Nine Months to a Fortune, page 1
THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS
Follow the lives and loves of a complex family with a rich history and deep ties in the Lone Star State
FORTUNE’S SECRET CHILDREN
Six siblings discover they’re actually part of the notorious Fortune family and move to Chatelaine, Texas, to claim their name...while uncovering shocking truths and life-changing surprises. Will their Fortunes turn—hopefully, for the better?
After the shock of an unexpected pregnancy subsides, Sabrina Fortune has one focus: giving her twins the best life possible. Problem is, that means co-parenting—and sparring—with equally opinionated Zane Baston. But with their lives so entangled, their hearts may not be far behind...
Dear Reader,
Zane Baston and Sabrina Fortune are learning what to expect when they’re expecting, and it’s not what they expected at all. First on the list? That they’re expecting in the first place! Zane has just finished raising his four brothers, for crying out loud. And the last thing Sabrina has thought about in, oh...ever...is having kids.
But here they are, trying to figure out how to work this co-parenting thing. Cue the disagreements about names and nursery themes and gender-specific toys. It’s gonna be a long gestation.
Eventually, though, they realize that when it comes to starting a family, the most important thing is, well, family. They’ll do whatever it takes to ensure their twins (yes, twins!) have the best of everything there is.
I had so much fun writing about Zane and Sabrina and the fabulous Fortune family. I hope you have as much fun reading about them.
All the best,
Elizabeth
Nine Months to a Fortune
Elizabeth Bevarly
Elizabeth Bevarly is the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of more than eighty books. She has called home such exotic places as Puerto Rico and New Jersey but now lives outside her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband and cat. When she’s not writing or reading, she enjoys cooking, tending her kitchen garden and feeding the local wildlife. Visit her at elizabethbevarly.com for news and lots of fun stuff.
Books by Elizabeth Bevarly
The Fortunes of Texas: Fortune’s Secret Children
Nine Months to a Fortune
Harlequin Special Edition
Seasons in Sudbury
Heir in a Year
Her Second-Chance Family
Lucky Stars
Be Careful What You Wish For
Her Good-Luck Charm
Secret under the Stars
Harlequin Desire
Taming the Prince
Taming the Beastly M.D.
Married to His Business
The Billionaire Gets His Way
My Fair Billionaire
Caught in the Billionaire’s Embrace
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
For David. Again. And Eli. Again.
Because how could I write about family without both of you being there with me?
Love you guys.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
Excerpt from The Maverick Makes the Grade by Stella Bagwell
Chapter One
Sabrina Fortune was panicking. And pacing. But mostly panicking.
Eyes fixed on the phone timer that was slowly—too slowly—ticking down the seconds, she carefully placed one foot in front of the other to make her way across her bedroom. It should have been an easy trek, considering she still didn’t have her new place completely furnished, and the only obstacles in the room were the bed, dresser and slipper chair she’d brought from her much smaller condo in Dallas when she’d joined her family here in Chatelaine Hills. And all of those were pretty minimalist style, so it was all barely there to begin with.
She really did need to buy some furniture to fill in the currently very sparsely furnished luxe log cabin she’d been calling home for almost a month. Ever since her mother, Wendy—after discovering she was a long-lost member of the famous Fortune family—bought a ranch in Chatelaine, Texas, and convinced her six children to join her in living on it. Sabrina had been the last to arrive in the tiny lakefront town and was still getting acclimated to her job as the ranch accountant. But her mother and siblings already had a million plans for the place, including, but not limited to, a dairy business, some sheep, a petting zoo, which—Sabrina hoped, since it would help her out with the fiber arts therapy camp she herself wanted to start—might even include some goats and alpacas and llamas, and...and...
And where was she?
Right. Panicking. And pacing so anxiously that her steps were becoming even more erratic than her thoughts. Anxious and erratic weren’t words people normally used to describe her. Sabrina Windham—no, Sabrina Fortune, she corrected herself, since her mother had also convinced all of the Windham children to change their last names, too—was normally the most forthright, most do-right, most upright...most uptight, some had said, though naturally she didn’t agree with that—and she didn’t like feeling anxious and erratic now. But it wasn’t exactly surprising in light of the news she’d received that morning. News she still couldn’t quite believe. Hence the pacing and the timer and the frazzled nerves. When she bumped her hip against the edge of her bed’s footboard again, she decided to leave the bedroom and move out into the hallway, where she would have better room to pace some more.
She studied the timer on her phone as she stepped through the door. Three minutes and thirty-eight seconds to go. The instructions for the home pregnancy test she’d picked up at a convenience store on her way home from the doctor this morning said she would have results in five to ten minutes, but not to wait any longer than that or she might get a false positive result. No way did she want to risk a false positive result. She didn’t even want a true positive result. But she hadn’t wanted to be hasty, either, and check right at five minutes, just in case that wasn’t quite enough time and might give a false negative when what she really wanted was a true negative, so eight minutes seemed like a good compromise, and—
Breathe, Sabrina, breathe.
