Fortune Found (8 page)

Of course, yesterday's rock-collecting outing had also been a family event and not a date.

But still, she lectured herself, she needed to not let anything develop between herself and Flint.

And yet the fact that Flint had hung back when he could have left earlier with Kelsey and Cooper or when the kids went up to bed… Well, did that mean he'd had a plan for getting a few minutes alone with her?

Jessie couldn't stifle the little rush of excitement at that thought.

And that little rush of excitement felt so good.

“All done. How about you?”

Jessie startled at Flint's voice, but recovered quickly.

“I'm done, too,” she said, turning off the water and closing the dishwasher.

“Then lead me to the putterings.”

He'd put a wicked twist to the word that time and
she knew he'd done it on purpose to tease her. It made her smile, but she didn't acknowledge his goading; she merely led him out the rear door.

As they crossed the yard—careful to step around the jungle gym parts and pieces that had yet to be put together—Jessie said, “When we rented the apartment it was furnished and everything is still in it, just pushed against the walls. It looks kind of messy—”

“I've never been in an art studio that didn't look messy.”

“I'm just saying that it's kind of a mishmash.”

When they reached the studio, Jessie opened the door and flipped on the light. She went in ahead of Flint.

The space wasn't large and with the exception of a bathroom and closet at the far end, it was just one big open room with the separate sections defined by the small refrigerator, stove and sink against one wall; a double bed and dresser near the bathroom and closet end; and a sofa, easy chair and two end tables riding the wall that ran beside the door.

When Jessie had taken it over as an art studio she'd added a huge worktable smack-dab in the center of the place. The worktable was laden with stones and supplies, while sections of the floor, all the counters, the small kitchen table, the end tables and every shelf of the bookcase held finished sculptures.

“Ta-da!” she said with forced flourish as she crossed the space to flip another switch and flood the place with even more light.

She'd shown her sculptures to people other than family and friends before, and while she was never completely comfortable with it, it hadn't ever made her feel as vulnerable as she did now. But there was no stopping
Flint as he began to examine her work with all the somber study of an art lover at the Louvre.

Her discomfort wouldn't allow her to keep quiet, though, so she said, “It's sort of like people who put up easels in the countryside and paint landscapes—I see rock formations and waterfalls and things in the woods, and then come home and try to reproduce them. Like little pieces of nature that can be brought indoors.”

Flint nodded that handsome head of his, but he wouldn't be distracted from studying sculpture after sculpture.

And Jessie still couldn't merely stand there and watch him.

“The kids and I wash most of the rocks,” she continued to babble. “But if we've found some with moss growing on them, I wait till any mud or dirt is dry enough to brush off so I can leave the moss undisturbed—I think it adds a little something. And a few of the pieces have water—a guy at the hobby shop showed me how I could hide small reservoirs in some of them and pump the water up and over the top like waterfalls.”

“This one?” Flint asked, pointing to the first of those that he'd reached. “Will you show me?”

She went to where he was standing and leaned in front of him to turn on the water feature, catching a whiff of his cologne as she did, and making her all the more aware of him and the effect he had on her. It didn't help her composure.

Which launched her into more chatter.

“The kids love it when I use the rocks they've picked up. They feel like they have their own part in the sculptures. Of course sometimes that means they get competitive and insist that the sculpture with their particular
rocks are better than the other ones and then I take the brunt of it because they'll say the other ones are ugly.”

“I don't see anything ugly here,” Flint said without taking his eyes off her work. And the fact that he sounded as if he genuinely meant it gave her a tiny wave of elation.

“Kelsey chose that one as a housewarming gift,” she said when he had circled the entire place and ended at the door where she'd set another of the fountain sculptures on the end table there. “I thought I'd bring it on Sunday to the party. So, now that I think of it, I guess you would have seen what I do with the rocks then…”

“I'm glad I didn't have to wait.”

Flint had seen how to turn on the water on the other fountain and so he did it with the one that would be Kelsey and Coop's.

Jessie busied herself shutting down the first one.

“You really don't know what you have here, do you?” he asked then.

“A whole bunch of rock piles?” Jessie joked as she pivoted in his direction, watching him watch the miniature wall of water cascade over moss rocks into a replica of a pond that was lined with mica rock to reflect blues and greens from beneath and make the water appear to shimmer.

“These are beautiful,” he declared.

Then he stopped the water feature on the sculpture and switched his focus to Jessie, catching her staring as he crossed to her big square worktable.

“Honestly,” he said as he did. “They're beautiful.”

“Thanks,” she responded quietly to his reiteration of the compliment, ill at ease with it.

There were bar stools around the worktable that she
sat on when she worked, that the kids used when they came to watch her. Flint perched a hip on one of them, stretching a long leg far out from it and hooking his other boot heel over the front rung, obviously having no intention of leaving now that they'd done what they'd come out there to do.

Not that Jessie was sorry to see that. Much as she knew she should avoid it, a little time alone with him seemed like a treat…a reward. So she joined him, sitting around the corner from him so she could face him.

Flint used his index finger to indicate the three unoccupied bar stools. “Do you have help putting your sculptures together?”

Jessie laughed. “No, but sometimes I have an audience. I think the kids come here when I'm working because it's like a session with a therapist for them. So even when I think that the income from renting the place again would help give me a cushion, I don't do it because the money isn't as important as the closeness I get from that alone time with the kids when they come out here with me on their own to talk. Sometimes I get to see a whole different side to them.”

“But all this—” Flint motioned to the rock sculptures on the table. “This shows that their mom has a whole other side herself. An alter ego who's an artist. And they get to see that.”

