Texan Seeks Fortune

by Marie Ferrarella

  Connor inclined his head obligingly. “Good night, Mom,” he replied.

  He waited until his mother had closed his bedroom door behind her. Getting up off the bed, he crossed over to his desk and took out the folder he had slipped into the top drawer. Pulling out his chair, he sat down at the desk and began to go through the folder. It was filled with notes he’d made to himself regarding Charlotte Robinson’s dealings, as well as her possible current whereabouts.

  He reviewed his notes slowly, rereading everything as if it was the first time he was seeing it. In his compilations, he’d come across the name of a freelance researcher, a Brianna Childress, who had handled some work for Charlotte Robinson over the course of the previous year.

  He looked at the papers thoughtfully. Whatever this Brianna person had been doing for Charlotte had to have been sent to some address, even if that address turned out to be a PO box. That PO box in turn had to have been paid for, which meant that there’d been a check that could be traced to a bank account.

  In addition, this freelancer had to be paid for her trouble. That brought him back to the bank account again, or at least a traceable credit card. All this meant that there was a possible paper trail. One he intended to follow.

  It was a start, Connor told himself.

  “You don’t know it yet, Brianna Childress, but you are about to be paid a visit tomorrow morning,” he said aloud. He closed the folder but went on holding it in his hands a little longer, as if the act connected him to the woman he was pursuing. “You just might be instrumental in helping me find the elusive Charlotte Prendergast Robinson before she can do any more damage.”

  Connor doubted that it would be that easy, but at least it was a lead, and who knew—maybe he’d get lucky. At the very least, this Childress woman might be able to provide him with the name of someone else who could in turn give him some clue as to where Charlotte Robinson was currently hiding.

  He’d had less to go on before, he thought as he rose from the desk and got ready for bed.

  * * *

  Connor was up early the following morning and got dressed quickly.

  He looked at the address he’d left out on his desk. It was the address where he was going to find this Childress woman. Initially, for about a minute and a half, he considered calling her to tell her he was coming to see her today.

  He decided against it.

  A face-to-face meeting would be the better way to go. He needed all the help he could get and the element of surprise might very well be useful in this case. If this woman turned out to be as nefarious as Charlotte, calling her might cause her to flee. If this Childress woman was actually involved with Charlotte, the last thing he wanted to do was tip her off.

  He knew nothing about Brianna Childress, which meant that there was no reason to suppose that she wouldn’t warn Charlotte that he was looking for her. That in turn would send Charlotte into even deeper hiding.

  He wouldn’t put anything past Charlotte no matter how innocent his parents, especially his mother, thought she was.

  Since it was rather early, Connor decided to just slip out of the house without waking anyone.

  The sooner he was on the road, the closer he would be to possibly bringing all this to a satisfactory conclusion.

  He had another reason to get out of the house without being noticed. He didn’t want to get involved in a possible discussion with his mother about Charlotte Robinson. Barbara Fortunado seemed reluctant to think badly of the other woman, but then, his mother had a tendency to view everyone in a good light.

  However, there was no doubt in his mind that Charlotte was behind everything that had gone wrong in his family lately. She was a dangerous woman. The very fact that she had either tried to burn down Gerald Robinson’s estate or had hired an arsonist to do it for her said it all in his book.

  The woman was evil and the sooner he found her, the sooner he would rest easy.

  Connor made good his escape and got to his car without anyone seeing him. Loading the address he’d found for Brianna Childress—the location was unfamiliar to him—into his car’s GPS, he got started.

  He turned on his radio but hardly heard any of the music coming out of it. He was completely focused on the encounter that was ahead of him.

  * * *

  Connor expected the address of the research company he was looking for to lead him to an office building somewhere in Houston. Instead, the address wound up leading him to what appeared to be a rather small, homey-looking cottage.

  Puzzled, he stopped his car a few hundred feet away from the house, wondering if he had made some sort of a mistake copying the address down.

  Still, he thought, he was here so he might as well check it out.

  Who knew, maybe this Brianna Childress ran her business out of her house. She wouldn’t have been the first person to start out that way. The names of several computer companies and software firms came to mind.

  Making up his mind, Connor started his car again. He brought it up closer to the cottage, then stopped a second time and parked.

  Getting out, he made his way up the front walk. He noticed that there were some sort of bushes planted in the front yard. He wasn’t very good at recognizing plants, although to his credit he did know a rose from a lily, he thought with a disparaging smile.

  He saw neither in the yard.

  Walking up to the front door, he noted that it was in need of a fresh coat of paint. Shrugging, he rang the doorbell. In his mind, he rehearsed what he planned to say to Brianna Childress in order to get her to let him come inside her house.

  His finger had no sooner pressed the doorbell than the front door flew open.

  A rather frazzled young woman with reddish-brown hair and heart-melting brown eyes looked up at him as if he was her personal savior. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, both of which lovingly highlighted all of her curves and nearly made him permanently lose his train of thought.

