Fortune's Christmas Baby

She’d always hated getting out of bed, but was generally looking forward to the day by the time she was out of the shower. That day was no different. With the extra money, she could get Stella the set of talking books the baby had been fascinated with in the store the week before.

She had Ziploc bags in the freezer filled with pumped milk for Carmela to feed the baby today. Her roommate’s last-year architecture classes were mostly at night to compensate for Lizzie’s daytime work hours—and also because of her internship with the famous Keaton Fortune Whitfield. If Carmela had to leave, she’d take Stella to the grandma-age nanny the two of them had chosen together.

Thank God for Carmela Connors. Getting her as a college roommate had been the second best thing that had ever happened to her. Next in line only to Stella.

She was in her favorite chair in the living room, feeding Stella one last time right before she left, grateful to have the time to bond with her baby girl, when Carmela came in with two cups of tea and handed her one.

“It sucks that you have to work today,” her amber-haired friend said, curling her long legs up under her on the couch and pulling a fleece blanket over her lap. “For you, that is. I’m glad, as always, to get to hang and play mommy with that little one.”

Switching the baby to her other breast, Lizzie kissed the top of Stella’s head and said, “I hate leaving her, but honestly, I’m glad they called. A chance to make some extra money is a good thing. Especially right before the holidays.”

And time away from the baby was good, too. Instead of getting overwrought with the permanent and all-encompassing responsibility of being a single parent, she had time away...and then chafed to get home to her.

“Yeah, but wouldn’t it be great to be independently wealthy? Even for just a day or two? Like, do you ever think about how it’d feel to win the lottery? Oh, no, wait, we’d have to play to do that.”

Carmela’s droll tone made her smile. But she shook her head, too. “I seriously don’t want that kind of money.”

Suddenly serious, Carmela gave her a warm look. “I know, sweetie. And I probably don’t really want it, either.”

Carmela was the only person in her current life who knew why Lizzie shuddered at the idea of being wealthy, the only one who knew how her life had changed when her parents had reconnected with a friend of her mother’s from high school who’d married money. The Mahoneys had been great to them. Always inviting her parents to parties and dinners and charity functions that were way above their means, and paying for it all, too. Buying Lizzie lovely gifts for Christmas. Things her parents could never afford.

She’d been expected to feel grateful. Blessed. And she’d tried so hard. But inside she’d struggled with having her parents gone so much. Somehow, when the Mahoneys had called, a trip out for ice cream was no longer important. The opportunities they offered were better than the three of them home laughing while they made chocolate chip cookies and her father gave himself a cookie dough mustache.

Maybe if the Mahoneys had had children, it would have been better. Or if Lizzie had had siblings. Maybe if they’d done things together as families, rather than Lizzie always being left behind. Maybe if her mom had seemed as peacefully happy as she’d been before Barbara Mahoney had moved home to Chicago. If she hadn’t always constantly been making excuses for their home, or trying to get Lizzie to dress up more, do her hair nice, speak differently when the Mahoneys were around. And getting tense about her own hair, her own clothes. Like their real life embarrassed her.

“Don’t you think, if your parents had lived, that they’d have eventually pulled away from those friends of theirs and returned to normal life?” Carmela’s quiet question broke into her thoughts.

Rubbing Stella’s cheek, silently promising her baby girl that she’d never lose sight of what mattered most, Lizzie glanced over at Carmela, flooded with a bout of happiness, of being right where she was meant to be. “I’m not sure,” she said now. “I like to think so. I just know that the Mahoneys left nothing but money behind, while Mom and Dad had an asset that was priceless. And now I do, too.” She looked at the baby, whose mouth had fallen away from her breast as she went to sleep, and then glanced back at Carmela. “It’s so weird, you know,” she continued as she righted her bra and shirt. “When I first found out I was pregnant and couldn’t get ahold of Nolan, I was so scared and depressed, thinking my life was over. And now I see that everything happened just as it was meant to. We might have an odd little family here—me and her and you—and I might have some struggles ahead, being a single mom, but I love this baby more than I’d ever thought it possible to love anyone.”

“And look at you. Even pregnant, you finished your degree and are now an officially certified music teacher,” Carmela added, holding up her teacup in a mock salute.

“I have to be ready for the day you graduate and get that fabulous job offer,” Lizzie told her friend.

They were a great family, the three of them. But they’d known from the beginning that it wouldn’t last forever.

It was something she made a point to remember so that when the time came for change, she’d be ready and able to deal with it.

Yep. She was going to work. Christmas was coming. And Stella was healthy.

She had this.

Nolan made it to breakfast around noon. Jim Daly and Arnold Branham were off somewhere. Glenn Downing, their drummer, was already at a table when Nolan showed up at the diner next door to their small hotel not far from the club. He joined the fortysomething divorced father of two who never got his kids on Christmas.

They talked about music, as they always did. The four guys had met in a private jazz class when Nolan had been in college. Daly, Branham and Nolan had been students and Glenn their instructor. Glenn, a music scholar, had chosen life on the road over life in the classroom after obtaining his doctorate degree in music theory. He’d toured with various bands for two decades and now hired himself out on the local New Orleans scene and taught private classes. Daly was hoping to get with a full-time touring band. And Branham, the oldest of the three former jazz students, was still in college, taking a couple of classes a semester since he had to work full-time to afford tuition. He wanted to be a veterinarian. But he was damned good with wind instruments, too.

