The Texan's Baby Bombshell

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  “The paths,” she said, once more interrupting his descent back into that particular snake pit. “I suppose we lost track of each other?”

  People who walked through actual minefields had always had his admiration. He imagined he felt a hint of empathy for them now. “After you graduated, you went to Europe on a fellowship.”

  “I did?” She tugged at the sleeve of the thin sweater, pulling it against her slender wrist even though it was already pulled down as far as it looked meant to go. “I don’t feel like I’m that adventurous.”

  She had dreaded going. She’d only applied for the fellowship because of pressure from her parents. She’d never expected that she’d get it. When she had, her parents had been insistent that she take it.

  And whether or not they’d “gotten along,” she’d always done what Sylvia and Nelson Hudson expected.

  “You must have liked it.” His voice sounded flatter than he’d intended. “You stayed longer than the fellowship lasted.” Long enough for him to get the message that she wasn’t coming back. At least, not to him.

  “What about your path?” Her fingers moved from her sleeve to the dog-eared corner of the thick sketching paper, folding it back and forth. “Are you married? Kids?”

  The vise around his throat tightened another notch. “Never married.” He pushed himself off the chair and swung it back around to the puzzle table, only to notice that the elderly couple had gone. So had the sullen teenager and her parents.

  The television was silent. The flat screen black.

  He looked back at Laurel. “Have you decided what you want to do when you leave here?”

  “You mean when they kick me out because they can’t afford to keep me any longer than they already have?”

  “They’re not kicking you out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Dr. Granger told me she’s made arrangements.” It was at least a partial truth.

  She didn’t look any less troubled. “I can’t stay here forever, though. I assume I have a life I should be getting back to.” She pushed the pencil behind her ear, reminding him sharply of days gone by that ought to have dimmed in his memory, and tugged at the bottom of her sleeve again. “Only nobody from that life’s come looking for me.”

  His molars clenched again. He thought of the man who, despite everything, was keeping vigil beside Linus in a Houston hospital. “Not for lack of trying.”

  She shot him a quick look. “What do you mean?”

  “Your fiancé.” His voice was brusque. He couldn’t help it. “Eric Johnson. He looked for you.”

  Her brows pulled together. “I’m engaged? How do you know that? And if he looked for me, why isn’t he here now?”

  He looked at the ceiling, head splitting, back aching, and wished his heart were empty. “Oh, sweetheart,” he sighed. “That is a long, convoluted story.” He took a deep breath and looked down at her. The window beside her was darkened. The sun had set. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re coming back?”

  When it came to Laurel Hudson, it seemed he’d never change. “Yeah.” His voice was gruff. “I’m coming back.”

  Chapter Two

  “Well?” Kane’s voice was demanding. “You saw her?”

  Adam pressed the speaker button on his cell phone and tossed it down on the bed in his motel room while he practically ripped off the cap of the pain relievers he’d bought at the convenience store across the street from Fresh Pine.

  “I saw her.” He downed two of the pills dry and yanked his shirttails out of his jeans as he crossed the room to the window. It overlooked a parking lot full of work trucks and middle-class cars. The economy rental he’d gotten from the airport was indistinguishable among them.

  He pulled the beige curtains closed and punched the Colder button on the air-conditioning unit beneath the window.

  “And?”

  She didn’t have any miraculous recovery at the sight of me. He looked back at the phone as if he were looking at his brother. “And nothing,” he said aloud.

  “Bull.”

  He pressed the heels of his palms against his closed eyes and gingerly lowered himself onto the bed beside the phone until he lay flat. The bag of food he’d picked up at the deli next to the motel was sitting by the bolted-down television where he’d left it. His stomach felt hollow, but the effort to get up and retrieve the food didn’t seem worth it.

  “She has amnesia,” he said to the phone and the room at large. “She doesn’t actually remember me. My face was just familiar to her for some reason.”

  “A five-month-old reason,” Kane said flatly. “Whether or not her conscious self knows why, something deeper knows she made a baby with you last year. Maybe it’s karma for her claiming that baby was someone else’s.”

  Adam winced. Kane spoke about the baby with more ease than Adam could. “More like I’m familiar from college days,” he corrected flatly. He didn’t want to believe Laurel had deliberately lied about the baby’s father, but at the moment, it was more than a little difficult.

  “She remembers me from college. It’s long-term memory.” That was what Dr. Granger believed, at any rate. “What happened last year is too new.” As were her actions five months ago, when she’d left her—their—newborn son.

  Call it what it was. Abandoned.

  He wished he could shut the voice in his head up. Even Eric had told him not to think of it in those terms. Yes, Laurel had left her son. But she’d left him in a safe environment, and at a pediatric center, no less, and it was something that they all needed to remember.

  His lips twisted. It didn’t make anything better.

  It was just more proof that Eric was the better man. Legally, he’d been declared the baby’s father. He could have kept the truth to himself. But he hadn’t. Not once he’d learned that Adam was in the picture.

