Fortune's Heirs: Reunion

Fortune’s Heirs: Reunion

Marie Ferrarella

Crystal Green

Stella Bagwell

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Marie Ferrarella is a RITA® Award-winning author who has written over one hundred and thirty books, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide.

To Patience Smith, my Guardian Angel, with sincerest thanks

Prologue

“All right, what’s wrong?”

Maria Mendoza looked up from the items she was straightening on the counter. On it was displayed a multitude of skeins, her latest shipment of angora yarn. The veritable rainbow of colors appeared as cheerful as she was sad. Maria had hoped that keeping busy in the shop would dispel the darkness that insisted on dwelling inside of her. After all, this was her shop and it had become successful beyond her wildest expectations.

But none of that did anything to lift her mother’s mood.

“What makes you think something’s wrong?” With effort, she put on the best face she could for the dark-haired woman who had entered the shop.

Rosita Perez, her cousin and dearest friend in the whole world, frowned. “You and I have known one another for more years than I will willingly admit to anyone except for Reuben,” she said, referring to her husband. “I know when there’s something wrong with you. You look as if you’ve lost your best friend.” Rosita, older by four years but shorter by several inches, picked up a skein, as if debating whether she needed or wanted more wool, then replaced it. “And as far as I know I’m still breathing.”

Maria shook her head. “No, not my best friend, my daughters.” Then, because Sierra still lived within Red Rock’s city limits, she clarified, “Christina and Gloria,” although there was no need. Rosita was as aware of the girls’ location as she was.

Rosita placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Maria, this isn’t exactly anything new. The girls have been gone five years—”

“Exactly.” Maria sighed, struggling against the overwhelming sadness. “Five years. With no end in sight. This is not why I became a mother, Rosita, to hope for an occasional word from my daughters.” She splayed her hand over her chest. “There’s a hole in my heart.”

“You’ve still got Sierra and Jorge close by,” Rosita pointed out. She tactfully omitted mentioning Roberto, who’d moved to Denver, the same city that Gloria had chosen to disappear to.

“And a hole in my heart,” Maria repeated. Even if she’d had a dozen children, she’d still feel the lack of the two who had left. Roberto returned frequently, Gloria and Christina did not.

Rosita shrugged, spreading her hands wide. “So, plug it.”

Maria blew out a breath. Her cousin made the situation sound so simple. “How?”

Rosita wandered from display to display within Stocking Stitch, which was what Maria had chosen to call her store. “Get the girls to come home.”

Maria’s impatience continued to grow. She stepped in front of her cousin before Rosita could move to yet another display. “Again, how?”

Rosita shook her head. “I have never known you to be slow with ideas, ’Ria. You could throw a party.”

Of course, how could she not have thought of that? Jose would cook, as he always insisted on doing, and she could be the hostess. Nothing made her happier than to have everyone home, under one roof. Maria smiled. “A big party.”

“A big family party,” Rosita agreed.

The smile faded from Maria’s lips. She was deluding herself. “But the girls will pass when I ask them to fly out. This thing between them…” She had never gotten all the details, but it wasn’t a stretch for her to guess at what was going on. Christina, her oldest, and Gloria, her wild one, had had a falling out. Most likely over a man. “There’re bad feelings.”

Rosita remained unfazed. The two had spent many hours talking about their children. “So? Come up with something to block out these bad feelings.”

A smile took hold of Maria’s lips, melting away the years. By everyone’s standards, she was still a very handsome woman. “I could tell them that their father’s had a heart attack. They’ll come rushing back for that.”

“They’ll come rushing to the hospital,” Rosita pointed out. “That’s where they’ll expect to see him if he’s had a heart attack.”

Maria nodded. Rosita had a point. “Chest pains, then,” Maria amended. “We’ll hold a family reunion and I’ll tell the girls that if they miss this one, I don’t know if their father will be here for the next one.” She looked at her cousin, a sunny smile on her lips. “What do you think?” she asked as she picked up a pad and pen from the counter.

“I think that I’m happy we’re friends and not competitors.”

But Maria didn’t hear her. She was busy making notes to herself for the party she and her husband were about to throw.

Chapter One

Like an outsider staring through a one-way mirror, Gloria Mendoza Johansen looked slowly around at the people milling about and talking in her parents’ spacious living room. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Just like the old days, she thought.

There were people in every room of the house, confined inside rather than spilling out onto the patio and the grounds beyond because of the cold weather. February in Red Rock, Texas, left its mark. At times raw, it could leech into your very bones.

But inside the house, everything was warm, cozy. The way she had once thought the world was. But she’d learned differently.

