Reckless Fortune, page 6
But it had been clear that she was missing nothing, and so, once she’d had the full experience, she’d stopped worrying about men and their parts and their backs and had gotten back to taking care of her family.
Yet never in any high school dating scenario, or even her short-lived experience with what was supposed to be passion a few years ago, had she ever felt anything like this.
And all she was doing was standing across the room, looking at Bowie Fortune’s back.
He turned then, and even though she knew that last night hadn’t actually been dark until after midnight and the sun had been up before her, she felt as if the morning light were breaking through whole nighttimes all the same. It poured in through the skylights and windows and lit him up like he was gilded, too.
It washed over a chest so mouthwatering it really should have come with a warning label.
There was just no getting away from that shocking, stunning beauty of his.
She was never going to be prepared.
It was so unfair.
At least she could trot out a reality show persona to fall back on in moments like this. It didn’t matter what she, the actual Autumn McCall, might have said or done in this situation. It didn’t matter that really, if it had been just her, she might have succumbed to her helpless knees and crumpled right down to the kitchen floor. What other reaction was a living, breathing woman expected to have when faced with that much astonishingly mouthwatering male beauty, right there in front of her when she hadn’t even had a chance to get a cup of coffee?
But when she remembered that she’d told him that she more or less thought she was on an episode of Survivor, the path forward became clear.
“We need to discuss sex,” she announced.
Autumn had always been good at projecting authority. The more unearned, the better. How else could a grieving fourteen-year-old fulfill her promise to her dying mother and take care of the whole freaking family? She’d simply acted as if she’d been taking care of everyone all along and they’d fallen in line.
She didn’t see how one overly attractive Alaskan pilot could be more difficult than a grumpy widower and three obnoxious little sisters, who were still texting their feelings at her. She could feel the phone buzz in her pocket. Again and again.
It was only as the silence drew out that she registered the details that all that morning sun and his general hotness had obscured. Bowie looked a little . . . rumpled. Slept in, a voice inside her whispered salaciously, the way one of her sisters would. His eyes, still the color of a Montana night, were sleepy. That dark hair of his looked as if he’d run his hands through it, then let it do what it liked.
But as he stared back at her, clearly startled by what she’d said, the look in his eyes changed. There was a gleam there now that made her pulse begin to catapult around the base of her neck.
And make a racket in other places farther south, too.
Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown out the word sex so starkly. As ever, that sort of thing occurred to her too late.
“Do we have to talk about sex?” Bowie asked.
Mildly.
Too mildly.
Autumn realized her delivery could have been better. And maybe her timing. Maybe the real truth was that she wasn’t cut out to be an amoral reality show contestant. But she brazened it out, because that was what she did.
It was the only thing she knew how to do.
“We do,” she said in the tone a field hockey coach might use, not that she was an expert on field hockey or coaches. But she thought she was hitting the right note of can-do forcefulness. “I think yesterday we were euphemistically dancing around the subject, but I want to be clear.”
“Clear is good,” Bowie agreed. “Who doesn’t like a little clarity?”
She could hear all that laughter in his voice again and was halfway certain she could see it on his face, too. But he didn’t actually laugh. He just seemed to fill the room with it without even trying.
Trust a beautiful person to exude things effortlessly while everyone else had to work to even make a splash.
“No romance, no sex, and no parading around naked,” Autumn said, in far more repressive tones than she might have used had she not started thinking of all the things that were probably dead easy for a man like him. “This is a literal eyes-on-the-prize situation.” She flapped a hand in the direction of his naked chest. The whole mesmerizing sweep of it. “That’s all very distracting.”
“I’m touched that a cutthroat contestant like you allows herself the occasional distraction at all,” he drawled. “Much less little old me.”
Little old him. There was something about the way he said it—or maybe that he said it at all—that made her want to explode. And that was not her style. She wasn’t a yeller. She didn’t flush all kinds of colors and blow her top. She had proven that she could weather any storm with equanimity, living on an isolated ranch with her entire family all those years. She would have said she had been tested and had proven herself, but apparently Bowie Fortune was a different kind of test.
She refused to fail.
“We’ve hit the ground running,” Autumn told him, back to her demented field hockey coach impression. “We need to get out ahead of it. Start as we mean to go on.”
“Yes,” Bowie said, and now he wasn’t exuding humor so much as laughing outright. “All of those phrases are empty, yet somehow mean the same thing.”
Autumn was beginning to worry that it was entirely possible that she was always going to be this uncomfortable around him. Always overheated, pulse rocketing around inside her, and her breath tangled up in the back of her throat. She was going to have to get used to it.
“I don’t think you’d like it if I was walking around without a shirt on,” she said, hoping she sounded reasonable and calm when she felt neither. “So why are you?”
