None of them knew Nolan’s real story. And the email address he’d given them had been created specifically and only for them, as was the cell number for the phone he’d purchased when he’d first had the yen to take a jazz music class and had invented Nolan Forte. None of them had any idea he’d learned the sax from some of the greats while still in high school because his parents had been trying to keep him out of trouble. They knew he lived in New Orleans and had a business degree, but he’d told them he worked as a grunt at a desk job. Statistical analysis, which was close enough to banking that he could pull off a conversation, and boring enough that he never had to.
If he had his way—and he usually did—that’s all they’d ever know.
Nolan spent his afternoon doing exactly what he’d told himself he would not do. He walked around familiar spots on campus, visited a coffee shop for a coffee he didn’t want because he’d been there before, stopped in a restaurant just to look at a particular booth in the back corner and even made it by the apartment complex that had tried to steal his life away from him.
Well, the complex hadn’t. The temptation within it had.
Lizzie.
Built into the side of a hill, the one-floor building stood almost a full story above the street.
Looking up at the window of her old apartment, picturing the bedroom beyond, he shook his head and moved on. He’d glorified the entire two-week episode, he was sure.
And he’d made the right choice, too, in breaking things off cold with Lizzie. And in coming back to Austin, too, as it turned out. He’d just wanted to take the walk down memory lane, to find the closure he needed to get her fully out of his system.
There was no way any relationship between them would have worked. She’d been having fun with a not-rich saxophone player. She’d made her views of a wealthy lifestyle quite clear, when she’d told him, after they made love for the first time, that it didn’t matter to her that he was a struggling musician. Unlike most, she didn’t yearn for financial abundance. In fact, she thought that money chained people, not set them free. The yearning inside him had agreed with her, even as warning bells had gone off.
The rest of him, the parts Lizzie didn’t know at all, liked his Ferrari, his home, his ability to take two weeks off worry-free and pretend to be someone else. He loved his family—even when he didn’t like them sometimes. He needed to be a solid, contributing part of the energetic Fortune clan.
He liked eating at the finest restaurants. Having the best seats at the theater. And having a driver at his disposal any time he wanted.
He particularly liked being able to fly off to Greece for a long weekend.
Problem was, he’d liked Lizzie, too. More than any woman he’d ever been with.
He’d liked her too much to challenge the feelings with reality. Better to love and leave, as they’d both planned, than introduce her to his life of wealth and have the money come between them. They were from different worlds and he’d already tried that route with a woman he’d met in college. It had been a disaster all the way around, and they’d both been hurt. Badly. One of Molly’s brothers had tried to cash in on knowing him, by using the Fortune name, and Molly had expected Nolan to let it go, because they were all “family.”
He’d let it go because it hadn’t hurt his family, but he’d also had to let her go.
Whatever love he’d had for her had turned to resentment. And worse. He hadn’t been willing to chance having the same thing happen to him and Lizzie when reality set in.
He’d never thought she’d have used his wealth in that way, but their enormous differences would have torn their love apart. And then there was the fact that he’d been duplicitous with her, even after sleeping with her. A lack of trust was definitely pavement on the road to resentment.
Taking the long way back to the cheesy hotel, Nolan played the whole Lizzie thing in his mind one more time. He checked himself, his choices, and knew he’d done the right thing, cutting himself off from her.
His oldest brother, Austin, Nolan’s mentor from birth, had been down the Lizzie road, too, falling hard for a woman in just two weeks. It had turned into the biggest mistake of his life and it had hurt the family. Austin had been twenty-five when he’d married on the spot, the age Nolan had been when he’d met Lizzie.
Lizzie had been young, too, just like Kelly, Austin’s ex. Twenty-one actually, the same age Kelly had been when she’d hoodwinked Austin.
Added to all that was Nolan’s own habit for getting into mischief. He could see now that it had been a result of him yearning to break free that had sent him down the wrong roads. He’d dealt with that shadowy side his entire life. And paid for it, too.
Like the time he’d thought it would be cool to dare a couple of his sisters, Savannah and Belle, the younger ones, to jump off a cliff into a swimming hole twenty feet below. After he’d already taken the fall himself. Of course, since he’d dared them and was older than them, they’d done it. Though they were both successful, Savannah got sick, with a cold that then went into a bronchial infection, and had to miss the first two weeks of school.
Miles Fortune had been all up for grounding his son for the entire school year. One of his older brothers had talked him down to Nolan being Savannah’s servant for the next month, in charge of collecting and delivering all of her school assignments, too.
And then there’d been the time he’d climbed out his window to meet up with the teenage daughter of one of the ladies who’d cleaned their ten-thousand-square-foot mansion. Austin had covered for him then. Miles had never found out about that one.
But he was an adult now. His brother couldn’t cover for him anymore.
He’d understood what he had to do. And he’d done it. Cut things off at the quick with Lizzie before they went too far. He’d thrown away her number. He’d changed his own. And he’d checked the band’s website to make certain that there was nothing there that could possibly tie Nolan Forte to Nolan Fortune.
