Jessie goaded her sister, turning the tables to distract her.
It didn’t work.
“No! It’s because I’m so in love with Coop that I want the same thing for you. And because I’ve learned firsthand that these Fortune men are men worth having and I want you to have a man who’s worth having. The way Pete was.”
“You can’t be sure that Flint Fortune is a man worth having just based on his brother. You barely know Flint himself.”
That particular member of the famed Fortune family of Texas didn’t live in their small town of Red Rock where so many other Fortunes did, so he was a stranger to both Kelsey and Jessie. A stranger who had come into town when suspicions arose that an abandoned baby might have been his son, the baby who had proved instead to be Coop’s child. The fact that Flint Fortune was inclined now to help out his brother and spend a little time with the rest of the family he didn’t seem close to, didn’t mean he was any less of a stranger to Kelsey or to Jessie.
“Okay, maybe I don’t really know much about him,” Kelsey admitted. “But I know he’s Coop’s brother and a really, really, hot guy …”
“Hot is not enough to sell him,” Jessie persisted.
But it was the one thing Jessie couldn’t argue because it was the plain and simple truth. She’d met Flint at the party Lily Fortune had had at the Double Crown ranch to introduce baby Anthony to the whole clan. And while Jessie might not have become wide-eyed with instant hero-worship of Flint the way her youngest son had, she had certainly not been able to overlook how impossibly attractive the man was.
“And no matter how hot he is,” she said to her sister, “I’m not in the market for any man.”
Not that she had so much as the most remote hope that any man was likely to want a widow with four small children. And if she allowed for the possibility of having a man in her life and then got rejected by him because of her kids? That just wasn’t a door she wanted opened. For her kids or for herself.
Plus rejection also equaled loss, and putting herself or her kids in line for suffering the loss of another man was also not—absolutely not—something she was going to do.
“Adam already thinks Flint hangs the moon …” Kelsey reminded in a singsong intended to tempt Jessie.
“Well, Flint doesn’t hang the moon,” Jessie responded in the same singsong. “He’s just a guy in a world full of guys who I don’t have the time or the inclination to mess around with.”
“Look at yourself,” Kelsey implored, stepping back, taking Jessie by the shoulders and turning her to face the mirror. “You look fantastic. Don’t wait around until the lines come in and everything starts to sag and droop and shrivel up—”
“Thank you so much for that image of my future.”
Jessie scowled, then craned her head to get a better glimpse of her sable-colored brown hair in the back. “One way or another, this hair clip hurts and I don’t want it,” she said, taking it out and shaking her hair so it fell free around her shoulders.
“The blush is nice, though, isn’t it?” Kelsey said. “It’s a little sparkly.”
Jessie studied her face more closely in the mirror, wondering if her slightly pale skin or her brown eyes or her maybe-a-little-too-straight-and-thin nose really were good enough to get her another man …
But she shied away from even the thought of that and judged the blush alone. “Yeah, it’s nice.” Because it did accentuate her high cheekbones and give her a healthy glow.
“Now tuck your T-shirt into your jeans so your butt shows,” Kelsey said, as if that simple admission that the blush was nice had encouraged her.
“Kelsey—”
“Come on. Those aren’t your best jeans, but you still have a good rear end that can almost be seen in them.” Kelsey began to tuck in the back of Jessie’s T-shirt.
“Will you stop?” Jessie protested.
“No, I won’t!” Kelsey decreed. “It’s bad enough that you’re wearing a big old T-shirt with a slogan on it, at least tuck it in.”
“I beg your pardon! The kids gave me this T-shirt for Mother’s Day and I like it,” she said, looking fondly down at the front of it where a picture of all four kids mugging for a camera stared back at her from beneath lettering that proclaimed her the World’s Greatest Mom.
“I know—I helped them pick it out. But you were supposed to sleep in it, not wear it outside of the house,” Kelsey chastised.
“I can’t just sleep in it. One of them might think I’m not proud of it.”
It was Kelsey who rolled her eyes this time. “Just tuck it in at least, and come out and say hello to Flint.”
“I don’t suppose I have a choice because he’s out there.”
Well, she did have a choice about tucking in or not tucking in the T-shirt. And even though she assured herself that she was only doing it so she didn’t look like a slob, she unzipped her jeans, tugged the tails of the shirt down inside them and then zipped them up again.
“Happy?” she asked her sister as if she’d only done it to appease Kelsey.
But while Jessie had tucked in her T-shirt, Kelsey had produced a hairbrush from somewhere and was holding that out to her. “Now put this through your hair and I try this lipstick—”
“No lipstick!” Jessie refused. But she took the brush and swiped it through her hair just so she was presentable. Certainly not to impress Flint Fortune or any other man.
And for that same reason, just before she followed Kelsey out of the bathroom, she took one final glance at herself in the mirror.
And regretted that she hadn’t worn jeans that were slightly less baggy.
And a T-shirt that wasn’t so oversize she should only be using it for pajamas.
But truly, it was just because she didn’t like to meet anyone when she looked sloppy.
It had nothing to do with Flint Fortune himself.
Truly.
“See, Mom? I tol’ you—iss Fwint!”
“Yes, I see—F-l-int,” Jessie answered her son, correcting Adam’s pronunciation, before she focused her attention on the new arrival after Kelsey had welcomed him with a hug.
“Hi, Flint,” Jessie greeted the man whose presence seemed to command the living room where he stood, a full five-feet-eleven inches of pure masculinity.
“Hi. Jessie, right? You’re Kelsey’s sister?”
“She’s my sister all right,” Kelsey confirmed with great enthusiasm.
But to Jessie the question had sounded like a shot-in-the-dark guess and she thought that