And if she hadn’t been standing there, staring right at him, perfectly capable of seeing that there were no hands around his neck, she would’ve thought that Bowie was being strangled.
“You’re right,” he said, in that odd, half-choked voice. “It would be terrible if you were walking around without a shirt on.”
He seemed to be frozen where he stood, an arrested sort of look on his face and still the clear sense that something had him by the neck.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
Bowie cleared his throat. Twice. “I think the jury is out on that one, darlin’.”
“Darlin’. Nice,” she said brightly, when that was not exactly how she would describe her body’s response to hearing him drawl an endearment. She might know that a man like him said darlin’ indiscriminately, but tell that to each and every overly warm part of her. They were all clamoring for attention now. “That will definitely help set the fake-marriage mood.”
“To clarify,” he said, and she watched, more intrigued than she should have been, surely, as he dragged a hand over his face. “The marriage part is a gimmick. You know that, right? We’re not trying to convince anyone that we’re actually married. We’re seeing if you can tough it out here for three months, do some survival stuff, and not run screaming back down to the Lower Forty-eight before Labor Day.”
“I will not be running off screaming to anywhere,” Autumn replied loftily. “I told you, I have every intention of winning. But since you’re the one doing this on a lark—”
“I beg your pardon. A dare, not a lark. I do have some pride.”
She didn’t see what pride had to do with either one, but she waved it all aside. “Since you’re the one doing whatever you’re doing while I try to actually win the thing, an endearment here and there can only help. It sets the scene.”
“Autumn.” And she could see the blue in his eyes then. Or maybe she was hallucinating things because of the way he said her name. “Are you telling me you like it when I call you darlin’?”
It was as if everything stopped.
Again.
The things she was aware of seemed to take over the world. Her breath. The way he looked at her. Her feet against the wood floor. The way she held herself so still, like everything inside her was pulled taut—
He didn’t move, either.
It could have lasted hours. Days.
But then Bowie broke the strange tension between them. He turned and scooped up a henley that she hadn’t noticed hanging like a dishcloth on one of his cabinets. Because she hadn’t noticed much of anything when faced with acres and acres of lean muscles and smooth-looking skin.
It felt like an ache to be released from that strange little spell, but then there was a new ache as she watched him shrug his shirt back on and return his attention to what he was cooking.
“No need to keep clutching those pearls,” he said gruffly, not looking at her. “I don’t normally wander around half-dressed. I dumped coffee on myself.”
She pulled in a breath, not surprised and yet also dismayed that it was so shaky. “Coffee?”
He jutted his chin toward a counter across the kitchen from him and Autumn couldn’t tell if she was grateful for the coffee itself or that she now had a task to perform that didn’t involve gaping at his body.
Or, worse in some ways, trying to act like she thought she was some strategic mastermind, planning to somehow use the middle-of-nowhere local publicity stunt as a stepping-stone to . . . what? Extreme regional greatness?
Her problem was, despite all the reality show episodes Donna had made them watch, Autumn had always disliked everybody on every show. When clearly she should have been psychoanalyzing them all and taking notes.
But there was coffee. That was something. Especially when she added a little of the creamer he’d put out, took a sip, and felt confident that her synapses were finally firing. And that all would be well.
Or at least she might stop shooting her mouth off before she thought better of it.
One or the other. Just so long as she never again decided it would be a good idea to talk to Bowie about sex, of all things. When it was already all she could think about when she looked at him.
Before laying eyes on this man, she would have said—and often had—that the general human preoccupation with sex baffled her. She’d tried it. It was fine.
There had been no near-catastrophic internal explosions. It had been pleasant. Civilized. She’d found it profoundly interesting to welcome another person into her body, but she had not felt the need to welcome said person back.
She wasn’t sure she’d really ever thought twice about her experience in the back of sweet Grady Harold’s pickup since. But now, thinking about stretching out in the back of a pickup truck with Bowie Fortune made her break out in goose bumps.
This is the first day, she lectured herself, glaring down at her coffee. If you can’t pull it together, what hope do you have of winning this?
And she really did want to win it. She needed to win it.
It was a $10,000 prize. And split in half, that gave her $5,000, the precise amount it would take to get her mother’s jewelry out of hock.
Her father didn’t know that Autumn knew he’d sold off the jewelry a year ago, just like he didn’t know she knew why. He’d wanted all his girls at his wedding to Donna, dressed pretty the way Donna wanted it, but he didn’t want it to cost any one of them a dime.
Because he was remarrying and he didn’t think they’d like it. Maybe paying for the whole thing was a bribe.
But Autumn knew that her mother would have loved that he’d done what he’d had to do to get all the girls home and dressed as part of the wedding—and the new family they were making. She would have applauded the idea that items he’d once given to her in love could be used to spread that love forward. Autumn knew that in her heart. And also because her mom had told her, repeatedly, how worried she was about Hunter and what he’d do with himself once she passed. How sure she was that he would make himself a hermit, then waste away in his own misery.