She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her mouth, then exhaled slowly through her nose. She’d read somewhere that that was what you were supposed to do when you were panicking. And boy was she panicking.
With measured steps, she walked past the two bedrooms on the other side of her own master suite, past the guest bath and the small den she was gradually turning into a home office. Then she turned to pace back again. She’d honestly been wondering what she was going to do with all this extra space, since the six guesthouses lining Lake Chatelaine that had come with the ranch—and which were now being occupied by Sabrina and her five siblings—were, in her opinion, way too big for one person. But it was looking like Mother Nature might have an idea—at least for Sabrina’s own not-so-crowded house. Biting her lip, she looked at her phone again.
One minute and seventeen seconds to go.
She couldn’t be pregnant, she told herself for perhaps the hundredth time in a matter of hours. Especially not twelve weeks pregnant. She didn’t care what her gynecologist had told her that morning. There was simply no way Sabrina Fortune could have gotten knocked up. She’d only had sex one time in the last three years—which, okay, had been twelve weeks ago—and they’d used protection. Correctly, too, if memory served, though, admittedly, in the heat of the moment—and there had been a lot of heated moments that night—things, and condoms, could go awry. But she’d had irregular periods ever since getting her first when she was twelve. Just because she’d missed the last two, that didn’t mean she was pregnant...
Twenty-two seconds to go.
She’d left the test in the master bathroom because she hadn’t wanted to be tempted to watch the results as they materialized. They weren’t going to materialize—at least not in the positive. Because she wasn’t pregnant. She couldn’t be.
Nine...eight...seven...six...
Hastily, Sabrina made her way back to the other end of the hall, into her bedroom and the en suite bath. Her phone’s timer sounded just as she stepped over the threshold, a series of gentle beeps that erupted in her ears like the banging of a fireworks finale. The little plastic test tray was sitting on the edge of the sink where she’d left it, looking completely innocuous in the soft white light reflecting off the pale blue walls. At least, it looked innocuous until she drew close enough to see the results.
A perfect pink plus sign. Sabrina Fortune was indeed pregnant.
Strangely, upon seeing her own personal confirmation of what her doctor had already told her—and what she had been so determined to mire herself in denial about until she could prove it to herself—her anxiety evaporated, to be replaced by... Something else. She wasn’t sure what. She only knew she wasn’t panicking anymore. The sight of that little plus sign was just so...surreal. Everything suddenly seemed to shift, as if the floor beneath her tilted, and she tumbled into another world that looked like the one she was used
Well, her and the life that was growing inside her.
Without thinking, she splayed her hand open over her belly, as if trying to find some kind of bodily proof, too, of what the test had just told her. But nothing felt different. She wondered how long it would be before anyone would be able to tell.
She shoved her phone into the pocket of the beige shirtwaist she’d donned that morning—since she’d planned to go to work after seeing her doctor—and ran restless fingers through her pale blond bangs.
Gingerly, she picked up the test tray, cradling it in her palm as if it were a sacred jewel. Then she went back down the hall to her home office to sit down at her desk. She pushed aside the handwritten figures from the ranch’s previous accountant that she’d been trying to decipher yesterday—way back when she thought she was only seeing her gynecologist today to make sure this latest double-period-skipping wasn’t something more concerning—and set the sliver of plastic at the center of her desk. Then she withdrew her phone again and snapped a quick photo. The little pink plus sign would fade soon, and the way she felt now, she might need evidence to convince herself later of what she still didn’t quite want to believe.
She was pregnant. Twelve weeks. Almost to the day. She knew that, because it had been twelve weeks since she attended a glitzy fundraiser for a children’s rodeo right here in Chatelaine, at the posh Chatelaine Hills Hotel and Resort. May 30. She’d never forget that date. Now it was September 2. How could it be more than three months since she met Zane Baston, the wealthy rancher with the dreamy green eyes who also lived right here in Chatelaine. Talk about tall, dark and handsome. Zane was all those things and then some. From the moment their gazes connected, something white hot had arced through the air between them, setting fire to a place inside her that had been cold for too long. As if they were two halves of a whole that had been separated for eons and were finally being pulled back together again. And, wow, had the two of them been pulled together that night. There were parts of Sabrina that were still sizzling, three months later. She’d never met a man like him.
And now that man was trying to pull a land grab of a small parcel of lakefront property that abutted the Fortune Ranch. A parcel of land Sabrina had already purchased and had big plans for but hadn’t been able to claim yet because Zane Baston had some of his cronies at town hall doing everything they could to negate the sale so that he could claim the land for himself. Sabrina could scarcely believe her property nemesis was the same man she met that night three months ago. Except he thought he was dealing with Sabrina Fortune, she knew, and not the Sabrina Windham he’d met that night.
