A powerful first love... An explosive secret...
The Fortunes of Texas: The Rulebreakers continues!
Dr. Everett Fortunado is sitting on the biggest secret to hit Texas—but nothing’s more shocking than finding Lila Clark working for the Fortunes. Years ago a teen pregnancy forced her to give up their baby...and Everett. Lila’s not one for second chances, but that won’t stop Everett from trying. Because this time around, he knows the meaning of family. And he wants his—with Lila!
Praise for USA TODAY Bestselling Author Marie Ferrarella
“Ferrarella delivers a fabulous couple. Wonderful storytelling expertly delivers both lighthearted and tragic story details.”
—RT Book Reviews on Her Red-Carpet Romance
“An easy-read modern romance with a creditable and self-possessed heroine to steal your heart.”
—Fresh Fiction on Mendoza’s Secret Fortune
“She has a genuine knack for keeping the reader interested and involved in the characters and their emotional feelings.”
—Fresh Fiction on His Forever Valentine
“Expert storytelling moves the book along at a steady pace. A solidly crafted plot makes it quite entertaining.”
—RT Book Reviews on Cavanaugh Fortune
“Master storyteller Ferrarella has a magical way of spinning feel-good romances that readers can lose themselves in, and her latest is no exception.”
—RT Book Reviews on The Cowboy and the Lady
“The bantering couple and jaw-dropping ending are top notch.”
—RT Book Reviews on Dr. Forget-Me-Not
Dear Reader,
Welcome back to the tumultuous, always exciting world of the Fortunes. One of my favorite themes to write about is former lovers who have gone their separate ways, only to have circumstances forcing them, for one reason or another, to interact with each other again. The characters always have a history to revisit, which makes the story so much richer for me to tell.
Such is the case with Lila Clark and Everett Fortunado. They were high school sweethearts, and the world was rosy and full of promise for them—until Lila became pregnant. Neither one of them felt that they were ready to be parents, so at Everett’s urgings, Lila gave the baby up for adoption. It immediately changed the way that she viewed Everett. He had taken the situation in stride, but Lila couldn’t, and she broke up with him shortly afterward, leaving not just Everett but the city they lived in, Houston, as well. Fast forward fourteen years. A chance encounter with Lila while Everett is visiting his younger sister in Austin resurrects that old feeling for him. Neither of them ever found anyone to replace the other. Could this be fate trying to drive them together? Everett wants to fully explore that. Read the story and see if he’s right.
As always, I thank you for taking the time to read one of my stories, and from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.
All the best,
Marie
The Fortune Most Likely To...
Marie Ferrarella
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–winning author Marie Ferrarella has written more than two hundred and seventy-five books for Harlequin, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, marieferrarella.com.
Books by Marie Ferrarella
Harlequin Special Edition
Matchmaking Mamas
Engagement for Two
Christmastime Courtship
A Second Chance for the Single Dad
Meant to Be Mine
Twice a Hero, Always Her Man
Dr. Forget-Me-Not
Coming Home for Christmas
Her Red-Carpet Romance
Diamond in the Ruff
Dating for Two
Wish Upon a Matchmaker
Ten Years Later...
A Perfectly Imperfect Match
Once Upon a Matchmaker
The Montana Mavericks: The Great Family Roundup
The Maverick’s Return
The Fortunes of Texas: The Secret Fortunes
Fortune’s Second-Chance Cowboy
Montana Mavericks: The Baby Bonanza
A Maverick and a Half
Montana Mavericks: What Happened at the Wedding?
Do You Take This Maverick?
Visit the Author Profile page at www.Harlequin.com for more titles.
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To
Susan Litman,
with thanks
for her
patience
Contents
Prologue
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
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Excerpt from The Sheriff’s Nine-Month Surprise by Brenda Harlen
Prologue
It was time that he finally faced up to it. He had never gotten over her.
Sitting on the sofa in his living room, Dr. Everett Fortunado frowned as he looked into the glass of expensive whiskey he was sipping. The single glass, two fingers, was his way of winding down. Not from a hectic day spent at his successful, thriving medical practice, but from the stress of terminating yet another less-than-stellar, stillborn relationship.
How many failed relationships did that make now? Ten? Twelve? He wasn’t sure.
He’d honestly lost count a number of years ago.
Admittedly, the women in those incredibly short-lived relationships had all become interchangeable. Now that he thought about it, none of them had ever stood out in his mind. And, if he was being honest about it, Everett couldn’t remember half their names.
