaccustomed cynicism.
“Lloyd was going to leave her skinny butt,” Crystal said. “She knew it and that must be why she killed him. That’s what I was just saying.”
“Do you know that for a fact, ma’am?” the officer asked her.
“I know they fought earlier today. On the phone. I was with Lloyd and I heard the terrible things she said to him. She called him a two-faced liar and a cheat and said as how she wasn’t going to put up with it anymore.”
“How did you hear her side of the conversation?” the officer asked. “Was she on speaker phone?”
Crystal gaped at him. “Um, maybe. I don’t remember. Or maybe she was just talking real loud.”
Or maybe the conversation never took place, Julie thought. She didn’t know what to believe—but she did know she shouldn’t be hearing any of this. Any affair between Lloyd Fredericks and Crystal Rivers was not something she wanted to know any more about.
She stepped away to leave the police officer to the interview. Still, Crystal wasn’t exactly being unobtrusive. Her words carried to Julie as she walked through the crowd.
“I just know Frannie made my poor Lloyd’s life a living hell. And now her brother’s going to cover it up. Watch and see if the Fortunes don’t all circle the wagons around her. You just watch and see.”
The Fortunes were a powerful family in Red Rock. But most of the ones she had met through the Foundation were also decent, compassionate people who cared about the community and making it a better place.
The family also had its enemies, though—people who resented their wealth and power—and Julie had a feeling Crystal wouldn’t be the only one who would whisper similar accusations about the Fortunes.
What a terrible way for the Spring Fling to end, she thought as she made her way through the crowd. The event should be a celebration, a chance for everyone in town to gather and help raise money for a worthy cause. Instead, one life had been snuffed out and several others would be changed forever, especially those in Lloyd’s family.
Julie knew the Frederickses had a teenage son. Josh, she thought was his name. If she wasn’t mistaken, he was friendly with Ricky Farraday Jamison, her boss Linda’s son, even though Ricky was a few years younger than Josh.
Had anyone told him yet? she wondered. How terrible for him if he were somehow drawn to the scene by the commotion and the crowd and happened to see his father’s body lying there. It was a definite possibility, even though the police were widening the perimeter of the scene, pushing the crowd still farther back.
Perhaps proactive measures were called for. Someone should find the boy first before he could witness such a terrible sight.
Ross Fortune seemed the logical person to find his nephew. She sighed. She really didn’t want to talk to him. Their altercation seemed a lifetime ago, but she would still prefer not to have anything more to do with the man.
If she had her preference, she would escape this situation completely and go as far away as possible. It reminded her far too much of another tragic scene, of police lights flashing and yellow crime tape flipping in the wind and the hard, invasive stares of the rapacious crowd.
She had a sudden memory of that terrible day seven years earlier, driving home from work, completely oblivious to the scene she would find at her tidy little house, and the subsequent crime tape and the solemn-eyed police officers and the sudden terrible knowledge that her world had just changed forever.
She didn’t think about that day often anymore, but this situation was entirely too familiar. Then again it would have been unusual if the similarities didn’t shake loose those memories she tried to keep so carefully contained.
She didn’t want Frannie’s son to go through the same thing. He needed to be warned, whether she wanted to talk to his uncle again or not. She started through the crowd, keeping an eye out for the tall, gorgeous private investigator.
In the end, he found her.
“Julie! Ms. Osterman!”
She followed the sound of her name and discovered Ross in a nearby vendor booth with his sister and the Red Rock chief of police, Jimmy Caldwell.
Frannie Fortune was slumped in a chair while her brother hovered protectively over her. She looked exactly as Julie imagined she had looked that day seven years ago. Frannie’s lovely, delicate features were stark and pale and her eyes looked dazed. Numb.
She wanted to hug her, to promise her that sometime in the future this terrible day would be just an awful memory.
“I told you, Jim,” Ross said. “I was talking to Ms. Osterman just a row over when we heard a scream. We were the first ones on the scene, weren’t we? Besides the other woman.”
Julie nodded.
“You’re the one who called 911, right?” the police chief asked her.
“Yes. But your officers were on the scene before I could even give the dispatcher any information. Probably only a moment or two after we arrived,” she said.
The police chief wrote something in a notebook. “Can you confirm the scene as you saw it? Lloyd was on the ground and Frannie was standing over him.”
“Yes.” She pointed. “And the other woman—Crystal—was standing over there screaming.”
“You didn’t see anyone else? Just Frannie and Crystal?”
Julie nodded. “That’s right. Just them.”
“Frannie? You want to tell me what happened before Ross and Ms. Osterman showed up?”
She lifted her shell-shocked gaze from her blood-stained pants to the police chief. “I don’t know. I was looking for…I just…I found him that way. He was just lying there.”
“Tell him, Frannie,” Ross insisted. “Go ahead and tell Jim you had nothing to do with Lloyd’s death.”
“I…I didn’t.”
Jimmy scratched the nape of his neck. “That’s not a very convincing claim of innocence, Frannie. Especially when you’re the one standing here over your dead husband’s body with blood on your hands.”
Ross glared at him. “Frannie is not capable of murder. You have to know that. You’re crazy if you think she could have done this.”
The police chief raised a dark eyebrow that contrasted with his salt-and-pepper hair. “This might not be the best time for you to be calling names, Fortune.”
“What else would you call it? My sister did not kill her husband, though she should have done it years ago.”
“Appears to be no love lost between the two of you, was there?”
“I hated his miserable, two-timing guts.”
“Maybe you need to be the one coming down to the station for questions instead of Frannie here.”
“I’ll go any place you want me to. But I didn’t kill him any more than my sister did. I’ve got an alibi, remember? Ms. Osterman here.”
“He’s right. He was with me,” she said.
“Lucky for you. Unfortunately, by the sound of it, Frannie doesn’t have that kind of alibi. I’m going to have to ask you to come with me to the station to answer some questions, Frannie.”
“Come on, Jimmy. You know she couldn’t have done this.”
“You want to know what I know? The evidence in front of me. That’s it. That’s what I have to go by, no matter what. You were a cop. You know that. And I’m also quite sure this is going to be a powder keg of a case. I can’t afford to let people say I allowed the Fortunes to push me around. I have to follow every procedure to the letter, which means I’m going to have to take her in for questioning. I have no choice here.”
Ross glowered at the man but before he could say anything, another officer approached them. He was vibrating with energy. Julie imagined in a quiet town like Red Rock, this sort of situation was the most excitement the small police force ever saw.
“We found what might be the murder weapon, sir,” the fresh-faced officer said. “I knew you would want to know right away.”
“Thanks, Paul,” the chief tried to cut him off before he said more, but the officer didn’t take the hint.
“It was shoved under a display table in one of the tents and it’s got what appears to be blood on it. I’ll have CSU process it the minute they show up. Take a look. What do you think, sir?”
All of them followed the man’s pointing finger and Julie could see a large, solid-looking ceramic vase. When she turned back, she saw that Frannie Fredericks had turned even more pale, if that was possible.
“What’s the matter?” Ross asked her.
She shook her head and looked back at her blood-stained slacks.
“Do you know anything about that vase?” Jimmy Caldwell asked her, his gray eyes intent on her features.
When Ross’s sister clamped her lips together, the police chief leaned in closer. “You have to tell me, Frannie.”
She suddenly looked trapped, her gaze flitting between Jimmy Caldwell and her brother.
“Fran?” Ross asked.
“It’s mine. I bought it from Reynaldo Velasquez,” she finally whispered. “I wanted to put it in the upstairs hallway.”
Ross muttered an expletive. “Don’t say anything else, Frannie. Not until I get you an attorney. Just keep your mouth shut, okay?”
She blinked at her brother. “Why do I need an attorney? I didn’t do anything wrong. I just bought a vase.”
“Just don’t say anything.”
“In that case,” the police chief said, “I guess we’ll have to continue this conversation at the police station.”
“You don’t have nearly enough to arrest her. You know you don’t.”
“Not yet.” The police chief’s voice was grim.
“Josh. You have to find Josh,” Frannie said suddenly. She clutched her brother’s arm. “Find him, Ross. Get him away from here.”
He looked taken aback by her urgency. “I’ll look for him.”
“Thank you, Ross. You’ve always taken care of everything.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then clamped it shut again.
“Let’s go, Frannie,” the police chief’s voice wasn’t unkind. “I’m sure it will be a relief to you to get away from this crowd.”
“Yes,” she murmured.
The police chief slipped a huge navy windbreaker over her blood-stained clothing, then wrapped his arm around her shoulders. By all appearances, it looked as if he were consoling the grieving widow but Julie saw the implacable set to his muscles, as if he expected the slight woman to make a break for it any moment.
Ross watched after them, his jaw tight. “This is a fricking nightmare,” he growled. “Unbelievable.”
“Do you need help finding your nephew? I was coming to find you and suggest you look for him. It would be terrible for him to stumble onto this scene without knowing the…the victim was his father.”
He muttered an expletive. “You’re right. I should have thought of that before. I should have gone to look for him right away.”
“I’ll help you,” she said. “We can split up. You take the midway and I’ll head to the dance.”
He blinked at the offer. “Why would you want to do that? You’ve already been dragged far enough into this.”
He wouldn’t get any arguments from her on that score. She would much rather be home in her quiet, solitary house than wandering through a crowd looking for a boy whose world was about to change forever.
She shrugged. “You need help.”
He eyes widened with astonishment, and she wondered why he found a simple offer of assistance so very shocking.
“Thanks, then,” he mumbled.
“No problem. Do you have a picture of Josh?”
“A picture?”
“I can’t find him if I don’t know what he looks like,” she pointed out gently.
“Oh right. Of course.”
He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, and she was more charmed than she had any right to be when he opened an accordion fold in the wallet and slid out a photograph of a smiling young man with dark-blond hair, brown eyes and handsome features.
“I’m almost certain I’ve seen him around at the Foundation but the picture will help immensely,” she said. “I’ll be careful with it.”
“I have more,” Ross answered.
“We should exchange cell phone numbers so we can contact each other if either of us finds him.”
“Good idea,” he said. He rattled off a number, which she quickly entered into her phone, then she gave him hers in return.
“Now that you mention cell phones, it occurs to me that I should have thought of that first,” Ross said. “Let me try to reach Josh on his phone. Maybe I can track him down and meet him somewhere away from here.”
