Best of Luck

Book 3: Chance of a Lifetime

by Kate Clayborn

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy; General Fiction

Synopsis

Winning the lottery is the biggest ticket to freedom Greer Hawthorne's ever had. Until her best friend's brother comes to town . . .

Greer Hawthorne's winning lottery ticket doesn't just bring her wealth, it also means her chance at a long-postponed education. She's finally on the cusp of proving to her big, overprotective family that she's independent—until a careless mistake jeopardizes her plan to graduate. Lucky for her, there's someone in town who may be able to help . . .

Alex Averin plans to show up for his sister's wedding, then quickly get back to his job as a world-renowned photojournalist. But when gorgeous, good-hearted Greer needs an assist with a photography project, he's powerless to say no. Showing Greer his professional passion ignites a new one, and rouses instincts in Alex he thought he'd long set aside.

Can a ceaseless wanderer find a stopping place alongside a woman determined to set out on her own . . . or are Alex and Greer both pushing their luck too far?

Contains mature themes.

Release date: November 27, 2018

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

Prologue

Greer

When I first see him there, I think I must still be dreaming.

I’d woken up at 3:13 a.m.—unlucky, that—the sharp planes of his face still fresh in my mind, my skin still flushed, the sheets tangled around my legs, and I’d nearly gasped in embarrassment over it. Dreaming about him, of all people, a man I’d only met hours ago. A man so handsome I could barely look him in the eye without flushing. A man who wore all his vast experience in the rangy, confident movements of his body. A man whose friendly, innocent hug at the end of the night had felt like electricity to me, like being shocked awake after a long, unnatural slumber.

My best friend’s brother, Alex Averin.

Now he pauses as he steps across the threshold of Boneshaker’s, my favorite coffee shop not two blocks from Kit’s house, where he’s supposed to be staying for the weekend—where, I’ve decided, I’ll avoid until he leaves, since I’d basically gone acutely nonverbal in his presence. Between me and Zoe and Kit, my two closest friends, I’ve always been the quiet one, but last night I’d brought shyness to new heights, barely managing three full sentences over the course of dinner and dessert. I’d watched as Kit had beamed over him, proud of everything about her brother, and proud of everything that she was getting to show and tell him about her life here: her job, her newly purchased house, even her budding friendship with Ben Tucker, a guy who I could already tell was more than half in love with her. And I’d watched as Zoe—cool and funny and unflappable—had traded stories with Alex of travel to Europe, to South America, even to Australia, where they’d both, apparently, visited the same koala refuge.

I’d just watched.

Watching. My specialty. For years, the only habit I was healthy enough to cultivate.

I return to that specialty now—so familiar, like I’m a wayward, crooked drawer that’s been pushed back into its track and now can slide easily into place, flush with its surroundings, barely noticeable. I turn my body in my chair slightly so I’m not directly facing the door, arranging my book in a way that makes it seem like I’m reading, though I’m still 100 percent tracking him. As he moves toward the counter, the heads of all three women at a table beside me turn to watch him, one of them actually letting her mouth fall open a little.

I can’t say I blame her. He’s beautiful, that’s the thing—not just handsome, not just a strong jaw and a tall, fit leanness, broad shoulders and narrow hips, not just thick, jet-black hair that’s gorgeously messy, exactly as it was in my dream, exactly as I’d made it in my dream. He’s actually beautiful—smooth olive skin underneath his heavy stubble, and high, cut cheekbones that transform into something softer and kinder when he smiles. Full lips, white teeth, his right-side incisor slightly crooked. Clear, bright green eyes that you can see across a room, framed with long, black lashes that leave a shadow on his skin when he lowers them.

From where I sit I watch him order, watch his mouth move: coffee, black. He pays in cash, shoves a dollar in the tip jar, and the barista looks like she wants to propose marriage. He smiles at her, and I try to telegraph her a message: Oh, I know. It hurts when he smiles like that.

He moves down the counter to wait for his coffee, and I curve my shoulders and look down to my book again, hoping he doesn’t see me. Without the cover of Kit and Zoe, my awkwardness will seem worse—either panicked silence or a blurting non sequitur, and I don’t think I could face his quizzical brow, his gentle smile of pitying encouragement, the same one he offered up last night across the table after I’d stumbled over answering a question as simple as Where did you grow up?

