Single with Children

by Arlene James

  Kate Fortune’s Journal Entry

  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.

  ARLENE JAMES

  Single with Children

  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.”