She waited while he dialed, impatient at even a few more moments of delay. The longer they waited, the more likely Josh would accidentally stumble onto his father’s body and the murder scene.
After a moment, Ross made a face and left a message on the boy’s voice mail for him to call him as soon as possible.
“He’s not answering. I guess we’re back to the original plan. I’ll cover the midway and you see if you can find him at the dance.”
“Deal. I’ll call you if I find him.”
“Right back at you. And Ms. Osterman? Thank you.”
She flashed him a quick smile, though even that seemed inappropriate under the circumstances. “Julie, please.”
He nodded and they each took off in separate directions. She quickly made her way to the dance, though she was forced to virtually ignore several acquaintances on her way, greeting them with only a wave instead of her usual conversation. She would have to explain later and hope they understood.
She expected Ross’s call at any moment but to her dismay, her phone still hadn’t rung by the time she reached the dance.
Country swing music throbbed from the speakers and the plank-covered dance floor was full. Finding Josh in this throng would be a challenge, especially when she knew him only from a photograph.
She scanned the crowd, looking for familiar faces. Finally, she found two girls she had worked with at the Foundation standing with a larger group.
“Hey, Ms. O.” They greeted her with a warmth she found gratifying.
“Hey, Katie. Hi, Jo. I could use your help. I’m trying to find a boy.”
“Aren’t we all?” Jo said with a roll of eyes heavily framed in mascara.
Julie smiled. “A particular boy, actually. It’s kind of serious. Do either of you know Josh Fredericks?”
“Sure,” Katie answered promptly. “He’s in my algebra class. He’s kind of cute, even if he is super smart.”
“Have you seen him lately? Tonight?”
“Yeah. It’s weird. Usually he doesn’t go two inches away from his girlfriend but I saw him by himself earlier, over by the refreshments. I think that was a while ago. Maybe an hour. He might have ditched the place by now.”
“Thanks,” she answered and headed in the direction they pointed.
She found Josh right where Katie had indicated, standing near the refreshment table as if he were waiting for someone. She recognized him instantly from the picture Ross had provided. He was wearing a western-cut shirt and a black Stetson, just like half the other men here, and she could see his dark-blond hair and brown eyes like his uncle’s.
She didn’t know whether to feel relief or dismay at finding him. She did not want to have to explain to him why she was searching for him. She quickly texted Ross that she had located his nephew at the dance and waited close by, intending only to keep an eye on him until Ross arrived to handle things.
He looked upset, she thought after a moment of observing him. His color was high and he kept looking toward the door as if waiting for someone to arrive.
Did he already know about his father? No, she couldn’t imagine it. Why would he linger here at the dance if he knew his father had just been killed?
After two or three minutes, Josh suddenly looked at his watch, then set down his cup on a nearby tray.
Rats. She was going to have to talk to him, she realized, as he started heading for the door. She waited until he walked out into the much cooler night air before she caught up to him.
“Are you Josh?”
He blinked a little, obviously startled to find a strange older woman talking to him. “Yeah,” he said slowly, not bothering to conceal his wariness.
“My name is Julie Osterman. I work at the Fortune Foundation with your mother’s cousin Susan.”
“Okay.” He took a sidestep away from her and she sighed.
“Josh, this is going to sound crazy, I know,” she began, “but I need you to stay here for a minute.”
“Why?”
She couldn’t tell him his father was dead. That job should fall to someone closer to him, someone with whom he had a relationship. “Your uncle is looking for you,” she finally answered. “He really needs to talk to you. If you can hang around here for a minute, he should be along any time now.”
She hoped.
“What’s going on?” His gaze sharpened. “Is it my mom?”
“Your mom isn’t hurt. Ross can explain everything when he gets here?”
“No. Tell me now. Is it Lyndsey? She was supposed to meet me here but she never showed and she’s not answering her phone. Is she hurt? What’s going on?”
“Josh—”
“Tell me!”
She was scrambling for words when a deep male voice spoke from behind her.
“It’s your dad, Josh.”
Chapter Three
She turned with vast relief to see Ross walking toward them, looking tall and solid and certainly strong enough to help his nephew through this.
The boy’s features hardened. “Did he hurt Mom again? If he did, I’ll kill him this time, I swear. I warned him I would.”
“You might not want to say that too loudly,” Ross said grimly. “Your father is dead, Josh.”
For all his bravado just seconds before, the teenager’s color drained at the words.
“Dead? That’s crazy.” Even as he spoke, Julie thought she saw something flicker in his brown eyes, something furtive, secretive.
“It’s true,” Ross said. “I’m sorry, Josh.”
The boy gazed at him blankly, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to respond.
“What happened?”
Ross cleared his throat. “We don’t know for sure yet.”
“Did he have a heart attack or a stroke or something? Was he hit by a bus? What?”
Ross sighed. His gaze met Julie’s for a moment and she saw indecision there as he must be weighing just how blunt he ought to be with his nephew.
She would have told him to be as honest as possible. Josh would find out all the gory details soon enough. In a town like Red Rock, the rumors would fly faster than crows on carrion. Better for him to hear the news from his family than for them to all dissemble about the situation, which he would probably find condescending and demeaning.
Ross must have reached the same conclusion. “It’s too early to say anything with a hundred percent certainty but it looks like he was murdered.”
“Murdered?” Josh blinked at both of them. “You’re kidding me, right? This is all some kind of a sick joke. People in Red Rock don’t get murdered!”
“I’m afraid it’s no joke,” Julie said, her voice soft with compassion.
“Who did it? Do they have any suspects?”
Ross’s gaze met Julie’s again with a wordless plea for help and she thought how surreal it was that just an hour ago they were wrangling over her purse, and now he was turning to her to help him through this delicate family situation.
It was hard enough telling Josh his father was dead. How were they supposed to tell Josh that his own mother was the prime suspect?
“They’re still investigating,” Ross said after a moment.
Josh pulled off his Stetson and raked a hand through his hair. “This is crazy. I can’t believe it,” he said again. “Where’s my mom? How is she taking this?”
“Uh, that’s the other thing I needed to talk to you about,” Ross said.
Fear leapt into his dark eyes and he turned to Julie with an accusation in his eyes. “You said my mom wasn’t hurt!”
“She’s not,” Ross assured him. “It’s just…Frannie had to go to the police station to answer some questions.”
Josh obviously wasn’t a stupid boy. He quickly put the pieces together. “Mom had to go for questioning? They think she killed him?”
“Josh—”
The color that had leached away at the news of his father’s death returned in a hot, angry flush. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! If she had it in her to kill him, she would have done it years ago.”
If Julie hadn’t worked with troubled youth on a daily basis for the last five years, she might have found his bitterness shocking. Instead, she found it unutterably sad.
“They’re only questioning her. She’s not under arrest,” Ross said. “I’m sure they’ll figure out soon enough that your mom is innocent.”
“What about his girlfriend? Are they questioning her? Or his last girlfriend? Or the one before that? I could give them a whole damn list of suspects!”
“I’m sure they’ll question as many people as they can,” Julie said. Unable to help herself, she laid a comforting hand on the boy’s arm. Though by all appearances he despised his father, her heart ached at the pain she knew still waited for him down the road. Losing a parent was traumatic for anyone, no matter what their relationship.
Josh didn’t flinch away from her touch, but he remained focused on his mother and her predicament.
“I should go to her,” he said after a moment. “She’s going to need me.”
Ross couldn’t seem to look away from that soft, comforting hand Julie placed on his nephew’s arm. There was no good reason he could figure out that the sight should put a funny little ache in his chest.
He cleared his throat. “I promise, the police station is no place for you right now, Josh. You have to trust me on this.”
He, however, needed to get his butt over there as soon as possible to find out what was happening with the investigation. He was torn between dueling obligations, one to his sister and one to his nephew during this difficult time.
“I’ll be eighteen in two weeks, Uncle Ross. I’m not a child anymore.”
“I know that. But I’ve spent most of my adult life in police stations and I can tell you the best place for you is at home. I’ll go check on your mother.”
“I want to see her.”
“She won’t be able to talk to you, son. Not if she’s being questioned.”
“Well, I can at least tell them that I know she couldn’t have killed Lloyd,” Josh answered.
His loyal defense of his mother struck a chord with Ross. It reminded him far too much of the way he used to stick up for Cindy, making excuses to the other kids when she would stay out all night drinking or would bring a new man around the house or, worse, would entirely forget about them all for a weekend binge.
The difference there was that he had foolishly been trying to protect an illusion, while Josh’s efforts were on behalf of an innocent woman.
“Everything’s going to be okay. Trust me. She’s only being questioned. I’m sure she’ll be home in a short time. Why don’t you head on home and get some rest? You’re going to have a lot to deal with in the coming days.”
“I should be with her,” Josh said stubbornly.
Julie again reached out to Josh and Ross saw that once more her quiet touch seemed to soothe him. “The absolute best way you can help your mother right now is to give her one less worry. You were the only thing she thought about as they were taking her in for questioning. She insisted that your uncle watch out for you and that’s just what he’s trying to do. As he said, you have to trust him right now to know what’s best, okay?”
Her words seemed to resonate with Josh. He looked between the two of them and then sighed. “I guess.”
Ross was astounded and more gratified than he wanted to admit that she would come to his defense like this, especially after their altercation earlier in the evening. That encounter and his own honest mistake over the purse had been a fortuitous meeting, he thought now. He didn’t know what he would have done this evening without her.
The thought sparked an idea—a nervy one, sure, but one that would certainly lift a little of the burden from his shoulders.
“Josh, could you hang on here for a second while I talk to Ms. Osterman?”
His nephew looked confused but he nodded and Ross stepped a few paces away where they could speak in relative privacy.
“Look, I do need to get to the police station to see how things are going with Frannie, but I don’t want to send Josh to his empty house alone. This is a huge favor to ask when I’m virtually a stranger to you and you’ve already done so much, but do you think you could stay with him for a while, while I check on my sister?”
As he might have expected, Julie’s soft blue eyes widened with astonishment at the request. “But wouldn’t you rather have someone in your family stay with him? Your cousin Susan, maybe?”
Susan would come in a heartbeat, he knew, and like Julie, she specialized in troubled adolescents. But he hated to ask the Fortune side of the family for anything. It was an irrational reaction, he knew, but for most of his life his particular branch of the family had always been the needy ones.
He didn’t know how many times the Fortunes had bailed Cindy out of one scrape or another, before they had virtually cut ties with her out of frustration that nothing ever seemed to change.