As she floated from place to place, observing, hesitating to join in, she twirled the stem of her glass. A wineglass to hide the fact that she was drinking seltzer instead of something alcoholic.

Because she was one.

A recovering alcoholic, to be exact. Except that alcoholics never really recovered, she thought wryly. They were doomed to an eternal dance, always careful to avoid the very thing that they would always, on some level, crave. A drink. But she had been sober two years now and she was determined to remain that way.

Nodding and smiling, she didn’t pause to talk to people who looked inclined to engage her in conversation. She was still picking her time, taking it all in. It felt strange coming home. In part, it was as if she’d stepped into a time warp and five years had just melted away, never having passed.

But they had passed.

They’d left their mark on her in so many ways. Too many for her to think about now. Besides, there really was no point.

Go forward, don’t look back.

It was something she told herself almost daily, a mantra she all but silently chanted within the boundaries of her mind. And now, finally, she was beginning to adhere to it.

“They’re your family. They won’t bite, Gloria. Mingle.”

Her mother. She’d caught the scent of her mother’s perfume a beat before the older woman had said anything.

Gloria glanced over her shoulder at the diminutive woman. At sixty-two, Maria Mendoza still had the same figure that had first caught Jose Mendoza’s eye, no mean feat after five children. She was wearing her shoulder-length black hair up tonight. The silver streaks added to the impression of royalty, which was in keeping with the way she and the others had viewed her when they’d been children. It was her mother who had summoned her like the queen mother to return home.

Gloria smiled to herself now. Her mother had no idea that she’d been toying with that very notion herself, not for any so-called family reunion or to come rushing back to an ailing father who in her opinion looked remarkably healthy for a man supposedly battling chest pains, but to relocate. Permanently. To set up her business and her life where it had all once began.

Home.

She’d fled Red Rock five years ago when she’d felt her life spinning out of control, when the effects of alcohol and drugs had all but undone her. She’d thought that if she got away from everything, from her mother’s strong hand and everything that had contributed to her feeling of instability, the temptation to drink herself into oblivion and to drug her senses would disappear.

As if.

Because everywhere she went, she always had to take herself with her. It had taken a great deal of soul-searching and one near-fatal catastrophe—her nearly falling off a balcony while intoxicated—for her to finally face the fact that the problem was not external but internal. If she wanted her life to change, then she and not her surroundings needed to change.

So she’d shed the poor excuse for a husband she’d acquired in her initial vain attempt to turn her life around and then scrubbed away every bad habit she’d accumulated since she was a teenager. To that end, she’d checked herself into rehab, probably the hardest thing she’d ever done, and prepared to begin from scratch. And to learn to like herself again.

She knew the process was going to be slow. And it had been. Like molasses rolling downhill in January. But every tiny headway she made was also fulfilling. And as she grew stronger, more stable, more certain, she realized that she wanted to return to a place where people—most people, at any rate—liked her.

She’d wanted to return home.

And home was her parents. It was also her sisters, but that hurdle she hadn’t managed to take yet. When she’d left, she’d left her relationships with them, especially her older sister, Christina, in shambles.

She still had to do something about that.

One step at a time, Gloria cautioned herself.

She’d gotten everywhere else so far and she’d get there, too. Just maybe not tonight. She’d already seen her sisters, both of them, but from a distance. And that was what she intended on keeping tonight: her distance.

The same height as her mother, except that she was wearing heels that made her almost two inches taller, Gloria inclined her head toward the older woman. “Papa looks terrific for a man who’s had a heart attack,” she commented, not bothering to keep the smile from her lips.

“Chest pains,” Maria corrected, as if the reason she’d given both her older girls had not been a creative fabrication. “I said he’d had chest pains.”

Gloria could feel her brown eyes fill with humor as she looked at her mother—and saw right through her. “More like indigestion maybe?”

Maria shrugged her shoulders, dismissing the topic. It was obvious that her mother was not about to insist on the lie. It had done its work. It had brought her home. “He wanted you here as much as I did.” Maria fixed her with a look that spoke to her heart. “As I do.”

There was no point in keeping her decision to herself any longer. Gloria slipped her arm around her mother’s shoulders. “Then I have something to tell you.”

But her mother cut her off, as if she was afraid she would hear something that would spoil the moment and the party for her. “Whatever it is, I am sure it is fascinating, but you can tell me all about it after you get my shawl.”

Gloria looked at her uncertainly. If anything, the press of bodies made the air warm, not cool. “Your shawl?”

“Yes, I left it in the den.” Already turning in that direction, she placed her hands on her daughter’s back and gave her a little initial push to start her on her way. “Get it for me, please.”