And then, like Austin, he’d concentrated on work.
When he and Lizzie had made love, they’d agreed that there’d be no promises. They’d just met and he was only in town a couple of weeks. And while they’d left open the possibility of being in touch after Nolan Forte’s gig was up and he had to leave with the band, they’d never promised to be.
Back at the hotel that Friday afternoon a year later to the day he’d first met Lizzie, Nolan showered, pulled on black jeans and rolled up the sleeves of his white cotton shirt, leaving the top buttons undone. He put on a black leather vest with silver studs, stepped into his black leather cowboy boots and grabbed his sax.
Lizzie was the past.
He was ready to move into his future.
Chapter Two
“He’s in town.”
Carmela didn’t say who. But Lizzie knew immediately who her best friend was talking about.
Sitting with Carmela at the used but good-quality wood kitchen table they’d found at an estate sale, Lizzie flitted through the lettuce and veggies in her bowl with her fork. She’d been home from school for an hour, had fed Stella, who was sleeping, and really just wanted to take a nap herself.
If not for the fact that it had been her turn to make dinner, she’d have taken a nap rather than grilling chicken and cutting veggies for the salads they were now eating.
“Hon?” Carmela put fingers on top of Lizzie’s hand.
Lizzie stilled, but didn’t look up. Or over at the baby sleeping in her swing, either. “I heard you.”
She was trying not to let the knowledge seep in. She didn’t want to know. And most certainly didn’t want to care.
She’d told herself—and Carmela, too, three months before—that she wasn’t going anywhere near the jazz club over the holidays. If he was there, he was there. The fact had nothing to do with her.
Not anymore.
So why
was her heart pounding in her chest, making it impossible for her to swallow even if she’d managed to get lettuce to her mouth and chew?
“You need to go see him.”
That got her attention. And gave her strength, too. Head shooting upward, she gave her roommate an authoritative stare. “Absolutely not.”
“He has a right to know.”
Putting her bare foot up on her chair, she hugged her knee with both arms. “No.”
Carmela didn’t speak, but Lizzie could feel the other woman’s striking gray stare burning into her, escalating the confusion roaring inside her.
Because as certain as she was that she was not going to see Nolan Forte ever again—in that lifetime or any other as far as she was concerned—she was equally aware that in some universe he had a right to know that he was a father.
Worse, and much more angst-producing, was the fact that Stella had a right for him to know. In case, someday, he wanted to know her.
Or had family that did.
Like her, he’d apparently had no family close enough with whom to spend the holidays the previous year. Aunt Betty, her only living relative, had been on a cruise with Wayne, Betty’s companion of thirty years. Nolan hadn’t mentioned anyone, nor said why he hadn’t been with them.
She hadn’t asked.
There hadn’t been time. Or it had seemed that way. With less than two weeks to spend with him, she’d been far more interested in their shared interests, in just “them,” than she’d been in any peripheral details.
When she’d found out they had a very real repercussion from their time together, she regretted that she knew almost nothing about him.
Funny, when they’d been together she’d felt like she knew him as well as she knew herself. Felt like they’d been connected before birth, destined to find each other.
Instead, she’d found herself pregnant by a ghost.
One who’d disconnected the number he’d given her. Or had given her a false number to begin with, which was more likely.
One who’d never used the number she’d given him. Not once. Ever.
“He made it very clear that he didn’t want to hear anything I might have to say to him ever again,” she dropped into the tense silence that had fallen between her and Carmela.
Her roommate wasn’t eating, either, or sipping from the wine she’d poured. Carmela was worried about her. She got that.
Truth be known, there were days when she was kind of worried about herself. But it had been a rough few months, having her blood pressure shoot so high the day she’d gone into labor that she’d had a seizure, prompting an immediate cesarean section. Trying to take care of her baby on her own as much as she could afterward, worrying when her blood pressure kept spiking and when Stella failed to gain weight. She’d wondered, a time or two, in the dark of the night, if they were both going to die.
They hadn’t. She’d completely recovered from the pregnancy and postpartum-induced blood pressure issues. And Stella was a picture of perfect baby health.
But now Nolan was back in town.
The truth bobbed around in the outskirts of her awareness, as though testing her for reaction. She wasn’t going to react, plain and simple.
“There is no way in hell I’m going back to that club,” she said now. Despite that declaration, she couldn’t help wondering how long he’d been in Austin, in her neighborhood.
He hadn’t bothered to call. Or stop by.
It wasn’t like he’d have forgotten where she lived. Unless he was a moron as well as a jackass.
He’d known she was a virgin. He’d made a big deal about how much it meant to him that he was her first time. Had made her feel so special. Cherished.
And then...he’d discarded her like she meant nothing at all.
Not even enough to deserve a real phone number. Or name.
She and Carmela had both spent months, on and off, searching the internet for any information on Nolan Forte. All roads led back to one place. His band’s website.
At Carmela’s urging, Lizzie had sent messages to the email listed on the site, with no reply.