Even though he loved and admired several members of his extended family, Ross preferred to handle things on his own when he could. And when he couldn’t, he much preferred asking somebody who wasn’t a Fortune for help.
“They’re all going to be busy with the last few hours of the Spring Fling. Plus, now they’re going to have to deal with damage control after Lloyd’s murder.”
It was bad public relations for the festival, especially since this was the second time a dead body had been found while the town celebrated. A few years earlier, an unidentified body turned up at the Spring Fling. The town had only just started to heal from that.
Her forehead furrowed for a moment and then she nodded. “In that case, of course. I’ll be glad to stay with Josh as long as you need.”
For one crazy moment, he longed to feel the soft comfort of her touch on his arm, though he knew that was ridiculous.
“Thanks a million. It won’t be long. I’m sure I’ll be taking Frannie home in just a few hours.
He had been far too optimistic, Ross thought an hour later as he stood in the Red Rock police chief’s office.
“Come on, Jimmy. This is a mistake. You have to know that. There’s no way on earth Frannie killed Lloyd.”
“You were on the job long enough, you know how it works. We just want to talk to her but she’s not saying a word. She’s shutting us down in every direction. I have to tell you, that makes her look mighty guilty.”
A white-coated lab tech pushed open the door. “Chief, I’ve got those results you put the rush order on.”
“Excellent. You’re going to have to excuse me, Ross. Why don’t you go on home? There’s nothing more you can do here tonight.”
“I’ll stick around. Somebody’s going to need to drive Frannie home when you’re done with this little farce here.”
Jimmy opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again. “I can’t make you leave. But if you really want to help your sister, tell her to cooperate with us. The quicker she gives us her side of the story, the quicker we can wrap this up.”
Ross had been a cop for a long time, trained to catch subtle nuances in conversation. He didn’t miss the way the police chief phrased his words. Wrap this up was a far cry from send her home.
Something about this whole thing gave him an ominous feeling. He suddenly guessed he was in for a long night.
Chapter Four
Four hours and counting.
From his perch in an empty detective’s chair, Ross looked at the clock above the chief’s glass-walled office in the Red Rock police station.
He couldn’t think the long delay boded well for Frannie. It was now nearly half past midnight and she had been in an interrogation room for hours.
His poor sister. Eighteen years of marriage to Lloyd Fredericks had just about wrung every drop of spirit out of her. She must be sick over this ordeal.
What could be taking so long? Frannie should have been released hours ago. With every tick of the clock, his hopes for a quick resolution trickled a little further away.
When the police chief emerged from the hallway that housed the interview room and headed for his office, Ross rose quickly and intercepted him.
“What’s going on, Jimmy? I need info here.”
His friend gave him a long, solemn look and Ross’s stomach suddenly clenched with nerves. He did not like the implications of that look.
“She’s going to be charged, Ross. We have no choice.”
He stared at the other man, not willing yet to accept the unthinkable. “Charged with what?”
The chief rolled his eyes. “With jaywalking. Lord, Ross, what the hell do you think, with what. With murder!”
This couldn’t be happening. Ross balled his fists. “That’s bull! This whole thing is bull and you know it! Frannie no more killed Lloyd than I did.”
“Are you confessing?”
“I’ve thought about killing the bastard a thousand times,” he answered the chief. “Does that count?”
“Sorry, but if we could prosecute thoughts, I doubt there would be anybody left outside the walls of my jail.”
“What evidence can you possibly have against Frannie that’s not circumstantial?” he asked.
The police chief just shook his head. “You know I can’t talk about that, Ross, especially not with the suspect’s own brother, even if he is an ex-cop and an old friend. Even if you weren’t Frannie’s brother, I couldn’t tell you anything.”
“Come on, throw me a little bone here. It’s only been four hours since Lloyd’s death. Why the big rush? You haven’t even had time to look at any other possibilities! What about Crystal Rivers? She claimed she just stumbled onto the body and found Frannie there, but she doesn’t exactly seem like the most upright, stalwart citizen of Red Rock. For all we know, she could have killed him, then waited around for somebody else to find him before circling back and throwing her big drama queen scene.”
Jimmy was quiet for a moment, then he motioned toward his office. They walked in, and he shut the door and closed the louvered blinds to conceal their conversation from any other curious eyes that might be watching in the station house.
“Look, I don’t know if this is my place, but you and I have been around the block together a few times, from our days at the academy together to our time in the same division in San Antonio. I respect you more than just about any detective on my force and you know I’d hire you here in an instant if you ever decided to come back to the job.”
“I appreciate that. Just be straight with me, Jimmy.”
“I’ll just remind you who calls the shots around here when it comes to prosecutions. Bruce Gibson. That’s not helping the situation for Frannie, especially when she’s refusing to say anything about what happened.”
Ross gazed at the other man as the implications sunk in. Bruce Gibson was the district attorney—and a particularly vindictive one at that. He was the one who chose when charges would be filed and what those charges would entail. Even if the police department wanted to pursue other leads, a district attorney could make the final choice about whether they had enough evidence to go forward with a prosecution.
And he had been one of Lloyd’s closest friends, Ross suddenly remembered, had practically grown up at the Frederickses’ mansion.
Gibson would be out for blood—and it would be a bonus to the man if he could extract a little of that blood from the Fortunes. Gibson had made no secret of the fact that he thought the Fortunes were too wealthy, too powerful. He was up for a tough re-election battle in the fall and from all appearances, he seemed to be making an issue of the fact that he considered himself a man of the people and wouldn’t let somebody’s social status sway prosecutorial decisions.
Added to that, there was no love lost between Ross and Bruce Gibson. Just a few weeks earlier, he and Ross had exchanged words over an incident involving a stable fire on the family ranch and the way the family was choosing to investigate it privately.
What a tangled mess. Any other district attorney would see how ludicrous this whole thing was.
“Can I see her?” he asked.
Caldwell gave him a long, appraising look, then finally nodded. “It’s past normal visiting hours but we can make an exception in this case. It might take a few moments, though. She’s in central booking.”
Perhaps half an hour later, Ross was finally ushered by the young, fresh-faced police officer he had seen earlier on the murder scene to a stark white interview room. Frannie looked up when the door opened and Ross had to stop from clenching his fists again at the sight of her in a prison-orange jumpsuit.
Since his sister’s ill-fated marriage to Fredericks years ago, he had seen her disheartened and hurt, he had seen her hopeless and bleak. But he didn’t think he had ever seen her look so desperately afraid.
The chair scraped as he pulled it out to sit down and she flinched a little at the noise.
“Hey, Frannie-Banannie.”
Her eyes filled up with tears at the childish nickname. “You haven’t called me that in years.”
He was suddenly sorry for that, sorry that while he had never completely withdrawn from his family, he had enjoyed the distance that came from living twenty miles away in San Antonio. He didn’t have to be involved in the day-to-day drama of family affairs, didn’t have to watch Frannie slowly become this washed-out version of herself.
“How are you doing, sis?”
She shrugged. “I guess you know they’re charging me.”
“Yeah. Jim told me. Sounds like Bruce Gibson is on the warpath.”
Her mouth tightened but she only looked down at her hands.
“What happened, Frannie?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s what I hear. But you told them you didn’t do it, right?”
She didn’t answer him. Instead she rubbed the fraying sleeve of the jumpsuit between her thumb and forefinger. “How’s Josh?” she asked.
He sighed at her evasive tactic but decided to let it go for now. “He’s fine. I sent him back to your house.”
“He shouldn’t be alone right now. Is someone with him?”
“Julie Osterman is with him.”
“Julie? From the Foundation? Why?”
Because I didn’t want to ask the family to bail us all out once again, he thought but could never say. “She was with me when…everything happened. I couldn’t be in two places at once and I needed help and Julie seemed a good choice since she’s a youth counselor and all, like Susan.”
“Julie is nice.”
Frannie sounded exhausted suddenly, emotionally and physically, and he wanted to gather her up and take care of her.
Those days were gone, though. Try as he might, he couldn’t fix everything. He couldn’t fix her marriage for the last eighteen years. He couldn’t get his young, happy sister back. And he wasn’t at all sure he could extricate her from this mess, though he sure as hell was going to try.
“Ross, I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything. Whatever you need.”
“Take care of Josh for me. Stay with him at the house. I know he’s almost eighteen and almost an adult and will probably tell you he doesn’t need anyone else but I don’t want him on his own right now. Help him through this, okay? He’s going to need you.”
“Come on, Frannie. Don’t worry. You’ll be out before we know it and this will all be a memory.”
“Just help him. You’ve always been far more of a father to him than…than Lloyd.”
“You don’t even need to ask, Fran. Of course I will.”
“Thank you.” She attempted such a forlorn smile it just about broke his heart. “I can always count on you.”
If that were true, she wouldn’t be in this calamity. She wouldn’t have been married to Lloyd in the first place and she wouldn’t be facing murder charges right now, if he had been able to rescue her from the situation years ago, like he’d wanted to.
“We’ll get the best attorney we can find for you, okay? Just hang in.”
She nodded, though it looked as if it took the last of her energy just to make that small gesture. He had a feeling in another minute, his baby sister was going to fold her arms on the interrogation room table, lay her head down and fall instantly asleep.
“Get some rest, okay?” he advised her. “Everything will seem better in the morning, I promise.”
She managed another nod. Ross glanced at the officer who was monitoring the visit, then thought, to hell with this. He pulled his sister into his arms, noting not for the first time that she seemed as fragile and insubstantial as a stained-glass window.
“Thanks, Ross,” she mumbled before the guard pulled her away and led her from the room.
The Spring Fling seemed another lifetime ago as Ross drove the streets of Red Rock toward the house where Frannie and Lloyd moved shortly after their marriage.
The security guard at the entrance to their exclusive gated community knew him. His fleshy features turned avid the moment Ross rolled down his window.
“Mr. Fortune. I guess you’re here to stay with your sister’s boy, huh? You been to the jail to see her?”
The news was probably spreading through town like stink in springtime. “Yeah. Can you let me in?”
“Oh, sure, sure,” he said, though he made no move to raise the security arm. “Jail is just no place for a nice lady like Mrs. F. Why, you could have knocked me six ways to Sunday when my cousin Lou called to tell me what had happened at the Spring Fling. Too bad I was here working and missed everything.”
Ross gestured to the gate. “Can you let me in, George? I really need to be with my nephew right now.”
