An Unexpected Father

by Marie Ferrarella

  The way Brady saw it, it was in the best interests of everyone involved if he started to keep his distance from Harper. No matter how difficult that would be.

  He believed her when she said she would be back in the morning and believed her when she said she intended to remain until he found someone to take her place. But even that wasn’t going to be easy. He had been through interviews looking for a competent nanny before Harper ever came on the scene and none of the women he had spoken to even came close to holding a candle to her.

  He had no reason to believe that things would be any different now than they had been when he had initially started his search. And after having Harper in their lives, he and the twins would just be settling for second best no matter who he hired.

  * * *

  Though he had low expectations, Brady made sure he put the word out that he would be interviewing nannies. If Harper was set on leaving, then it was best for all concerned if he ripped the Band-Aid off as soon as possible.

  It was as arduous a task as he expected and his heart really wasn’t in it, but he plowed through the interviews, talking to one woman after another. He finally settled on a middle-aged woman with two degrees in child psychology. Slightly heavyset, Sharon Overton had short, fluffy gray hair, thin lips and brown eyes. She seemed qualified and pleasant enough, but he felt she had no spark, no imagination.

  Still, she was certainly better than the squadron of nannies he had already interviewed.

  She just wasn’t Harper, he silently admitted, but then, no one was.

  The interview over, Mrs. Overton was set to start as the twins’ nanny at the beginning of April.

  When it was finally decided, he told Harper. She received the news stoically.

  He put his own interpretation to her behavior. “I know you didn’t want to wait until then, but it’s the soonest she can come on the job.”

  “I understand,” Harper replied quietly. She could feel sadness flooding through her and did what she could to block the feeling. “In the interim,” she continued, “we still have to get through Easter.”

  “You are coming with us to the big Easter egg hunt, right, Harper?” Tyler asked hopefully, watching her face.

  “You said you would. You promised,” Toby reminded her. “And we’ll be on our best behavior,” he declared, as if that would help to convince her.

  “Well, I certainly can’t resist an offer like that,” Harper told the twins. “C’mon,” she coaxed, “let’s get the two of you dressed.”

  “And then can we help you get dressed?” Toby offered innocently.

  “I can manage,” she assured the boy with a wide smile. “But thank you. That was very thoughtful of you to offer.” Moved, Harper kissed each of the boys on the top of his head.

  Oh lord, she was going to miss them, she thought. Really miss them.

  Harper felt a sadness fill her as she realized that this would probably be the last time the four of them would be together like this. April would be here in the blink of an eye and with April came the new nanny.

  She told herself not to dwell on that.

  * * *

  Everything was going to work out for the best, she promised herself as they approached the Hotel Fortune.

  “Oh boy, look at all these people!” Toby cried, his eyes growing wide as he glanced from one group to another. He didn’t know where to look first. “Are they all gonna be hunting for Easter eggs?” he asked Harper. It was obvious that the idea worried him. “There won’t be any eggs left,” he lamented.

  “Only the kids will be doing all the hunting for eggs,” she told him with a wink. “Besides, you and your brother will probably outdo them all,” she predicted with pride.

  The twin puffed up his chest, as did his brother. “Yeah,” he agreed gleefully.

  The lobby of the hotel was crowded to overflowing and moving around was a challenge. There was even a long line of patrons waiting to be seated at Roja. It seemed like everyone at Rambling Rose wanted to have brunch at the hotel, Harper thought. She was about to say as much to Brady when she suddenly spotted a familiar face.

  The last face she wanted to see.

  It was her old boss, Justine Wheeler, the soon-to-be ex-wife of the man Justine had accused her of having an affair with. The woman who had also angrily accused her of trying to wreck her marriage, a marriage that was already beyond repair.

  Realizing she had stopped moving, Brady turned around to look at her.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked Harper. “You suddenly look awfully pale. Are you feeling all right?” he wanted to know, concerned.

  She grasped at the way out he had just handed her. “As a matter of fact, I’m not. Excuse me, please,” she said and without any further explanation or waiting for Brady to respond, Harper quickly ducked into the ladies’ room.

  Startled, Tyler watched his nanny take off. “Where’s Harper going?” he asked Brady.

  “She’s going to the ladies’ room, Tyler,” Brady told the boy.

  Toby asked the question he had always heard put to him whenever he said he needed to go to the bathroom himself. “Why didn’t she go at home?”

  “Maybe she didn’t think of it when she was home.” Brady was still looking toward the ladies’ room, wondering if he should be concerned. “Don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll be right back,” he said for the twins’ benefit. “Meanwhile, why don’t we look around?” he suggested, ushering the twins toward where the egg hunt was soon to be held.

  * * *

  She knew she was hiding, but what choice did she have, Harper thought.

  She stayed in the ladies’ room longer than she wanted to, trying to figure out what to do.

  By the time Megan Fortune came in, looking for her, Harper had decided that she needed to go home.

  “Harper, are you all right?” Megan asked her, looking concerned. “Brady sent me,” she explained. “He told me that he was worried about you. Should he be?”