As for their faces, well, if pressed, he could give a general description, but there again, nothing about any of them had left a lasting impression on his mind. Strictly speaking, he could probably pass one or more of them on the street and not recognize them at all.
A mirthless laugh passed his lips. At thirty-three he was way too young to be on the threshold of dementia. No, that wasn’t the reason behind this so-called memory loss problem. If he were being entirely honest with himself, he thought, taking another long, bracing sip of whiskey, this cavalcade of women who had been parading through his life for the last thirteen years were only poor substitutes for the one woman who had ever really mattered to him.
The only woman he had ever been in love with.
The woman he had lost.
Lila Clark, the girl he’d known since forever and had barely been aware of until he suddenly saw her for the first time that day in Senior English class. Though a straight A student, Everett had found himself faltering when it came to English. Lila sat next to him in class and he’d turned to her for help. She was the one responsible for getting him through Senior English.
And somewhere along the line during all that tutoring, Lila had managed to make off with his heart. He was crazy about her and really excited when he found out t
hat she felt the same way about him. Not long after that, they began making plans for their future together.
And then it had all blown up on him.
When he’d lost her, his parents had told him that it was all for the best. They had pointed out that he was too young to think about settling down. They wanted their brightest child to focus on his future and not squander his vast potential by marrying a girl from a working-class family just because he’d gotten her pregnant. To them it had been the oldest ploy in the world: a poor girl trapping a rich boy because of his sense of obligation.
But Lila really wasn’t like that. And she hadn’t trapped him. She’d walked out on him.
Everett sat on the sofa now, watching the light from the lone lamp in his living room play across the amber liquid in the chunky glass in his hand. He would’ve given anything if he could go back those thirteen years.
If he could have, he wouldn’t have talked Lila into giving up their baby for adoption.
Because that one thing had been the beginning of the end for them.
He’d been at Lila’s side in the delivery room and, even then, he kept telling her that they were doing the right thing. That they were too young to get married and raise this baby. That they could always have more kids “later.”
Lila changed that night. Changed from the happy, bright-eyed, full-of-life young woman he’d fallen in love with to someone he no longer even knew.
And that was the look in her eyes when she raised them to his. Like she was looking at someone she didn’t recognize.
Right after she left the hospital, Lila had told him she never wanted to see him again. He’d tried to reason with her, but she just wouldn’t listen.
Lila had disappeared out of his life right after that.
Crushed, he’d gone back to college, focusing every bit of energy entirely on his studies. He’d always wanted to be a doctor, ever since he was a little boy, and that became his lifeline after Lila left. He clung to it to the exclusion of everything else.
And it had paid off, he thought now, raising his almost-empty glass in a silent toast to his thriving career. He was a doctor. A highly successful, respected doctor. His career was booming.
Conversely, his personal life was in the dumpster.
Everett sighed. If he had just said, “Let’s keep the baby,” everything would have been different. And his life wouldn’t have felt so empty every time he walked into his house.
He wouldn’t have felt so empty.
Blowing out a breath, Everett rose from the sofa and walked over to the liquor cabinet. Normally, he restricted himself to just one drink, but tonight was different. It was the anniversary of the day Lila had ended their relationship. He could be forgiven a second drink.
At least, he told himself, he could fill his empty glass, if not his life.
Chapter One
“Your problem, brother dear,” Schuyler said after having listened to him tell her that maybe he’d made a mistake talking Lila into giving up their baby all those years ago, “is that you think too much. You’re always overthinking things and making yourself crazy in the process.”
“Says the woman who always led with her heart,” Everett commented.
“And that seems to be working out for me, doesn’t it?” Schuyler asked.
He could hear the broad smile in her voice. It all but throbbed through the phone. Everett had no response for that. All he could do at the moment was sigh. Sigh and feel just a little bit jealous because his little sister had found something that he was beginning to think he never would find again: love.
“By thinking so much back then about how everything would affect your future,” Schuyler went on, “I think you blew it with Lila. You were so focused on your future, on becoming a doctor, that you just couldn’t see how badly she felt about giving up her baby—your baby,” she emphasized. “And because you didn’t notice, didn’t seem to feel just as badly as she did about the adoption, you broke Lila’s heart. If it were me, I would have never forgiven someone for breaking my heart that way,” Schuyler told him.
“Thanks for being so supportive,” Everett said sarcastically.
This was not why he’d called his sister, why he’d lowered his guard and allowed himself to be so vulnerable. Maybe he should have known better, he thought, about to terminate the call.