The guard hit the button with a disappointed kind of look.
“You tell Mrs. F. I’m thinking about her, okay?”
“I’ll be sure to do that, George. Thanks.”
He quickly rolled his window up and drove through the gate before George decided he wanted to chat a little more.
Lights blazed from every single window of the grand pink stucco McMansion he had always secretly thought of as a big, gaudy wedding cake. There was no trace of his sister’s elegant good taste in the house. It was as if Lloyd had stamped out any trace of Frannie.
The interior of the house wasn’t any more welcoming. It was cold and formal, white on white with gold accents.
Ross knew of two rooms in the house with a little personality. Josh’s bedroom was a typical teenager’s room with posters on the wall and clutter and mementos covering every surface.
The other was Frannie’s small sitting room that hinted at the little sister he remembered. It was brightly decorated, with local handiworks, vivid textiles and many of Frannie’s own photographs on the wall.
Lloyd had a habit of changing the security system all the time so Ross didn’t even try to open the door. He rang the doorbell and a moment later, Julie Osterman opened the door, her soft, pretty features looking about as exhausted as Frannie’s had been.
“I’m sorry I’m so late,” he said. “I never expected things to take this long, that I would have to impose on you until the early hours of the morning.”
“No problem.” She held the door open for him and he moved past her into the formal foyer. “Josh tried to send me home and insisted he would be okay on his own, but I just didn’t feel right about leaving him here alone, under the circumstances.”
“I appreciate that.”
“He’s in the kitchen on the telephone to a friend.”
“At this hour? Is it Lyndsey?”
Josh’s young girlfriend had been a source of conflict between Josh and his parents, for reasons Ross didn’t quite understand.
“I think so, but I can’t be certain. I was trying not to eavesdrop.”
“How is he?”
She frowned a little as she appeared to give his question serious consideration. Despite his own fatigue, Ross couldn’t help noticing the way her mouth pursed a little when she was concentrating, and he had a wild urge to kiss away every line.
He definitely needed sleep if he was harboring inappropriate fantasies about a prickly busybody type like Julie Osterman.
“I can’t really tell, to be honest with you,” she answered. “I get the impression he’s more upset about his mother being detained at the police station than he seems to be about his father’s death. Or at least that appears to be where he’s focusing his emotions right now. On the other hand, his reaction could just be displacement.”
“Want to skip the mumbo jumbo?”
She made a face. “Sorry. I just meant maybe he’s not ready—or doesn’t want—to face the reality of his father’s death right now, so it’s easier to place his energy and emotion on his mother’s situation.”
“Or maybe he just happens to be more upset about Frannie than he is about Lloyd. The two of them didn’t exactly get along.”
“So I hear,” she answered. “It sounds as if few people did get along with Lloyd Fredericks, besides Crystal and her sort.”
“And there were plenty of those.”
Her mouth tightened but she refrained from commenting on his bitterness. Lloyd’s frequent affairs had been a great source of humiliation for Frannie. “How is your sister?” she asked instead.
“Holding up okay, under the circumstances.”
“Do you expect them to keep her overnight for questioning, then?”
He sighed, angry all over again at the most recent turn of events. “Not for questioning. For arraignment. She’s being charged.”
Her eyes widened with astonishment, then quickly filled with compassion. “Oh, poor Josh. This is going to be so hard on him.”
“Yeah, it’s a hell of a mess,” he answered heavily. “So it looks like I’ll be staying here for a while, until we can sort things out.”
She touched him, just a quick, almost furtive brush of her hand on his arm, much as she had touched Josh earlier. Through his cotton shirt, he could feel the warmth of her skin and he was astonished at the urge to wrap his arms around her and pull her close and just lean on her for a moment.
“I’m so sorry, Ross.”
He cleared his throat and told himself he was nothing but relieved when she pulled her hand away.
“Thanks again for everything you did tonight,” he said. “I would have been in a real fix without you.”
“I’m glad I could help in some small way.”
She smiled gently and he was astonished at how that simple warm expression could ease the tightness in his chest enough that he could breathe just a little easier.
“It’s late,” she finally said. “Or early, I guess. I’d better go.”
“Oh right. I’m sorry again you had to be here so long.”
“I’d like to say goodbye to Josh before I leave, if it’s all right with you,” she said.
“Of course,” he answered and followed her into the kitchen.
In his fantasy childhood, the kitchen was always the warmest room in the house, a place scattered with children’s backpacks and clumsy art work on the refrigerator and homemade cookies cooling on a rack on the countertop.
He hadn’t known anything like that, except at the occasional friend’s house. To his regret, Frannie’s kitchen wasn’t anything like that image, either. It was as cool and formal as the rest of the house—white cabinets, white tile, stainlesssteel appliances. It was like some kind of hospital lab rather than the center of a house.
Josh sat on a white bar stool, his cell phone up to his ear.
“I told you, Lyns,” he was saying, “I don’t have any more information than I did when we talked an hour ago. I haven’t heard anything yet. I’ll tell you as soon as I know anything, okay? Meantime, you have to get some rest. You know what—”
Ross wasn’t sure what alerted the boy to their presence but before he could complete the sentence, he suddenly swiveled around to face them. Ross was almost certain he saw secrets flash in his nephew’s eyes before his expression turned guarded again.
“Um, I’ve got to go, Lyns,” he mumbled into the phone. “My uncle Ross just got here. Yeah. I’ll call you later.”
He ended the call, folded his phone and slid it into his pocket before he uncoiled his lanky frame from the chair.
“How’s my mom? Is she with you?”
Ross sighed. “No. I’m sorry.”
“How long can they hold her?”
“For now, as long as they want. She’s being charged.”
His features suffused with color. “Charged? With murder?”
Ross nodded, wishing he had other news to offer his nephew.
“This completely sucks.”
That was one word for it, he supposed. A pretty accurate one. “Yeah, it does. But there’s nothing we can do about it tonight. Meanwhile, Ms. Osterman needs to get on back to her house. She came in to tell you goodbye.”
He was proud of the boy for reining in most of his outrage in order to be polite to Julie.
“Thank you for giving me a ride and staying here and everything,” Josh said to her. “And even though I told you I didn’t need you to stay so late, it was…nice not to be here by myself and all.”
“You’re very welcome.” She smiled with that gentle warmth she just seemed to exude, paused for just a moment, then stepped forward and hugged the boy, who was a good six inches taller than she was.
“Call me if you need to talk, okay?” she said softly.
“Yeah, sure,” he mumbled, though Ross was pretty sure Josh looked touched by her concern.
They both walked her to the door and watched her climb into her car. When she drove away, Ross shut the door to Frannie’s wedding-cake house and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do next.
He would just have to figure it out, he supposed.
He didn’t have any other choice.
This was just about the last place on earth he wanted to be right now.
In fact, given a choice between attending his despised brother-in-law’s funeral and wading chest-deep in a manure pit out on the Double Crown, Ross figured he would much rather be standing in cow honey swatting flies away from his face than sitting here in this discreetly decorated funeral home, surrounded by the cloying smell of lilies and carnations and listening to all the weeping and wailing going on over a man most people in town had disliked.
It would be over soon. Already, the eulogies seemed to be dwindling. He could only feel relief. This all seemed the height of hypocrisy. He knew of at least a dozen people here who had openly told him at separate times over the last few days how much they had hated Lloyd. Yet here they were with their funeral game faces, all solemn and sad-eyed.
He glanced over at his nephew, who seemed to be watching the entire proceedings with an odd detachment, as if it was all some kind of mildly interesting play that had no direct bearing in his life.
Josh seemed to be holding up well under the strain of the last five days. Maybe too well. The boy’s only intense emotion over anything seemed to be rage at the prosecuting attorney for moving ahead with charges against his mother.
It had been a hellish five days, culminating in this farce. First had come the medical examiner’s report read at Frannie’s arraignment that Lloyd had been killed with a blunt instrument whose general size and heft matched the large piece of pottery his sister had purchased shortly before the murder. Then reports had begun to trickle out that the heavy vase had several sets of unidentified fingerprints on it—and one very obvious identified set that belonged to his sister.
Added to Crystal’s testimony that Lloyd had a heated phone call with Frannie shortly before the murder, things weren’t looking good for his sister.
A good attorney with the typical cooperative client might have been able to successfully argue that Frannie’s fingerprints would naturally be on the vase since she had purchased it just a short time earlier, and that a hearsay one-sided telephone exchange—no matter how heated—was not proof of murder.
But Frannie was not the typical cooperative client. Despite the high stakes, she refused to confirm or deny her involvement in Lloyd’s murder and had chosen instead to remain mum about the entire evening, even to her attorney.
Ross didn’t know what the hell she was doing. He had visited twice more since the night of the murder in an effort to convince her to just tell him and the Red Rock police what had happened, but she had shut him out, too. Each time, he had ended up leaving more frustrated than ever.
As a result of her baffling, completely unexpected obstinacy, she had been charged with second-degree murder and bound over for trial. Even more aggravating, she had been denied bail. Bruce Gibson had argued in court that Frannie was a flight risk because of her wealthy family.
He apparently was laboring under two huge misconceptions: one, that Frannie would ever have it in her to run off and abandon her son and, two, that any of the Fortunes would willingly help her escape, no matter how much they might want to.
In the bail hearing, Bruce had been full of impassioned arguments about the Fortune wealth and power, the entire time with that smirk on his plastic features that Ross wanted to pound off of him.
The judge had apparently been gullible enough to buy into the myth—either that or he was another old golfing buddy of Lloyd’s or his father, Cordell. Judge Wilkinson had agreed with Bruce and ordered Frannie held without bail, so now his delicate, fragile sister sat moldering in the county jail, awaiting trial on trumped-up charges that should never have been filed.
And while she was stuck there, he was forced to sit on this rickety little excuse for a chair, listening to a pack of lies about what a great guy Lloyd had been.
Ross didn’t buy any of it. He had disliked the man from the day he married Frannie, when she was only eighteen. Even though she had tried to put on a bright face and play the role of a regular bride, Ross had sensed something in her eyes even then that seemed to indicate she wasn’t thrilled about the marriage.
He had tried to talk her out of it but she wouldn’t listen to him, probably because Cindy had pushed so hard for the marriage.
When Josh showed up several weeks shy of nine months later, Ross had put the pieces of the puzzle together and figured Lloyd had gotten her pregnant. Frannie was just the sort to try doing what she thought was the right thing for her child, even if it absolutely wasn’t the right decision for her.