Gloria paused, then shrugged in compliance. Going to get her mother’s shawl gave her an excuse to withdraw for a moment. Just because she’d made up her mind to uproot her life for the second time in five years and come back home didn’t mean that the idea didn’t make her just the slightest bit uneasy. She supposed it was because she kept thinking about that old line she remembered from her high school English class. Some author, Wolfe? Maybe Hardy? Whoever it was had said you couldn’t go home again.

She prayed it was just a handy title for a book and not a prophecy.

The immediate reason she’d left Red Rock was that she’d blacked out after a drinking binge only to wake up to find herself beside a man she’d had no recollection of meeting. But in part she’d fled to San Antonio because relations had also deteriorated between her and her sisters. They’d been so close once, but that had been as children and children had a tendency to overlook things adults couldn’t.

Such as cutting words and deceptions that should never have taken place. She and Christina had worked for the same financial firm, Macrizon, naive in their enthusiasm. And were easy prey for a woman named Rebecca Waters who took perverse pleasure in pitting one of them against the other.

Maria, looking impatient, ran her hands along her arms. “Please, Glory, I’m getting cold.”

She looked at her mother suspiciously. Was she getting sick? But Maria’s face appeared as rosy as ever. Again, Gloria shrugged. “Fine, Mama. One shawl, coming up.”

She made her way to the den, wondering if her father knew how oddly his wife was behaving tonight.

The second she walked into the den, she knew she had been set up.

Maria Mendoza, you’re still a crafty little woman, she thought.

Her younger sister, Sierra, was standing inside the bookcase-lined room, looking around as if she was searching for something. She’d watched as Christina, her older sister, had preceded her into the room by less than a minute.

Gloria shook her head. She should have seen this coming a mile away.

Despite her unease, she couldn’t help commenting, “All we need now is a little Belgium detective with a waxed mustache and a cup of hot chocolate saying, ‘I know that you are wondering why I asked you all to be here tonight.’”

At the sound of Gloria’s voice, Christina whirled around to look at her, her mouth open in surprise. Sierra’s head jerked up. She looked as if she could be knocked over with a feather plucked from a duck’s back.

Awkwardness warred with that old, fond feeling she’d once had when she was in the company of her sisters. “Mom sent me,” Gloria finally explained.

Lights dawned on her sisters’ faces. “Papa sent me,” Christina told them.

“Rosita,” was Sierra’s contribution for the reason behind the exodus that had brought the three of them to this room.

Suddenly, Gloria felt herself being pushed into the room. Catching her balance, she whirled around, only to have the door shut in her face. Her sisters were immediately on either side of her as she tried the doorknob. It wouldn’t give.

Big surprise.

“It’s locked.” Maria’s voice came through the door. “And it’s going to stay that way until the three of you resolve your differences and come out of there acting like sisters instead of angry strangers.”

“You’re really going to be needing that shawl, Mama.” There was nothing Gloria hated more than being manipulated. She knew her sisters felt the same way about being played. “Considering that hell’s going to be freezing over when that happens.”

She tried the door again, but it still didn’t give. Her mother was obviously in for the duration. Angry, Gloria turned to look at the two other women. Now what? She jerked her head in the direction of the door. “She sounds serious.”

Christina snorted, her arms akimbo. “Mama can get pretty stubborn when she wants something.”

And that, Gloria thought, was a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. Gloria eyed her older sister. “You’re not exactly a shrinking violet yourself in that department.”

It was impossible to read Christina’s expression. “And you are?”

Sierra placed herself between the two older women she still loved dearly. Peacemaking came naturally to her, it always had. Becoming a social worker had only intensified that tendency.

Shorter than both her sisters, Sierra nonetheless refused to give ground as she looked from one to the other. “Tina, Glory, let’s not pick up where you two left off five years ago.”

Edgy, nervous, Gloria felt like the odd girl out. When she’d left, it had been Christina and Sierra against her.

She raised her chin now, defensive, wary. Wondering if the other two were willing to begin again the way she was or wanted to draw the lines in the sand again. “And why not?”

Sierra looked exasperated. She also looked older, Gloria thought. More in control. “Because it’s obvious that Mama and Papa want us to pick up where we left off ten, fifteen years ago, not five.”

Gloria searched Sierra’s face. Her younger sister wasn’t just paying lip service to something. It was obvious she was speaking what was in her heart, as well.

A smile slowly emerged on her lips. She continued to test the waters. “We were pretty close then, weren’t we? Be nice to just step on a magic carpet and go back in time.”

Sierra had a better solution. “Or just forget what went down.”

Gloria looked at Christina. The acrimony, because that was what it had become, had been mainly between her and her older sister. It had spilled out onto Sierra only when she’d thought that Sierra had joined forces with Christina against her.