In my dream, though…he looked at me with total concentration. With desire.

I shake my head, force my eyes to focus, training them back at the top of the page of my textbook so I can start reading all over again. I’m sure I’ve lost every bit of information I read over in the minutes before he walked in.

“Hey,” comes a quiet, deep, already familiar voice from above me, and for a second I keep my eyes down, hoping I’ve somehow developed actual powers of invisibility, rather than standard wallflower syndrome.

But I can feel him there watching me, those thick black brows probably arranging themselves into the most charming little furrow. This again, he’s probably thinking.

When I turn to face him, to look up to meet those sea-glass eyes, my elbow knocks my textbook from the table, and Alex reaches a hand out, catching it easily at the spine, not even disrupting the steaming coffee he’s holding in his left hand. I think I let out a small groan of frustration, or of exasperation—I’m sure at any moment, after seeing that display of his reflexes, either the barista or the open-mouthed latte drinker will just toss her panties across the room at him.

“Cultural Anthropology,” he says, looking down at the book he’s just rescued, his lips tipping up wryly in some ironic recognition. This renowned photojournalist who’s traveled the entire world, has seen it and so many of its cultures through his own eyes—who’s shaped, through his lens, the way other people see it—holding my little college textbook, my little lottery-induced dream of a college degree. It must seem—

“I always wanted to take a class like this,” he says, smiling down at me, and for a second I think about throwing my panties at him.

It feels like a good two and a half minutes of me simply blinking at him, adjusting to the handsome glare his face gives off, but in actuality I’m pretty sure it’s only a few startled seconds before I manage a weak, “It’s a good class.”

He nods, gestures to the seat across from me. “Mind if I sit?”

“Oh,” I say, pulling my papers toward me, clearing space for him on the table. “Sure.” Inside my head there’s a tattoo of a thought: Don’t think about the dream.

“Thanks.” He sinks into his chair. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Don’t think about it, I tell myself again, hopelessly.

“Did you and Kit have a late night?” I feel ludicrously pleased at how normal and casual I’ve managed to sound. Now that the shock has worn off—or I guess now that my eyes have adjusted to his presence—I feel a bit more settled, ready to converse like a normal person.

“Sort of.” When he shifts in his seat I notice something for the first time. He has a bag with him—a sun-bleached canvas rucksack, one of its straps duct-taped, and as my eyes settle on it he reaches a hand down, tries to tuck it more tightly under the table.

“Are you—are you leaving already?” The disbelief in my voice—it seems to lash him like a whip. He snaps his head to the side to look out the window, inhaling sharply through his nose. “You’re supposed to stay for the whole weekend,” I add. Kit’s been preparing for Alex’s visit for days, ever since his quick, unexpected call to let her know he’d be in town—a call she’d greeted with such genuine excitement and hope that I’d immediately felt a prickle of unease. Never good luck, I’d thought, to look forward to something that much.

He looks back at me then, and I’m tempted to lower my eyes.

But Kit—Kit must be so disappointed.

“I got called in for a job,” he says, and it could be true. Alex shoots for the New York Times, for the AP, once, even, for National Geographic, photographs that Zoe and I oohed and aahed over when Kit had shown them to us last year.

But because I’m good—I’m so, so good at seeing every single thing, at watching—I notice it. I notice the way the corner of his mouth, right there on the left side, twitches. Barely a split second of movement, a pull of his lips that’d be entirely hidden from the casual observer.

“You’re lying.” I stare right into those eyes, those sea-glass eyes I’d avoided looking at last night, and I hope mine are burning right into his. I hope I’ve put into them all the accusation I mean to level at him. Kit’s heart is probably broken—all her plans for him this weekend, all the things she meant to show him about her new home. All the time she’s been waiting for him to come.

I remember: I can do more than just watch. When it comes to the people I love, I can do anything. “You can’t do this to her. You can’t leave.”

