Single with Children

I’m so happy Adam and Jake are finally reconciling. I watched them have lunch together the other day. I knew that when Adam flipped through the family heirloom photo album, he would see that he was following too closely in his father’s footsteps. Though Adam always resented that Jake worked a lot and was away from his family, Adam was doing the same thing with his children. But now, at last, they both realize the importance of family.

I wish that I could come out of hiding. But I still haven’t figured out who tried to kill me and who is out to destroy the Fortunes. I hope some clue is discovered soon and this mess is resolved so we can all get back to our lives.

A LETTER FROM THE AUTHOR

Dear Reader,

It is my privilege to bring you Book Six of the Fortune family saga. This project has been a joy for several reasons, chief among them the fact that it is truly a family exercise. The Fortune family, with its variety of interesting characters, has proven to be an exciting but comfortable group with which to spend many an enjoyable hour for author and reader alike. However, another family is involved: the family of writers and editors at Silhouette.

Writing is usually a solitary enterprise. That’s why it has been such fun talking to and working with other FORTUNE’S CHILDREN authors as we coordinated details, descriptions and new ideas, enriching the basic plot of the series.

In the same vein, I must compliment all the editors involved with this project. Organizing and editing a twelve-book series is a complicated, detailed endeavor requiring much patience, latitude and a firm, shared vision.

The heart of it all is a common purpose: to provide you with the finest reading entertainment possible. My sincere hope and expectation are that we’ve done our jobs well. If we have, the Fortune family will become as dear to you as it has to me. Family, after all, is everything in this life.

If you’re a new reader, allow me to welcome you to the Silhouette family. If you’re a faithful fan, allow me to express my gratitude for your support. You are what it’s all about for the rest of us.

God bless.

For Jim,

in honor of twenty good years

with a singularly good man.

I love you still…

D.A.R.

ARLENE JAMES

Growing up on a small ranch in Oklahoma made adjusting to the suburban lifestyle of Dallas, Texas, rather difficult, but once the move was made, she couldn’t seem to stop. Her oldest son was born in Florida. In Oklahoma she met and married the wonderful man who has been her partner and joy for the past twenty years. They’ve spent almost all of that time in the Dallas area, where they produced a second son and helped raise a dear niece.

Her children have been her focus in her life, and as she sends her youngest off to college, she says, “The rewards of motherhood have indeed been extraordinary for me. Yet I’ve looked forward to this new stage of my life.” Her need to write is greater than ever, a fact that frankly amazes her as she’s been at it since eighth grade! She also expects to indulge her favorite hobbies of cooking, sewing and amateur theater, as well as her husband’s love of travel and the nurturing of their many friendships.

Meet the Fortunes—three generations of a family with a legacy of wealth, influence and power. As they unite to face an unknown enemy, shocking family secrets are revealed…and passionate new romances are ignited.

ADAM FORTUNE: The ex-army officer is a clueless single father raising three small, rowdy children. Finding a nanny hasn’t been easy…until a pretty young waitress offers to lend a hand.

LAURA BEAUMONT: Her dreams of having a family to love come true when she becomes the nanny of Adam’s kids. But her happiness is threatened by the past she is running from….

TRACEY DUCET: She is the heart-stopping image of Lindsay Fortune. Is it possible that the missing Fortune twin has been found? Or is this a clever deception?

JANE FORTUNE: Single mother. Would an old clapboard New England home inherited from her grandmother give Jane the chance to build a new life for herself and her son?

LIZ JONES—CELEBRITY GOSSIP

As I predicted, a big bombshell has dropped on the Fortune family!

The long-lost heiress has been found. Over thirty years ago, Lindsay Fortune’s twin was kidnapped. Now, the twin, Tracey Ducet, has come home to claim her rightful place in the family. Everyone seems to be overjoyed by her unexpected arrival.

I’ll bet she’s a gold digger! After all, who wouldn’t want a piece of the Fortune pie? I wonder if there are any other long-lost relatives that I could masquerade as? But I must admit, she does know her facts about the family, and maybe I’m just being cynical.

