Mendoza's Secret Fortune (The Fortunes of Texas: Cowboy Country)

by Marie Ferrarella

  Cisco looked genuinely interested. Ordinarily, he would have thought it was an act, but now he wasn’t sure. “What kind of misgivings?” he asked.

  Matteo told him what had been eating away at him almost from the start, when he’d asked Rachel about her family. “I don’t think she’s being entirely honest with me.”

  “About what?” Cisco prodded him.

  “There’s something about her family that she’s not being entirely honest about.”

  That, to Cisco, was small potatoes. Definitely not something to cause a breakup in a promising relationship. And from what he’d picked up, Matteo and Rachel had all the makings of a promising relationship.

  “Hey, little brother, Rachel’s human. Everyone is entitled to have some secrets. Secrets keep you on your toes and make a person more interesting, if you ask me.” He smiled as he said, “Oh, ye who are without secrets, cast the first stone.”

  Matteo frowned. “I don’t want to cast the first stone—or any stone. I just want to feel that she trusts me and knows she can confide in me.”

  “Time, buddy,” Cisco advised him. “That kind of thing takes time. But you and the lady will get there—just take it one step at a time. Show her that she can count on you not just when you want to be there but when she needs you to be there, as well.”

  It suddenly hit Matteo that Cisco was giving him some very solid, sage pieces of advice. “Where are you coming up with all this?”

  “On-the-job training, Mattie. On-the-job training. Now, go and make me proud,” Cisco urged him with a fond wink. “Oh, and I get dibs on being best man once you and she get around to tying the knot.”

  Matteo formed a fist and knocked on his brother’s desk twice, as if to counteract a jinx. “If we ever finally do get to that point,” he told Cisco, “the job’s yours.”

  Cisco laughed. “I’ll hold you to that.”

  Matteo had absolutely no doubt that his brother would do just that. And when it came right down to it, if this did turn out the way he hoped it would, then he definitely wanted Cisco as his best man.

  But first Rachel had to say yes.

  * * *

  Rachel didn’t know why she should have these butterflies crashing into one another inside her stomach. After all, she wasn’t going to be called upon to speak. Her boss, Christopher Fortune Jones, was. Her only function here was to be one of the well-wishers and enjoy the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

  A substantial number of people had responded to the invitation to attend the ceremony. They gathered in front of the brand-new building that housed the latest branch of the Fortune Foundation.

  In addition to all the people who would be working at the Foundation, the ceremony was being attended by some of the more important members of the Fortune family. There was Emmett Jamison, the former FBI agent who ran the Foundation these days, Lily Fortune, still a stunning, exotic-looking woman at sixty-nine, and James Marshall Fortune. James was the sixty-three-year-old family member who, Rachel had heard, had gone through such great pains to find his two sisters—he was one of a set of triplets and the only member of the family to have been kept as a Fortune, while the other two had been given up for adoption.

  It was because of James’s relentless efforts that Christopher’s mother finally found out about her true identity.

  Rachel looked at the faces around her, faces that belonged to members of the Fortune family.

  Look at them all, she thought.

  She didn’t know why she felt such butterflies dive-bombing inside her. Was it anxiety causing this reaction?

  Or something else?

  A hush fell over the crowd as Christopher stepped forward. Wielding a giant set of scissors, the newly minted member of the Fortune family cut the ribbon in front of the building, signaling the official opening of the Fortune Foundation.

  Once both sides of the wide red ribbon had gently floated to the ground, cries of “Speech” echoed throughout the crowd. Resigned, Christopher put down the scissors and reluctantly gave the onlookers what they asked for.

  “I don’t really have a speech,” he confessed. “I’m not much good at talking to more than a couple of people at a time. But I just wanted to say that I still wake up in the morning and think that all this was just a dream. That James Marshall Fortune did not come into my life and the lives of my siblings and mother, and he didn’t tell us that we were all part of the Fortune family—long-lost members he had finally tracked down.

  “As you all probably know, I resisted at first, as did some other members of my immediate family, because we had the misconception that the Fortune family was made up of snobs who thought of themselves as being privileged. Boy, was I wrong.”

  Laughter met his statement, and he waited until it died down before continuing.

  “I can’t tell you exactly what it means to find out that you’re a Fortune—I’m still learning about that part every day. But I can tell you that it comes with a warm feeling, knowing there’s a network of people who have your back. A network of people you can always turn to if there’s a problem.

  “Being a Fortune means never, ever being alone, even if you think you are. I had to learn that the hard way because I resisted taking on the name, resisted the idea that I was part of them and they were part of me. But I’m not always bright about things. I do know, thanks to them, that you can never have too much family. Until my dying day, I will always be grateful that Uncle James has embraced all the Fortunes of Horseback Hollow. You have no idea what that means to all of us, Uncle James.”

  He addressed these last words to the man who had brought about this vast change in his life.

  James nodded in response, a smile gracing his thin lips.

  A wave of applause went up.