The look he gives me—it’s nothing like what I saw in his face last night, nothing like the gentle, indulgent smiles he gave to Kit, nothing like the low, laughing surprise he’d had for Zoe’s bold sense of humor. Nothing even like the open curiosity in his eyes when he’d seen me for the first time.

It looks like anger.

“I can,” he says, and his voice is forceful. Unapologetic. So, so confident.

There’s a thick silence between us, the sounds of the café tinkling and vague. But I hear his voice like an echo.

I can.

It sounds so—it sounds so true. There isn’t anything stopping Alex—he’s healthy, he’s successful, he’s made his own way in the world. Someone—his sister, me, anyone, probably—may tell him you can’t, but he doesn’t have to listen.

He could get up and leave right now. He could pick up his rucksack and take his coffee with him, walk out this coffee shop’s doors. There’d be a trail of women’s undergarments in his wake.

Instead he shifts in his seat, puts his elbows on the table, and holds his to-go cup between his hands. The movement puts him closer to me, the steam from his coffee wafting between us, warming the space between our bodies. For a split second I’m back in that dream, and I drop my eyes to the table. There’s a stray penny, tail side up, beside his right forearm.

“Out there,” he says, nodding toward the door, his voice softer now, a still-rough texture to it that now doesn’t sound quite so unapologetic. “Out there is the thing I waited for my whole life.”

I press my lips together, roll them inward, a habit I seem to have picked up since I started my college classes. Trying not to over-participate, trying not to get a reputation as the eager adult degree student while the slackers in the back roll their eyes at me, hoping for an early release from class.

Alex’s eyes dip to my mouth, and suddenly I don’t care so much about seeming eager. I use a fingernail to tap out the curiosity I feel building in my shoulders, my elbows, my wrists. I hear the plink, plink of it against the ceramic. “What’s that?” I ask, my voice hardly above a whisper.

And then he smiles. He smiles like he—like he somehow knows, like he heard me make that wish six months ago, the night Kit and Zoe and I had all joked about our possible lottery win, a win that became a shocking, I’m-still-not-over-it reality. The night I’d told my friends that all I’d want was an education.

“Freedom,” he says, and he could not have cut me deeper if he’d held a hot knife against my body.

My secret wish, the one I’d made silently that same night our numbers came up, the one I’m working so hard to make come true—with my winnings, with my college classes, with every small effort I make to be stronger, healthier, more independent.

I lean back in my seat, lengthening the distance between us. I let the moment stretch a beat too long, my eyes on my mug, my book, the penny. Strangely, even though we don’t know each other well—at all, really—I can feel him waiting for me to argue, to push back. And when I finally meet his eyes, that’s what I see there.

Expectation. Anticipation.

Maybe not quite what I saw in my dream, but maybe not all that different either.

But Alex isn’t who I thought he was, not if he’ll leave Kit this way. And his freedom isn’t the same as mine, not if it looks like this—a beat-up bag, a faraway look, no limitations, no attachments, no debts, no thought to who or what you leave behind.

I let go of that electric, curious heat he makes me feel. I replace it with all the disappointment I feel on behalf of my friend. I pull my book closer to me.

“I’d better get back to studying.” I keep my gaze level, uninterested, aloof—the corollary gift of my shyness for moments like these.

He doesn’t wait long. Maybe a few seconds of taut silence before he stands again and hoists his bag over one shoulder, his cup of coffee still steaming in his hand. Oblivious, clearly, to the way so many eyes in the café are newly drawn to him.

“Greer,” he says, tipping his chin down in some old-fashioned gesture of acknowledgment that—despite my new opinion of him—feels like a brand on my skin. His smile is different now: smaller, sadder. “Maybe I’ll meet you again sometime.”

And then he’s gone, ducking out the same door he came in, and I don’t see him again. Not for almost two whole years.

Not even in my dreams.

Chapter 1

Greer

“He’s right. You can’t leave.”

At first I don’t process what the bureaucrat in the statement necklace across the desk from me is saying. After all, I’m three minutes deep in a daydream about that necklace, which is so aggressively big and multicolored that I’ve pictured the bureaucrat in a kind of medieval fairy tale/ancient war epic mashup in which it figures heavily as some kind of magical token of her as yet undiscovered powers. I’m trying to find a way to work in a unicorn, but so far, no dice.

