Fortune's Greatest Risk (The Fortunes 0f Texas: Rambling Rose Book 4)

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Callum said I needed to wear something other than boots,” he explained.

  “Ah, so you made the ultimate sacrifice for your nieces,” Hailey concluded. Her smile was wide as her eyes sparkled. “Very noble of you.”

  Coming from someone else, Dillon would have taken it as sarcasm. But there was something about the way the woman smiled when she talked that softened everything and pulled him in. He couldn’t take offense.

  Shrugging, he told her, “I didn’t want to scuff up your floors.”

  Hailey inclined her head by way of acknowledgement. “The floors and I thank you.” She looked over toward the instructor in the center of the room. “Looks like you’re about to get started,” she warned Becky and Dillon.

  Becky and her brother-in-law each took a twin’s hand. The girl that Becky was holding onto looked disappointed to have her connection to her uncle broken.

  “I really appreciate this, Dillon,” Becky told him.

  He shrugged off Becky’s thanks. “Don’t mention it.”

  He slurred the statement a little because Luna, having shimmed up his leg, was now trying to stick her fingers into his mouth.

  Apparently, Hailey judged, the little girl was plucking at her uncle’s face, trying to make her uncle’s smile wider.

  “Luna, honey, Uncle Dillon doesn’t want to smile right now,” Becky prompted.

  The little girl looked up at him questioningly, then pushed even harder at Dillon’s mouth, determined to make him grin as Becky tried to entangle the twin from her brother-in-law.

  Hailey tried her best not to laugh, but it wasn’t easy. “I’d say you definitely have your hands full,” she said as she began to back away.

  “You’re going?” Becky asked, sounding just a touch distressed.

  “Unless you’d like me to stay,” Hailey told her. She had gotten the impression that Dillon would have rather that she wasn’t around to witness what he was about to go through.

  “Please,” Becky said.

  The hopeful look on Becky’s face overrode what she assumed might be Dillon’s wishes in the matter. After all, he hadn’t said anything.

  “Then I’ll stay,” Hailey replied.

  Glancing in his direction, Hailey couldn’t tell if Dillon took her decision in stride, or if her presence put him on edge.

  She supposed she would find that out soon enough.

  Chapter Six

  She had learned something today, Hailey thought, smiling to herself. She had learned that, without a shadow of a doubt, Dillon Fortune was an incredibly patient man.

  She had been watching Sasha and Luna’s Unca Dilly contort his body into all sorts of really awkward, uncomfortable positions for the last half hour, simply to entertain his sister-in-law’s two little girls.

  Some of the movements he’d attempted, like virtually making a pretzel of himself, could not have been easy for him. Hailey was fairly certain that at least half the moves he attempted had to have really hurt.

  In her opinion, the movements he was doing would have been challenging for an accomplished yoga instructor to execute.

  But Dillon had gamely tried each and every one of them as they came up. Some movements he’d attempted had come with accompanying sound effects. Those too had been for the girls’ gleeful benefit. The twins had lapped it all up like hungry little puppies. Entertained, they had giggled to the point that they had fallen down—and then they had giggled some more.

  It was clearly obvious to anyone who was watching that Sasha and Luna really loved their uncle.

  They weren’t the only ones, Hailey thought. She found herself thinking that the contractor was just adorable, willingly doing all this just to keep the twins entertained.

  If it hadn’t been for the twins, Hailey was fairly sure that she would have never been privy to this kinder, sillier side of the handsome contractor. While she was attracted to the former, she found this Dillon Fortune to be utterly endearing.

  Her only problem was that she kept staring too much.

  But she really couldn’t help it. Every time she tried to look away, Dillon did something else to make his nieces laugh and she found she just couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  When she managed to avert her eyes, she noticed that Becky looked a great deal more relaxed now than she had when she had first walked in.

  The man was definitely a miracle worker, Hailey thought, even though she suspected that, if he was human, he just had to be counting the minutes until the class was finally over.

  And then, inevitably, it was.

  The moment Linda Hathaway, the woman who was running the class, declared, “That’s it for today, Moms and Dads. See you all on Friday.” Dillon, already on the floor because of the last exercise he had attempted to do, completely collapsed and seemed to all but press his exhausted body flat, practically sinking into the exercise mat he was on.

  “Oh, thank God,” he murmured, barely audible. “If I had to contort myself into one more position, I think I would’ve wound up breaking up into a hundred pieces,” he groaned for the benefit of his pint-sized captive audience.

  Sasha and Luna might not have understood all the words, but they did understand that Unca Dilly was out of oomph. The little girls gathered around him on either side, giggling, and then they finally lay down next to him, curling up against him.

  “I really appreciate you doing all this for Sasha and Luna,” Becky told her brother-in-law. She gently tried to prod the twins to get them up. “C’mon, girls, your uncle’s exhausted. You need to give Uncle Dillon a little breathing room.”

  But the girls stubbornly remained where they were, apparently content to be lying next to their beloved, funny uncle forever.

  “That’s all right, Becky. Don’t worry about it. Leave them where they are right now. I can breathe,” Dillon told her.

