Guest Post: Luck by Meggan Connors

Well, it’s the month of March, and there’s a lot of luck going around.            March madness, leprechauns, my son’s birthday… it’s all about luck.            Which, logically, I shouldn’t believe in.            I come from a family of scientists, none of whom believe in luck. But for all of that, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time breaking down my heritage and deciding which nationalities are lucky and which ones are unlucky.            For instance, I’ve decided the Dutch are, generally, lucky. Score one for me! At the other end of the spectrum, the Irish are either tremendously lucky or horribly unlucky. There is no in-between with the Irish. And the English? They’re the “meh” in the luck sandwich. Sometimes, they’re lucky, sometimes they’re not.             My brother has Dutch luck. I’ve never met anyone who is as lucky as he is. It’s like he has a guardian angel looking after him, a leprechaun in his back pocket, and Ganesh is sitting on his shoulder. My brother can wake up in a foreign country with no pants, no shoes, and not a cent to his name, and leave with a new set of clothes, a bus ticket home, two new friends, and $500 in his pocket.             Sure, that sounds absurd, but it actually happened. (Don’t ask about the no pants part. It’s a long story.)            This is the same brother who will tell you he doesn’t believe in luck. In his opinion, we make our own fate, and we make our own luck. He believes that luck is about positioning oneself in such a way that when the opportunity strikes, one is in the position to take advantage of it.             Hmph. The lucky always say that.            As for me, I have Irish luck. It’s either really good or really bad. For instance, if I’m at a college or professional sporting event, and there’s even the remotest possibility that the ball could hit me in the face, I’m pretty much guaranteed that it will. I remember once, I was at a basketball game, and I was seated in the 15th row from the floor. Great seats. I looked over at my mother and said,             “Ma, we have to move. The ball is going to hit me in the face.”            She told me to stop being melodramatic. Or, rather, that’s what she was in the process of saying when…the ball bounced over all the people standing in front of me and hit me in the face. On TV, too. It was super awesome, because what senior in high school doesn’t want to be hit in the face by a basketball on national TV, while sitting next to her mother? It was more spectacular because I knew I’d be starting college there the following Fall.            This has happened often enough that I’ve learned that nosebleed seats aren’t so bad. Yes, that means it has happened more than once. More than once on national TV, too. Pretty much, if someone says to me, “Oh, I saw you on TV,” it because I was hit in the face with something. (Once it was another woman’s boobs when she drunkenly and “accidentally” fell into my husband’s lap.  That particular escapade aired on Pay Per View. Apparently, I did not look happy. Since I’m not so good at hiding my disdain, and I know I possess an awesome stink eye, I’m sure “not happy” was a bit of an understatement.)            What are the chances of that? My oh-so-lucky brother may not believe in the Fortune smiling down upon him, but I certainly do. Because those of us who suffer under the yoke of unluckiness from time to time recognize Fortune’s smile, even when it’s not bestowed upon us.            But my luck has also been really, really good. It’s come through for me when I’ve needed it. And trust me, it was luck, chance, fortune… whatever name you decide to give it, it was all about luck. Not skill, not some innate ability, not positioning myself so that I could recognize and seize opportunity when it struck. No, it was dumb luck, plain and simple.            A few years ago (okay, more than a few), when my husband and I were flat broke, he took me out to dinner to celebrate my graduation. I knew we didn’t have a whole lot of money, since we’d been eating ramen for the last month, but I didn’t know we were flat broke—I’d been ensconced in my study, writing my thesis, for the last six months, all while working two jobs and going to school. I hadn’t slept more than four hours a night in those six months, and I was exhausted. But I’d finished the darn thing, and I had a job lined up that I would start two days later. Husband wanted me to reward me for all my hard work, so he took me out to a dinner we couldn’t afford (at a coffee shop in a casino), and while we were there, he told me he wasn’t even sure we had enough money to afford a meal and drinks, so he warned me to “eat cheap.”             And so I did.            At the end of a terrible meal, we had a single dollar left over.             Outside of the coffee shop was a slot machine. One of the high paying ones. Out here, it’s known as MegaBucks. The payouts are over a million dollars, if you’re lucky and have bet the maximum you’re allowed, which is three dollars.             I had a buck, and, on a lark (and knowing the odds—I’d been doing stats for six months, after all), I went ahead and put that single dollar into the MegaBucks machine. I turned to talk to husband, so I never saw the eagles line up.            I heard an alarm, though, and, for a moment, I was convinced the place was on fire. That is until I glanced at husband’s face and saw he’d gone pale.            No, I hadn’t hit MegaBucks. I hit the MegaMini, the one just below the massive win. If I’d played three dollars, I would have won something like $150,000. As it stood, I won $7,000.             For two kids who had resorted to eating ramen noodles for weeks on end, that $7000 was more money than we’d see in months.            What was that but Fortune, smiling on us, when we really needed it? I haven’t won anything since (I suppose you have to play more often than I do in order to win, though), and I don’t expect to. After all, Fortune, like lightning, rarely strikes twice. Well, more to the point, she rarely strikes me twice.             So while I think we have the ability to shape our own destinies, I believe in luck. I keep thinking I can pull another one out, and I’ll win the lottery or something (again, there is that whole playingthe lottery in order to win it thing, but those are just details, right?). But the way karma works with me, I’m actually more likely to be struck by lightning a few times.
            And, from what I’ve been told, it’s not worth it. I heard this from a friend who’s been struck not one, not twice, but three times. Talk about unlucky. And he doesn’t even have a winning lottery ticket to show for it.

When Kenneth Mackay, long-banished rogue and thief, returns to the Mackay holding at the request of his brother, he has no idea what he might find. He certainly doesn’t expect to be confronted with his twin’s imminent death, or with the plan his brother has concocted. Ten years before, Malcolm made a tragic mistake, and, to preserve the family name—and his own skin—he allowed Kenneth to take the fall. Now that he is dying without an heir, Malcolm plans to atone for his mistake: by giving Kenneth his life back. All Kenneth has to do is assume his brother’s identity. But complicating matters is the unexpected return of Lady Isobel Mackay, the daughter of an English marquess... and the wife Malcolm didn’t want. Isobel barely knows the husband who abandoned her even before their marriage, and she'd long since given up on having a real marriage with him. Yet when she returns to the Mackay holding far earlier than expected, she finds her husband a changed man. Despite the hurt between them, Isobel's heart responds to this man who cares for his entire clan as if they were family. Who, for the first time since their marriage, cares for her as if she is, too.  Falling in love with her husband had never been part of Isobel’s plan. But when their future is suddenly in peril, Isobel must find a way to save him—from himself and from the deception threatening to tear them apart.