“What?” I say, once her punch-to-the-gut words sink in.

She looks over the rim of her plastic-framed glasses, primary school red, two teeny-tiny rhinestones on each winged tip. It’s too much, what with the statement necklace. Plus someone who accessorizes this much should be more fun than this.

“You,” she begins, stretching out that one syllable before continuing. “Cannot. Graduate.” It’s the kind of tone that I’ll bet she has to use a lot on panicked, desperate undergraduates, the ones who come in here looking for a reprieve about their unacceptable GPA or some honor code violation that’ll keep them from their diploma. She’s got to enunciate every single thing. She’s got to speak slowly to cut through their narcissism or their naïveté or their general unwillingness to accept reality.

Says the twenty-seven-year-old woman who was just thinking about a unicorn.

“There has to be some kind of mistake,” I say, repeating words I’ve already said once today, barely an hour ago, when I’d sat in a similarly uncomfortable chair across from my academic advisor. He’d looked at me with a gentle, consoling expression, handed me my three-page degree application, and said, “We’ve got a problem here, Greer.” I’d stared down at that slim stack of paperwork with a thudding sense of shock.

“There’s no way,” I’d said to him as I’d taken it with a shaking hand, already gathering my bag. “I’ll go check at the registrar’s office. There’s no way I’ve gotten this wrong.”

If there’s one thing I’ve gotten good at in the two and a half years since I won the lottery, it’s paperwork. The lottery itself involves a fair amount of paperwork, sure: disclosures and waivers and verifications of all kinds. Yes, you can use my name or image to promote the state lottery. Yes, I sign verifying that I am who I say I am. No, I do not dispute the other two claimants to this ticket. Yes, I can provide an authenticating letter from my bank; no, I don’t owe any back taxes or child support.

But what I’d chosen to do with my winnings—that too had been paperwork city. Some of it had involved an accountant (four pages of paperwork just to meet with him, by the way), some of it had involved an attorney (no paperwork for that, since Zoe had done all her work for me for free), and some of it, most of it—the paperwork connected to my getting this long-postponed college education—had only involved me. Applications and essays, overload permission slips, internship filings, independent study proposals. Regular tracking of my coursework, to show I was right on schedule for…this.

This degree application. The one that verifies I’m walking across a stage at the end of the summer, diploma in hand with a full-time, health-insurance and retirement-plan supported professional job waiting.

The one that says I’m finally free.

“There’s no mistake,” Necklace says, setting the application on her desk and folding her hands on top of it. “You need an art credit.”

“But I took—”

“You took two art history courses,” she says, cutting me off. She’s probably heard a version of my story a million times. Students lost in the bureaucracy of the university, little scheduling mistakes that mean trouble later. “One of those needed to be a studio art. The practice of art, not just the study of it.”

“Okay, but—”

She cuts me off with a palm-out gesture before I can make a case for myself. Before I can show her the records I kept from every meeting with my advisor, including the one in which I’d selected the second art history course to fill a requirement. Shouldn’t he have warned me? Shouldn’t he have stopped me, pointed me in a different direction? Even as I think it, I know I’m wrong. Maybe he could’ve done a better job, but I know the buck stops with me. I know this is my mistake, my responsibility.

“Ms. Hawthorne. You have managed to very nearly complete a degree program in social work with a minor in social welfare in”—she looks down again at my application, scanning the top—“about two and a half years, which is an incredibly impressive feat. This is a minor hiccup, one you can remedy with a single semester of per-credit-hour payment.”

She breaks off here to give me a pointed look at the word payment, and I wonder if maybe she’s one of the few people in this city who saw the frozen, shocked smiles on my and Zoe’s faces when we’d taken that paperwork-approved promotional photograph for the lottery, sans publicity-shy Kit. Of course Necklace wouldn’t know how little I have left of the cardboard check I’d held that day. “I know this is a disappointment,” she says, “but you shouldn’t feel at all ashamed.”

