Getting Lucky (3 page)

“Yeah, I should just go.” She turned and crossed to where her flip-flops lay in the dirt. She slipped them on and started to reach for the car door.

A big hand wrapped around her wrist.

A
big
, hot, heavy hand.

Whoa.

She looked up at TJ, startled.

“You can’t leave.” He didn’t look happy about that. Resigned. That was the best way to describe his expression.

“Excuse me?”

Honestly, the showing-up-on-a-stranger’s-doorstep thing hadn’t occurred to her as a bad idea. Her mother had talked about Sapphire Falls with a wistful affection that had Hope believing it was some magical place where everything went right, everyone was generous and kind and there was nothing to fear.

Some people might have thought that was a strange reaction for a girl who had ended up in town due to car trouble, had gotten pregnant and then had to raise the child alone. But Melody had been thrilled. She’d never thought about needing anyone else or even wanting Hope’s father involved. The universe had given her the chance to be a mother. She’d reveled in it all.

That was Melody.

Hope didn’t look at the world with quite the rose-colored glasses her mother had always worn. Melody had found bright sides and silver linings everywhere. Hope liked to think she was more realistic than that.

“You can’t… I can’t let you leave,” TJ said, still holding her wrist.

Hope’s eyes widened. She also hadn’t thought for a second that she might run into a big, hunky farmer who would physically restrain her.

Nor had she thought she would be a little turned-on by that.

Should she be afraid of TJ, or at least intimidated? Maybe. They were strangers. He lived on a farm, miles from the nearest neighbor. And no one knew she was here. There were probably acres on which he could bury a body.

But all she felt with him touching her was heat. Intense, blood-pounding heat.

Half-brother. Half-brother
, she tried to remind herself. But all she really heard was
maybe.

“You can’t let me leave?” she repeated. “Why not?”

He felt the heat too?

“Because I don’t know you. You could head straight to my dad’s house and still fuck everything up.”

Ah. Not heat. Distrust and suspicion. Got it.

“I won’t,” she said. But what would she do? She’d come a thousand miles. She really wanted to meet this guy. This might be her
father
they were talking about here.

TJ wasn’t buying it either. “You need to stay here.”

Her eyes widened again. She glanced toward the house, then back to him. “Here?”

His gaze dropped to her mouth and he let go of her wrist quickly. “Well, nearby.”

All he’d done was look at her lips and they were tingling. Hope pressed them together and ran a hand through her hair. What was happening here? He was practically stumbling over his words. Hope had the definite impression that TJ Bennett always knew what he was going to say and always meant it. Stuttering and stammering were not his style. And she’d only known him for a few minutes.

So maybe not
just
distrust and suspicion. Though those were there too, she knew. And she couldn’t really blame him.

“Nearby?”

He looked at her camper. “You can kind of stay anywhere with that thing, right?”

She shrugged. It was not the Ritz-Carlton, but it was shelter. “Yeah, I guess.”

“So you can—” He cleared his throat. “Keep it here. Until we can get some answers.”

She could keep her camper parked here and stay until they could figure out if Thomas Bennett was her father. Huh.

“We?” she asked. “You’re going to help me?”

He sighed. “How do you think
you’re
going to get a DNA sample from my father?”

“
You’re
going to get one?”

“Someone has to.”

His expression still clearly said he didn’t have time for this. But he was offering. And he had a point.

“We could do it with a kit. You can get them online. It’s just a swab—”

“I know.”

She blinked. “You do?”

“Let me handle it. But it can take a week to get the results.”

She nodded. “I read that.”

He looked her up and down. His gaze traveled from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, and he took his time on various parts in between. In fact, his attention seemed to pause on her tattoo longer than even on her breasts.

She was tingling all over by the time he was done, and again there was a flitting thought of,
Please, please
don’t let me be related to this guy.

“You’re going to have to stay here,” he finally said.

She nodded. “I’m not going anywhere until I know one way or another.”

She wasn’t here to fill a gap in her life left by her father. She couldn’t miss something she’d never had. She’d been loved and cared for. She’d wondered about her dad from time to time, but she’d never felt a deficit in her life.

But this man had been important to her mother. Melody had spent a summer here and had remembered it fondly for twenty-five years.

Hope just wanted to meet him and experience this place.

But she understood that the news of her existence might be a bigger deal for the others involved.

So there hadn’t been a lot of thought and planning put into this trip. So what? Melody had always done things by the seat of her pants, gone with the flow, wherever the wind blew her—and any number of other clichés. Hope wanted to live her mother’s life for the summer and planning and forethought would definitely not be faithful to that experiment.

“Okay, but I mean you have to stay
here
,” TJ said, his eyes finally back on her face.

“Here? As in
here
, on your farm in my camper?”

He nodded. “You will…attract a lot of attention if you go anywhere else.”

A corner of her mouth curled at that. “You think so?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Uh, yeah.”

For some reason, that made her feel warm. TJ maybe hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but she took it as one. If she’d been in her own clothes, doing her own thing, being the real Hope Daniels, she would have been able to blend in. She had been raised in an unconventional lifestyle by an unconventional woman, but ever since she’d
insisted
on going to public school starting in ninth grade, Hope had been very aware of how
regular
people dressed and ate and acted. Hope was still a vegetarian and loved yoga and her mother’s homemade, organic shampoos, soaps and lotions. But she also knew when to downplay her hippie-Earth-girl upbringing and habits and be
normal
.