  Even so, Dillon did sit up, although he made no attempt to rise to his feet and move away from the little girls.

  “You certainly have the patience of Job,” Becky marveled, making no effort to hide how very impressed she was with her brother-in-law.

  “The girls are very lucky to have someone like you around,” Hailey remarked, adding her praise to Becky’s. “You’re really a natural born father,” she told him with enthusiasm.

  Dillon looked at her sharply. Rather than take her words as a compliment, the way she had intended, she saw Dillon’s face darken in response. Not only that, but he seemed to withdraw and totally shut down right before her eyes.

  Hailey’s comment had hit far too close to home, Dillon thought. And just like that, it had brought with it all sorts of thoughts, not to mention regrets, that he was trying his best to at least bury temporarily, at least until he was able to do something about the situation.

  But right now, given this resurrected frame of mind, he needed to leave. Otherwise, he was afraid he’d wind up bringing the little girls down and that was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Hailey saw the change in Dillon immediately.

  Stunned, Hailey could only wonder what had triggered it.

  For heaven’s sake, she had given the man a compliment, not verbally filleted him, she thought, at a loss.

  Confused, when Hailey looked at Dillon’s sister-in-law for some sort of an explanation or enlightenment, Becky only shook her head, a blank, bewildered expression on her face.

  Obviously Becky didn’t understand his reaction any more than she did.

  She was on the verge of asking Dillon what she’d said that was so wrong, but now that the class over, he gave her the impression that he was going to leave.

  Immediately.

  His next words, addressed to Becky, confirmed her impression.

  “I’ve got to get going, Becky,” he told his sister-in-law. “You’ll be okay?”

  “Yes, of course,” she told Dillon wit
h a weary smile.

  But his nieces, it seemed, had another opinion on the matter. Each little girl grabbed hold of one of Dillon’s arms clinging like limpets to keep him from leaving.

  Although he clearly doted on the girls, Dillon looked resolved. He was leaving.

  Bending down to the point that he appeared to be folding up his large frame, Dillon kissed the top of each twin’s head.

  “I’m afraid I have to go, girls. But I’ll be back,” Dillon promised. Taking hold of one of the girls’ hands, he gently tried to extricate himself from his tiny rabid fan club.

  As he made progress with one, the other little girl would grab onto him, giggling as if this was a fine new game she and her sister were playing.

  “C’mon, girls, let go of your uncle,” Becky said a bit more forcefully than the way Dillon had expressed his feelings. “He’ll be back soon. Won’t you, Uncle Dillon?” she asked, looking at her brother-in-law for his confirmation.

  “You bet,” Dillon responded. But even so, when he tried to pull his hands away, his nieces continued to hold onto him for dear life.

  Hailey sensed that she had to come to the rescue to keep this from ending with the little girls in tears.

  “Hey, how would you girls like some ice cream?” Hailey asked, saying the word ice cream as if it were the most wonderful treat imaginable and theirs exclusively to enjoy.

  That seemed to do the trick. Letting go of their uncle’s hands, the twins eagerly gathered around Hailey, their eyes huge with anticipation.

  “Well, you’re in luck. I just happen to know where we can find some.” Hailey glanced over toward Becky. “Is it okay, Mom?”

  Becky laughed. “How could I say no?”

  “Well then, come on. Let’s go get these hardworking little ladies some well-deserved ice cream,” Hailey coaxed for the twins’ benefit.

  As she herded the girls toward the spa’s designated kitchen area, she glanced over her shoulder toward Dillon. She expected to see him watching them.

  Hailey was disappointed to see that he had used the opportunity to make good his escape. He was clearly anxious to get away, and although it could all very well be connected to his business, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it had something to do with what she’d said.

  But how could what she had clearly meant to be a compliment have had such an adverse effect on Dillon?

  And why? What did he think she meant by it?

  Hailey suppressed a sigh as she led the little girls and their mother into the kitchen. It just made absolutely no sense to her.

  But she intended to find out, she promised herself. Her curiosity had been aroused and she wasn’t one of those people who was content to just let things go. She wasn’t going to be happy or know any peace until she had an answer.

  She began by asking Becky.

  “Do you have any idea what made your brother-in-law suddenly turn tail and run like that?” Hailey asked as soon as she had handed ice-cream cups to Becky’s daughters after first carefully pulling off the tops. She also presented each little girl with a small spoon and armed herself with a lot of napkins for the cleanup she knew would be ahead.

  “Well, he didn’t exactly run,” Becky tactfully pointed out. “And he did say that he had to be getting back, probably for the same reason that Callum couldn’t make it here in the first place,” Becky surmised.

  Hailey thought about letting the matter drop, but her curiosity just wouldn’t let her.

  That was why, in the next moment, she heard herself asking, “Do you really think that?”

  Becky neatly turned the words around without appearing to be argumentative. “You don’t?”

  “I’m not really sure what to think,” Hailey confessed honestly. “One minute, Dillon is all but cavorting with your kids, acting like just another big kid himself. The next minute, he’s acting like a dark rain cloud about to let loose with a deluge, all because I paid him a compliment.” She rolled what she’d said over in her mind, searching for what might have offended him about the words she’d used.