Ashamed? That’s the least of it. I feel like a failure. I feel stupid and careless, and worst of all, I feel weak. I’ve done everything right the last two years, but all of a sudden I feel like the Greer who’s never been able to see things through, who’s been too tired or too sick to finish what I start, the Greer who needs help with even the smallest tasks.

“I have to graduate,” I say, hating the way my voice has risen to a desperate, almost keening pitch. “I have a job waiting for me.”

She sighs, cuts a glance over to the clock that I know is hanging on the wall above me. The lobby outside her office is packed with students, and I sympathize. The timing for me couldn’t be worse either. That I had to find this out on this Friday, of all possible Fridays, feels like particularly bad luck.

I squint at her necklace, trying to work out the stones in there. If there are any opals stuck in between what look mostly like acrylic, oven-baked blobs, there’s a bad luck reason for this, maybe.

Necklace lets out a gusty sigh. “Your job requires that you have the degree at your start date?”

I don’t see a single opal in there.

“Yes.” It’s not a lie. It’s part of my contract, in fact, another piece of paperwork I’ve recently signed. I’m giving her a look like I’m the unicorn, the never-before-seen student creature she’s going to make an exception for. Use your undiscovered powers on me, I’m thinking. I’ll even wear that necklace.

She grabs a pen out of a cup on her desk, flips my degree application over, and scribbles a few lines of text before handing it over. “This is the name of the chair of the studio art department. Below that is the name of the chair of our academic standards committee. You might be able to make an appeal.”

Inside my bag, my phone pings with a text, and I know I’m out of time, at least for today. Waiting in my car I’ve got a suitcase, a garment bag, and a small wooden box of good luck charms—borrowed, blue, new—for Kit. I don’t know how I’m going to empty my head enough of this problem to get through the weekend.

“I’ll get in touch with them right away,” I tell her, standing from my chair. My knees feel like they’re made of jelly donuts. “Thank you.”

Before I can turn away, hustle out the door, and take out my phone to address whatever logistical crisis related to this weekend has come up in the last hour, she clears her throat. She lowers her red glasses, so now they’re resting on a thin gold chain on top of the statement necklace. My eyes blur with the garishness of it. I couldn’t picture a unicorn if I tried.

“He’s a photographer,” she says, and everything in my line of sight is replaced with an image in my mind, one I try not to think about all that often.

Sea-glass eyes and a sad smile. A broad back carrying a beat-up rucksack, walking out the door.

“The chair of the department, I mean,” she says. “Try that as your way in, if you’re looking to get in his good graces.”

“Right.” For a second, I’m frozen stock still there, a living embodiment of you can’t leave, even though my phone pings with three more messages. On any other day I’d say it was only my mother who’d have such persistence, but today I’m guessing it’s my fellow maid of honor, because I’m supposed to be at a pedicure across town in ten minutes and there’s about three thousand other errands to run before my best friend gets married tomorrow.

But standing across from Not-Bad-Luck Necklace and clutching my stack of Bad Luck Paperwork, I can only think about one thing.

I know a photographer.

And this weekend, I’m going to see him for the first time in a long time.

* * * *

He breezes in the same way he’d done two years ago.

He’s windblown and stubbled along his jaw, sporting a sheepish grin as he ducks through the front door of Betty’s restaurant, closed down for the night in honor of Kit and Ben’s rehearsal dinner. “Oh, thank God,” Zoe says, nudging me as though I haven’t noticed him come in, as though I didn’t sense a change in the air even before that door opened. Across the room, where she’s standing with Ben, Kit says, “Finally!,” but there’s a laugh in her voice. She crosses the room to her brother, holding out her arms for a hug that I drop my eyes to avoid seeing.

I’m not going to forgive him so easily.

His first call had come mid-pedicure, while all three of us had had our feet soaking in warm, bubbling water and while I’d been doing a bang-up job of not revealing a thing about my impending graduation crisis. I’d shown up to that nail salon with a sunny disposition and a can-do attitude, and I’d intended to keep it that way. When Kit disconnected the call she’d shrugged and said, “Weather out of LaGuardia,” and I’d been ready to fully engage my sunny disposition to explain how we were going to can-do this rehearsal even if her brother didn’t show up.