In the years since, he had watched her change from a luminous, vivacious girl to a quiet, subdued society matron. She always wore the right thing, said the right thing, but every ounce of joy seemed to have been sucked out of her.
And all because of Lloyd Fredericks, the man who apparently was heading for sainthood any day now, judging by the glowing eulogies delivered at his memorial service.
Ross wondered what all these fusty types would do if he stood up and spoke the truth, that Lloyd was just about the lousiest excuse for a human being he’d ever met—which was really quite a distinction, considering that as an ex-cop, he’d met more than his share.
In his experience, Lloyd was manipulative and dishonest. He cheated, he lied, he stole and, worse, he bullied anybody he considered weaker than himself.
Ross couldn’t say any of that, though. He could only sit here and wait until this whole damn thing was over and he could take Josh home.
He glanced around at the crowd, wondering again at the most notable absence—next to Frannie’s, of course. Cindy had opted not to come, and he couldn’t help wondering where she might be. He would have expected his mother to be sitting right up there on the front row with Lloyd’s parents. She loved nothing more than to be the center of attention, and what better place for that than at her son-in-law’s memorial service, with all its drama and high emotion?
Cindy had adored her son-in-law, though Ross thought perhaps he’d seen hints that their relationship had cooled, since right around the time Cindy had been injured in a mysterious car accident.
Still, even if she and Lloyd had been openly feuding, which they weren’t, he would have thought Cindy would come.
He was still wondering at her absence when the pastor finally wrapped things up a few moments later. With the autopsy completed, Lloyd’s parents had elected to cremate his remains, so there would be no interment ceremony.
“Can we go now?” Josh asked him when other people started to file out of the funeral chapel.
Ross would have preferred nothing more than to hustle Josh away from all this artificiality. He knew people likely wanted to pay their respects to Lloyd’s son, but he wasn’t about to force the kid to stay if he didn’t want to be there.
“Your call,” he said.
“Let’s go, then,” Josh said. “I’m ready to get out of here.”
As he had expected, at least a dozen people stopped them on their way to the door to wish Josh their condolences. Ross was immensely proud of his nephew for the quiet dignity with which he thanked them each for their sympathy without giving away his own feelings about his father.
They were almost to the door when Ross saw with dismay that Lloyd’s mother, Jillian, was heading in their direction. Her Botox-smooth features looked ravaged just now, her eyes red and weepy. Still, fury seemed to push away the grief for now.
“How dare you show your face here!” she hissed to Ross when she was still several feet away.
Chapter Five
Several others at the funeral stopped to watch the unfolding drama and Ross did his best to edge them over to a quieter corner of the chapel, away from the greedy eyes of the crowd.
“My nephew just lost his father,” he said calmly. “I’m here for him, Jillian. Surely you can understand that.”
She made a scoffing sort of sound. “Your nephew lost his father because of your sister! If not for her, none of us would be here. He would still be alive. You have no right to come here. No right whatsoever. This service is for family members. For those of us who…who loved Lloyd. You never even liked him. You probably conspired with your sister to kill him, didn’t you?”
It was such a ridiculous thing to say that Ross had no idea how to answer her grief-induced ravings.
“I’m here for Josh,” he repeated. “Whatever you might think about my sister right now, and whatever the circumstances of Lloyd’s death, Josh has lost his father. He asked me to come with him today and I couldn’t let him down.”
Though he had let him down, Ross thought. And he had let his sister down, over and over. He hadn’t been able to get Frannie out of her lousy marriage. He had tried, dozens of times, until he finally gave up. But maybe he hadn’t tried hard enough.
“I want you to leave. Right now.” Jillian’s features reddened and she looked on the verge of some apoplectic attack.
“We’re just leaving, Grandmother,” Josh assured her and Ross was proud of his nephew for his calm, sympathetic manner.
At that moment, Lloyd’s father stepped up and slipped a supporting arm around his wife’s shoulders. “That’s not necessary. You don’t have to leave, Joshua. Come along, Jillian. The Scofields were looking for you a moment ago.”
Cordell gave Ross a quick, apologetic look, then steered his distraught wife away from them. Ross watched after him, his brow furrowed. He hadn’t seen Lloyd’s father in a few months but the man looked as if he had aged a decade or more. His features were lined and worn and he looked utterly exhausted.
Was all that from Lloyd’s death? he wondered. He knew the Fredericks had always doted on their only son and of course his death was bound to hit them hard, but he hadn’t expected Cordell to look so devastated.
Maybe Lloyd’s death wasn’t the only reason the man seemed to have aged overnight. Ross had been hearing rumors even before Lloyd’s death that not all was rosy with the Fredericks’ financial picture. He had heard a few whispers around town that Cordell and Lloyd had been late on some payments and had completely stopped making others.
It wouldn’t have surprised him at all to learn that Lloyd had been the one keeping Fredericks Financial afloat. Maybe Cordell was terrified the whole leaky ship would sink now that his son was dead.
He made a mental note to add a little digging into their financial records to the parallel investigation he had started conducting into Lloyd’s death.
“Follow the money” had always been a pretty good creed when he’d been a cop and he saw no reason for this situation to be any different.
“Sorry about that, Uncle Ross,” Josh said when they finally stepped outside into the warm afternoon, along with others who seemed eager to escape the oppressive funeral chapel. “Grandmother is…distraught.”
Poor Josh had a bum deal when it came to grandparents. On the one side, he had Lloyd’s stiff society parents. On the other, he had Cindy. She was no better a grandmother than she’d been a mother, alternating between bouts of spoiling her grandson outrageously with flamboyant gifts she couldn’t afford, followed by long periods of time when she would ignore him completely.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ross assured him. “Jillian’s reaction is completely understandable.”
“It’s not. She knows my mom. She’s known her for eighteen years, since she married my dad. Grandmother has to know Mom would never kill him.”
“It’s a rough time right now for everyone, Josh.”
“I don’t care how upset she is. My mom is innocent! And then to imply that you were involved, as well. That’s just crazy.”
Ross sighed but before he could answer, he was surprised to see Julie Osterman slip outside through the doors of the chapel and head in their direction.
She wore a conservative blue jacket and skirt with a silky white shirt and had pulled her hair back into a loose updo, and she looked soft and lovely in the sunshine.
His heart had no business jumping around in his chest just at the sight of her. Ross scowled. It didn’t seem right that she should be the single bright spot in what had been a dismal day.
How did she have such a calming presence about her? he wondered. Even some of Josh’s tension seemed to ease out of him when she slipped her arm through his and gave a comforting squeeze.
“Hi, Ms. O.”
She smiled at him, though it appeared rather solemn. “Hi, Josh. I was hoping to get a chance to talk to you.”
“Oh?”
She studied him for a long moment. “I have a dilemma here. Maybe you can help me out. I promised myself I wasn’t going to ask you something clichéd like how you’re holding up. But then, if I don’t ask, how am I supposed to find out how you’re doing?”
Josh smiled, the first one Ross had seen on his features all day. “Go ahead and ask. I don’t mind.”
“All right. How are you doing, under the circumstances?”
He shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Under the circumstances.”
“It was a lovely memorial service, as far as these things go.”
“I guess.” Josh looked down at the asphalt of the parking lot.
“When do you go back to school?” she asked.
“Tomorrow. I’ve got finals next week and I can’t really miss any more school if I want to graduate with my class. Uncle Ross thinks I should study for finals at home.”
He and Ross had argued about it several times, in fact. It was just about the only point of contention between them over the last five days.
“I just think he should take as much time as he needs,” Ross said. “If he doesn’t feel ready, he can probably take a few more days, as long as he gets the assignments from his teachers. There’s also the scandal factor. Everybody’s going to be talking about a murder at the Spring Fling and I want to make sure he’s mentally prepared for that before he goes back to school.”
“What do you think, Ms. O.?” Josh asked.
Ross could tell she didn’t want to be dragged into the middle of things but Julie only smiled at both of them. “There are arguments to be made for both sides. But I think that you’re the only one who can truly know when you’re ready. As long as you feel prepared to handle whatever might come along, I’m sure returning to school tomorrow will be fine.”
“I think I am,” Josh answered. “But I won’t know until I’m there, will I?”
Julie opened her mouth to answer but one of Lloyd’s elderly aunts approached them before she could say anything.
“Joshua? I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. “You’re not leaving already, are you?”
Josh slanted a look at Ross. “In a minute.”
“You can’t leave yet. Your great-grandmother is here. She specifically wanted to see you.”
Josh looked less than thrilled about being forced to talk with more Fredericks relatives but he nodded and allowed himself to be led away by the other woman, leaving Ross alone with Julie.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said after a moment.
He didn’t add that if he had seen her earlier, it might have made the whole thing a little easier to endure.
She made a face. “I decided I would probably regret it if I didn’t come to pay my respects. I know Jillian casually from some committees we’ve served on together and it seemed the polite thing to do, for her sake alone. But more than that, I wanted to come for Josh. It seemed…right, especially as I feel a little as if I were involved, since you and I were on the scene so quickly after it happened and I was with Josh for those few hours afterward.”
“Makes sense. It was nice of you to come.”
She studied him for a long moment. “Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression you’re not very thrilled to be here.”
His laugh was rough and humorless. “Is it that obvious? I can’t wait to leave. We were just on our way out. And just so you don’t think I’m rushing him away, Josh is as eager to get out of here as I am.”
She frowned. “How is he really doing?”
He gazed toward the door, where Josh was talking politely to an ancient-looking woman in a wheelchair. “Not as peachy as he wants everybody to think. He isn’t the same kid he was five days ago.”
“That’s normal and very much to be expected.”
“I get the grieving process. I mean, even though his relationship with his dad wasn’t the greatest, of course he’s going to be upset that he died a violent death. But something else is going on. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
One of the things Ross liked best about Julie Osterman was the way she gazed intently at him when he was speaking. Some women looked like they had their minds on a hundred other things when he talked to them, everything from what they had for breakfast to what they were going to say next. It bugged the heck out of him. But somehow he was certain Julie was focused only on his words.
“I’m sure he’s also upset about his mother’s arrest.”
“True enough. If you want the truth, he acts like Frannie’s arrest upsets him more than Lloyd’s death. He’s furious that his mother has been charged with the murder and that she’s being held without bail.”
“Have you talked to him about his feelings?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m a guy, in case it escaped your attention.”