Whatever the truth is, it’s bound to come out sooner or later. The family is having Ms. Ducet thoroughly investigated. And if she’s got any skeletons in her closet, they’ll find them….

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

One

Adam swiped his hand over the flat, bristly top of hair the color of mahogany. It was a classic gesture of frustration for a retired military man used to sweeping a service cap off his head. He pushed his shoulders back and took a deep breath, trying to keep his voice carefully reasonable. Mrs. Godiva took offense at the tone of command, and pride would not allow him to succumb to the desperation of pleading.

“Now let’s just talk this out calmly,” he said. “I’m sure the snow in your slippers was just a little prank. They wouldn’t understand the…the depth of your shock. They’re only three, after all.”

“And wouldn’t have dreamed this up all by themselves!” the woman retorted, drawing herself up to her full rawboned height. “That Wendy is behind this! She had those scamps put snow in my slippers because I put her in the corner this morning for refusing to eat her prunes.”

“Wendy doesn’t like prunes, Mrs. Godiva,” Adam pointed out tersely. “I’ve asked you time and time again not to—”

“Prunes are good for them!” the middle-aged widow insisted. “If you’d just let me guide you, we’d have both fared better, but like your daughter, you just won’t listen to reason! Well, I’ve had it. Not only did she put her little brothers up to filling my brand-new house slippers with snow, she then cried out for me in the night, knowing my feet had only just warmed and that I’d thrust them trustingly into…into…” Her upper lip trembled in outrage.

Adam bowed his head, a dull ache setting in behind his eyes. She was undoubtedly correct. Everyone knew that cold feet were the bane of Godiva’s existence, but the twins would not have dreamed up this particular act of vengeance—and it was vengeance, Wendy-style. Still, the blasted woman knew that Wendy loathed cooked prunes. Adam sighed.

“Couldn’t we just forget about this?”

“We could not!”

“I’ll make certain that it never happens again.”

“Ha! You have no more control over that child than you have over the weather! It’s beyond me how a man with your experience of command could allow that trio of miscreants to rule this…this house of chaos!”

“Mrs. Godiva, they lost their mother only eighteen months ago—”

“And you’ve lost seven nannies in that time!”

“Six,” he corrected offhandedly.

“Seven!” she snapped, dipping low to grasp the handles of her bags. “You may forward my pay to my sister’s in Minneapolis. I believe you have the address!” With that, she turned, struggled furiously with the handles of her luggage and the doorknob, and marched out into the night.

“Mrs. Godiva!” Adam called after her. “At least wait until the morning!”

His plea fell on her ears with no more effect than the fat flakes of snow that melted into the garish scarf tied about her head or the icy crust that crunched beneath her sturdy feet, presumably warm inside her clunky fur-lined boots. Within seconds, he heard the muted sounds of her car doors opening and closing, then the engine being gunned as headlights swung in an angry arc over the drifts of snow banking the drive.

Adam closed the door quietly, resisting the urge to lay his head against it and moan, but only just. Behind him, he heard the bumps and rustles of little bodies moving, encased in flannel pajamas. His spine seemed to straighten of its own accord, and his shoulders to level themselves and draw back. He executed a turn with all the precision of a soldier on review and scowled down at the three little faces that peeked around the corner of the foyer and the front hall.

“Is she gone?” Wendy whispered. Her freckled nose wrinkled in ill-disguised hope as her chubby fingers pulled at a thin reddish brown braid.

“She is.”

“For good?” Robbie asked, his voice all little-boy innocence, the illusion abetted by the tousle of curly blond hair around his plump, squarish face.

“Afraid so—no thanks to you three.”

Ryan, a slightly smaller version of his minutes-older brother, flashed a triumphant smile at Wendy before breaking out in whoops of sheer delight. Instantly the other two joined him, all attempts at feigning regret abandoned. Adam rolled his eyes, and in that short space of time, they bolted down the hall and erupted into the living room, where he found them, seconds later, gleefully jumping on the furniture.