“If he’d wanted his kid to have his name, he should have given the real one to her mother.”
“I’m not suggesting that you try to hook up with him, hon.” Carmela’s tone was soft. “Just that this might be the only time you have a chance to tell him about Stella.” She rubbed Lizzie’s arm. “I’m not championing him here,” she said. “You know what I think of him.”
In the very beginning, when Lizzie had first started seeing Nolan, Carmela had warned her against hanging out with a band member. Her boss’s wife, Francesca Whitfield, had been in a relationship with a traveling band member for years—a boy she’d loved since high school—and had caught him cheating on her with a groupie.
Lizzie had thought Nolan was different.
“It’s not because I give a rat’s ass about him,” Carmela started in again. “But you never know what the future’s going to hold, sweetie. What if Stella needs him for some medical reason? A kidney match or something? You might need him to save her life and you’d have no way to find him. Or maybe he has family, a mother even, who’d love Stella, and you, too, for that matter? Chances are if she exists, she has a pretty good idea what a creep her son turned out to be.”
She didn’t need Nolan’s mother to love her. Or anyone associated with him, either. She had Aunt Betty. And Carmela.
And the miracle of Stella.
If anyone had told her how her life would change the instant she held her baby in her arms, she’d never have believed them.
The way that baby filled her heart...made her feel strong and capable...and willing to give up her life at the same time, if it would save Stella’s... It was transforming.
“You might be able to get support out of him,” Carmela said.
“I don’t want his money.” She didn’t want anything more from Nolan Forte. He’d given her enough. “And I don’t want him anywhere near Stella. He’s a liar. A fake. If he’d pull a stunt like he did on me, pretending to be someone he wasn’t, giving me an unusable phone number, who knows what he’d do if she was bugging him? Children believe everything they hear. And they expect their parents to be truthful to them. They don’t need a parent they can’t trust, one who will be constantly disappointing them. Besides, who knows, the guy might be a total creep. Could be the universe was watching out for me, keeping me safe, when it worked out like it did.”
She’d had a lot of months to get herself right with the situation.
“Stella’s going to need to know who he is someday. She’s going to have a mind of her own and she’ll need to know who fathered her.”
“I’ll tell her what I know. It’ll be enough.”
“You don’t know that.”
No. She didn’t. The pang of guilt that hit her was unwelcome. As unwanted in her life as she was in Nolan Forte’s.
He was in town and hadn’t bothered to look her up.
“We’re just going to have to cross that bridge when we come to it,” she said now, standing to clear her plate from the table.
* * *
It had been a great night. Two long sets played to a completely full club. Setting his sax down on the stand where he’d leave it long enough to have a beer before packing up for the night, Nolan jumped down from the two-foot-high stage. Glenn would leave his drums set up. The mics would stay. Daly and Branham were already downing a couple of shots of whiskey and talking up the women who’d been flirting with them all night.
An older version of the two women at the bar with his bandmates stood to the side of the stage, talking to Glenn. The way she was smiling, leaning into him, touching his arm, she was doing more than asking about the band’s schedule.
A woman who’d caught Nolan’s eye a couple of times that night—only because he’d been loo
king over the crowd and she’d been staring at him each time—was lingering not far from the stage. After a couple of years on the road, he knew the probability existed that she was waiting for a chance to talk to him, maybe hang out for a while. And while Nolan Forte wasn’t averse to little weekend flirtations now and then, just plain Nolan needed escape more.
And maybe a trip back to the hotel. He’d had a couple more beers than he should have had last night. Hitting the sack sounded not half-bad.
Now that he’d taken his walk down memory lane and gotten his closure, revisited his decisions and determined they’d been the right ones, concluding he was fully over Lizzie, he’d be out like a log. He’d probably have the best night’s sleep he’d had in...well...a year, maybe.
“Hey.”
The voice called out to him from behind just before he reached a corner of the bar. Swinging around, he felt his throat catch just when he’d begun to breathe easily for the first time all night. The sets were done and there’d been no Lizzie sighting.
He hadn’t expected her to be there. But there’d been a small part of him that had insisted on hanging on to a minute bit of lingering doubt...
“Carmela, Lizzie’s roommate,” the woman said by way of introduction. “Remember me?”
“I didn’t see you out there.” He said the first thing that came to mind. And he forgave himself for not playing it cooler than that, considering the shock he was in seeing Lizzie’s friend—someone who probably knew how she was.
“I timed my arrival for the ending of the last set. I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t see me and bolt.” The last was said with obvious derision.
He wasn’t really getting her attitude. “I don’t bolt.”
“No, you just disappear.”
“Look, I don’t know what Lizzie told you, but we clearly said no strings attached. Her idea. She had very definite plans for her life and a struggling musician from out of town didn’t fit them. We knew going in that it was only for two weeks. I was here for a gig, left when it was over. End of story.” No one, not even Lizzie, knew of his inane and very dangerous struggle with his own wayward inner yearnings ever since.
Fortune's Christmas Baby Page 2