“It hasn’t,” she murmured, an odd note in her voice that sent heat curling through him.
He cleared his throat. “I’m no good at the whole ‘let’s talk about our feelings’ thing. Not that I haven’t tried, though. Yesterday I took him out on my boat, thinking he might open up out on the water. Instead, we spent the entire afternoon without saying a word about his mom or about Lloyd or anything. Caught our limit between us, though.”
Why he shared that, he wasn’t sure and he regretted even opening his mouth. What kind of idiot thought a fishing trip might help a troubled teen? But Julie only gazed at him with admiration in the deep blue of her eyes.
“Brilliant idea. That was probably exactly what he needed, Ross. For things to be as normal as possible for a while. To do something he enjoys in a safe environment where he didn’t feel pressured to talk about anything.”
“I used to take my brothers when we were kids. I can’t say we solved all the world’s problems, but we always walked away from the river a little happier, anyway. Or at least we stopped fighting for a few minutes. And sometimes we even caught enough for a few nights’ dinners, too.”
She smiled at that, as he found he’d hoped she would. “You know, Ross, if you think it might help him cope with his grief, I would be happy to talk to Josh in a more formal capacity down at the Fortune Foundation.”
He mulled the offer for a long moment, then he shrugged. “I don’t know if he really needs all that.”
“I’m not talking long-term psychotherapy here. Just a session or two of grief counseling, maybe, if he wants someone to talk to.”
Ross thought of Josh’s behavior since Lloyd’s death. He had become much more secretive and he seemed to be bottling everything up deep inside. Every day since his father’s murder, Josh seemed to become more and more tense and troubled, until Ross worried he would implode.
He had seen good cops take a long, hard journey to nowhere when they tucked everything down inside them. He didn’t want to see the same thing happen to Josh.
His nephew wouldn’t share what he was going through with Ross, but maybe a few sessions with Julie would help him sort through the tangle of his emotions a little better. He supposed it couldn’t hurt.
“If he’s willing, I guess there’s a chance it might help him,” he answered. “You sure you don’t mind?”
“Not at all, Ross. I like Josh and I want to do anything I can to help him through this hard time in his life. I would say, from a professional standpoint, it’s probably better if he gets some counseling earlier rather than later. Things won’t become any easier for him the next few months, especially if the case against Frannie goes to trial.”
“It won’t,” he vowed. He was working like crazy on his own investigation, trying to make sure that didn’t happen. “I can’t believe such a miscarriage of justice would be allowed to proceed.”
“You were a police officer,” she said. “You know that innocence doesn’t always guarantee justice.”
“True. But I’m not going to let my baby sister go to prison for something she didn’t do. You can be damn sure of that.”
Her mouth tilted into a soft smile that did crazy things to his insides. “Frannie is lucky to have you,” she said softly.
He deliberately clamped down on the fierce urge to see if that mouth could possibly taste as sweet as his imagination conjured up.
“We’ll see,” he said, his voice a little rough. “If Josh is willing, when is a good time for me to bring him in?”
“I’ve got some time tomorrow afternoon, if that works. Around four, at my office?”
“I’ll talk to Josh and let you know. I don’t want to force him to do anything he’s uncomfortable about.”
“From the little I’ve learned about your nephew, I don’t think you could force him to do anything he didn’t want to do. I’m guessing it’s a family trait.”
He actually managed a smile, his first one in a long time. He was suddenly enormously grateful for her compassion and her insight. “True enough. Thank you for all your help. I’ve been baffled about what to do for him.”
He didn’t add that he felt as if was failing Josh, just as much as he had failed Frannie for the last eighteen years.
“You’re doing fine,” she answered. “Josh needs love most of all and it’s obvious you have plenty of that to give him.”
She touched his arm again, as he realized was her habit, and Ross felt the heat of it sing through his system.
He wanted to stay right here all afternoon, to just let her gentle touch soothe away all his ragged edges, all the tangles and turmoil he had been dealing with since Lloyd’s murder and Frannie’s arrest.
What was it about her that had such a powerful impact on him? She was lovely, yes. He had known lovely women before, though, and none of them exuded the same soft serenity that called to him with such seductive invitation.
“Sorry that took so long. We can leave anytime.”
At Josh’s approach, Julie quickly dropped her hand from his arm and Ross realized they had been standing there staring at each other for who knows how long.
Josh shifted his gaze between the two of them, as if trying to filter through the currents that must be zinging around.
“Um, no problem,” Ross mumbled. “I guess we should go, then.”
They said their goodbyes to Julie, and he couldn’t help noticing that she looked as rattled as he felt, something that probably shouldn’t suddenly make him feel so cheerful.
Julie studied the boy sprawled in the easy chair in her office.
For the past half hour, Josh had been telling her all the reasons he wasn’t grieving for his father. He talked about Lloyd Fredericks as if he despised him, but then Julie would see flashes of pain appear out of nowhere in his eyes and she knew the truth of Josh’s relationship with his father wasn’t so easily defined.
“I’m not glad he’s dead. I know I said that right after he was killed, but it’s not true. I guess I didn’t really want him dead, I just wanted him out of my life and my mom’s life. It’s weird that he’s gone, you know? I keep expecting him to come slamming into the house and start picking on my mom for whatever thing bugged him most that day. Instead, it’s only Ross there and he never says much of anything.”
“It’s natural for you to be conflicted, Josh. You’re grieving for your father, or at least for the relationship you might have wanted to share with your father.”
Josh shrugged. “I guess.”
“Nobody can make that process any easier. We each have to walk our own path when it comes to learning to live with the things we can’t have anymore. But one thing I’ve found that helps me when I’m sad is to focus not on the things that are missing in my life but instead on the many things I’m grateful to have.”
“Glass-half-full kind of stuff, huh?”
“Exactly. You’re in the middle of a crisis right now and many times it’s hard to see beyond that. That’s perfectly normal, Josh. But it can help ease a little of that turmoil to remember you’ve still got your uncle standing by your side. You’ve still got good friends who can help you through.”
“I’ve got Lyndsey.”
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.
Her own neighborhood near the elementary school was far different, an eclectic mix of old-timers who had lived in Red Rock forever and some of the new blood that had moved into the town, drawn by the quiet pace and friendly neighbors.
Moving here from Austin a year ago had been good for her, she thought as she rang the doorbell. She had made many new friends, she had a busy social life and she enjoyed a career where she felt she was affecting young lives.
Did she really need to snarl that up by yearning for a man who appeared unavailable?
At just that moment, Ross opened the door and she had to swallow hard. He was wearing Levi’s and a navy-blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looked casual and relaxed and her traitorous body responded instantly.
She was staring at his mouth. She realized it a half second too late and jerked her gaze up, only to find him watching her with a strange, glittery light in his eyes that struck her as vaguely predatory.
“Hi,” she murmured.
“Evening.”
“It’s a gorgeous one, isn’t it?”
He glanced past her to the soft twilight and blinked a little as if he hadn’t noticed it before. “You’re right. It is. Come in.”
She followed him inside. Though his sister had been in custody for less than a week, the grand house already felt a little neglected. A thin layer of dust covered the table in the foyer and several pairs of shoes were lined up by the door, something she was quite sure Frannie wouldn’t have allowed.
“Where’s Josh?” she asked.
“Holed up in his room, claiming homework. I’ll let him know you’re here in a minute. Actually, I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you alone first.”
Her heart skipped a beat, despite her best efforts to control her reaction. “Oh?”
“About Josh, I mean.”
She hoped he didn’t notice her flushed features or the disappointment she told herself was ridiculous. “Of course.”
“Do you mind coming out back with me? We can talk while I throw the steaks and your fish on the grill.”
She nodded and followed him through the house, noticing a few more subtle signs of neglect in the house that weren’t present when she was first here nearly a week ago. A few dirty dishes in the sink, a clutter of papers on the edge of the kitchen island, a jacket tossed casually over the back of a chair.
Ross grabbed a covered platter from the refrigerator, then opened the sliding doors to the vast patio that led to an elegantly landscaped pool. In the dusky light, the area looked quiet and restful. While she didn’t much care for the style of the rest of the house, Julie very much admired the gardens around Lloyd and Frannie Fredericks’ mansion.
She eased into a comfortable glider swing near the grill and watched while Ross transferred the meat from the plate to the grill with the ease of long practice. When he was done, he approached the swing and after a moment sat beside her, much to her dismay.
He was so big, so very masculine, and she was painfully aware of his proximity.
“What did you want to talk about?” she finally asked, hoping he didn’t try prodding her again to reveal details about her counseling session with Josh earlier.
“I’m looking for an honest opinion here,” he said. “What do you think about Josh’s girlfriend?”
Okay, she hadn’t been expecting that. “Lyndsey? I haven’t met her.”
“But Josh has mentioned her, right?”
“Yes. That first night when I stayed here with him while you were at the jail.” She didn’t want to breach Josh’s confidences by mentioning all the times he had brought up her name during their therapy session. “Why do you ask? Don’t you like her?”
Ross was quiet for a moment, a push of his boot sending the glider swaying slightly. “I’ve only met her briefly myself. Can’t say whether I like her or not. But I know Frannie was concerned about how serious they seemed to be getting. Now that I’ve had a chance to take a closer look at the situation firsthand, I’ve got to admit, it worries me a little, too.”
“In what way?”
“To me, it seems like they’re together all the time. I mean, all the time! When he’s not over at her place or she’s not here, he’s talking to her on the phone or texting her or talking to her online. I don’t know how intense things were between them before Lloyd’s death but I’m a little worried that he’s becoming too wrapped up with her. He’s only a kid, with his whole life ahead of him.”
“Don’t you remember your first love? They can be pretty intense.”
“No,” he said, his voice blunt. “I never had one.”
She stared. “You never had a girlfriend?”
“No. Not in high school, anyway. I was too busy with…things.”
“What kind of things? Sports?”
His mouth tightened. “Family stuff.”
He didn’t seem inclined to add any more, so Julie forced herself to clamp down on her curiosity to press him.
“Well, first love can be crazy for a teenager,” she said instead. “Wonderful and terrible at the same time, full of raw emotions and all these fears and hopes and insecurities. I’m sure his emotional bond to Lyndsey is heightened by the chaos elsewhere in his life. She must seem like a sturdy rock he can hang on to.”
“She strikes me as the clingy, needy sort, just from the little I’ve been able to see of her,” Ross said.
