Fortune's Secret Heir Read online

  “It’s not like that.”

  “You’re not already halfway in love with him?”

  Ella couldn’t stand to hear anymore. Her face was already on fire. “Of course not. And he certainly doesn’t feel like that about me. Why would he?”

  Elaine smiled gently. “Honey, why wouldn’t he?”

  Ella shook her head vehemently. It was easier to deny now the very possibility that Ben was interested in anything more than sex from her—something in which he’d assured her he would never indulge—than to let herself hope for more later. “I’m not in the market for a broken heart,” she told her mother, “and that’s the end of it!”

  She quickly left the laundry room and rushed out into the dining room, where Rory had already checkmated Ben.

  Ben peeled out of his suitcoat. “Two out of three?” He glanced at Ella as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. “What’s wrong?”

  Her throat felt like a noose was tightening around it. “Nothing, if you don’t count that spectacular loss.” She gestured at the chessboard, where Rory had captured all but two of Ben’s pieces. “How long ago did you say it was since you’ve played?”

  Rory was cackling with laughter, obviously in his element as he reset the board. “I can spot you some pieces.”

  Ben gave him a mock glare. “You think, unless it’s your king, I don’t have a chance?”

  Rory’s shoulders bounced with his laughter. “Well—”

  Ben finished rolling up his sleeves. “Get that chess clock I saw you had at the tournament.”

  Rory’s eyebrows shot up his forehead.

  “I’ll get it,” Ella said thickly and nearly jogged out of the room.

  The clock—a new digital one that she’d bought Rory for Christmas—was sitting on his bed where he’d tossed it. Getting it had been only an excuse to gather her composure, which, with every passing moment, she was beginning to fear wasn’t ever going to be possible.

  Because Ella’s mother was more right than she knew.

  Ella wasn’t halfway in love with Ben.

  She was all the way, head over heels in love with him.

  * * *

  The second chess game was a draw.

  The third, Ben managed to win. Though later, he wasn’t really sure how.

  “I hope your brother didn’t let me win,” he admitted to Ella when he finally made himself take his leave for the night.

  They were standing on her front porch, the gold light of the plain light fixture shining weakly down on her head.

  “Rory never lets anyone win,” she assured him. She’d pulled on a sweater, but still had her arms crossed over her chest as if she was chilly. “He’ll never forget this evening,” she said. “It was, um, really nice of you to indulge him.”

  “I’m no more nice than I am generous.”

  Her eyes flew to his and he knew she was remembering that kiss just as well as he was. Then she looked away, moistening her lip and staring down at her shifting feet. “Fine. Thanks for selfishly spending the evening entertaining my brother. And for the tablet. But you really didn’t need to give him anything.” She scuffed her shoe against the cement porch. “We’re not charity cases.”

  He went still. “Is that what you think?”

  She looked up then, looking so miserable he was damnably afraid he could see a sign of tears in her eyes. “What were you really doing here, Ben?”

  Hollowness suddenly opened up inside his chest. “It can’t just be celebrating a kid’s chess win?”

  She moistened her lips again. And there was definitely a visible sheen to her full lips. “I don’t think so.”

  He shoved his hands into his suit pockets to keep from touching her. “I had a bitch of a week,” he said abruptly.

  “You were in California. Mrs. Stone told me.” She scuffed her foot again. “Did you see...see Henry?”

  He frowned, genuinely shocked. “Henry! I told you he’s gone.”

  “He’s in California.”

  “San Diego. I was in San Francisco trying and mostly failing to pull a business deal out of the fire. The cities aren’t exactly on the same block.” He peered at her face. “Pursuing Henry is pointless. I have no legal standing. No biological tie.” His voice went gruff. “Just memories of a little kid I never wanted to want in the first place getting under my skin.”

  The knot she’d pulled her hair into had loosened and she tucked a lock behind her ear. “What about your old girlfriend? His mother?”

  “Stephanie? If I’d have had a way of saving him from her, I would have.”

  She angled her head at that, frowning at him. “What’s that mean?”

  “That he’s saddled with a money-hungry bitch for a mom?”

  “If she was money hungry, why’d she ever let you know he wasn’t yours?”

  “This is the last thing I expected to get into tonight.”

  “Okay, so what did you expect?”

  “I needed a break!” His voice started to rise and he exhaled. “I told you that it’s been a bad week.”

  She tightened her arms around her chest. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

  He shoved his fingers through his hair and stared over her shoulder at the house next to the Thomases. It was the mirror opposite of Ella’s, with a waist-high hedge separating the driveways.

  The modest, aging homes were poles away from the lavish estate where he’d grown up. And he tried to remember times spent in his own home where he’d felt as easy and as...calm...as he had tonight, and he couldn’t.

  “First off, I don’t do girlfriends. Ever. But for about three months, Stephanie Blakely and I were lovers because it suited us both. She wanted money and made no bones about it. She liked being on my arm, and I liked knowing I’d never fall in love with her. Sorry if that sounds calculated, but I’ve already warned you I’m not a nice guy.”

