Fortune's Perfect Match Read online

He ate his food, not really tasting any of it anymore. He guessed he smiled when he was meant to smile, and responded when he needed to smile, because by the time they’d finished eating and Jeremy slid his bank card to the waiter before Max could even get his hands on the check, not even Max’s sister was giving him any more curious looks.

  “Here.” He pulled several twenties out of his wallet and tossed them on the table next to his brother-in-law’s elbow.

  He saw Jeremy start to wave away the money, but Max gave him a hard stare. Jeremy was an orthopedic surgeon and a Fortune. He could buy and sell Max dozens of times over. But Max paid his own way now.

  Fortunately, his brother-in-law seemed to take the unspoken hint and pocketed the cash along with his credit card when the waiter returned it.

  There wasn’t even any need for him to hang around. Emily had her own car. And she and his sister were talking a mile a minute as if they were long-lost friends. Max caught snippets of their conversation. Talking and laughing about college and graduate degrees.

  “Think I’ll call it a night,” he said abruptly.

  The colored lights hanging around the courtyard reflected softly in Emily’s glasses when she turned toward him. It was only his own wishful thinking that she seemed to show some disappointment. “Do you want to set up a time now for me to meet with you again at the office, or should I call you in the morning? The only thing I have on my schedule is a conference call, but I’ll be finished with that by ten.”

  “Call.” He realized how terse he sounded. “I don’t know what’s on my schedule from Tanner for tomorrow yet,” he added.

  Her soft lips pressed together a little, but she smiled and nodded. “Okay. Thanks for dinner.”

  “Sure.” Before she could say anything else, he leaned over and gave his sister a kiss on the cheek. He didn’t even consider a kiss for Emily—on her cheek or elsewhere. Not in front of his sister. Not when he’d already overstepped the lines of “business.”

  He just gave a general wave meant to cover the whole table. “See y’all later.” And then he headed out of the restaurant.

  * * *

  Emily chewed the inside of her cheek, watching Max stride out of the courtyard. She suddenly dropped her napkin on the table. “Would you excuse me, too?” she said quickly to her cousin and his pretty wife. “I forgot to mention something to Max.”

  “We’ll see each other again soon,” Jeremy said easily. Kirsten was nodding.

  Emily smiled hurriedly and grabbed her purse before quickly following the path that Max had taken. When she reached the parking lot, she spotted him already at his truck and she broke into a trot to catch up to him. “Max,” she called as he unlocked his door. “Would you wait a minute?”

  He turned to wait.

  She felt breathless when she reached him and knew it wasn’t owed entirely from her sprint across the parking lot. But now that she’d caught up to him, she felt completely tongue-tied. “Thanks for dinner.”

  “You already thanked me.”

  “I know, but…I—” She broke off, shaking her head a little. “I just really enjoyed myself.”

  “Catching up with your cousin?”

  “No.” Seemingly of its own accord, her fingers touched his arm. Which was strange, because she wasn’t generally a touchy sort of person. “Well, yes, I mean it was good to see Jeremy. Of course. And your sister. She and Jeremy seem so perfect for each other. I meant I really enjoyed dinner with you.”

  His right eyebrow lifted slightly. “You were pretty quick to add more company.”

  Her lips parted. “She’s your sister. How could we not invite them to sit with us? Would you rather have had me be rude?”

  “I’d rather have had you to myself,” he said bluntly.

  That dark and sensual something that had wakened while they’d danced reared again, clenching hard inside her belly. “I’d have liked that, too,” she admitted and gave a little blessing to that margarita or she’d never have had the guts to say the words aloud. “Maybe we could do this again,” she added boldly. “Have dinner. Just…just the two of us.”

  The parking lot was too dark for her to see the expression in his eyes. “Maybe.”

  Maybe was just another word for no.

  She swallowed hard and while she still had some nerve, leaned up and pressed her lips to his cheek. “That’s for being there after the tornado that day,” she said when she went back down on her heels.