Back to being embarrassed. “I don't think of myself as an artist.”

“You should. I'm telling you, these are really wonderful. So why don't you let this space make you some money after all?”

“You lost me,” Jessie said, frowning in confusion.

“Why not sell the sculptures?”

She laughed and something about that caused him to smile.

“I'm serious, Jessie,” he said, his eyes so intently on her that she was afraid she might blush. “These are good.
You're
good. I know I can either sell them outright to some of the shops I deal with or place them in a few of the galleries for sale.”

“No,” she demurred in disbelief. “They're just…my little rock piles.”

Flint chuckled at that. “Your
little rock piles
are intricate and multifaceted little natural wonders of their own. Haven't you ever sold one?”

“I don't even give them away unless someone asks for one. I don't want anyone to have to hide them in a closet and then try to remember to take them out when I visit to make me think they don't hate the weird gift I gave them.”

Flint shook his head. “I'm telling you that I can sell them. Why don't you let me put out some feelers and prove it to you?”

Flattered, Jessie was still hesitant. She found it difficult to believe that her sculptures were as good as he said and could actually bring in money.

But there was another facet to his suggestion—doing business with Flint would mean more of a continuing connection with him.

And in the midst of her strongest attractions to him, her most potent fantasies about him, her daydreams and inability to stop thinking about him almost every waking minute, it was the fact that he wouldn't be staying in Red Rock that made that all seem not so dangerous. The fact that he would leave and that from then on her contact with him would be rare, gave her hope that what
seemed like it might be a tiny crush on him would just resolve itself.

But if he sold her sculptures?

There would definitely be maintained contact. And it wouldn't merely be from a distance on an occasional visit he might make to his brother next door. It would be a continuing arrangement just between the two of them. Complete with the potential that she would go on harboring this ever-growing attraction to him while he dropped in, poured fuel on the fire, and then sauntered out again to get on with the rest of his life.

That didn't seem like something that would be good for her in the long run. So she tried to decline.

“No, I don't think so,” she said.

“Jessie, you could be sitting on Ella's entire college education right here in this room.”

“Come on, that isn't true,” she said, actually leery of believing that, because putting anything in terms of her kids was her weakest spot and she knew it would be all the more difficult to resist what he was suggesting.

“It is true,” he insisted. “You can make some serious bank here, lady.”

“I can't believe that.”

He reached across the corner of her worktable and took her hand, rubbing the back of it with his thumb. “Like I said, let me prove it to you. Let me take some pictures of the pieces and show them to my people. If I'm right—”

“If you're wrong it will be humiliating.”

He smiled gently, patiently. “I'm not wrong. I know my business, my buyers, my market. And when I come back to you with facts and figures,
then
you can tell me what you want to do. Or not.”

He could be wrong,
Jessie thought. Which would solve the problem. Or if he was right, by the time what he was proposing actually happened, maybe she would have found some fatal flaw in him that totally turned her off. And any amount of contact she might have to have with him wouldn't matter…because he wouldn't be so enticing.

“You don't have anything to lose,” he said.

His hand was big and strong and warm, and hers seemed to fit into it as if it were made to be there. Plus his eyes were holding hers so tenderly that they were making it impossible not to trust him.

And heaven help her, she heard herself say, “Okay, you can take pictures. Then we'll see.”

Flint grinned and Jessie felt much, much too happy to have pleased him.

“You won't be sorry,” he promised, squeezing her hand, still gazing into her eyes, making her think for the millionth time about that kiss they'd shared the night before.

Then he let go of her hand and got up from the bar stool, and Jessie had the oddest yen to reach out and take his hand back, to keep him from leaving.

Of course she didn't do that. Instead, as she stood, too, she heard him say, “We've been warned that tomorrow will be jam-packed—”

“Right. Everything needs to be finished, the house needs to be cleaned, and we have to get set up for the housewarming party on Sunday,” Jessie confirmed.

“So I'd better let you get some rest. I heard Kelsey tell you to come over at seven tomorrow morning.”

“We're even putting the kids and Mom and Dad to work, but they'll be over later.”

While Flint went to the studio door and opened it, Jessie turned off the light switch on the opposite wall. Just as she was joining him at the door he flipped off that light switch, too.

The moon was nearly full and very bright, illuminating the dark studio.

“This is kind of like being out in the woods with you again,” Flint said.

He was standing in the doorway, facing the shelves inside. Jessie took a look over her shoulder at what he was seeing as her backdrop. Somehow the stone sculptures drank in the moonlight and reflected it back, making them stand out in the milky glow more than any of the furniture.

“I suppose if you put enough of them around it
is
like being out in the forest,” she agreed.

“Only here I get you all to myself. I'm beginning to see the appeal of the studio.”

Jessie wasn't too sure what to say to that. And because he was blocking the exit she couldn't get past him to go outside. So there she was, standing in the moon glow, facing Flint.

And again thinking about that kiss from the night before.

“Early day tomorrow,” she said in a voice far softer and more breathy than she'd intended it to be.

“Early day tomorrow and I should get going. I shouldn't be…” He muttered to himself as he took a step toward her, raised that same big, strong hand that had held hers earlier and placed it gently to the side of her face.

She had to tilt her head up to see him when he closed the distance between them. Or at least that's what she
told herself, not wanting to admit that the movement could also be interpreted as an invitation. And certainly letting his hand stay on her face was not a rebuff, even though in her mind she was checking off the reasons why she shouldn't let this happen again and adding to the list the fact that they could be working together in the future.