But Kit had surprised me, barely batting an eye at either of the next two calls—one when we were checking into the Crestwood Hotel for our pre-wedding girls’ sleepover, the other when we were driving to the rehearsal itself.

“He’ll get here,” Kit had said, confident in Alex’s eventual arrival or else so blissed out by her impending wedding and three-week honeymoon trip through Europe that she hadn’t allowed herself to consider the possibility that the man who’d basically raised her might not make it. I’d felt the tension that’d been gathering in my neck since this afternoon ratchet up to near painful levels.

Alex has moved further inside the warm, wainscoted interior of the main dining room, usually full of Betty’s diverse crowd of bearded or barrel-roll-hair hipsters, young professionals, and the few old-timers who still remember when her bar was a smoke-filled fish and chips place and who grudgingly allow her food is better. He and Ben are shaking hands, one of Alex’s coming up to clutch Ben’s elbow in a gesture of casual affection and approval that suggests he knows the groom is forgiving too. Zoe’s already crossed the room, leaving me behind the bar where I’m checking the Sterno cans under the chafing dishes like I work here. From the other side of the bar Betty gives me a skeptical look, and I pretend not to see her making a shooing motion at me.

Why wouldn’t he have flown in earlier, I’m thinking, to avoid exactly this kind of thing? Why wouldn’t he have made Kit’s wedding his top priority? Why wouldn’t he have put her needs, her special day, first in his mind and his plans?

That’s what I’m doing, after all.

“Greer, look who’s here,” says Kit, interrupting my very intense self-congratulatory monologue, and I nearly burn my hands on a dish of garlic-parmesan green beans. When I look up I see Kit and Alex, arms linked in the same way they would’ve been had Alex actually showed up for his part in the rehearsal, Kit a full two heads shorter than her brother and wearing a smile of relief and pride.

As for Alex? Up close he’s more handsome than I remember, even if he’s grossly underdressed in a faded black T-shirt and wrinkled, army-green chinos and beat-up hiking boots. He runs a hand through his hair, slightly longer than it’d been last time he was here, and smiles as though the last words we exchanged weren’t harsh ones. He looks like he’s never been felled by a piece of paperwork in his whole life. The casual nomad with no permanent address. Reckless and strong and no strings attached.

Over his shoulder I see the familiar strap of his bag.

“Good of you to stop by.” As soon as it’s out of my mouth, my own eyes are widening in shock at the same time as Kit’s, and at the same time as Zoe’s, who’s returned just in time to see me act like a jerk.

One question about my reunion with Alex is answered, then: his face is still a wire cutter for my brain-mouth synapse. I open it again, trying to rally my sunny disposition, but I’m interrupted by Betty, who probably caught the scent of awkward.

“Alex, welcome. Can I put your bag behind the bar?” She gives me another pointed look, one that says This is why I work here, and you don’t. I back away from the chafing dishes and away from the gaze Alex has leveled at me.

He’s still watching me when he answers Betty. “I’m going to make a stop in your restroom and change my clothes.”

Betty and Kit usher him away, Kit giving me a brief, puzzled glance over her shoulder, and Zoe looks at me. “Everything all right?”

I sink onto the stool behind me, try for a casual wave of the hand, a self-deprecating eye roll. “I guess I’m being a bit intense about our maid of honor duties.”

The look I get in return tells me Zoe’s not buying what I’m selling. “You’ve been a little off today.” I know her well enough to know she won’t leave me alone about it. She’ll cross-examine me until I’ve spilled it, and then she’ll probably take out her phone and call the registrar’s office at the university and leave a legalese-packed voice mail that’d make the statement necklace rattle right off the bureaucrat’s neck.

I look over my shoulder, make sure Kit’s nowhere nearby. For all my self-congratulation, I guess I haven’t done a great job setting my worries aside if Zoe and I are having this conversation, and the least I can do is keep Kit far away from it today of all days. “There’s a problem with my graduation.”

Zoe’s gold-brown eyes immediately sharpen, her posture lengthening. “What kind of problem?” In spite of the fact that I don’t want to be doing this here, I love the way Zoe knows already—that this is serious, that I’d be freaked out about it. She and Kit have had tickets reserved for the graduatio. . .