“Gone! Gone! The witch is gone!”

Adam took a militant posture in the middle of the room. It was a cold, colorless room, one he particularly disliked, but in all the months since his wife’s death, he had made no effort to change it. Nor did he intend to. “That’s enough!” he barked in his best commander’s voice.

Robbie turned an awkward cartwheel on the couch and tumbled to the floor with a thunk, howls of glee instantly becoming cries of pain and shock. Ryan crawled down to join him, giggling, and Robbie abruptly switched to laughter, one hand rubbing the back of his head as he sat up. Wendy ignored them all, dancing in place on the seat of an armchair. “Gone! Gone! The old prune’s gone!”

The boys laughed all the harder at that, while Adam’s face turned red and his temper frayed. “Stop that this instant, and go to bed!” What his bark had not accomplished, his roar did, as all three children went still and silent, their attention at last on their father. Not that they actually obeyed. The boys merely lay down on the floor and regarded him curiously, while Wendy slid down into a sitting position on the chair, her face set mutinously.

“I hated her. She was mean and ugly and—”

“You did everything in your power to drive her away!” he accused. “You know we need the help, but still you—”

“We don’t need no help!” Wendy cried in a thin voice. “Mommy always took care of us with just Cook.”

“Cook is part-time!” Adam exclaimed. “And I am not Mommy! I have to make a living for us, I can’t stay home all day long to take care of you!”

“Mommy did!”

“Because I was off making us a living!”

“In the army,” Ryan said accusingly, and something in his tone robbed Adam of all his anger.

“That’s right,” he muttered, swamped by the odd confusion that always came with that hint of resentment. Diana had never seemed to mind his career with the military. She had, in fact, on occasion during a long leave, seemed anxious to send him on his way. Maybe that was why he had always felt relieved to go. Maybe the kids had sensed his relief and felt it had to do with them, and that was at the root of their resentment. And maybe Diana had complained from time to time that he wasn’t around. He would have been ashamed to admit that he hadn’t really known his late wife well enough to say with any uncertainty what she might have said or done concerning his absences. He was depressingly irritated to know that the same was true of his children, and in the eighteen months since a traffic accident had taken Diana’s life, that somehow had not changed. Adam sighed, too tired and too deflated to wrangle with his unruly children. How much easier it had been to deal with tough adult men! He made a sweeping gesture with one hand. “Get on to bed, all of you. It’s late.”

Robbie and Ryan sat up and folded their legs, watching their sister to see how she was going to respond to their father’s order. Wendy stuck out her plump pink bottom lip and glared at Adam with his own light golden-brown eyes. “Who’s gonna tuck us in, with Nanny Godiva gone?”

“You should have thought of that before you filled her shoes with snow, little Miss Ringleader. Now get to bed before I start smacking bottoms.”

Wendy folded her arms stubbornly, but just as Adam felt his temper go, she suddenly bounced up off the chair and tore out of the room, her little arms swinging stiffly at her sides. The boys scrambled up and ran after her, singing, “Hey! Gone, the witch’s gone. Hey, hey, witchy’s gone…”

Adam put a hand to the back of his neck. What on earth was he going to do now? He had an important meeting tomorrow afternoon, with an auto lube franchiser from Minneapolis, and another on Friday, with a real estate agent. Surely Rebecca or Natalie could watch the kids for a few hours tomorrow. He’d worry about Friday later. He supposed he could always cancel, but only as a last resort. He was tired of living in limbo. He had to find something to do now that his retirement from the military was official. He needed a career, a business, a focus of some sort, but how could he concentrate on that, when the kids had just managed to drive off yet another nanny? Sometimes he wondered if those little rascals were actually trying to trap him here in the house—an unlikely scenario, since they seemed to actively dislike him much of the time.

He shook his head as he walked barefoot toward his bedroom, hitting light switches along the way. He groaned when the thought occurred to him that Godiva was likely to crack up her car on the snowy, icy roads and sue the pants off him. Wouldn’t that just cap the New Year! He ignored the whispers coming from behind Wendy’s door and trudged into the cold confines of his bedroom. Not even the blaze flickering in the fireplace could warm up the place, decorated as it was in shades of white and ice blue, but he crawled gratefully beneath the dark red coverlet—the one change he’d taken the initiative to make—and settled down to a happily blank sleep.