  He recognized the woman from her online photo. But to be honest, she could use a new head shot. That one didn’t do her justice.

  “Oh thank goodness you’re here!” Brianna cried, a look of relief washing over her features. “It’s right in there!”

  She pointed toward the back of the house where “it,” whatever that referred to, was.

  Without waiting for a response from him, Brianna grabbed his hand and pulled him in her wake, quickly leading him toward the back of the house.

  Given that she had rather a good grip for such a delicate person, Connor realized that at the moment, he had no choice but to follow her.

  “I was at my wits’ end,” Brianna confided unabashedly. “Luckily, I saw your ad on TV the other day and remembered the phone number. Actually, I copied it down,” she confessed. “I had a feeling I was going to need you sooner rather than later and I was right. If you hadn’t come, I’d probably be underwater before noon.”

  “Um—”

  At a loss, Connor got no further. He had followed the woman into a bathroom. The “it” she was obviously referring to was a toilet. The water was rising precariously high within the bowl. It looked as if any second, the water was going to overflow and go all over the floor.

  The sprightly redhead was standing in front of the toilet, her hands on her hips. “Kids,” she said to him by way of an explanation.

  “Kids?” Connor echoed, unable to understand what she was telling him.

  “Every time I turn around, one of them has decided that one of their stuffed animals or trucks or figurines is dirty and needs to be washed. I guess the toilet’s like a bathtub to them.” She sighed and looked at him plaintively. “So, can you fix it?” she asked, a hopeful look on her face.

  It was a face, Connor realized, that he couldn’t bring himself to say no to.

  Chapter Three

  Connor forced himself to focus on something other
than Brianna Childress’s very expressive eyes. He knew that he couldn’t very well lie to the woman, not if he needed her help and wanted her to be truthful with him. If he lied, or omitted telling her the truth, that wouldn’t exactly be starting off their relationship, however short it might turn out to be, on the right foot. Lies just begat lies.

  “I’m afraid that you’ve made a mistake,” Connor began.

  Dismay washed over Brianna’s face as she took in what he had just said. “You can’t fix it like the commercial said?” she asked.

  “It’s not that, it’s—”

  Connor got no further in his explanation than those first four words because right at that moment there was a bloodcurdling scream followed by a wail and then the sound of things either falling or being thrown.

  The jarring noise went clear down to the bone.

  “Oh dear lord, now what?” Brianna cried in exasperation.

  Before Connor could venture a guess, she made an abrupt about-face and dashed out of the room, heading toward the scream. That left Connor standing alone in the bathroom with a toilet that looked as if it was about to blow at any moment.

  “There’s obviously never a dull moment around here,” he commented under his breath.

  Left to his own devices, Connor looked around the small, blue-and-white-tiled bathroom. From what he had gathered, this wasn’t the first time the toilet presented a problem. Judging from the tools that were scattered on the floor, Brianna had the right things to deal with the situation.

  The fact that she hadn’t dealt with it told him that she’d never learned how to put any of these tools to use. She’d probably just seen the plumber using them and had thought ahead—or wanted to be prepared for the next time. Next time had obviously arrived.

  He gave the woman an A for observation. Too bad her execution was sorely lacking.

  Connor had no desire to follow the woman into the other room, given the high-pitched screaming that was coming from another part of the house, but on the other hand, he was never much for standing around gathering dust, either.

  Looking around again, he took inventory of the tools in the room. There was a long, thin metallic tool expressly made for breaking through the debris that gathered in clogged pipes. Whimsically dubbed a “snake,” it was lying beside a standard plunger. There were a couple of other tools, as well, but in his opinion, they were just overkill.

  Connor prided himself on being rather handy. He decided that he might as well do something while he waited for the woman to come back.

  Assessing the problem one last time, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

  * * *

  The job turned out to be easier than he had expected. The reason for the clog was a miniature toy train that had been wedged in the bottom of the toilet’s evacuation pipe. The train had been covered in what appeared to be a massive wad of sopping wet toilet paper that had wound itself around the toy. It had been a little tricky getting the train free, but in the end, he managed to get it loose—all without breaking the toy.

  He looked down at the item that was now safely nestled in his hand. Such a little thing, so much trouble, he thought.

  It was only when he finally rose back to his feet again that he realized the knees of his pants had gotten quite wet. He looked around for a mop to at least dry the floor, but it appeared to be the one thing that the woman hadn’t brought out with the other equipment.

  Shaking his head, Connor muttered under his breath. “It figures.”

  “What figures?”

  The voice startled him. Swinging around to face the doorway, he saw that Brianna had finally reappeared.

  She was not alone. She was carrying a squirming, very vocal preschooler on her hip. A boy.

  The slightly surprised look on her face gave way to a wide, relieved smile when she saw the toy train in Connor’s hand.

  “You fixed it,” she cried, delighted.

