Gambling On a Heart. Sara Walter Ellwood
two weeks after their senior year of high school had started. A week later, they’d begun dating.
His icy, penetrating eyes locked on hers when Logan sang the chorus. Had this cold man given her a compliment earlier? Was he the same man who lovingly cut up his little girl’s barbecued beef and buttered her roll?
Desperate to break the tension between them, she said, “Logan’s doing well these days, it seems.”
The muscle in his jaw twitched again as if he had to unclench his teeth to respond. “I guess.”
That was the extent of their dance floor conversation. The moment the music ended, Zack dropped his hands and stepped out of her grasp. He didn’t say a word, only turned and walked away.
She watched him make his way toward her parents, his back straight as a branding iron. He was so damned handsome he made her heart flutter.
Dylan took Tracy into his arms and kissed her cheek. With her heels, she was two inches taller than her brother. “Hey, sis, it’s my turn with the third most beautiful woman in the world.”
She playfully glared into his gray eyes and forced her trouble with Zack Cartwright to the back of her mind. “Third?”
Dylan shrugged. “My bride is the most beautiful woman in the world. I know better than not to call my mother the second. So, that leaves third place for my busybody little sister.”
She laughed and hugged him close. “I love you, you jerk.”
“Hey, have you and my bride been swapping endearments for me?” He swung her into a two-step to a countrified love song that Zack and Logan’s mother had originally made a hit when she was a rock singer in the ’70s.
“That and a few stories.” She let him spin her around.
When she faced him again, he cleared his throat. “I guess I owe you.”
She leaned back. “Why’s that?”
Dylan chuckled, but it was like a hawk’s call over the grassland, deep and echoing. “I know you and Cartwright have been working together to get me straightened out. Without you, I wouldn’t have ever found Charli.”
She followed his stare to the woman dancing with their father. Charli laughed at something he said. Zack swung their mother into view. He smiled with an ease making him a stranger to the man Tracy had danced with.
“I don’t know where I’d be without her.” When Dylan’s voice grew soft, she focused on her brother again.
“Have you two figured out a name for the baby yet?” she asked, turning the conversation away from the emotional cliff before she fell into the blubbering abyss below.
“Yep.”
“You know the sex?”
He grinned and swung her into the last strains of the song. “I never could keep a secret from you. But all I’ll admit to is we’ll need both.”
“You’re having twins?”
“Shhh.” Dylan glanced around. “We’d like to keep that off the Colton Grapevine. According to the ultrasound, we’re having a boy and a girl.”
Her eyes burned. She blinked, but a tear slipped by anyway. “Oh, Dylan. So, what are their names?”
He shook his head and wiped the drop of water off her cheek. “Not telling you. That’s a surprise for the family.”
As the music ended, Dylan drew her close and spoke huskily near her ear. “Tracy, I want you to be careful, but don’t over-think things where Zack’s concerned. Follow your heart. You may be surprised where it leads you. I know I was.”
He kissed her on the cheek and left her standing in the middle of the dance floor. When the hell had her big, hard-assed brother started sounding like a Hallmark card? No, actually, he sounded more like a fortune cookie.
She hated fortune cookies for a reason. In her experience, they never boded well.
Chapter 2
God, Tracy was happy to see the evening end. She’d waited for the last of the catering help and Logan’s band to pack up their equipment. The guests had left a half-hour ago after the groom whisked the bride and their soon-to-be-adopted teenage daughter, Annie Larson, off in his new pickup truck, a wedding gift from his bride.
Tracy parked in the five-car garage beside her parents’ rented car. She and Bobby got out of the old Taurus. Now that she could afford a new car, she should consider buying a replacement. Then again, she was waiting for someone to tell her the millions of dollars she’d inherited from her grandfather was all a joke. She still couldn’t believe the man she’d considered an uncle would have been so devious as to forge her grandfather’s will to cheat her mother, brother, and herself out of their inheritance.
She and Bobby entered the massive Antebellum-styled house she’d moved into almost a month ago. As she kicked off her shoes by the coat closet in the mudroom, she ruffled Bobby’s hair and kissed his cheek. He usually squirmed and made a face when she cuddled him. Tonight, he let her smooch him without so much as an Eww, Mom. He had to be tired.
She ruffled his dark brown hair. “You should have left with Grandpa and Grandma. You’d be in bed by now. Go on up and get ready.”
“Do I have to shower?”
“Yes. You and Mandy were playing in the lake, which we’ll have to talk about tomorrow,” she said with a firm tone. “You’re filthy. And brush your teeth.” When he didn’t argue, she hugged him close one last time, her heart so swollen her chest hurt.
What happened to the days when she’d played with him in his bathwater and helped him brush and floss his teeth? Jake had never let a single time go by without accusing her of coddling the boy, but she’d ignored him.
With a deep breath, she let her arms relax. “Good night, sweetheart. I love you.”
“’Night, Mom. Love you, too,” he said, stifling a yawn.
Bobby trudged through the kitchen, stopping long enough to accept a kiss from his grandma, then went through the swinging door leading to the front hall of the mansion to the stairs. He didn’t allow her to tuck him in anymore–another thing his father made him believe was babyish–but how she ached to follow him up the stairs.
Her mother sat at the kitchen table with a cup of herbal tea. Tracy made herself a cup and joined her. “Where’s Dad?”
With her graying blond hair cut to a chin-length wedge, and dressed in a cream-colored linen pantsuit, Eileen Ferguson Quinn cut a stylish figure. At six feet tall and with her runway model body, her mother didn’t look her sixty-three years–or much like a world-class chef.
Her mother smiled. “He just took the pooches out.”
After sipping her tea, Tracy sat the cup on the table and grinned. “Ah.”
Her mother’s two Yorkshire terriers had joined the family when she had left her grown children in Texas to follow her husband on his first assignment after returning from Bosnia. The big bad general claimed the dogs were only her mother’s, but Tracy knew he loved the yappy rats-with-fur as much as her mom.
Her mother sipped her tea. “You and Zachery Cartwright seem to be getting along.”
The last person Tracy wanted to talk about, after spending all day with him, was Zack. She sighed. “It was a wedding. Of course we’d be on our best behavior.”
Mom shrugged and studied her with summer blue eyes. “You two made such a lovely couple on the dance floor.”
Tracy groaned. The dance they’d shared was still excruciating. The awkwardness of the slow dance had been worse than anything she’d ever experienced as a gangly teenager.
Her mother pushed her hair behind her ears. “Winnie and Jackie