  Rachel had tried, really tried, to stand there and smile as her boss talked about this rare gift that had been bestowed on him and on the members of his family. She’d almost made it through the entire speech intact, her eyes dry, her body almost rigid. She was determined that no one around her would guess the secret that she had been living with for the past five years.

  But when Christopher continued to go on about what it meant to be a Fortune, and then turned toward James Marshall Fortune to sincerely thank him for embracing all the Fortunes—while she was standing out here in the cold, unrecognized and certainly not part of the actual inner circle, something within Rachel just gave way.

  The dam broke. Before she could stop herself, she was crying. Tears were sliding down her cheeks. At any second, one of the Foundation’s guests would notice and could very well start asking all manner of questions.

  Questions she didn’t trust herself to answer coherently right now. Feeling like an outcast, she was far too emotional to deal with something like that properly.

  Rachel bolted, blindly running from the area and praying that she would be able to find someplace to hide until she could cry this out of her system.

  Barring that, she’d just go home. She had made a grave mistake coming to the ceremony.

  She didn’t belong here.

  Rachel was beginning to feel that she didn’t really belong anywhere.

  Chapter Sixteen

  At the last minute, Matteo had come, along with his father, his sister, Gabi, and her new husband, Jude Fortune Jones, to take part in the dedication ceremony. Truthfully, he was paying far less attention than he should have to what Christopher was saying. Instead, he was busy searching the crowd for Rachel.

  Which was why he saw her when she ran from the gathering. Surprised, he was quick to follow.

  Within moments, it became obvious to him that Rachel’s long legs were not just for show. She covered an impressive amount of ground in a short time.

  He was really having trouble catching up to her. She zigzagged through the crowd, making a beeline for the perimeter.
He had no idea where she was heading after that.

  All he knew was that he had to catch her before she disappeared on him. He’d caught a glimpse of her face from a distance and saw that she was crying.

  He couldn’t even begin to guess why.

  But something was very wrong. He needed to get to the bottom of this, to make it right no matter what it took.

  For the first time since they had initially gotten together, he realized that Rachel had the makings of a prize-winning runner.

  If he was going to catch her, Matteo told himself, he was going to have to dig deep and really pour it on.

  So he did.

  * * *

  Rachel didn’t realize that anyone was running after her until she was more than half a block away from the Fortune Foundation building. The sound of rhythmic footfalls directly behind her registered in her brain. The sound was getting closer.

  And then someone was catching her arm and pulling her around to face him.

  Her heart thudded against her rib cage.

  Matteo.

  “Rachel, what’s wrong?” Matteo asked, almost undone by the sight of her tears. Every protective fiber of his being went on red alert. “You’re shaking. And you’re crying,” he said needlessly. “Why are you crying?”

  She didn’t want to talk about it. She couldn’t. He’d think she was being an idiot. But that still didn’t take the pain away. “Dedication speeches always make me sad.”

  “Okay, you got that out of your system,” he said, pushing the quip aside. “Now tell me the truth.” He put a hand on each of her shoulders, just in case she was thinking of darting away again. “What happened back there to make you cry? What’s wrong?”

  But Rachel just shrugged, wishing he would drop the subject. “It’s complicated.”

  He hadn’t thought it was going to be a simple matter. “That’s all right. I have all afternoon. And if that’s not enough time, I can clear the rest of the evening, as well.” He had no intention of leaving her side until she told him everything. She was in no condition to be left alone.

  Rachel waved him away. “You won’t understand,” she told him.

  But Matteo remained steadfast. His place was here, with her, even if she didn’t know it yet. “Then make me understand,” he told her. “Why are you crying?” he repeated patiently.

  Matteo was not going to leave until she told him. She could see that in the set of his chin, the look in his eyes. He had a very sensitive, sensual face, but it could also be an exceedingly stubborn face, as well.

  So she proceeded to tell him—and braced herself for either ridicule or annoyed dismissal.

  “Because Christopher was going on about how James Fortune was embracing the missing branch of the family he’d discovered in Horseback Hollow and how wonderful everything was going to be.”

  Matteo still didn’t see a reason for her to burst into tears. “What about that—other than being maybe a little bit syrupy?”

  She avoided his eyes and looked at the ground as she said, “It’s not true.”

  Matteo was doing his best to understand what she was telling him and why she was so upset, but it wasn’t easy. She was giving him middle pieces of the jigsaw puzzle without allowing him to see any of the defining corners.

  “Then he’s not embracing them?” Matteo asked, using the word she had repeated, since it seemed somehow important to the underlying matter.

  “No, not all of them,” Rachel told him, still avoiding his eyes.

  Matteo hadn’t heard anything about the patriarch turning his back on anyone, as she seemed to be telling him, but he refrained from saying as much to Rachel.

  Instead, he asked, “Who’s James rejecting?” When she finally raised her face to look at him, there was something there in her eyes, something she’d been hiding. A glimmer that suddenly flashed the answer to him. “You?” he asked her uncertainly.

  The moment he asked, he knew.

  It was her.

  But how was that possible? She’d said her last name was Robinson. As far as he knew, that wasn’t a surname associated with the Fortunes.