But if she was going to live and act like Melody, Hope would stand out. Melody always had. It wasn’t just how she dressed, it was how she
was
. How she’d looked at things, how she’d approached things, how she’d lived. She’d always had a glow about her that had drawn people to her.

It had driven Hope crazy.

Her mother had never gone anywhere without meeting someone interesting. She would strike up conversations everywhere and errands that should have taken ten minutes often turned into hour-long adventures into someone else’s life.

Looking at TJ now, Hope felt an inkling of understanding. She could see the appeal in being adventurous.

It was…strange. There was no better word for it. She didn’t know him. He didn’t really want her here. She was—potentially anyway—about to stir up some big things for his family, and he might even
be
her family, but she still had an impulse to be in his world for a bit.

Her mom would have gone for it. Impulses were signals, signs of something your soul knew it needed. God, how many times had Hope heard that? How many times had Melody used that to excuse something—quitting a job with benefits, breaking up with a great guy for another not-as-great guy, taking off at midnight for a road trip to the mountains, selling their house for a trailer because she had the
impulse
to minimize her material possessions and simplify her life.

So many times.

And yet Hope had never been able to look at her mother with anything less than resigned affection. Melody had been the happiest person Hope had ever known. She’d embraced everything that had come at her as a chance to learn something and be new and better than she had been before. Her optimism had been boundless.

Not for the first time in her life, Hope wondered if her mom hadn’t actually held the secret to life, the universe and everything.

Be happy. No matter what. No matter where.

So maybe right here, right now, was Hope’s chance to just be happy. To let go of all the niggling doubts and the little voice that said this wasn’t
normal
and just be for a while.

With TJ Bennett.

She shook her head.

Yikes.

Maybe she needed to lay off her mother’s home-blended tea she’d been drinking instead of her coffee. Coffee was good. Caffeine was good. She was still going through withdrawals obviously.

“And that’s bad?” she finally asked. “To attract attention?”

“Yes.” He said it firmly and without hesitation.

She smiled. “Why is that?”

“Because here, people don’t just look or talk behind your back. They’ll corner you, demand to know who you are, where you’re from, what you want and how long you’re staying.”

She thought about that. Sapphire Falls was a small town in Nebraska. She admittedly knew nothing about those. Sedona wasn’t a huge town, but they had millions of tourists every year. Even without the visitors, though, Sedona was almost ten times the size of Sapphire Falls.

“I’m a friendly person,” she said. On the friendly-and-interested-in-others spectrum, where her mother was a ten, Hope was about a six, but she did actually like other people. Part of her following in her mother’s footsteps this summer was embracing new situations. Learning about small-town life in the Midwest could absolutely be part of that.

“Do you have answers to those questions?” TJ asked.

She thought about the questions again—who she was, where she was from, what she wanted and how long she was staying. “Three of the four,” she said.

“Really?”

“I’m Hope Daniels from Sedona, Arizona, and I’m staying for the rest of the summer.”

TJ’s brows pulled together in a frown. “The rest of the summer?”

“Yes.”

He stared at her. “Why?”

She had an answer to that too, but it was complicated. “My mother loved it here. I’d…” She took a deep breath. “I want to experience some of the things that she did, that meant a lot to her. She spent a summer here and said it was the best summer of her life.”

TJ didn’t say anything for almost a full half minute. “And you’re looking for the best summer of your life?”

Something about that question from him made her tingle. She nodded. “Definitely.”

He seemed to think about that. His gaze softened slightly. “This is a good place for having amazing summers.”

She was taken aback. That was pretty…warm of him. “Good. Amazing sounds like exactly what I need.”

And she thought maybe, just maybe, the corner of his mouth curled slightly.

“But I do understand I could be complicating some things by being here,” she added.

The softness left his eyes and mouth. “Yeah, you could.”

Damn.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said sincerely. “I don’t want to upset anyone. I guess, I just want to know. Just know who he is for sure. Maybe just meet him. I’m not really looking for someone to spend holidays with or to send Father’s Day cards to.”

And she wasn’t. She knew Father’s Day was sometime in June, but she wasn’t looking for a
father
exactly. She was twenty-five. She didn’t need a father for anything. She had a job with benefits and her own condo. She had no debt. She knew how to take care of herself. She’d never had fatherly advice. Hell, she’d never had a lot of motherly advice either. Her mom had taught her things, exposed her to ideas, given her expectations and then let Hope make her own decisions.

TJ didn’t look convinced that she wasn’t looking for more than she claimed, but he gave her a nod. “How about we figure out if my dad is…” he coughed, “…yours and we’ll go from there.”

She understood that this was uncomfortable. Bizarre even. And that TJ wished he hadn’t been dragged into it. But she did appreciate the offer of help.

“Okay.”

“I’m going over there for dinner tonight. I’ll talk to him.”

“You’re going to tell him?”

“How else will I have a chance to swab his cheek?”

So TJ really did know about DNA tests. That was interesting. “What will he say?” she asked.

TJ shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“But you’re not going to tell him in front of your mom or anyone.” A sudden thought occurred to her, and she looked toward his house again. “Are you married?”