A little thumb pulled his eyelid up and back, nearly gouging out his eye in the process.

“Ow!”

Adam yanked away and surveyed his son with dismay and exhaustion. How many times could one little boy wake up in the space of a single night?

“God, Robbie, don’t you ever sleep?”

“Ryan,” corrected a petulant voice.

“Oh.” The boys were alike enough to confuse, if one didn’t look too closely, but Wendy claimed that their mother had never gotten them mixed up, and Adam could not quite squelch a spurt of guilt that he had, however seldom, done so. Sighing, he rolled onto his back and laid an arm across his eyes. “What is it now?”

“Ah hun-wy,” said Ryan, his slight speech impediment exaggerated by the three fingers he had thrust into his mouth. Adam’s aunt Lindsay, the family pediatrician, had told him that there was no reason for concern, but he worried anyway—when he had the energy, which he didn’t at the moment.

“Ryan,” Adam groaned, “it’s the middle of the night.”

“Na-a-aw. Id maw-ning!”

Surely not. It couldn’t possibly be morning. He hadn’t slept two full hours yet. Oh, God, don’t let it be morning, he thought, carefully lifting his arm and slitting open his eyes. Oh, God, it was morning. Adam made a whimpering sound in the back of his throat and resigned himself to the inevitable, even as he rolled onto his side and craned his neck to read the time on the digital alarm clock beside the bed. Seven-forty. The alarm would screech in five more minutes. Five minutes was not worth fighting for.

“All right,” he said, sitting up and yawning. “What’s for breakfast?”

Ryan shrugged and popped his fingers out of his mouth. “I don’t know.”

Adam swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the T-shirt he’d left lying on the floor the night before. “Well, go see what Nanny’s making, and come tell—”

“Nanny’s gone,” Ryan reminded him.

Adam closed his eyes. Gone, gone, witchy’s gone. Godiva had left them the night before, and Cook didn’t come in until just before lunch. Heaven help them. Well, surely there was something he could dish up…cold cereal, perhaps, doughnuts… He’d have given a thousand bucks to put on his fatigues and jog down to the mess hall just once more. But things were bound to look better after he’d gotten down a cup of coffee. Coffee. He groaned again, realizing that there wouldn’t be any coffee, not this morning. The civilian world was hell.

Ryan scrambled off the bed and attached himself to Adam’s leg, tugging with all the might in his little limbs. Adam laughed at the senselessness of it and got awkwardly to his feet, reaching for the bathrobe that hung over the bedpost. He threw it on and belted it over the fleece pants he’d worn to bed and the T-shirt he’d just donned. His shoes were around here somewhere, if he could just see around the bunched body of his son.

“Okay, okay, Ryan,” he said, patting the boy’s back. “I’m on my way.”

Ryan let go and ran to the door, where he paused and called back. “Better huwwy.” He shook his finger at Adam in a perfect parody of his older sister. “Wendy say if you don’t come, she gonna make breakfast herself.”

Adam’s eyes widened in alarm. Forgetting his shoes, he pelted toward the kitchen, bawling, “Wen-dy!”

He burst through the louvered swinging doors in time to see his daughter standing on a chair that she had pulled up to the counter and dumping flour into a glass bowl from a sack. The flour hit with a whump and rose in clouds around the bowl, which wobbled ominously near the edge of the counter. Adam threw himself across the cooktop island and snatched Wendy off the chair, just as the bowl shattered into a thousand pieces on the floor. Flour and glass sprayed the narrow aisle between the counter and the island. Wendy immediately burst into loud wails. Adam pulled her up onto the island, expecting to see blood running down her legs. He sagged with relief when all he saw was flour dusting her legs. At that moment, the boys pushed through the door, Robbie first, then Ryan, his hand in his mouth.