  The little boy on her hip saw the toy at the same time that his mother did.

  “Mine!” he cried, eagerly putting his hands out as if that would somehow cause the toy to levitate out of the stranger’s hand and into his own.

  “Then what’s it doing in the toilet?” Connor asked, pretending to be serious as he presented the train to the little boy after rinsing it off in the sink.

  The kid had the same wide, sunny smile that his mother had. He flashed that smile now at Connor as he grabbed the toy train and pressed it to his chest.

  “Mine,” he repeated.

  “We’ve established that,” Connor replied as if he was talking to someone his own age. “But why did you—?”

  Brianna anticipated his question. “You’re not going to get an answer,” she told him. “He knows he’s not supposed to throw anything down there but for some reason, the toilet just seems to really fascinate him.” She looked at her son with an indulgent smile. “Axel used to have a pet hamster until one day he decided that Howard was dirty and needed a bath.”

  “Let me guess,” Connor said to her, “Howard drowned.”

  She surprised him by saying, “No, actually, he didn’t. I managed to fish him out of the toilet bowl just in time.”

  “So you saved Howard,” Connor concluded.

  “No,” she said with a heartfelt sigh. “I didn’t.” When he raised a quizzical brow, she told him the rest of the story. “As near as I can figure it, Howard died of a heart attack. After I rescued him and dried him off, I put Howard in his cage. I found him the next morning, lying on the floor of the cage, as stiff as one of the kids’ figurines.”

  The boy had stopped making noise and now sniffled a couple of times.

  “We had a funeral,” Axel said solemnly.

  “So he can talk in sentences,” Connor marveled, looking at the boy. The boy seemed pretty young to him and he had no idea just what kids were able to do at any given age.

  “Only when he wants to,” Brianna answered. Shifting her son to her other hip, she looked contritely at the man whose pant legs she had just noticed were wet. “I’m sorry I’m going on and on here. I don’t get much of a chance to talk to adults,” she admitted. Setting Axel down, she looked around for her purse. “How much do I owe you?”

  Smiling at the woman, Connor shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Brianna looked at him, confused. “But you just fixed my toilet—and got your knees wet in the process,” she pointed out.

  “That’s okay,” he told her, shrugging off her offer of payment. “This is on me. No charge.”

  That only managed to confuse things even further for Brianna. “I don’t think your boss is going to appreciate you doing things for free.”

  “On the contrary,” Connor said. He thought of his father, who he was, in essence, working for at the moment while he was conducting this investigation. “I think he’d approve.”

  Judging by her expression, his answer made absolutely no sense to the woman. “But you’re a plumber. How are you supposed to make any money if you don’t accept payment for doing a job?” she asked, confused.

  “Because,” Connor answered cavalierly, “I’m not a plumber.”

  This was making less and less sense to her. She began at the beginning. “But the company I called, they said they were sending someone right out.”

  “They probably meant what they said, but they didn’t send me,” he told her.

  Things were finally falling into place. Brianna looked at the man standing and dripping in her bathroom. She was horrified at her mistake. He probably thought she was an idiot.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she confessed, “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Amused, Connor laughed off her attempt at an apology. “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “It was just an honest mistake.”

  The fact that she had let a perfect stranger into her house and that he was still
standing here suddenly registered with her.

  “But if you’re not the plumber,” she cried, backing away from him, “who are you?”

  She was doing her best not to panic or appear nervous. After all, she had no idea who this man was or what he was doing in her house.

  Brianna thought of her children and a chill went shooting up her spine.

  She had to protect them!

  Connor offered her an easy smile as he put his hand out to her. “Connor Fortunado, at your service.”

  But who was Connor Fortunado and why had he come to her house? His answer just created more questions.

  Before she could ask him, the doorbell rang. For a split second, she appeared torn between questioning the man in her bathroom further or going to answer the doorbell.

  The doorbell won.

  Making up her mind, she hurried to the front of the house.

  “Does it ever let up?” Connor called after her, curious.

  “Sometimes,” she answered. Just not today.

  Brianna opened the door and found herself looking at a slightly overweight man in coveralls that had seen better days.

  “Somebody called for a plumber?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I did, but I don’t need you anymore,” Brianna began, ready to close the door again.

  The man looked at her skeptically, then glanced down at what was apparently a work order in his hand. “The toilet fixed itself?” he asked with a touch of sarcasm.

  “No, but—”

  Connor was about to intervene for her but Brianna’s son beat him to it. Or, more accurately, her son and her daughter did. The duo had decided to resume whatever battle they had been deeply embroiled in a few minutes earlier.

  Connor came forward, listening. The battle was apparently over whether or not the rather scrappy-looking mutt who had come running in with them should be wearing a dress. The vote was tied. The little girl—Ava, according to the name her brother had yelled—was saying yes while Axel was very loudly proclaiming, “No! He’s a boy dog!”