He had tried his best to do it.
Autumn knew that their mother would have pawned the jewelry herself if she could, but she also knew her sisters would find that hard to take on board. Maybe even impossible. But Autumn had no intention of standing idly by and giving her younger sisters, who’d been coddled their whole lives, another reason to speak ill of their father. It was already bad enough they called Donna their wicked stepmother. Or sometimes even stepmonster, when Donna had never said an unkind word to another soul in all her life. The truth about the jewelry would be like a bomb dropped into the middle of the family.
And Autumn hadn’t spent nearly half her life trying to keep the family together for something like this to tear them apart.
She was going to win that money. To save her family, and also because she knew her dad had only the rest of the summer to raise the money to get the jewelry back. Sweet old Mr. Daniels at the pawnshop in Missoula had extended the loan as long as he could, he’d said sorrowfully in the last message he’d left. Right there on the old school answering machine where anyone could hear it.
Autumn doubted very much that her dad had an extra $5,000 sitting around. Neither did she. But she could win it—and she would.
Beautiful men with astonishing backs notwithstanding.
“Breakfast,” Bowie said gruffly, snapping her back to the here and now.
She was still standing at the kitchen counter in his uniquely rambling house in Alaska, her coffee mug in her hands. Pretending not only to be some kind of hard-hearted reality show person, but also that she was in no way overwhelmed by the man she was supposed to spend these next three months with.
She’d known that Alaska was far away from everything and she’d assumed the man she ended up with would be a project, because men always were. What was important was that she could access the internet so she could research things at will and never had to feel too alone here. She already had the texts to prove she wasn’t too isolated. This was going to be fine.
Fine.
She turned around, trying to smile in a manner both professional and calming, whatever that was, but he wasn’t hanging around waiting to see what expression she had on her face. He was already shouldering his way out through the back door, so she followed him.
And found him settling down at a table on yet another porch, this one covered. And with a view of that beautiful lake once more. It was brighter now. The water seemed bluer. She’d been staring at mountains her whole life, and loved tracking weather and seasons across their peaks, but water was different. She thought she could spend a whole lifetime staring at the surface of the lake, always different from the moment before. Three months of this seemed like a treat.
“Any chance I get to be outside in summer, I take it,” Bowie was saying. “That’s the kind of thing you hold on to, round about January.”
“I hear you,” she said, crossing to the little table to sit down with him.
“Before we got off topic with dress codes and anti-sex pacts,” Bowie said, his dark blue eyes gleaming again, “my intention was to have a celebratory breakfast. It’s a tradition in my family. When everyone gets together, we make pancakes.”
“I’m delighted to qualify as ‘everyone.’ ”
She meant that to come out as offhandedly sophisticated. Arch and amusing, the way Jade always managed to sound. But she was sitting on an isolated porch with a gorgeous man and one of the prettiest views she’d ever seen, and she was no good at sophisticated or arch.
It was a little demoralizing to comprehend that she would probably make a terrible reality show villain. That she didn’t have what it took.
Bowie only smiled a little, hopefully unaware of her internal struggle for the sort of sophistication that would be out of place here anyway. “Today we’ll take a tour of the land and make sure you know how to operate the vehicles around here. You need to know how to get around.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “So I can go about my business, which is winning, and you can go about yours, which is . . . not hindering me from winning, right?”
Last night it had sounded like he would help, but she didn’t want to sound too presumptuous.
He stopped in the act of forking fluffy pancakes on to her plate. “I can help. And I don’t want you to feel trapped here, Autumn. It might be the Alaskan bush but the entire point of being out here is that it’s not a prison.”
“Right. And that.”
She took the plate he handed her, piled high with pancakes drenched in butter, and decided she had never been so ravenous in her life. There were two syrup jugs on the table, one birch and one maple. Autumn reached for the maple but then grabbed the birch syrup at the last moment, because that seemed deeply, authentically Alaskan and why not dive in? She dragged the jug close, tipping it over the mound of pancakes until they were flooded with a spicy sweetness she could smell on the morning breeze.
“You might want to brace yourself,” Bowie told her when she set the jug back down.
“For the impending sugar rush? Don’t you worry. I can’t wait.”
His face changed. It got . . . not softer, exactly. But it made her feel softer. “Tonight my entire family wants to meet you.”
He had talked about his family. He’d pointed out that they lived close by—or close by according to rural Alaska standards, anyway. He might have mentioned that dinner with them was expected last night, though all she could really remember was shoveling pasta in her mouth.
But she hadn’t really thought about meeting his family. In the way a woman who came home with a man might expect she would. It made Bowie seem, distressingly, like a real person, not just the key to her plans for this contest.