“Out!” Adam barked. Neither of them moved a muscle. “There’s glass all over the floor! Get out of here!”

Eyes wide, they backed through the swinging door, but then Robbie pushed them open again and stuck his head inside. “Wendy, you hurt?”

Wendy’s wails had subsided to sobs now, but she made no effort to answer. Adam answered for her, still miffed—pained, if he was to be honest—that his children always seemed to need a reason to obey him. “She’s not hurt, she’s just scared,” he said gruffly, pulling her to him and beginning to inch his way across the floor toward the door, on the lookout for the telltale sparkle of glass splinters.

Once safely on the carpet of the dining room, he set Wendy on her feet, went down on one knee and grasped her by her solid little shoulders. “What on earth did you think you were doing?” He hadn’t meant to shout, and he hadn’t meant to shake her, but the thought of glass embedding itself in her plump child’s body both horrified and angered him. She went off into screeching wails again, her face scrunched up and her braids shuddering, but Adam noted that her eyes were dry. He guessed she was more embarrassed than frightened. Truth to tell, he was somewhat shaken himself. He let her go and wiped a hand across his brow. “All right,” he muttered. “It’s all right, but don’t you ever do anything like that again. Do you hear me?” She nodded her head, sniffing phonily. Adam ignored the sham and schooled his tone to patience. “What were you doing anyway?”

“Making pancakes,” she said challengingly, sticking out that lower lip.

“Pancakes!” Robbie echoed, jumping up and down. “Yeah, yeah, pancakes!”

Ryan immediately picked up the chant, clapping his hands together.

Adam winced. They would settle on something as difficult as pancakes for breakfast. Even if he could find a recipe, he couldn’t begin to put together an edible batch of pancakes. Who was he kidding? He’d be lucky to get the milk in the bowl with the cereal—if he could find any. He wasn’t about to go looking in his bare feet, not now. He made a sudden decision. He was good at decisions. In fact, deciding was what he often did best, and this decision let him off the hook in several ways. For one thing, they’d actually get to eat, and for another, he wouldn’t have to face cleaning up the mess in the kitchen on an empty stomach. He pushed up to his full height. “All right, let’s get you dressed. We’re going out for pancakes.”

That elicited paroxysms of delight. Robbie danced around, whooping in circles, knees knocked together, lower legs flying out at odd angles. Ryan took a look at his brother’s improbable dance and settled for stomping up and down and hoo-hooing like a train. Wendy merely looked up at her father in that solemn way of hers, nodded sharply and spun away to drag her noisy brothers from the room. Adam smiled to himself. He might actually have scored some points with this one.

An hour later, Adam asked himself how a good idea could have gone so bad as he grabbed for the syrup pitcher yet again. He snatched it out of the way just as Robbie fell, chest forward, into his plate, his arms stretching out to knock salt and pepper shakers into ashtrays and ashtrays into toast baskets. Wendy snickered, one hand over her mouth, the other waving a fork bearing a speared piece of dripping pancake. Robbie giggled, looking down at the sticky mess on his shirt, and Ryan immediately went up on his knees, preparing to duplicate his brother’s antics. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Adam jumped up, trying to balance the syrup pitcher with one hand and grab Ryan’s shoulder with the other. His hip hit the table, and coffee sloshed out of the cup, over the rim of the saucer and onto his khakis. “Damn!”

The children descended into loud laughter. Adam felt the syrup pitcher lifted out of his hand. An instant later, it was replaced by a damp white towel. “Allow me,” said a soft voice. Adam caught a flash of pale blue uniform and brown hairnet as he bent to wipe at the stain on his thigh. He looked up in time to see a slender young woman tugging Wendy’s leg down into place and sliding her chair farther under the table, situating the hand with the fork over her plate. She smiled down at the girl, then moved on around the table, putting Ryan back into his booster seat and pushing his milk glass away from the edge of the table. She leaned down and whispered something to him before moving on to Robbie, and Ryan instantly picked up his fork and began to eat. Robbie required a bit more attention.