None of them knew Nolan’s real story. And the email address he’d given them had been created specifically and only for them, as was the cell number for the phone he’d purchased when he’d first had the yen to take a jazz music class and had invented Nolan Forte. None of them had any idea he’d learned the sax from some of the greats while still in high school because his parents had been trying to keep him out of trouble. They knew he lived in New Orleans and had a business degree, but he’d told them he worked as a grunt at a desk job. Statistical analysis, which was close enough to banking that he could pull off a conversation, and boring enough that he never had to.

If he had his way—and he usually did—that’s all they’d ever know.

Nolan spent his afternoon doing exactly what he’d told himself he would not do. He walked around familiar spots on campus, visited a coffee shop for a coffee he didn’t want because he’d been there before, stopped in a restaurant just to look at a particular booth in the back corner and even made it by the apartment complex that had tried to steal his life away from him.

Well, the complex hadn’t. The temptation within it had.

Lizzie.

Built into the side of a hill, the one-floor building stood almost a full story above the street.

Looking up at the window of her old apartment, picturing the bedroom beyond, he shook his head and moved on. He’d glorified the entire two-week episode, he was sure.

And he’d made the right choice, too, in breaking things off cold with Lizzie. And in coming back to Austin, too, as it turned out. He’d just wanted to take the walk down memory lane, to find the closure he needed to get her fully out of his system.

There was no way any relationship between them would have worked. She’d been having fun with a not-rich saxophone player. She’d made her views of a wealthy lifestyle quite clear, when she’d told him, after they made love for the first time, that it didn’t matter to her that he was a struggling musician. Unlike most, she didn’t yearn for financial abundance. In fact, she thought that money chained people, not set them free. The yearning inside him had agreed with her, even as warning bells had gone off.

The rest of him, the parts Lizzie didn’t know at all, liked his Ferrari, his home, his ability to take two weeks off worry-free and pretend to be someone else. He loved his family—even when he didn’t like them sometimes. He needed to be a solid, contributing part of the energetic Fortune clan.

He liked eating at the finest restaurants. Having the best seats at the theater. And having a driver at his disposal any time he wanted.

He particularly liked being able to fly off to Greece for a long weekend.

Problem was, he’d liked Lizzie, too. More than any woman he’d ever been with.

He’d liked her too much to challenge the feelings with reality. Better to love and leave, as they’d both planned, than introduce her to his life of wealth and have the money come between them. They were from different worlds and he’d already tried that route with a woman he’d met in college. It had been a disaster all the way around, and they’d both been hurt. Badly. One of Molly’s brothers had tried to cash in on knowing him, by using the Fortune name, and Molly had expected Nolan to let it go, because they were all “family.”

He’d let it go because it hadn’t hurt his family, but he’d also had to let her go.

Whatever love he’d had for her had turned to resentment. And worse. He hadn’t been willing to chance having the same thing happen to him and Lizzie when reality set in.

He’d never thought she’d have used his wealth in that way, but their enormous differences would have torn their love apart. And then there was the fact that he’d been duplicitous with her, even after sleeping with her. A lack of trust was definitely pavement on the road to resentment.

Taking the long way back to the cheesy hotel, Nolan played the whole Lizzie thing in his mind one more time. He checked himself, his choices, and knew he’d done the right thing, cutting himself off from her.

His oldest brother, Austin, Nolan’s mentor from birth, had been down the Lizzie road, too, falling hard for a woman in just two weeks. It had turned into the biggest mistake of his life and it had hurt the family. Austin had been twenty-five when he’d married on the spot, the age Nolan had been when he’d met Lizzie.

Lizzie had been young, too, just like Kelly, Austin’s ex. Twenty-one actually, the same age Kelly had been when she’d hoodwinked Austin.

Added to all that was Nolan’s own habit for getting into mischief. He could see now that it had been a result of him yearning to break free that had sent him down the wrong roads. He’d dealt with that shadowy side his entire life. And paid for it, too.

Like the time he’d thought it would be cool to dare a couple of his sisters, Savannah and Belle, the younger ones, to jump off a cliff into a swimming hole twenty feet below. After he’d already taken the fall himself. Of course, since he’d dared them and was older than them, they’d done it. Though they were both successful, Savannah got sick, with a cold that then went into a bronchial infection, and had to miss the first two weeks of school.

Miles Fortune had been all up for grounding his son for the entire school year. One of his older brothers had talked him down to Nolan being Savannah’s servant for the next month, in charge of collecting and delivering all of her school assignments, too.

And then there’d been the time he’d climbed out his window to meet up with the teenage daughter of one of the ladies who’d cleaned their ten-thousand-square-foot mansion. Austin had covered for him then. Miles had never found out about that one.

But he was an adult now. His brother couldn’t cover for him anymore.

He’d understood what he had to do. And he’d done it. Cut things off at the quick with Lizzie before they went too far. He’d thrown away her number. He’d changed his own. And he’d checked the band’s website to make certain that there was nothing there that could possibly tie Nolan Forte to Nolan Fortune.

And then, like Austin, he’d concentrated on work.