  Kane was on a roll, too. “Except she doesn’t recall her parents?” His voice was hard. Sarcastic. “Or her own name? Seems to me those are pretty long-term memories, too.”

  Adam changed the subject. “Any word about the birth certificate?” Just because Eric had figured out Adam was the baby’s father, it didn’t mean the Great State of Texas had caught up with that fact. There were rules about who could request official birth records—much less get one man’s name off and another on—and for now, Adam didn’t meet the requirements.

  Which meant involving the official people who could.

  “Not yet,” Kane said. “Eric had a letter from the missing mama saying he was Linus’s father and a crappy DNA test that confirmed it well enough for a judge to give him custody back in February. Then he got that second DNA test done after the donor drive a few months ago that conclusively said otherwise. And now all those tests they ran on you before the transplant? It was a short step from HLA markers and whatever to a DNA test. Hell, you’ve got DNA tests to spare at this point. It’s no wonder the social worker Eric had back in February is saying that it’ll take a few days to untangle all the legalities.”

  “It’s been a few days.”

  “Don’t bite off my head, bro. I’ll call her again tomorrow and check on it if you want.”

  “I want.” His voice was terse.

  His brother waited a beat. “Have you talked to the hospital?”

  Adam had called the hospital on his way to the motel from Fresh Pine. He’d spoken to Angelica, who was the main nurse assigned to Linus, and dissuaded her from transferring his call to Linus’s hospital room.

  Since he’d met Eric, there’d already been too many conversations. He preferred putting off the next one as long as he could.

  Eric was the man Laurel had planned to marry. That was reason enough to resent him.

  He was also the man who had, for months, truly believed Linus was his son. Laurel had hurt him, too, unintention
ally or not. They had that in common.

  And that was something else Adam didn’t want to think about.

  The only logical reason for any of it was that Laurel must have wanted Eric to be her child’s father. Maybe she’d suspected that he wasn’t, and that was why she’d disappeared.

  “So far, Linus is doing well,” he told Kane, focusing his mind with an effort. “If everything continues that way, he’ll be released in a few weeks once they know he’s producing new blood cells.”

  “And then?”

  Adam pinched the bridge of his nose. “And then I bring him home.”

  The silence from the phone was loud with all of the things neither one of them said.

  Like how was Adam supposed to take care of an infant? Much less one with aplastic anemia?

  When Eric had claimed Linus in February and taken him home to Houston, he’d hired a full-time nanny. He could afford it, thanks to owning his own company.

  Adam, on the other hand, was a restaurant manager. His paycheck was dependent upon actually being there to do the managing. Provisions was already a success, but the restaurant was still new and no one was sure whether the town of Rambling Rose would be able to sustain it over the long haul.

  And he was well aware that he’d never be more than a manager there despite the fact that it was owned and operated by his cousins, Ashley, Nicole and Megan.

  They were all Fortunes, it was true. But they’d only discovered the fact that they were related in the last year. And the sisters were the money behind the restaurant.

  Where Adam had gotten a homemade cake from his folks to celebrate his college graduation, his triplet cousins had received a couple hundred thousand dollars apiece from theirs.

  Such was the difference between his father, Gary Fortune, and their father, David Fortune.

  Adam brought a lot of work experience to Provisions, but he’d never have the stake in the restaurant that the girls did. He didn’t want one, either, because his goal lay elsewhere.

  But now, he had a son he needed to provide for and he’d just committed to spending several thousand dollars a month for his son’s mother’s care.

  A mother who didn’t remember either one of them.

  “Yo. Bro.” Kane’s voice broke into his churning thoughts. “You pass out on me or something?”

  He thumbed off the speaker button and held the phone to his ear. “I’m here.”

  His brother’s tone sobered. “How was it seeing her?”

  Miraculous.

  Hard as hell.

  Adam stretched, trying to find a more comfortable position. “Surreal,” he finally answered.

  “You spend the past year thinking she’s in Houston, married to some other guy by now, participate in a donor drive for a baby you think you have no connection to and find out that you’re not just a good match, but you’re the match and then learn that the baby’s mama is none other than the loved-and-lost Laurel? The very woman whose complete disappearance from the planet had her fiancé convinced she’d met some untimely end?” Kane let out a laugh short on humor. “Surreal barely begins to cover it. You’re in Land of Oz territory.”

  Adam muttered an oath. “You’re not helping.”

  “Sure she’s not faking it?”

  “For God’s sake!”

  “Just playing devil’s advocate,” Kane defended.

  “She’s not faking amnesia,” he said flatly.

  When Kane spoke again, his tone was neutral. “When’re you coming back?”

  “Tomorrow night. Last flight out.”

  “How’s the back feeling?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Should’ve listened to the doctors. They advised you it was too soon to travel.”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t exactly know everything that’s happened, do they?”

  “They know you spent a night in the hospital five days ago,” Kane returned just as sharply.

  “My supper’s getting cold,” Adam said abruptly. Since it was a cold deli sandwich, it was more likely getting warm, sitting on the cheap dresser next to the television. “You can save the lectures until I get home. Better yet, just save ’em from here on out.”

