Getting Lucky (2 page)

And she’d just lost her mom. God. Any thought of tossing her back onto the gravel road leading
away
from his house was gone with that. Her mom had died recently, and she was here wanting to meet his father. There was really only one conclusion to reach, but he stubbornly ignored it.

Not that it mattered.

There was a beautiful woman in need on his doorstep.
Another
beautiful woman in need. He’d been there and had the T-shirt.

This had all the makings of a big, dramatic emotional entanglement. Exactly the last thing TJ wanted. Ever again.

“You look a lot like him though,” the woman said, studying TJ.

He shifted his weight. Fuck. He did
not
want to do this. He had work to do that would take him twice as long with one arm. He had a mother to convince that he was fine. He had grumpiness to practice.

And he wouldn’t want to do this even if he felt great and had nothing else to do.

This was trouble. He sensed it.

“He’s your dad, right?” she finally asked.

What was he going to do here? TJ nodded.

“Is he…still alive?” she asked carefully.

He actually snorted at that. “Uh, yeah. Very.” His dad was a big, tough, outgoing smart-ass. He couldn’t imagine anything taking him down. Ever.

She looked relieved at that. “And he still lives here?”

That meant she hadn’t spent much time in town. It would take her about three seconds in the gas station, diner, grocery store or bakery to find out all of that information. Or it was very possible she’d run into Thomas himself at the gas station, diner, grocery store or bakery.

Sapphire Falls was a small town with very few secrets.

Except…maybe there were a few skeletons in closets around here. He could only hope the closet wasn’t his father’s.

TJ sighed. “He still lives here. Why do you really want to find him though? Not just to reminisce about your mom, I’m guessing.”

He didn’t want to hear this.

She swallowed and looked hesitant. Those big round emerald eyes were easy to read. She recognized that he wasn’t going to like whatever she was about to say.

“What’s your name?” he asked when she hadn’t answered.

Her lack of answer was kind of answer in and of itself.

“Hope.”

He stared at her. Hope.

Well, of course it was. Because he hadn’t had hope in a really long time. And now Hope was right in front of him and he still couldn’t have it—her—because…

“I think he might be my father.”

Hearing it was way worse than thinking it.

TJ took a step back, out of reach of her flowery scent, away from the freckles and the pixie ears and the tattoo that he
still
wanted to see closer.

Fuck
.

Things really did keep getting better and better.

He was stirred by the first woman in a long time and she might just be his
sister
.

The look on TJ Bennett’s face was a mix of shock, frustration and pain.

The pain, she didn’t really get.

Except that she was feeling a pain of her own.

The man was hot. Really hot. Big and solid, with an attitude that said most people listened to him and no one messed with him. He wore a ball cap instead of a cowboy hat, but otherwise he looked the part of a country boy she’d always imagined—blue jeans, T-shirt and boots. And muscles and tanned skin and scruffy jaw…and muscles.

The word
rugged
suddenly had a very visual definition.

And he might be her
brother
.

Ew
.

It was so unfair. She hadn’t been attracted to anyone in a long time and her life had really sucked lately. The idea of spending some time in the little town that had changed her mother’s life had seemed like the perfect solution.

Hope knew she had been conceived in Sapphire Falls. She also knew this photo was the only one her mother had kept in a special place in her journal and looked at regularly. Only one man’s name was written on the back. Thomas John Bennett. He had to be the one. The guy Melody had loved. Hope’s father.

So she’d let her company know she was taking some time off, packed her mom’s stuff—her clothes, her books, her journals—into her mom’s teeny tiny camper and had headed for Sapphire Falls.

Of course, Hope hadn’t ever used the camper before, and she hadn’t realized just how teeny tiny the camper really was. Melody had been all about a minimalist lifestyle, not becoming dependent on material things, trusting the universe to bring her what she needed when she needed it.

Living like her mom, even for a summer, was going to take some getting used to.

And then there was the idea of meeting her father.

That was also going to take some getting used to.

It had always just been her and her mom. She knew that her father knew nothing about her and she’d always accepted Melody’s assertion that the universe had given Hope to Melody, not to them as a couple. The summer had changed Melody’s life, not her father’s life. It had always seemed normal and happy to have only a mother. Lots of kids she knew had unique family situations. It had never fazed Hope a bit.

Until her mom died.

Now Hope was filling the summer with things that had been important to her mom to try to understand her better. They had gone through many of the typical mother-daughter phases. Like Hope rebelling against her mother’s practices and beliefs simply because they were her mother’s practices and beliefs. They just hadn’t had a chance to get to that phase where the daughter came back around and realized how much they had in common and that her mom was a really amazing person after all.

Some of her hopes for the summer came from grief. Absolutely. But some of it was the self-awareness that Melody had possessed a wisdom and confidence and peace that Hope wanted. She’d expected once she was an adult and had experiences and adventures of her own, she and her mom would find common ground.

Now they would never get to that point.

The woman Hope had adored and who had challenged her and driven her crazy was gone.

Hope had more growing to do. She wasn’t sure she knew how to do it without her mom.

So she was living life in Melody’s footsteps this summer. Living the way Melody had and visiting the places and people who had been important to Melody in her life.

Including Hope’s dad.

“How old are you?”

Hope focused on the big man still frowning down at her.

“Twenty-five.”

He stood looking at her, saying nothing else.

“So…” Hope said into the silence that stretched between her and TJ Bennett. The younger Thomas John. The son of Thomas John Bennett.

Her maybe half-brother.