  She didn’t have time to worry about Brady. She had a feeling all hell was going to break loose any moment now. “I need to go home, Megan,” Harper blurted out. She felt like a mouse, trapped in a maze with no way out. “Coming here was a big mistake.”

  Megan looked at her, totally confused and not a little puzzled. “I don’t understand. Why would coming here be a mistake?”

  Harper was searching for a rational way to explain this to Brady’s cousin when Justine Wheeler chose that moment to walk in.

  The second that the tall, thin well-dressed woman saw Harper, a condescending, nasty expression slid over her sharp features. The look in her eyes bordered on hatred.

  “Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in. Apparently the rumors that I heard were true,” she said smugly. “I see that you’re here, trying to sink your hooks into another one.”

  Megan was instantly protective and indignant at the tone this woman was using, not to mention what she was saying. “Now just hold on, lady. You can’t talk to Harper that way,” Brady’s cousin declared angrily.

  Justine raised her chin, her eyes turning into angry slits. “I can and I will. I see she had you fooled, but allow me to set you straight about this she-devil.

  “Pollyanna here is a gold digger looking for her next sugar daddy. Aren’t you, honey?” Justine asked condescendingly, smirking at Harper. “She swooped into my life, all phony sweetness and light, mesmerizing my husband who she decided was going to be her next victim. But I saw right through her and put an end to it. I fired her,” the woman declared proudly, “and threw his ass out. Make sure she doesn’t get near your man,” Justine warned, “unless you’re ready to lose him.”

  Harper wanted to defend herself, to put Justine in her place, but what was the point? The more she would protest the picture the hateful woman painted, the more tangled up the whole situation would become. Justine had already made
up her mind about her and from the looks of it, she wasn’t about to hesitate spreading these terrible lies about her.

  She obviously seemed to relish it.

  Feeling like she was suddenly suffocating, Harper raced out of the ladies’ room.

  “That’s right, run away,” Justine stood in the ladies’ room doorway, shouting after her. “But you can’t outrun the truth!”

  The taunt echoed through the hallway.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Despite all the other people and their children milling around the hotel lobby, Brady saw Harper coming toward him across the floor. It concerned him that she looked even worse now than she had when she had gone running into the ladies’ room.

  “Harper, did Megan find you?” he questioned, then realized that she must have. “Is everything all right?” The woman was as white as a sheet. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Harper didn’t bother commenting on his observation. All she told him was, “I have to leave now, Brady. I just came looking for you so I could tell you that I was going.”

  “Now?” he asked, perplexed. The whole point of coming here was for the twins to take part in the egg hunt. It had been Harper’s idea in the first place. That was why they had gone shopping for new Easter clothes. He knew the boys would be really disappointed if they wound up missing the hunt.

  “Now,” Harper answered. “I’ll get a cab. You stay with the boys. I’ll call you later and explain everything.”

  He still couldn’t believe that she was leaving. She hadn’t been that ill when they left the house. How had she gotten so sick so fast? “But—”

  “C’mon, Unca Brady. We gotta go!” Toby insisted. He pointed to the giant, six-foot white bunny that was crossing the lobby and heading toward the garden. “They’re gonna start the egg hunt,” the twin cried eagerly, pulling on Brady’s leg as he tried to get “Unca” Brady to follow him.

  Brady found himself torn between being a good guardian and being there for Harper, who was obviously in some sort of pain.

  He hadn’t counted on something like this happening. “I—” he began.

  Harper shook her head. “That’s okay,” she assured Brady. All she wanted to do right now was to get away. “You should go,” she urged him.

  To keep Brady from arguing any further, she quickly hurried away from him as well as from the twins and headed straight for the hotel’s main exit.

  “C’mon, Unca Brady, let’s go,” Toby cried. “The bunny’s getting away!”

  Grabbing Brady’s hand, Toby wrapped his small, sturdy fingers around it and began yanking him out into the hotel garden.

  The hotel staff in charge of decorations had been working all week to turn the garden setting into an Easter wonderland for what promised to be the first annual egg hunt.

  Brady had already lost sight of Harper. Well, at least the egg hunt would divert the twins from the fact that Harper had just taken off like that, he thought. He was doing his best to look on the bright side—if there actually was a bright side to all this.

  “All right, let’s go,” he agreed, picking up his pace as he tried to keep up with the twins.

  * * *

  Harper managed to get to her apartment in record time. The moment she unlocked the door and walked in, it felt small to her, even for a studio. Almost claustrophobic, she realized. She found herself feeling trapped.

  But she was not about to venture out again.

  Not until she mentally made peace with what she assumed was taking place beyond her front door.

  She had no doubt that her former employer was out for revenge. Justine’s vicious take on what she believed had happened between her nanny and her husband was undoubtedly all over the Hotel Fortune by now.

  The thought of having to face that wall of hatred was almost more than Harper could bear. It felt practically suffocating to her. And the awful thing about the whole situation was that she had never done anything to encourage Justine’s husband. Not once.

  The only thing she had ever been guilty of was being polite and not telling Edward Wheeler what he could do with all his unwanted attention.

  Maybe she should have, Harper thought now. But it would have done no good.