  “You might convince me to save them, but what about the rest of the family? It’s only a matter of time before Mom is on the plane from New York to meet the new grandbaby.”

  He couldn’t afford to let himself think that far ahead. Laurel was recovering. Dr. Granger said the odds of her never regaining her memory were slim, though she might never remember the trauma of her accident. But even if she didn’t regain the rest, they couldn’t keep the truth from her forever.

  She had a child. Whether or not she returned to Eric, Adam couldn’t believe she wouldn’t want her son with her, regardless of what had motivated her five months ago.

  “Not if Dad can talk Mom out of coming,” he told Kane. It was a lot easier to think about the tensions in their father’s family than in his own. “We might have talked him into coming to Texas last summer, but he said then that he’d never come back.”

  “That’s because he’s got a bug up his ass about money. Bad enough to find out he’s one of Julius Fortune’s illegitimate sons. Learning you’re the half brother of the guy who started up Robinson Tech? Gerald Robinson’s so rich he probably owns half of Texas. And David’s no slouch, either, with those video games he designed. Toss in the others—what have we got? Real estate moguls and financial wizards? But you know Dad. He’s got more pride than Midas had money.”

  When Gary Fortune’s job, along with thousands of others in the auto industry, had been cut years ago, he’d never seemed to spring back. But even before then, their family had always been short on money. Adam would say that having six kids tended to cause that, but David Fortune’s passel of yours, mine and ours was even larger.

  It wasn’t enough for Gary to begrudge Gerald his fortune, though. He seemed to feel the same way about David even though David hadn’t known anything more about Julius or Gary and Gerald than Gary had known about them.

  Adam had no problem with Gerald or his new wife, who’d seemed pretty down-to-earth when he’d met them a year ago for their wedding. He knew David and the other newly discovered uncles were all married. Didn’t know or care if their wives worked or not. His own mother, Catherine, did. And the fact that she’d had to contribute to the family coffers had just seemed to add to their dad’s simmering bitterness. That was Adam’s take on it, anyway.

  “Dad’s bitter because he doesn’t have what all the rest of Julius’s sons seem to have,” Adam said bluntly.

  “Yeah, too true,” Kane said. “Anyway, you want some good news?”

  Adam gave a half snort, half groan. “I don’t know. Do I?” He’d had enough news lately to last a lifetime.

  “Callum is ready to submit the revised plans for the hotel to the town council. He ran them by the mayor and she thinks it might actually get approved this time.”

  That was a surprise. “Callum’s finally satisfied?” Callum was the eldest son of David and brother not only to Ashley and her sisters but to Dillon and Steven, who were the other owners of Fortune Brothers Construction—the driving force behind all of the new projects that Rambling Rose had seen in the last year.

  A real estate developer and contractor, Callum had also been at Gerald and Deborah’s wedding last year. Callum had talked then about the possibilities awaiting in Rambling Rose. And what better way to put Julius’s past in the past for all of them than to share those opportunities with Gary’s side of the family, too?

  Adam’s dad had flatly refused to discuss it. He hadn’t wanted to attend the wedding in the first place. Hadn’t wanted to drive all the way from Buffalo to Paseo—a tiny town he’d considered a zit on the back end of a boar. But either curiosity or jealousy had gotten the better of him.

  When i
t came to the opportunities that Callum talked about? Nothing doing. Gary said they were from Buffalo and from Buffalo they’d remain.

  His attitude hadn’t stopped Callum, though. He’d been more than willing to bring Adam and Kane into the fold regardless of their father’s attitude. Rambling Rose was a not-so-sleepy little town with a great location midway between Austin and Houston, with the burgeoning plan to offer newcomers more affordable land around their mini-mansions than in its larger neighboring cities. And then all of those mini-mansion-dwellers would need newer and fancier places to shop and eat and pamper themselves. They’d need space for their satellite law firms and country clubs and luxury resort living.

  In time, there’d be plenty of opportunity for all of the Fortunes if they just took the chance.

  Callum had promptly relocated from Florida to Rambling Rose and began turning those opportunities into reality.

  It had taken longer for Kane and Adam to move there. They’d both had jobs to get out of first. Jobs they didn’t really care about but were committed to doing. Adam had just wanted to get away from Buffalo. It was Kane who’d really been ready for the new challenges. He’d been the one who’d been arguing for weeks now that Callum’s plans for an expansive luxury resort needed to be scaled back. Maybe it was because he and Adam came from modest means, but Kane had recognized the growing animosity among the core residents of Rambling Rose toward the wealthy newcomers.

  Most of all when it came to the fancy hotel Callum and his brothers had originally planned. Not even Steven’s recent marriage to the mayor had gotten the elaborate project past the red tape in which it had been mired. Finally, the plans had been revised entirely from a luxury hotel to a property more in keeping with the town’s personality.

  “Congratulations,” Adam said. “Some progress finally.” His brother had a wealth of patience that Adam didn’t, but even Kane had limits.

  “The only thing we’re missing in town is a brewery,” Kane said pointedly.