  Coming up empty, she decided to say her comment out loud, hoping that might trigger something for Becky. “I said that he had the makings of a really great father. Why would that upset him? It’s obvious that Dillon likes acting the part.”

  Hailey looked at Becky, waiting, but the latter only shook her head helplessly. “I’m afraid I have no idea. I really don’t know very much about Dillon.” She smiled ruefully at Hailey. “I’m still learning things about Callum,” she confessed.

  Hailey felt guilty about prodding the woman. Heaven knew Becky had more than enough to deal with between her job, her new marriage and her little girls.

  “I’m sorry, you’re right. I have no business playing twenty questions with you about Dillon. He probably misunderstood what I was saying to him.” She waved away the whole thing as if she could literally erase it with her hand. “Forget I said anything,” she told the new Mrs. Fortune.

  Getting up from the small snack table, Hailey handed Becky the fistful of napkins she’d grabbed earlier. “For cleanup,” she explained, nodding at the twins. “Although it does look like they managed to get a little bit of ice cream into their mouths,” she deadpanned.

  Becky laughed, wiping the mouth of the twin who was closest to her.

  “That’s better than they usually manage to do,” she told Hailey. “I’m just glad you gave them vanilla instead of chocolate. It always looks so much messier with chocolate ice cream. I can’t wait until they grow out of this phase and they can eat like normal people without creating such an awful mess.”

  Hailey nodded as she took possession of the used napkins that Becky was discarding. “I understand, but I also know that according to some more seasoned mothers I’ve talked to, you are going to look back someday and miss this.”

  Becky sighed as she rose, taking each semi-cleaned twin by the hand. “I know that you’re probably right. But I sure would like the chance to find that out for myself,” she said, then tagged on the word, “Soon.”

  “The next Mommy and Me class is the same time on Friday,” Hailey said, calling after the departing woman.

  Looking over her shoulder, Becky promised, “I’ll be here.”

  Hailey couldn’t help wondering if that meant that Dillon would be coming with Becky, as well. Or had her comment about fatherhood scared him away from here permanently?

  Get over yourself, Hailey. If the man doesn’t show up, it’s because his brother was able to take his place. Or rather, take his own rightful place. Callum’s the one who married Becky, the one who adopted the twins. Not Dillon.

  Hailey sighed as she walked away, heading to another part of the spa. There was no doubt about it. She could all but hear Janelle’s voice in her head, telling her that she was spending much too much time thinking about Dillon. It was energy that was better spent elsewhere.

  But that being true or not, Hailey couldn’t help thinking and wondering about the elusive Fortune brother. She still didn’t know very much about him other than the general information that was available about all the Fortune brothers who were currently working hard renovating and building up the town of Rambling Rose.

  She knew that Dillon hailed from Florida, a good place, in her opinion, to be from, if for no other reason than the place was rumored to have mosquitoes you could put a saddle on and ride.

  She also knew that he was part of a far larger family than the seven siblings he had mentioned, although it seemed to her that having seven siblings was definitely large enough for anyone. He was involved in the construction company with his brothers, but unlike Steven and Callum, she didn’t have a clue what the man’s marital status was,

  Was his family covering for Dillon for some reason?

  No, that didn’t seem possible. Ellie didn’t strike her as being a devious person.

  Neith
er, for that matter, did Becky. If her gut impression meant anything, neither were Steven and Callum. They seemed to be rather genuine if she had to make an assessment of the men.

  So what was Dillon’s big secret—if there was a secret?

  And if there was no secret, why had Ellie intimated that he might not be in the market for a woman at this time? Was he recovering from a bad relationship?

  More importantly, why had he suddenly grown so quiet and all but run away when she had said that harmless comment about him having the makings of being a good father?

  She chewed on her lower lip, feeling confused and bewildered.

  None of it made any sense to her.

  But that didn’t mean that she was going to just let it lay there, waiting for someone to say something in passing that would wind up clearing it up for her some time down the line.

  No, Hailey told herself, she fully accepted the challenge of unscrambling this mystery, of getting to the bottom of it and making sense of the situation.

  Now.

  For some reason, what she had said to Dillon about his making a good father had definitely not sat well with the man. That either meant that he secretly wanted to be a father or he already was one and had made what he probably considered to be a horrible, irreversible mess of the situation.

  There was a third, sadder alternative to that. He already had become a father but no longer was one because the child had either died or been whisked away by his or her mother, not to be found again.

  But if that were the case, wouldn’t one of his brothers have known about that? And if one knew, wouldn’t he have shared that piece of information with his wife?

  The logical answer to that was yes, but Hailey had a feeling that there was absolutely nothing logical about this case.

  Which meant that she wasn’t going to have any peace until she was able to find out what the big mystery surrounding Dillon was.

  And she fully intended to.

  Chapter Seven

  Despite her best efforts to focus on all the hundred and one details she had to see to in order to keep the spa in top running condition, Hailey still found herself looking forward to Friday and, specifically, the Mommy and Me class.