  Struggling to calm down, Harper took out her cell phone and placed it on the tiny coffee table in front of her so she could quickly pick it up when it rang.

  It didn’t ring.

  Fifteen minutes went by. She decided that Brady wasn’t going to call.

  Well, she supposed that she couldn’t really blame the man. When she had fled the hotel ladies’ room, Justine’s voice had been ringing in her ears. The woman had been extremely passionate in her diatribe. By now, everyone at the hotel’s Easter festivities knew what Justine believed had happened.

  Harper convinced herself that she was better off leaving.

  No one should have to deal with those kind of lies.

  * * *

  “My lord, Brady, you should have heard that witch shrieking and carrying on,” Megan told her cousin after she had finally found him. The moment she did, she quickly reported, in a nutshell, the reason she felt that Harper had taken off the way she had. “I would have left the shrew, too, if I were her husband.” Just thinking about what had been said made Megan shiver. “That witch accused Harper of the most awful things! Things I know she couldn’t have done,” Megan said loyally. “Harper is just too good a person to have done any of those things.”

  It was all coming together now and making sense, Brady thought, listening to what his cousin was telling him. He understood now why Harper had been so distressed about her former employer—and why she wouldn’t talk about it.

  Harper had never struck him as a woman who spoke ill about someone, no matter how much they might deserve it. Still, he felt that she should have come to him about it. He would have listened to her and more important, he would have believed her and helped her deal with it.

  As Megan said, Harper was just too nice. He, on the other hand, knew how to handle vicious, mean-spirited people.

  Momentarily turning away from the twins, Brady told his cousin that he appreciated having her go after Harper. “And thanks for telling me all this,” he said, taking out his cell phone. There was no question in his mind that he needed to clear all this up and get Harper to come back. She needed to know that he didn’t believe any of the lies the Wheeler woman was telling. “I have to call Harper and—”

  The rest of what he was about to tell his cousin was cut short when they, as well as everyone around them, heard the awful scream.

  Brady swung around to find that Toby, who had been running around the garden only a second ago, was flat on his back at the base of one of the trees.

  He, Megan and Tyler, not to mention a number of other people, instantly ran over to the screaming boy.

  “What happened?” Brady cried, stunned. How could this have happened? He had only looked away from Toby for a minute.

  Maybe less.

  Stunned, Toby could only cry in pain. Tyler quickly filled them all in. “Toby climbed up that tree.” He pointed up to one of the higher branches. “He thought there were Easter eggs in that nest up there.”

  Tyler’s explanation was drowned out by a fresh wave of Toby’s screams. “My arm! It hurts, it hurts,” the boy sobbed.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” Megan told her cousin. She looked sympathetically at Toby as she waited for her 9-1-1 call to go through. “Hang in there, Toby,” she encouraged the boy.

  Brady couldn’t help it. He looked anxiously around the gathered crowd, hoping against hope that he’d see Harper making her way toward them. But he knew better. This was now the new normal, which meant that he was going to have to handle this situation without her.

  He knelt down beside Toby and reassured him. But it was Tyler who shifted nervously from foot to foot. “Is he goin
g to die?” he asked Brady, terrified.

  Brady took the boy’s hands in his. “Nobody’s going to die, Tyler,” Brady told him as calmly as he could, secretly relieved that he was able to say that to him. “Toby’s going to be just fine.”

  As the sound of an approaching ambulance pierced the ongoing commotion, he wished he could say the same for himself.

  * * *

  “I’m afraid that the boy’s arm is broken, Mr. Fortune,” the young emergency-room physician told him after he had looked at the X-rays that had been taken of Toby’s injuries. “Frankly, considering that Toby fell out of that tree, he’s very lucky that his arm is the only thing he broke.”

  “I don’t feel lucky,” Toby complained. “It hurts!”

  The physician, Dr. Neubert, looked sympathetically at the little boy. “I’m sure it does, but the good news is it’s a clean break and considering how young Toby is,” he told Brady, “it should heal fast.” He smiled at Toby. “You’ll be back to running around in no time,” Dr. Neubert assured him.

  Despite the positive news, Brady could see that Toby was doing his best not to cry.

  The twin’s lower lip quivered as he looked at him and said, “I want Harper, Unca Brady.”

  It killed him to have to tell the boy, “I’m afraid Harper’s not here, Toby.”

  “Where is she?” Tyler piped up, ready to go looking for the nanny if it would make his brother feel better—because that would make him feel better, too.

  Brady glanced at Megan, who had driven Tyler in his car to the hospital while he rode with Toby in the ambulance. He really didn’t want to talk about this right now but Megan silently encouraged him. “Harper’s home, Tyler.”

  “Home?” Tyler echoed, confused. “What’s she doing home?” he wanted to know. It didn’t make sense to him. Toby needed her. She was always there when they needed her.

  “She wasn’t feeling well,” Brady answered, sounding a little short. He saw Tyler’s face fall and immediately felt bad as he apologized. “I’m worried about your brother, too, Ty. Why don’t you keep him company for a minute? I want to talk to the doctor about something.”