  “You don’t have to tell me any of—”

  He cut her off. “When the Robinson luster wore off—and it always does, regardless of the dollar signs—she moved on. No harm, no foul. She came back with Henry when he was a year old, telling me he was mine.” His jaw tightened. “I told you already, the timing was right. The blood types were right. It made sense and I let myself believe her. I said I’d take care of them. I moved her into my house. I even started to care about Henry. Then ten months later, Henry’s real father showed up, DNA tests in hand. But I didn’t give up that easily. I had my own DNA test done. And it proved what blood types didn’t. Henry wasn’t mine.” His hands curled into fists as he forced himself to finish the story. “For all of Stephanie’s interest in my money, and I offered her a lot to stay—”

  The shock filling her eyes was visible even in the thin porch light.

  “—she still took Henry and went back to California,” he said flatly. “End of story. No happily-ever-afters. Not with them.”

  Annoyed because his voice sounded hoarse and his chest ached, he stepped down the porch ramp, intent on leaving.

  But the second he did, Ella said his name and he stopped.

  Then she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his neck. With the advantage of the ramp added to her height, her eyes were almost on a level with his. “I’m sorry,” she whispered and hugged him.

  Before he even had a chance to register her pressed against him, she was pulling back again. “If you need a reason, just blame that on being nice to my brother. Because you were, whether you want to admit it or not.” She edged closer to the house door. “And I’ll report to work on Monday like usual. If you’ve decided I’m not the right person to help—”

  “Shut up.”

  Her full lips pressed together.

  “Monday,” he said. “I have another person to add to your plate.”

  “Another wom
an of your father’s?”

  “In a matter of speaking. His mother. His real mother, Jacqueline Fortune, not the made-up fiction he gave us our whole lives. Only I can’t find a straight answer on whether she’s alive or not. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  “Okay.”

  He took several steps down the driveway toward his Porsche, which stuck out like a sore thumb parked at the curb in front of the house. Then he looked back at her. “Tell your mother thank you again for including me this evening. I don’t remember a dinner that I’ve enjoyed as much.”

  “I will.”

  He drove away with the sight of Ella still standing on the porch, the light shining on her hair.

  He’d never wanted to leave somewhere less in his life.

  * * *

  Ella locked her bicycle up outside Ben’s house again on Monday morning and once again used her key to go inside when Mrs. Stone failed to answer the buzzer. Even though Ben had never asked her to work over the weekends, she’d come to work that morning armed with more information she’d gathered over the weekend about the Fortune family. There was a lot of information to be garnered over the internet about Ben’s family, but there was even more about the Fortunes.

  Not only was there Kate Fortune and her world-famous cosmetics, but there were also Fortunes in California and Georgia and here in Texas, as well as Lady Josephine Fortune Chesterfield’s assorted British offspring.

  Since she knew Keaton Whitfield was located in London, she started with one of Lady Josephine’s sons, Charles, who also lived there and held a position with the British tourism department. But trying to reach him through his work when she’d called earlier that morning from home had proved as fruitless as her efforts to reach Keaton Whitfield directly. Not that that was much of a surprise to Ella. If she were ever hounded by the paparazzi the way Charles was, she wouldn’t take calls from absolute strangers, either.

  It was the paparazzi reports, though, that gave Ella her next idea, since it was the gossip websites that led her to Charles’s sister, Lucie, who’d been reportedly seen traveling to Texas to visit her sister, Amelia.

  The question remaining was whether Lucie was still in Texas.

  Ella made her way up the stairs to Ben’s office without encountering Mrs. Stone and her focus strayed to the closed door of Henry’s bedroom. Sighing a little, she went into the office and dumped her bag on the floor behind the desk before sitting down at the computer.

  Ben had left another neatly typed note for her with the information he had about Jacqueline Fortune. Once again, Ella couldn’t help feeling warmed by the fact that he wanted her help on that search, as well.

  He’d scrawled a handwritten thanks at the bottom of the page and she placed her hand over it for a moment before sliding the sheet to the side and opening up her notebook, where she’d made her notes over the weekend.

  She pulled out the computer keyboard and began quickly pecking at the keys. All she had to do was type in Lucie Chesterfield and a slew of mentions appeared on the screen. Mostly they were in conjunction with her sister, Amelia, who’d caused a terrific scandal a few years before when she’d supposedly dumped an English viscount in favor of a no-name rancher from Horseback Hollow.

  A Texan would have had to have been living under a rock to miss the furor that had caused. Ella remembered it well, because Rory had been in the hospital with a respiratory infection at the time and she’d spent hours in his hospital room while the television news dwelled on the scandal.

  As Ella trolled the internet, she thought the photographs that she found of Amelia and her “Horseback Hollow Home Wrecker”—the term bestowed on the rancher Quinn Drummond—showed a handsome couple obviously devoted to each other. They’d even married and had a doll of a baby girl.