  He watched her for a moment that was so tight she felt almost sure that he was going to kiss her back.

  Really kiss her.

  But he didn’t. He just nodded and pulled open his truck door. “You know your way back to your sister’s from here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drive carefully.”

  “You do the same.” Her voice was faint.

  He started up the truck engine and she backed away several feet and watched him drive away.

  She wasn’t sure what had just happened.

  All she knew was that she felt shaky.

  And ridiculously disappointed.

  * * *

  “You were out late last night.”

  Emily looked up from the coffee she was pouring into a mug when Wendy padded silently into the kitchen the next morning. “Not terribly.”

  “It was practically ten.” Wendy reached around her for a coffee mug of her own. “What were you doing?”

  Mildly amused, Emily filled her sister’s mug and replaced the pot on the coffeemaker’s burner. “Maybe I was going wild and crazy like my little sister used to do.”

  Wendy made a face. “Ha-ha. Your idea of wild and crazy is leaving the house without a bra on under your tailored shirt.” She twisted her hair up in a deft twist and stuck a clip in it that she pulled out of the pocket of her silky red robe. Then she poured some cream into her coffee and carried it over to the kitchen table that sat in a sunny little alcove. She sank down onto a chair and stretched out her long, shapely legs before sipping her coffee with catlike pleasure.

  Emily just shook her head. Her sister could roll out of bed and look like a magazine spread for lingerie. She, though, would have to fuss with her hair for two hours just to get some semblance of style into the stubbornly straight strands and she’d have had to have some serious surgery to gain some of the curves that Wendy came by naturally.

  And sad to say, Wendy had her pegged when it came to the whole “wild and crazy” thing.

  “You’re the kind of woman who makes women like me feel like dish rags,” she muttered.

  Wendy rolled her eyes. “So says the epitome of strikingly beautiful Nordic blondes,” she returned. “I know why I’m feeling sleepy this morning. Because my beautiful daughter woke up twice last night. But what’s got you so cranky this lovely morning? Anything to do with whatever mischief you were getting up to last night?”

  “I’m not cranky. And there was no mischief. I had dinner with Max Allen.” Emily sat down across from her sister and sank her nose into her coffee mug. “This decaf stuff is for the birds.” She got back up and added a hefty dose of cream to it.

  “Not cranky my hind end,” Wendy observed. “Open up that plastic container there next to the stove. Maybe you’ll find something in there that’ll help.”

  Emily opened the container and stared almost lasciviously at the pastries inside. “Did you make these?”

  “I did.”

  She plucked one flaky croissant-shaped item out of the container and set it on a paper napkin. “I still can’t believe you can cook.”

  Wendy laughed. “Baking isn’t cooking,” she said.

  “It’s harder,” Marcos said, entering the kitchen just then. He leaned over his wife, planting a kiss on her lips that seemed to raise the temperature in the room by a good five degrees.

  Emily just focused on her flaky pastry that tasted a little like almonds and a lot like something sinful. She couldn’t very well tell her brother-in-law and sister to “get a room” when they were right i
n their very own home.

  Emily was the interloper here.

  She took another huge bite of the pastry and added a spoon of sugar to her coffee. Maybe if she went into a sugar coma, she’d be able to forget about the way she’d practically thrown herself at Max the evening before. “I’m going to take a shower,” she said to nobody in particular, before leaving the room with her creamy, sweet coffee and a second pastry.

  “What’s eating her?” she heard Marcos ask.

  She reached the guestroom she’d commandeered before she heard her sister’s reply. But if she’d thought she’d avoid her sister’s curiosity entirely, she was wrong, which she learned when Wendy boldly walked into the bathroom a while later while hot water poured down on Emily’s head.

  “So…” Wendy flipped down the lid on the commode, blithely ignoring the glare that Emily gave her from around the shower curtain, “Max Allen?”

  “It was business,” Emily said shortly, yanking the shower curtain back in place and sticking her face into the spray of water.

