MaryAnne kicked her bare little feet, her cheeks rounding as she opened her mouth in a gummy grin, and Emily felt such a wistful longing inside her that she could hardly bear it. She cuddled the baby close, carrying her out of the nursery. “This time next year, you’ll have a new cousin,” she told her niece. “And you’ll be great friends and won’t ever argue over who gets to play with which doll like your Auntie Jordana and I did.” There was only a year separating Emily and Jordana. By the time their live-wire baby sister, Wendy, had come along several years later, they’d both been in elementary school.
Now, both Wendy and Jordana were well into making families of their own and Emily was the odd one out. “Not for long, though, right?” She jiggled MaryAnne as she walked through her sister and brother-in-law’s home.
She’d been up and showered for hours already; the early-to-rise habit sticking even though she’d been away from home base in Atlanta for nearly three months now. She’d already toyed some more with the mock website that she wanted to show Tanner, dealt with a few minor crises with her staff at FortuneSouth and saved a bunch of real estate listings she was interested in looking into on her cell. And as soon as Wendy was finished showering, Emily would meet with the adoption attorney she’d been working with for the past few months. If that meeting ended up as fruitless as all the others she’d already had, then she’d confirm her appointment next week with the gynecologist to go forward with a second insemination attempt. After that, she’d head out to Tanner’s office for the brief duty-meeting with Tanner and his marketing guy.
She didn’t particularly mind the meeting. It had sort of been her own fault, anyway, because she’d happened to mention that the website for his flight school was a little … dry. Fortunately, her new brother-in-law hadn’t been offended. Instead, he’d asked her to come in and discuss the matter, as well as kick around some marketing and advertising strategies for increasing the flight school’s business. Of course, she’d said she would. He was Jordana’s brand-new husband and the father of the baby they were soon expecting, so how could Emily refuse?
Besides, she liked Tanner.
And even though she’d come up with the mock site herself—something she had some fun doing, even though the technical end wasn’t particularly her area of expertise—it didn’t mean she was particularly interested in discussing business with anyone any more than she was interested in her own duties with FortuneSouth these days.
For the first time in her life, Emily’s eye was not only on business. She’d realized what mattered and one way or another, she was going to become a mother.
Not because she was trying to keep up with her sisters. But because it was the one thing she’d come out knowing, after that horrible day when the tornado had ripped through the Red Rock airport, seemingly bent on changing all of their lives.
She was thirty years old. She was alive. She wanted to be a mother. To give all the love inside her that she had to give to a child, the same way she’d always known her mother loved her.
And she wasn’t going to waste any more time.
Max Allen eyed the plain watch on his wrist and held back an oath while he picked up his pace, crossing the tarmac from the Red Rock Regional Airport’s terminal to the hangar that housed Redmond Flight School. Admittedly, he wasn’t looking forward to the meeting that his boss, Tanner Redmond, had set up with his sister-in-law. But that didn’t mean he wanted to be late for it.
After a month, he still had a hard time believing that he was even working for Tanner as his assistant. Which meant he also needed to swallow the obvious fact that his boss figured he needed some help and had asked him to meet with Emily Fortune.
Best thing Max could do was forget about all the reasons he wasn’t qualified to handle any sort of sales and marketing for the flight school, and learn anything and everything he could from the high-powered advertising executive.
He skirted a slow-moving fuel truck, absently giving the driver, Joe, a wave, and broke into a jog to cross the last fifty yards. Not a smart move, he realized, when he pushed through the door to the business office and cool air-conditioning wafted over him, reminding him that it was a hot June afternoon out there.
Not only was he running late, but he was going to look like he’d been running late, too.
Through the window of Tanner’s office, he could see the back of a blond head. The woman had already arrived. Naturally.
He shoved his hand through his hair and blew out a deep breath. Hell with it. The lady would just have to put up with him the way he was. Sweating, unqualified and all. Before long, Tanner would probably realize the error of his ways and Max would be out of the job, anyway.
At least he had the animals at the Double Crown where he still worked part-time as a ranch hand. They didn’t have to bother seeing beyond his checkered past; all they cared about was getting their feed and water when they needed. And he was pretty sure that Lily Fortune would let him go back to full-time, even though the woman had been one of the ones to encourage Max to take a chance with the flight school gig when Tanner had offered it.
He reached out and pushed open Tanner’s office door, his gaze focused on his boss’s face. “Sorry I’m late.” Might as well get the obvious out of the way first. “I got hung up talking to the maintenance supervisor.” Though the airport was up and running again, repairs were still going on from the damage caused by the December tornado.
Tanner didn’t look unduly worried. “No problem.” He gestured toward the woman sitting in front of his desk. “Emily Fortune,” he introduced. “This is—
“You,” the woman interrupted as she rose.
Max focused on her, then, and her obvious surprise. She was stepping away from the leather chair she’d been sitting in, her hand extended toward him. She was wearing a black jacket and matching pants that only accentuated her slender figure, and her pale blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked expensively professional and even though there was no dirt covering her face and no debris tangling in her hair, the green eyes staring back at him through narrow, black-framed glasses were definitely the same ones he remembered.
He must have stuck his own hand out automatically, because her smooth, warm palm met his, her long fingers clasping his in a no-nonsense way and jolting his attention away from that mossy green.
“It was you at the airport that day,” she was saying in a smooth voice that held a trace of a Southern drawl. “Wasn’t it?”
He nodded and managed to find his voice somewhere. Even though he’d figured out that day at the airport who she was, he’d been hoping that she wouldn’t remember him. “You look like you came through it pretty well.”
She smiled a little, then looked down and he realized he was still holding her hand. He quickly let go.
“I was lucky,” she said. “Just a sprained ankle.”
“So, I’m guessing you two have met.” Tanner sounded amused.
Emily looked away from Max to his boss. She’d tucked her hands in the pockets of her blazer, Max noticed, and that abrupt swell of pleasure he’d felt at first dimmed. Probably not used to touching the lower class unless she was being pulled from beneath a collapsed roof by one.
“He rescued me after the tornado,” she was telling his boss. Her gaze slid toward Max. “But we never did get around to introductions.” She smiled again, and tucked-away hands or not, Max felt another jolt.
“It was the rescue workers who pulled you out,” he reminded.
“Yours was the voice that kept me going,” she countered. “I’ll never