Yeah, still
ew
.

She’d definitely been having lusty thoughts about him. He was just so…there. No woman could ignore this guy. He took up space like he owned it, like the space molded around him, wanting to be close.

Holy crap.

“Can you tell me where he lives?” she asked, concentrating on the thing that had brought her here from Arizona. Not big, bulging biceps, not wide shoulders, not dark-blue eyes that somehow seemed suspicious and inviting at the same time.

TJ’s eyes narrowed. “No.”

Hope felt her eyebrows arch. “No?”

It was a small town. Surely she could ask the first person she saw on the street. Of course, the lady at the bakery had been super friendly but had sent her
here
instead of to the elder Thomas. Maybe she’d misunderstood Hope when she asked where Thomas John Bennett lived. Maybe she’d assumed Hope was looking for TJ. She supposed that was possible. He was closer to her age, and she figured there were women wanting to find this Thomas all the time.

“No.”

Clearly, her possible half-brother wasn’t the type to go on and on and on.

“Why not?”

“There is no way in
hell
I’m letting you waltz your pretty butt up onto my dad’s front porch and screw everything up unless you know
for sure
what happened between him and your mom.”

Her pretty butt? Those three words were so distracting that Hope had to shake her head and replay the last couple of minutes to remember that he was saying
no
to her request to meet the man who she’d traveled over a thousand miles in a
Fiat
to meet.

A Fiat. Did TJ have any idea how small a Fiat really was?

Looking him up and down now, she realized he wouldn’t even fit in her car. Her
mother’s
car. Hope had a Jeep. A nice, tough, four-wheel-drive Jeep that she could take up into the hills or out into the desert with no problem.

Her mother, on the other hand, loved the tiny, colorful, fuel-efficient Fiat.

Cute. That’s what she’d called it.

Hope called it girlie.

But the bright sunshine-yellow always made her smile. It was so Melody.

She focused on TJ. “I don’t want to screw anything up for him.” She really didn’t, but she did acknowledge that learning about a twenty-five-year-old daughter might be a bit of a shock.

“My father has spent his life in this town. He and my mom have been married for thirty-three years. They have four sons, a daughter-in-law, a grandchild on the way, another soon-to-be daughter-in-law and four adopted grandsons. They are pillars of this community.” TJ shoved a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. “My grandmother is still alive,” he said.

Wow. That was a lot of people. A lot of family.

Hope didn’t really know how that stuff worked. It had always been her and her mom. She had grandparents, but she rarely saw them. Her mom had kind of been an afterthought in their relationship. Their only child, she’d been raised to be incredibly independent and self-sufficient. Melody had never said as much, but Hope got the idea that they’d done so in order to be less burdened themselves. And it had worked. Melody rarely talked to them, almost never saw them and had never ever asked them for anything.

Then it hit her—TJ had a grandmother.

“Is she your dad’s mom or your mom’s mom?”

He narrowed his eyes, as if knowing what she was thinking. He sighed and answered anyway. “My dad’s.”

She could have another grandmother. The kind that saw her grandkids. The kind that her grown grandsons loved enough to protect her from crazy women who showed up in yellow Fiats wanting to claim a branch of the family tree.

She took a deep breath. “I see.”

“I don’t think you do.” He was clearly frustrated. “You show up here, out of the blue, claiming you think my dad is your father simply because you have a photograph with his name on the back. I can’t let you stir all of this up without knowing for sure.”

Of course, she understood that her showing up like this might stir up some things for this family.

She stepped closer, wanting to see his eyes more clearly. She peered up at him, realizing that he was easily eight or nine inches taller than she was. She was an averaged-sized woman, about five-six in her mother’s flip-flops. But TJ was an above-average-sized man. He had to be six-three, maybe more. And his hands were
huge
.

And her reaction to that revelation was
completely
inappropriate.

Not only because they’d just met, but because of the whole maybe-related thing.

Since she hadn’t yet met the senior Thomas Bennett and had spent all twenty-five years of her life without a father and had turned out just fine, thank you very much, she allowed herself a moment of hoping it wasn’t true. Maybe Thomas Bennett was not her father.

That would mean her inappropriate attraction to TJ was not inappropriate at all.

TJ looked a lot like his dad. They had the same dark-brown hair, the same eyes, though TJ’s were darker. They were built alike too, from what she could see in the photo. The photo showed Thomas, Melody and the other man from about mid-thigh up. The guys had their arms around Melody’s shoulders and she had an arm around each of their waists. They were smiling widely, looking very happy.

Hope wondered if the two Thomas Bennetts shared the same smile. She definitely hadn’t seen TJ’s yet. But his father was a good-looking guy. This son had definitely taken after him in that department. And TJ had mentioned four sons. He had three brothers? Good Lord, if they were half as hot as TJ, she felt sorry for the females in Sapphire Falls. And the mother who had likely been chasing girls off for years.

But there was nothing about
her
looks that linked her to the man in the photo. Of course, she and her mother could have been twins. Especially considering Melody had looked fifteen years younger than she was, and she’d had Hope when she’d been only nineteen.

“Okay, I get it. I need to know for sure before I introduce myself as his long-lost daughter. How do you suggest I get sure?”

TJ scrubbed his hand over his face. “I don’t have time for this,” he muttered.

She frowned. That kind of stung. But, yeah, okay, this wasn’t really his problem. She’d been directed to the wrong guy by the lady at the bakery, and Thomas was TJ’s dad, but that didn’t exactly make any of this his issue.