She could barely think straight, sitting this close to him, but she did her best to rearrange her mind to gain a little clarity. “Well, that might be part of her appeal to him. Lyndsey is somebody who needs him. Look at things from Josh’s perspective. His father is dead. His mother is in deep trouble, but not any kind of trouble he can solve for her. Aiding this girl with whatever troubles she’s having might make Josh feel less helpless about the rest of the things going on in his world.”
He pushed the swing again with his foot. “So you think I ought to let their little romance run its course?”
“Josh is almost eighteen. There’s not really much you can do about it.”
“I could lock him in his room and feed him only gruel,” he muttered.
She laughed. “He’s a teenage boy. I imagine he would figure out a way to sneak out and go for pizza.”
He was quiet for a long moment. When she glanced over to gauge his expression and try to figure out what he was thinking about, she thought she detected a hint of color on his cheekbones.
“Should I take him to buy condoms, just to be on the safe side?” he asked, without looking at her.
The temperature between them seemed to heat up a dozen degrees and she knew it was not from the barbecue just a few feet away. She cleared her throat. “Maybe that’s a conversation you ought to have with his mother.”
“I can’t discuss my nephew’s sex life with my sister while she’s in jail!”
She supposed she ought to be flattered that he felt he could discuss such a delicate subject with her, but she couldn’t get past the trembling in her stomach just thinking about “Ross” and “condoms” in the same conversation.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said. “You’re going to have to make that decision on your own. But I will say that if Josh were my son or in my care, it’s certainly a conversation I would have with him, especially if he’s becoming as serious with his girlfriend as you seem to believe.”
He didn’t look very thrilled by the prospect, but he nodded. “I guess I’ll do that. Thanks for the advice. I can see why you make a good counselor. You’re very easy to talk to.”
She smiled. “You’re welcome.”
He gazed at her and she saw that heat flare in his eyes again. The world seemed to shiver to a stop and the night and the lovely gardens and the soft wind murmuring in the treetops seemed to disappear, leaving just the two of them alone with this powerful tug of attraction between them.
He was inches from kissing her.
Ross could feel the sweet warmth of her breath, could almost taste her on his mouth. He wanted her, with a fierce hunger that seemed to drive all common sense out of his head.
He tried to hang on to all the reasons he shouldn’t kiss her. This was not supposed to be happening right now.
His life was in total chaos, he had far too many people depending on him and the last thing he needed was to find himself tangled up with someone like Julie Osterman, someone soft and generous and entirely too sweet for a man like him.
One kiss wouldn’t hurt anything, though. Only a tiny little taste. He leaned forward and heard a seductive little catch of her breath, felt the brush of her breast against his arm as she shifted slightly closer.
His mouth was just a tantalizing inch away from hers when he suddenly heard the snick of the sliding door.
“Ross?” Josh called out.
Julie jerked away as if Ross had poked her with hot coals from the grill and the glider swayed crazily with the movement.
“Over here,” Ross called.
He didn’t like the way Josh skidded to a stop, his sizefourteen sneakers thudding against the tile patio, or the way his eyebrows climbed to find them sitting together so cozily on the glider.
He also didn’t like the sudden speculative gleam in his nephew’s eyes.
“Hi, Julie. I didn’t hear you come in.”
She was breathing just a hair too quickly, Ross thought. “I only arrived a few moments ago. Your uncle and I were just…we were, um…”
“Julie was helping me with the steaks. And speaking of which, I’d better turn them before they’re charred.”
He definitely needed to get a grip on this attraction, he thought as he turned the steaks while Julie and Josh set the table out on the patio.
She was a nice woman who was doing him a huge favor by helping him figure out how to handle sudden, unexpected fatherhood. It would be a poor way to repay her by indulging his own whims when he had nothing to offer her in return.
“I think everything’s ready,” he said a few moments later.
“We’re all set here,” Julie said from the table, where she sat talking quietly with Josh about school. They had set out candles, he saw, and Frannie’s nice china. It was a nice change from the paper plates he and Josh had been using while he was here.
He went inside for the russet potatoes he had thrown in the oven earlier while they were waiting for her to arrive, and he put the tomato salad Julie had brought into a bowl.
“Wow. I’m impressed,” Julie exclaimed as he set the foil packet containing her fish on her plate and opened it for her. The smell of tarragon and lemon escaped.
“Better wait until you taste it before you say that,” he warned her.
He knew only two ways to cook fish. Either battered and fried in tons of butter—something he tried not to do too often for obvious health reasons—or grilled in a packet with olive oil, lemon juice and a mix of easy spices.
He knew he shouldn’t care so much what she thought but he still found it immensely gratifying when she closed her eyes with sheer delight at the first forkful. “Ross, this is delicious!”
He was becoming like one of the teens she worked with, desperate for her approval. “Glad you like it. How’s the steak, Josh?”
His nephew was still studying the two of them with entirely too much interest. “It’s good. Same as always.”
“Nothing like family to deflate the old ego,” Ross said with a wry smile.
“Sorry,” Josh amended. “What I meant to say is this is absolutely the best steak I have ever tasted. Every bite melts in my mouth. I think I could eat this every single day for the rest of my life. Is that better?”
Julie laughed and it warmed Ross to see Josh flash her a quick grin before he turned back to his dinner. He didn’t know what it was about her, but when she was around, Josh seemed far more relaxed. More like the kid he used to be.
“What are your plans after the summer?” she asked.
Josh shrugged. “I’m not sure right now.”
Ross looked up from dressing his potato and frowned. “What do you mean, you’re not sure? You’ve got an academic scholarship to A&M. It’s all you could talk about a few weeks ago.”
His nephew looked down at his plate. “Yeah, well, things have changed a little since a few weeks ago.”
“And in a few more weeks, this is all going to seem like a bad dream.”
“Is it?” Josh asked quietly and the patio suddenly simmered with tension.
“Yes. You’ll see. These ridiculous charges against your mom will be dropped and everything will be back to normal.”
“My dad will still be dead.”
He had no answer to that stark truth. “You’re not giving up a full-ride academic scholarship out of concern for your mother or some kind of misguided guilt over your dad’s death.”
Josh’s color rose and he set his utensils down carefully on his plate. “It’s my scholarship, Uncle Ross. If I want to give it up, nobody else can stop me. You keep forgetting I’m not a kid anymore. I’ll be eighteen in a week, remember?”
“I haven’t forgotten. But I also know that you have opportunities ahead of you and it would be a crime to waste those. I won’t let you do it.”
“Good luck trying to stop me, if that’s what I decide to do,” Josh snapped.
Ross opened his mouth to answer just as hotly but Josh’s cell phone suddenly bleated a sappy little tune he recognized as being the one Josh had programmed to alert him to Lyndsey’s endless phone calls.
He didn’t know whether to be annoyed or grateful for the interruption. He had dealt with his own stubborn younger brothers enough to know that yelling wasn’t going to accomplish anything but would make Josh dig in his heels.
“Hey,” Josh said into the phone. He shifted his body away and pitched his voice several decibels lower. “No. Not the best right now.”
Ross’s gaze met Julie’s and the memory of their conversation earlier—and all his worries—came flooding back. Was it possible Lyndsey was part of the reason Josh was considering giving up his scholarship?
Josh held the phone away from his ear. “Uncle Ross, I’m done with dinner. Do you care if I take this inside, in my room? A friend of mine needs some help with, um, trig homework. I might be a while and I wouldn’t want to bore you two with a one-sided conversation.”
He and Julie both knew that wasn’t true. He wondered if he should call Josh on the lie, but he wasn’t eager to add to the tension over college.
“Did you get enough to eat?”
Josh made a face. “Yeah, Mom.”
Ross supposed that was just what he sounded like. Not that he had much experience with maternal solicitude. “I guess you can go.”
The teen was gone before the words were even out of his mouth. Only after the sliding door closed behind him did Ross suddenly realize his nephew’s defection left him alone with Julie.
“You know, lots of parents establish a no-call zone during the dinner hour,” Julie said mildly.
He bristled for about ten seconds before he sighed. Hardly anybody had a cell phone twenty years ago, the last time he’d been responsible for a teenager. The whole internet, e-mail, cell phone thing presented entirely new challenges.
“Frannie always insisted he leave it in his room during dinner.”
She opened her mouth to say something but quickly closed it again and returned her attention to her plate.
“What were you going to say?” he pressed.
“Nothing.”
“You forget, I’m a trained investigator. I know when people are trying to hide things from me.”
She gave him a sidelong look, then sighed. “Fine. But feel free to tell me to mind my own business.”
“Believe me. I have no problem whatsoever telling people that.”
She gave a slight smile, but quickly grew serious. “I was only thinking that a little more consistency with the house rules he’s always known might be exactly what Josh needs right now. He’s in complete turmoil. He’s struggling with his mother’s arrest and his father’s death. Despite their uneasy relationship, Lloyd was his father and having a parent die isn’t easy for anyone. Perhaps a little more constancy in his life will help him feel not quite as fragmented.”
“So many things have been ripped from his world right now. It’s all chaos. I was just trying to cut him a little slack.”
She stood and began clearing the dishes away. “Believe it or not, a little slack might very well be the last thing he needs right now. Rules provide structure and order amid the chaos, Ross.”
He could definitely understand that. He had craved that very structure in his younger days and had found it at the Academy. Police work, with its regulations and discipline—its paperwork and routine—had given him guidance and direction at a time he desperately needed some.
Maybe she was right. Maybe Josh craved those same things.
“Here, I’ll take those,” he said to Julie when she had filled a tray with the remains of their dinner.
After he carried the tray into the kitchen, he returned to the patio to find Julie standing on the edge of the tile, gazing up at the night sky.
It was a clear night, with a bright sprawl of stars. Ross joined her, wondering if he could remember the last time he had taken a chance to stargaze.
“Pretty night,” he said, though all he could think about was the lovely woman standing beside him with her face lifted up to the moonlight.
“It is,” she murmured. “I can’t believe I sometimes get so wrapped up in my life that I forget to enjoy it.”
They were quiet for a long time, both lost in their respective thoughts while the sweet scents from Frannie’s garden swirled around them.
“Can I ask you something?” Ross finally asked.
If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he might have missed the slight wariness that crept into her expression. “Sure.”
“How do you know all this stuff? About grieving and discipline and how to help a kid who’s hurting?”
“I’m a trained youth counselor with a master’s degree in social work and child and family development.”