She closed her eyes again, but this time it was to envision what she’d written off twelve weeks ago as just one of those things, like the old song said. She’d never planned on seeing Zane again after that night, because she knew she’d be returning to Dallas in the morning. The only reason she’d come to the fundraiser in the first place was to check out the little town her mother had been raving about for months. Then again, now that she thought about it, being sure she’d never see Zane again might have been why she’d let things go too far that night.
She still couldn’t believe they’d ended up in bed together. Sabrina was never that impetuous. Never that spontaneous. Of the six Fortune siblings, she’d always been The Cautious One. Especially after—
Well, suffice to say that for the last ten years, Sabrina had made it an extra fine point to live her life carefully. Thoughtfully. Deliberately. She seldom dated, and what few relationships—if she could even call them that—she had managed to develop over the years had all ended quickly when both she and her potential partner realized how hard it was for her to open herself up to an emotional commitment. She’d learned her lesson there.
Even so, she had to tell Zane he was going to be a father. He had the right to know. Then he could do with the knowledge what he would. Just how she was supposed to tell him, though?
She inhaled another deep breath and released it slowly. There was just one thing to do. The thing Sabrina had done her entire life when it came to times of turmoil. She was going to have to assemble her sisters.
* * *
“So I guess you’re all wondering why I’ve called you here tonight,” Sabrina said some hours later after pouring glasses of wine for her twin sister, Dahlia, and her older sister Jade.
She’d changed into her usual nightwear of pajama pants—these pinstriped in pink and pale yellow—and a tunic the color of buttercups. Her pale blond hair was bound at her nape in a loose ponytail, much like her sister Dahlia’s, but that was about where the fraternal twins’ similarities ended. Where they were both tall, Dahlia had curves that lanky Sabrina could only dream about, every last one of them evident in Dahlia’s work-about-the-ranch blue jeans and white button-up shirt. Her blond hair was a shade lighter than Sabrina’s, and her blue eyes were dark and expressive where Sabrina liked to think she kept her own thoughts to herself. Jade’s hair was long, too, but was dark brown and fell loose around her shoulders. Her own style was more conservative as well, and hadn’t changed much over the years, her blue jeans and T-shirt much like what she wore when they were in high school.
Really, all six of the Fortune siblings had features that ran the gamut. Some were dark, some fair, some were in between. Yet they somehow all managed to resemble both their mother, Wendy, and their father, Casper.
Jade and Dahlia accepted the wine from Sabrina gratefully, and each enjoyed a generous sip after giving her their thanks. Looked like they’d both had One of Those Days, too. But she’d also bet dollars to doughnuts those days were nothing compared to her own.
“You sound like you’re going to accuse us of murder,” Jade said from her seat on Sabrina’s sofa.
Her living room, too, was still sparsely furnished, the delicate curves and pale colors of her furniture looking overwhelmed by the soaring beams and honey-gold logs of the living room. She was definitely going to have to do some furniture shopping soon.
“So who died?” Dahlia asked.
Sabrina sighed. “My sense of self.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound good,” Dahlia replied.
“Have a sip of wine and tell us what’s going on,” Jade told her.
Sabrina looked down at her glass, into which she’d poured a generous serving of pomegranate juice. “It’s not wine,” she told them. “It’s juice.”
“Wow, you really have lost your sense of self,” Dahlia said with a chuckle.
“Indeed,” Jade concurred. “Explain yourself.”
Sabrina smiled at her sisters in spite of the turmoil cartwheeling through her. Usually, these conclaves with her sisters weren’t about anything too major. A lot of times, it was just girls having fun. Tonight, though, she needed help sorting things out. But how was she supposed to explain any of this to Dahlia and Jade when she didn’t understand it herself?
In an effort to stall, she asked her sisters, “Hey, how’s Hope doing? Have either of you spoken to her lately?”
Hope was a woman who Dahlia and their brother Ridge had discovered in his barn late one night last month with a baby in her arms, a wound on her head, and absolutely no memory of who she was or how she’d gotten there. Ridge had taken her in, along with baby Evie, but the last Sabrina had heard, they hadn’t made any headway in discovering her identity or history. They didn’t even know if her name was truly Hope.
“She’s doing well physically,” Dahlia said. “I talked to them yesterday. The doctor gave her and Evie both a clean bill of health and told Hope that her memory should return in time. Nothing seems to be jarring any recollections, though.”
Sabrina couldn’t imagine what it must be like to have no inkling of who you were. And to have a baby to care for on top of that. She was just happy Hope and Evie had found their way to a place where they’d be safe. Her youngest brother, Ridge, was just about the most decent human being Sabrina knew.
“But enough about Hope,” Jade said. “What’s happening with you? Why are we here?”