  Amelia and her royal connections obviously hadn’t put her too far out of the small-town rancher’s league.

  Pushing aside the thought, Ella focused her attention more closely on figuring out a way to reach Lucie. She remembered very well from Kate Fortune’s party the hostess’s mention of the Fortune Foundation, and there was a new branch of the agency located in Horseback Hollow. It wasn’t such a stretch to imagine that Lucie might have some involvement with the foundation, considering her own charitable activities, which were copiously chronicled.

  Short of that, Ella supposed just showing up in the small town and yelling their names might garner some response.

  Shaking her head at her own silliness, she pulled up the website for the foundation and tracked down the staff listing. She hadn’t really expected to find Lucie on it, but she called the Horseback Hollow office, anyway.

  The girl who answered the phone was obviously young. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said in response to Ella’s request to speak to the office manager, “but everyone’s in a meeting right now for our fund-raising event tomorrow. Can I leave a message?”

  Ella idly clicked through the links on the computer, bringing up images of Fortunes located far and wide. “Where’s the event again?”

  “The elementary school,” the other girl answered as if it should have been obvious. “They’re giving out books to all of the third and fourth graders—”

  “Oh, right.” Horseback Hollow was a tiny town. Maybe not as tiny since as the theme park, Cowboy Country, had opened up there a year ago, but still, it was barely a dot on the map in comparison to Austin. How many elementary schools could the town possess?

  “If you’re with the media, they’ll be offering statements in the school cafeteria after the book distribution. About 10:00 a.m.”

  “They?”

  The girl sighed again, as if all this information should have been obvious. “Christopher Fortune, of course. He runs this location.”

  “Will anyone else be there?”

  “Oh, I suppose you mean his cousin? Lady Amelia—well, she’s Mrs. Drummond now, but everyone still keeps calling her that—is supposed to be there. And her sister—”

  Ella held her breath.

  “—Lucie will be there, too, but neither one of them are scheduled to speak, so—”

  “Thanks,” Ella interrupted. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “If you want to make a donation to the foundation, you can visit our website at www-dot—”

  “Got it!” Ella quickly hung up, feeling only a little guilty.

  She found the calendar of events on the Fortune Foundation’s Horseback Hollow website and sure enough, the book giveaway was listed.

  She opened up the phone app and called Ben, too excited to wait. As he’d assured her, when she gave her name to his secretary, Bonita immediately connected her with his office.

  “Ella? What’s wrong?”

  Her stomach squiggled around at the sound of his deep voice coming out of the speakers and filling the room. “Nothing. I’m sorry to bother you at work—”

  “You’re not bothering me. Hold on a sec.” She heard him speaking to someone else, then a moment later, he was back. “Had someone in my office,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I have a line on Lucie Fortune Chesterfield’s whereabouts,” she said quickly. “Remember she’s one of the Fortunes who lives in—”

  “London.”

  For some reason, she typed in a search for “Ben Robinson office” and up popped an image from a technical magazine with him on the cover. Maybe it was a studio shot. Or maybe that was actually his desk he was leaning against.

  “And?” he prompted.

  She recentered her thoughts. “London. Right. Anyway, she’s in Texas right now...oh. I wonder if she was at Kate Fortune’s party? I don’t remember seeing her.”

  “Ella—”

  “Right!” She nervously rose from his chair and moved around behind it, squeezing her hands over the back. “She’s going to be at an event at an el
ementary school in Horseback Hollow tomorrow morning. Would you be able to get away to meet with her? See if you can enlist her help in meeting Keaton Whitfield?”

  He muttered a soft oath. “I’m speaking at a thing tomorrow at the university.”

  “Of Texas?” She immediately resumed her seat and started typing again.

  He laughed softly and her fingers curled against the keyboard. “Yes. The University of Texas.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “A symposium of business leaders.”

  “I found it.”

  “Found what?”

  She flushed, looking away from the computer screen, where she’d pulled up a graphic of the symposium schedule. On it, Ben was clearly listed as the keynote speaker. “You’re kind of a big deal, aren’t you?”

  He laughed softly again and Ella closed her eyes, savoring the sound.

  “You can go to Horseback Hollow and talk to Lucie yourself,” he suggested. “I’ll arrange a charter flight tomorrow morning. You could be there in a little over an hour. Talk to her and get back to town by tomorrow night.”

  “Without you?”

  “I trust you.”

  Ella exhaled carefully.

  “Okay,” she said faintly.

  As if she had any other choice when Ben asked something of her.

  Chapter Twelve

  She flew out of the same executive airport that they’d used going to Boston.

  Her blue suit was getting a workout. She’d worn it more in the past two and a half weeks than she had in the two years since she’d bought it at a department-store clearance sale.

  The novelty of the flight was nowhere near as interesting as it had been with Ben’s company, and she spent the eighty-minute flight immersed in her Intro to Taxation book, since the class started that week. Unfortunately, the subject was considerably less interesting than remembering in vivid detail the last time she’d flown with Ben.