Stroke of Fortune by Christine Rimmer

leading a woman along the garden path. They paused. For a moment, the two shadows merged into one. Josie sighed. A kiss, a passionate one.
    And also brief. Now the man was stepping back, grabbing the woman’s hand again, leading her away.
    The woman seemed to hesitate. The man turned back, said something, and a shaft of moonlight fell across his face.
    Matt. Flynt’s younger brother.
    Josie smiled. How sweet. Matt and his special lady. A secret meeting in the garden in the middle of the night. Matt urged the woman onward, deeper into the shadows of the greenery. Josie, her romantic heartbeating a little faster for them, leaned right up to the glass, not even pausing to think that, should one of the lovers look toward the window, her own face might very well be seen, floating ghostlike, just beyond the glass.
    The woman paused again briefly and slanted a nervous look over her shoulder, the moon lighting her face as it had that of her lover. Something must have drawn her eye upward, for all at once, she was looking straight at Josie’s window. For one split second, the woman’s eyes locked with Josie’s. Josie gasped as recognition dawned.
    Then Matt pulled his lady into the shadows, and the two disappeared around a bend in the path.
    Josie remembered to breathe. She sank into her chair again and stared at her dark computer screen, shaking her head in disbelief.
    The woman Matt had kissed in the garden worked at the Mission Creek Library. She and Josie often exchanged how-are-you’s when Josie dropped in to pick out another big stack of books.
    Her given name was Rose.
    And her last name was Wainwright.
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    Josie might have told Flynt what she’d seen in the garden in the middle of the night.
    But after the toe-curling kiss in the baby’s room, he decided to avoid her for two days running. Bythen, it was Friday. At 6:00 p.m., Grace relieved her for her weekend off.
    That gave her time to think the situation over.
    Really, she couldn’t predict how he might react if she told him she’d seen his brother kissing a Wainwright. As a Carson, Flynt would be way too likely to mess everything up for the lovers.
    Josie didn’t want that. She felt kind of… What was the word? Proprietary. Yes. She felt proprietary and protective toward Matt and Rose. She knew their secret. But no one was getting it out of her. They were bucking generations of senseless hatred and bad blood and Josie was one hundred percent on their side. The way she saw it, if a Carson and a Wainwright had found love together, well, more power to them.
    Flynt said things would never change. To him, Carsons and Wainwrights would forever be enemies—and he had blown his chance at love and happiness and did not deserve another.
    Josie thought otherwise. To her mind, a person had to think otherwise. If change wasn’t possible, why not give it all up now? There’d be no point in going on.
    By the first Sunday in June, four days after the kiss and three days into Flynt finding an excuse to leave any room Josie happened to be in, she decided she’d had about enough of his running away from her.
    She returned from her mother’s house at six that evening. She had a pretty good idea he’d be stopping in to see the baby at some point. He’d probably dowhat he’d done Thursday night—wait until Josie left the nursery before going in. So she tricked him. She put Lena to bed and she turned off the light and sat there in the rocker in the dark, facing the door.
    It took him an hour, but he came at last, hesitating in the doorway, as if he sensed a trap. The hall light behind him outlined his tall body, leaving the front in shadow so she couldn’t see his face.
    But he saw her. “Damn it, Josie.”
    She stood. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
    He swore again.
    She went to him in the doorway and looked up into his shadowed face. “I want to talk to you.”
    â€œIt’s