“I am being supportive,” Schuyler insisted. “I’m just calling it the way I see it. I love you, Ev, and you know I’m always on your side. But I know you. I don’t want you to get your hopes up that if you just approach her, she’ll fly back into your arms and everything’ll be just the way it was back then. Not after thirteen years and not after what went down between the two of you back then. Trust me, Lila is not going to get back together with you that easily.”
“I know that and I don’t want to get back together with Lila,” he insisted defensively. “I just want to talk to her.” Everett paused because this next thing was hard for him to say, even to Schuyler, someone he had always trusted implicitly. Lowering his voice, he told his sister, “Maybe even apologize to her for the way things ended between us back then.”
He could tell from Schuyler’s voice that she felt for him. But she was far from optimistic about the outcome of all this. “Look, Everett, I know that your heart’s in the right place, but I really don’t want to see it stomped on.”
“No worries,” Everett assured her. “My heart is not as vulnerable as you think.”
What he’d just said might have been a lie, but if it was, it was a lie he was telling himself as well as his sister.
He had a feeling that Schuyler saw it that way too because he could hear the skepticism in her voice as she said, just before she ended their call, “Well, I wish you luck with that. Maybe Lila’ll listen to reason.”
* * *
Maybe.
The single word seemed to throb in his head as Everett decided to find out as much as he could about Lila and what she was doing these days.
It had all started two months ago when he’d taken the day off, gotten another doctor to cover for him and had driven the 165 miles from Houston to Austin to pick up his sister, Schuyler. At the time, he was supposed to be bringing Schuyler back home.
Given to acting on impulse, his younger sister had initially gone to Austin because she had gotten it into her head to track down Nathan Fortune. The somewhat reclusive man was supposedly her cousin and the ever-inquisitive Schuyler was looking for answers about their family tree. The current thinking was that she and the rest of their brothers and sisters were all possibly related to the renowned Fortune family.
It was while Schuyler was looking for those answers that she decided to get closer to the Mendoza family whose history was intertwined with the Fortunes. She managed to get so close to one of them—Carlo Mendoza—that she wound up completely losing her heart to him.
Confused, unsure of herself for very possibly the first time in her life, Schuyler had turned to the one person she was closest to.
She’d called Everett.
Listening to his sister pouring out her heart—and citing her all uncertainties, not just about her genealogy investigation but about the direction her heart had gone in—he had decided he needed to see Schuyler and maybe convince her to come home.
But Schuyler had reconciled with her man and decided to stay in Austin after all. Everett returned home without her. But he hadn’t come away completely empty-handed. What Everett had come home with was a renewed sense of having made a terrible mistake thirteen years ago. And that had come about because while he’d been in Austin, he had run into Lila.
Sort of.
He saw Lila entering a sandwich shop and it had been a jarring experience for him. It had instantly propelled him back through time and just like that, all the old feelings had come rushing back to him, saturating him like a huge tidal wave. At least th
ey had in his case. However, he’d been struck by the aura of sadness he detected about her. A sadness that had not been there when they were in high school together.
He’d thought—hoped really—that when he got back to Houston, back to his practice, he’d be able to drive thoughts of Lila back into the past where they belonged. Instead, they began to haunt him, vividly pushing their way into his dreams at night, sneaking up on him during the day whenever he had an unguarded moment.
He began wondering in earnest about what had happened to her in all those years since they’d been together. And that sadness he’d detected—was he responsible for that? Or was there some other reason for its existence?
He felt compelled to find out.
Like everyone else of his generation, Everett turned to social media in his quest for information about Lila Clark.
He found her on Facebook.
When he saw that Lila had listed herself as “single” and that there were only a few photographs posted on her page, mainly from vacation spots she had visited, he felt somewhat heartened.
Maybe, a little voice in his head whispered, it wasn’t too late to make amends after all.
Damn it, Everett, get hold of yourself. This is exactly what Schuyler warned you about. Don’t get your hopes up, at least not until you talk to Lila again and exchange more than six words with her.
Who knows, she might have changed and you won’t even like Lila 2.0.
Everett struggled to talk himself out of letting his imagination take flight. He tried to get himself to go slow—or maybe not go at all.
But the latter was just not an option.
He knew he felt too strongly about this, too highly invested in righting a wrong he’d committed in the past. Now that he’d made up his mind about the matter, he needed to make Lila understand that he regretted the way things had gone thirteen years ago.
Regretted not being more emotionally supportive of her.
Regretted not being able to see the daughter they had both lost.
Still, he continued to try to talk himself out of it for two days after he found Lila on Facebook. Tried to make himself just walk away from the whole idea: from getting in contact with her, from apologizing and making amends. All of it.
The Fortune Most Likely To... Page 1