She was silent for a long moment, the only sound in the night the distant hoot of an owl and the wind sighing in the treetops. “Beyond that,” she finally said softly, “I know what it is to be lost and hurting. I’ve been there.”
Her words shivered through him, to the dark and quiet place he didn’t like to acknowledge, that place where he was still ten years old, scared and alone and responsible for his three younger siblings yet again after Cindy ran off with a new boyfriend for a night that turned into another and then another.
He knew lost and hurting. He had been there plenty of times before, but it didn’t make him any better at intuitively sensing what was best for Josh.
He pushed those memories aside. It was much easier to focus on the mystery of Julie Osterman than on the past he preferred to forget.
“What are your secrets?” he asked.
“You mean you haven’t run a background check on me yet, detective?”
He laughed a little at her arch tone. “I didn’t think about it until just this moment. Good idea, though.” He studied her for a long moment in the moonlight, noting the color that had crept along the delicate planes of her cheekbones. “If I did, what would I find?”
“Nothing criminal, I can assure you.”
“I don’t suppose you would have been hired at the Foundation if you had that sort of past.”
“Probably not.”
“Then what?” He paused. “You lost someone close to you, didn’t you?”
She gazed at the moon, sparkling on the swimming pool. “That’s a rather obvious guess, detective.”
“But true.”
Her sigh stirred the air between them.
“Yes. True,” she answered. “It’s a long, sad story that I’m sure would bore you senseless within minutes.”
“I have a pretty high bore quotient. I’ve been known to sit perfectly motionless on stakeouts for hours.”
She glanced at him, then away again. “A simple background check would tell you this in five seconds but I suppose I’ll go ahead and spare you the trouble. I lost my husband seven years ago. I’m a widow, detective.”
Chapter Seven
For several moments, he could only stare at her, speechless.
She was a widow. He would never have guessed that, not in a million years, though he wasn’t quite sure why he found the knowledge so astonishing—perhaps because she normally had such a sunny attitude for someone who must have lost her husband at a young age.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you to talk about something you obviously didn’t want to discuss, especially after you’ve done nothing but help Josh and me.”
“It’s okay, Ross. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t wanted you to know. I don’t talk about it often, only because it was a really dark and difficult time in my past and I don’t like to dwell on it. I prefer instead to enjoy the present and look ahead to the future. That’s all.”
“What happened?” he asked after a long moment.
He sensed it was something traumatic. That might help explain her empathy and understanding of what Josh was dealing with. He braced himself for it but was completely unprepared for her quiet answer.
“He shot himself.”
Ross stared, trying to make out her delicate features in the dim moonlight. “Was it a hunting accident?”
The noise she made couldn’t be mistaken for a laugh. “No. It was no accident. Chris was…troubled. We were married for five years. The first two were wonderful. He was funny and smart and brilliantly creative. The kind of person who always seems to have a crowd around him.
“After those first two years, we bought a home in Austin,” she went on. “I was working at a high school there and Chris was a photographer with an ad agency. Everything seemed so perfect. We were starting to talk about starting a family and then…everything started to change. He started to change.”
“Drugs? Alcohol?”
“No. Nothing like that. He became moody and withdrawn at times and obsessively jealous, and then he would have periods where he would stay up for days at a time, would shoot roll after roll of film, of nothing really. The pattern on the sofa cushions, a single blade of grass. He once spent six hours straight trying to capture a doorknob in the perfect light. Eventually he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, with a little manic depression thrown in for added fun.”
Ross frowned. He knew enough about mental illness to know it couldn’t have been an easy road for either of them.
“You stayed with him?”
“He was my husband,” she said simply. “I loved him.”
“You must have been young.”
“We married when I was twenty-four. I didn’t feel young at the time but in retrospect, I was a baby. I suppose I must have been young enough, anyway, that I was certain I could fix anything.”
“But you couldn’t.”
“Not this. It was bigger than either of us. That’s still so hard for me to admit, even seven years later. For three years, he tried every possible combination of meds but nothing could keep the demons away for long. Finally Chris’s condition started a downward spiral and no matter what we tried, we couldn’t seem to slow the momentum. On his twentyeighth birthday, he gave up the fight. He returned home early from work, set his camera on a tripod with an automatic timer, took out a Ruger he had bought illegally on the street a week earlier and shot himself in our bedroom.”
Where Julie would be certain to find him, he realized grimly. Ross had seen enough self-inflicted gunshot wounds when he had been a cop to know exactly what kind of scene she must have walked into.
He knew her husband had been mentally ill and couldn’t have been thinking clearly, but suddenly Ross was furious at the man for leaving behind such horror and anguish for his pretty, devoted young wife to remember the rest of her life. He hoped she could remember past that traumatic final scene and the three rough years preceding it to the few good ones they had together. “I’m so sorry, Julie.”
He wanted to take it away, to make everything all better for her, but here was another person in his life whose pain he couldn’t fix.
The unmistakable sincerity in Ross’s voice warmed the small, frozen place inside Julie that would always grieve for the bright, creative light extinguished far too soon.
She lifted her gaze to his. “It was a terrible time in my life. I can’t lie about that. The grief was so huge and so awful, I wasn’t sure I could survive it. But I endured by hanging on to the things I still had that mattered—my faith, my family, my friends. I also reminded myself every single day, both before his death and in those terrible dark days after, that Chris wasn’t responsible for the choices he made. I know he loved me and wouldn’t have chosen that course, if he could have seen any other choice in his tormented mind.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time and she couldn’t help wondering what he was thinking.
“Is that why you work with troubled kids?” he finally asked, his voice low. “To make sure none of them feels like that’s the only way out for them?”
She sighed. “I suppose that’s part of it. I started out working on a suicide hotline in the evenings and realized I was making an impact. It helped me move outside myself at a time I desperately needed that and I discovered I was good at listening. So I left teaching and went back to school to earn a graduate degree.”
“Do you miss teaching?” he asked.
“Sometimes. But when I was teaching six different classes, with thirty kids each, I didn’t have the chance for the one-on-one interaction I have now. I can always go back to teaching if I want. I still might someday, if that seems the right direction for me. I haven’t ruled anything out yet.”
“Do you ever wonder if anything you do really makes a difference?”
How in the world had he become so cynical? she wondered. Was it his years as a police officer? Or something before then? It saddened her, whatever the cause.
“I have to give back somehow. I’ve always thought of it as trying to shine as much light as I can, even if it only illuminates my own path.”
He gazed at her, his dark eyes intense, and she was suddenly painfully aware of him, the hard strength of his shoulders beside her, the slight curl of his hair brushing his collar.
“You’re a remarkable woman,” he said softly. “I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone quite like you.”
He wanted to kiss her. She sensed it clearly again, as she had earlier in the evening. She could see the desire kindle in his eyes, the intention there.
This time he wouldn’t stop—and she didn’t want him to. She wanted to know if his kiss could possibly be as good as she imagined it. Anticipation fluttered through her, like the soft, fragile wings of a butterfly, and she caught her breath as he moved closer, surrounding her with his heat and his strength.
The night seemed magical. The vast glitter of stars and the breeze murmuring through the trees and the sweet scents of his sister’s flower garden. Everything combined to make this moment seem unreal.
She closed her eyes as his mouth found hers, her heart pounding, her breath caught in her throat. His kiss was gentle at first, as slow and easy as the little creek running through her yard on a hot August afternoon. She leaned into it, into him, wondering how it was possible for him to make her feel shattered with just a kiss.
She was vaguely aware of the slide of his arms around her, pulling her closer. She again had that vague sensation of being surrounded by him, encircled. It wasn’t unpleasant. Far from it. She wanted to savor every moment, burn it all into her mind.
He deepened the kiss, his mouth a little more urgent. Some insistent warning voice in her head urged her to pull away and return to the safety of the other side of the patio, away from this temptation to lose her common sense—herself—but she decided to ignore it. Instead, she curled her arms around his neck and surrendered to the moment.
She had dated a few men in the seven years since Chris’s suicide. A history teacher at the high school, a fellow grad student, an investment banker she met at the gym.
All of them had been perfectly nice, attractive men. So why hadn’t their kisses made her blood churn, the lassitude seep into her muscles? She supposed it was a good thing he was supporting her weight with his arms around her because she wasn’t at all sure she could stand on her own.
In seven years, she hadn’t realized how truly much she had missed a man’s touch until just this moment. Everything feminine inside her just seemed to give a deep, heartfelt sigh of welcome.
They kissed for a long time there in the moonlight. She learned the taste of him, of the wine they’d had with dinner and some sort of enticing mint and another essence she guessed was pure Ross. She learned his hair was soft and thick under her fingers and that he went a little crazy when she nipped gently on his bottom lip.
His tongue swept through her mouth, unfurling a wild hunger for more and she tightened her arms around him, her hands gripping him closely.
She didn’t know how long the kiss lasted. It could have been hours, for all the awareness she had of time passing. She only knew that in Ross’s arms, she felt safe and desirable, a heady combination.
They might have stayed there all night, but eventually some little spark of consciousness filtered through the soft hunger.
This was dangerous. Too dangerous. His nephew could come outside to the patio at any moment and discover them in a heated embrace.
Although Josh was almost eighteen, certainly old enough to understand about sexual attraction, she had a strong feeling Ross wouldn’t be thrilled if his nephew caught them kissing.
She wasn’t sure how, but she managed to summon the energy and sheer strength of will to pull her hands away and step back enough to allow room for her lungs to take in a full breath.
The kick of oxygen to her system pushed away some of the fuzzy, hormone-induced cobwebs in her brain but for perhaps an entire sixty seconds she could only stare at him, feeling raw and off balance. Her thoughts were a wild snarl in her head and she couldn’t seem to untwist them.
An awkward silence seethed around them, replacing the seductive attraction with something taut and clumsy. She struggled for something to say but couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound silly and girlish.
Ross was the first one to break the silence. “I swear, that wasn’t on the agenda for the evening,” he finally said.
His hair was a little tousled from her fingers and he looked rumpled and rough around the edges and rather dismayed at their kiss.
She found the entire package absolutely irresistible.
“I believe you.”
“I’m not…I didn’t intend—”
He raked a hand through his hair, messing it up even more. A muscle worked in his jaw and he seemed so uncomfortable that she finally took pity on him.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/kristin-hardy/fortune-s-woman-a-fortune-wedding-fortune-s-woman/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.