  “Until ten o’clock business?”

  Emily turned her back to the water and rinsed the shampoo out of her hair. “You knew I was meeting with him for Tanner.”

  “And again…until ten o’clock?” Wendy’s voice was full of laughter.

  Emily yanked the curtain back enough to eye her sister. “It was just business.”

  “Methinks you sound a little defensive, sister dear.”

  Emily shut off the water and stuck her hand out. “Make yourself useful and hand me a towel.”

  Wendy dutifully pressed a fluffy white towel into her hand. Emily swiped it over herself and wrapped it around her torso before fully pulling back the shower curtain and stepping out. “We had a lot to go over,” she said. She found a comb in her toiletry bag and began dragging it through the tangles in her hair. “So we worked through dinner at Red.”

  “My favorite restaurant,” Wendy inserted, grinning. “For obvious reasons.” Not only did Marcos manage the place, but Wendy was the pastry chef there. “And very romantic.”

  Emily ignored that. “Excellent food was the goal. But we did run into Jeremy and Max’s sister, Kirsten, there.” She slid a glance toward her sister. “Why didn’t you remind me that Max was her brother?”

  Wendy shrugged. “I didn’t think about it, to be perfectly honest. Why is it a big deal?” Her gaze was still sharp. “I mean, since your interest in Max is just business, anyway?”

  Emily slapped her comb down on the vanity before she tore out her hair by the roots and picked up a tube of face cream instead. “I just felt sort of like an idiot.” She squeezed out a few drops of cream and worked it in. “He’s practically a relation.”

  Wendy picked up the tube that Emily had set down and took the top off, smelling it. “Hardly. Jeremy Fortune is a distant cousin which means his brother-in-law is perfectly free game for an interested woman.”

  Emily exhaled noisily. “Wendy, I am not interested that way.”

  “Lies’ll give you wrinkles,” Wendy advised. She held up the expensive cream. “Better use a little more of this.”

  Emily snatched the tube out of her sister’s hand and capped it again. Then all of her irritation seemed to fizzle out of her. She stared at herself in the mirror but was only seeing Max in her mind’s eye. “Do you know much about him?”

  “Some.” Wendy picked up the comb and stood behind Emily. “Don’t you have conditioner or something to keep your hair from tangling like this?”

  “I’m out. Please don’t tell me you dated him, too.” Until she’d fallen for Marcos, Wendy had been quite the social butterfly.

  Wendy tsked and started working gently at the snarls. “I never dated Max Allen,” she assured. “I do know that he’s sown some of his own wild oats, though. But then, after all that mess with little Anthony—” She broke off, shaking her head.

  Emily studied her sister’s reflection in the mirror over the sink. “Who’s Anthony?”

  Wendy’s gaze met hers in the mirror. “He was Max’s baby. At least that’s what everyone thought for a while.”

  Wendy couldn’t have shocked her more if she’d tried. “Max has a child?”

  Wendy shook her head. “No. It’s a long story. But you remember when William and Lily were supposed to have gotten married last year?”

  Emily nodded. She’d heard the story more than once about how William had gone missing on his and Lily’s wedding day. All of William’s sons—Jeremy being one of them—had been frantic to find him. But it had been months before he’d been found, recovering from an automobile accident, and a while after that before his memories of Lily and his family had fully returned to him.

  “Well, while everyone was worrying over why William hadn’t shown up at the church that day, an old girlfriend of Max’s had basically dumped a baby on him, telling him it was his. He was living with Kirsten at the time and she helped him take care of the baby for a while. But the baby wasn’t Max’s. It was Cooper Fortune’s—did you ever meet Cindy Fortune?” Wendy shook her head before Emily could answer. “Coop’s mother. Anyway, it turned out that the baby had actually been left at the church the day of the wedding.”

  Emily turned around, staring at her sister. “Someone abandoned a baby at the church?”