  Had Rachel been lying to him all along? Was her last name really Fortune? But what reason would she have to hide that?

  Try as he might, he just couldn’t see her doing that. He would have bet any amount of money that Rachel couldn’t lie. Lying just wasn’t part of her makeup.

  There was no point in hiding it anymore, Rachel thought. The other Fortunes, new or otherwise, wouldn’t accept her as one of them, so making herself publicly known as a Fortune served no purpose there.

  But it did here, between Matteo and her. She wasn’t about to lie to him, the man she loved, even if part of her was afraid he’d turn his back on her because she’d kept this from him until now.

  “Yes,” she told him stoically, “I’m a Fortune—at least, I think so.”

  He had to admit, this nearly knocked him for a loop. “How do you know that?” he asked. “Wait, start from the beginning.”

  Taking her hand, he led her even farther away from the Fortune Foundation building. He was playing a hunch that if she went on a walk with him, talking might come more easily for her.

  “The beginning,” she repeated, as if to orient herself where that would be. “Okay. I grew up thinking that my father, Gerald Robinson, was this computer genius who started up his own company and made a ton of money while he was at it. He wasn’t around all that much, and I thought it was his work that kept him away. Other kids’ fathers were workaholics, so it was okay that mine was, too.

  “Dad tried to make up for his absences by giving my brothers and sisters—and me—everything we could possibly have wanted. Private lessons in everything imaginable, expensive clothes.” She paused for a moment as the irony of what she was about to say next got to her. “Whatever we wanted, we got. I realize now that he did that to make up for his guilty conscience—not because he was away from us, working, but because he was away from us...indulging in other things,” she finally said as delicately as possible.

  “Other things?” Matteo repeated. He wasn’t sure he understood what she meant.

  It took her a second to make peace with what she was about to share—and then she told him.

  “Women. I think he was trying to fill some inner void. My dad was—and most likely still is—estranged from his family. I don’t know why or how it started, but I got the feeling that they were the ones who turned their backs on him—although maybe it was the other way around. I don’t know for sure. All I do know is that I feel like I’ve been living a lie all of my life.”

  “You’re not the one who’s lived a lie, Rachel. Your father’s the one who did. He’s the one who lied to you, not the other way around.” Matteo could understand why she felt so disoriented, so rejected, and he didn’t want her going through this alone. He was there with her all the way, starting from this moment on. “And you think that your father’s really a Fortune?”

  She nodded. “Just before I finally left home, I looked through some of his things—he was away again, as usual, and my mother was gone with some of her friends for the weekend. I found some correspondence addressed to a Jerome Fortune and a very old driver’s license for the same name. The picture on it belonged to a much younger version of my father.” She remembered that her heart had stopped when she saw the picture. At that moment, it was as if her life had literally turned on its head. “He’s either got a dead ringer wandering around somewhere with his face—or my father is one of the Fortunes.”

  He still didn’t see the problem. It could be so easily resolved, in his estimation. “If that’s what you think, why haven’t you said something to one of them? You see Christopher several times a week. You could have told him your suspicions. He might have helped you find out the truth one way or another.”

&nbs
p; She shook her head. The fewer people in on this secret, the better. “If I’m right, they didn’t want my father. Why would they want me?”

  “Are you kidding?” Matteo cried, stunned by her question. He stopped walking and turned to look at her. “I can’t imagine anyone not wanting you.” He gently pushed aside a few stray hairs from her face, lightly caressing her cheek. “I want you every minute of every day. I want you so badly, I can taste it.”

  Rachel found that she was having trouble swallowing. “You’re just saying that,” she whispered hoarsely, her eyes never leaving his.

  “I’m just saying that because it’s true,” he told her. “I meant what I said the other day, Rachel. I’m in love with you, and I want to be with you. Forever. If you’ll have me,” he qualified. He didn’t want her feeling that she had no choice in the matter—although it would kill him if she didn’t want to be with him.

  “Stop talking like that,” she warned him. “Or you’ll make me say yes.”

  “That’s the whole idea,” he pointed out.

  There was a time when she’d bought into happily-ever-after, but now she wouldn’t dare. There were too many obstacles in the way. She didn’t want to believe him and then go on to have all her hopes dashed because he had come to his senses.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she told him. “Besides, you’re going back to Miami soon.”

  Once again, he surprised her by telling her, “No, I’m not.”

  Then he was staying here? With her? “Don’t do this, Matteo. Don’t tease me like this.” She didn’t want to deal with more disappointment. She’d had enough to last a lifetime.

  “If I was planning to go back to Miami, why did I put money down on a ranch house right here in Horseback Hollow?” he asked her innocently.

  This was the first she’d heard of it. He hadn’t even mentioned that he was thinking about buying a ranch house.

  “You did what?” she asked, stunned.

  “I bought a house.” But he had more news than that to share with her. “And I’m going to be working with my dad at the Redmond Flight School and Charter Service.” He grinned. He and his father had had a few rocky moments as well as differences of opinion on some matters, but now everything was stabilizing, and he had every reason to think things would continue on this even keel. “We’ve worked out the details.”