  “The baby’s real mother. Presumably she’d done it to get the baby to his father, but that got all messed up. Obviously. And Max’s old girlfriend Courtney somehow ended up with the baby, claiming it was hers and Max’s. All lies, of course, and Max ended up turning the baby over to the authorities, and eventually they were able to determine that Cooper was the baby’s natural father.”

  “So what happened to Anthony’s mother?”

  “It was finally discovered that she’d been driving the other car in the same automobile accident that William was involved in on his wedding day.” Wendy’s lips twisted sadly. “She died.”

  Emily was horrified. “How long did Max have the baby?”

  “From what I understand, long enough to get attached. Lily told me that he makes himself scarce whenever Coop or his wife, Kelsey, are around the ranch with his son. She says that Max hasn’t seen the baby since he gave him up. Says he doesn’t want Anthony to be confused about who his father is. She’s tried to convince Max he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore, but he won’t even discuss it.” Wendy handed Emily the comb. “It’s been over a year now.”

  Emily closed her fingers around the comb, the tines digging into her palm. “Maybe he’s just glad to have dodged the fatherhood bullet.”

  Wendy shrugged. “Maybe. Personally, I don’t have any idea. I just know what Lily’s take of the situation is. And, I’m pretty sure Max hasn’t been seeing anyone since. So the field is clear for you if you’re interested.”

  For a woman who’d never factored romance in her life, Emily didn’t want to admit how interested. “It’s just business between us,” she said again.

  Wendy just rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Stock up on that eye cream,” she suggested again, before leaving the bathroom.

  Alone once more, Emily turned to look at herself in the mirror. She was thirty years old. She wanted a baby…by just about any legal means that she could get one.

  But entertaining thoughts about Max and babies in the same sentence was just purely dangerous. Particularly if Max was still hurting after giving up little Anthony.

  She wouldn’t use the attraction between them just to see her own needs fulfilled.

  Would she?

  Chapter Four

  Emily was no closer to an answer later that day when she visited Tanner’s office again to meet with Max.

  She’d called him that morning to check what time was best for him and there’d been nothing remotely personal in his response. And as she sat beside him, giving him a basic tutorial of the graphics program she preferred, she couldn’t help wondering all over again if she’d blown up the attraction between them in her mind. A result of her own desire
for a family of her own?

  “How’s that look?”

  She gathered her wandering thoughts and focused on Max’s brochure layout showing on the computer screen. “It looks great.” And then she focused a little harder. “Really, really great.” His design was eye-catching, modern and simple. And he’d picked up most of the basics in the span of an afternoon. “I don’t have people in my department who pick up things as quickly as you do.”

  He gave her a sideways look. “Offering me a job?”

  She ignored the tightening inside her chest. “Interested in exchanging Red Rock for Atlanta?”

  His lips tilted a little. He shook his head. “Once Red Rock’s in your blood, it tends to stay there.”

  “I’m learning that myself.” And then, because he was still looking at her and she was in danger of squirming in her chair, she leaned forward, tapping the edge of the layout with her fingernail. “Try offsetting the edge of the plane just a little so it looks like it’s flying onto the page.”

  His hand covered the computer mouse again and his arm brushed against her. Emily inhaled silently and leaned back again while he moved the image.

  “Nice. Looks better.” He hit the print command and turned his chair until he was facing her. “I set up a lesson for you.”

  It was difficult concentrating when he focused those blue eyes on her. “What kind of lesson?”

  His smile widened a little. “Flying.”

  Duh. She felt her face flush. “Right. That’s not really necessary.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Of course not.”

  “Then…what’s a little lesson?” His lips tilted. “It’ll give you a better sense of what I need to convey with—” he reached behind him and lifted the page off the printer behind him “—stuff like this.”

  She slid the page from his fingers and spread it on his desk, studying it. “You’re conveying quite nicely all on your own, here.”

  “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

  She glanced at him, but her eyes seemed to hesitate on the curve of his lower lip. Very curious. “Maybe,” she said much more moderately. “A little.”