Maybe things wouldn’t have seemed so intense, so distorted and so overly dramatic if she hadn’t been trapped inside a bottle at the time, Gloria thought. A lot of the fault, if she were being honest, had lain with her.

She offered Sierra a rueful smile, covertly watching Christina’s expression. “That’s a whole lot of forgetting.”

Christina took a deep breath, her natural composure slipping into place. Of the three of them, she was the most unflappable, at least outwardly. The one who seemed to be able to take everything in stride. Not too many people guessed at the chaos going on inside. Or at the pain.

She seemed to reach a conclusion. “I can if you can,” Christina finally said, looking at her.

Which put the ball squarely in her court, Gloria thought.

She didn’t want to be thought of as the lesser sister, the one who clung to old arguments and hurt feelings. The one who refused to allow bygones to be bygones.

More than anything, she wanted to bury the recent past and return to the years when they had viewed life with a rosier hue—without the benefit of any artificial crutches or additives.

To Gloria’s surprise, Christina put out her hand. “Fresh start?”

Tension drained out of her and for the first time since she’d entered the room, Gloria really smiled as she took the hand that was offered. “Fresh start.”

Sierra placed her own hand on top of her sisters’ clasped ones. She beamed as she looked from one to the other.

“Fresh start,” she echoed.

And suddenly, just like that, it felt like old times. Gloria embraced the feeling just as she embraced the sisters she had been without for much too long. A huge sense of relief hovered like a cleansing cloud within the room.

The sisters all sank down onto the thickly padded brown leather sofa that dominated the room, shy, but eager to catch up and make up for lost time.

On the coffee table sat a bottle of wine and three glasses. Gloria ignored the alcohol and instead took a sip from the glass of seltzer she had brought with her. She thought about what had just been pledged. A fresh start. Something she intended to make a reality. “You know, for this to be a true fresh start, we have to give it all our attention.”

“I’m for that.” Christina poured Sierra a glass of wine, then one for herself. She hesitated over the third glass, then raised her eyes to Gloria.

Gloria smiled, then shook her head. Unlike their mother, her sisters were aware of her demons. At least, some of them.

“Don’t worry about me.” She indicated the glass of seltzer. “I’m fine with this.”

“You’ve already made your fresh start,” Christina observed, setting the bottle back on the tray.

“One day at a time.” They raised their glasses and toasted a new beginning. Gloria caught her lower lip between her teeth as she regarded the other two thoughtfully. “You know what the single most disastrous obstacle in our path to recovery is?”

Sierra gamely placed her glass on the tray. “I’ll bite, what?”

Gloria thought of her ill-fated marriage and the men who had come before. Christina had fared little better. As for Sierra, she had never found anyone to make her happy, either.

“Men,” she told the others.

Christina laughed. “They are a problem, bless their black hearts.”

“No,” Gloria contradicted, “we’re the problem.” The other two women looked at her. “We can’t seem to choose the right ones.”

Sierra and Christina readily agreed with the assessment.

“That’s because the rotten ones are always so damn attractive,” Sierra observed.

Christina nodded. “Sure can’t tell a book by its cover.”

And the handsome ones knew they could get by on their looks and not take any responsibility for their actions. Well, she was swearing them off, the lot of them. And for the time being, so should her sisters. “So we’re going to close the bookstore.” But that sounded too final, so she added, “Temporarily.”

Christina frowned. Leaning over, she pretended to look into the glass that Gloria was holding. “Sure that isn’t vodka?” Rather than answer, Gloria held the glass out to her. Christina took it and sniffed. Bubbles were still dancing on top of the liquid. She wrinkled her nose as she pushed the glass back toward Gloria. “Seltzer,” she confirmed.

Satisfied that she had her sisters’ attention and compliance, Gloria continued. “We’re not going to have anything to do with them.”

Sierra shook her head. That seemed like rather an impossible resolution. “Pretty hard, considering they’re almost half the population.”

“On a private, social level,” Gloria clarified. Her eyes shifted from Christina to Sierra to see if they were still with her. “Meaning, no dates.”

“No dates,” Sierra echoed. A beat later, she smiled, as if the words and their import were sinking in. “No dates,” she repeated.

Christina held up her hand, taking a solemn oath. “No dates.”

She couldn’t tell if they were humoring her or if she’d really gotten through. “No, I’m serious,” Gloria insisted. Warming up to her subject, she moved to the edge of the sofa, like a bird about to dive-bomb. “We shouldn’t go out with any of them—no matter how tempted we are—” She stopped, deep in thought. “For a year,” she concluded, then repeated, “A year. That should be long enough to at least begin to get the rest of our lives in order.”

There was no one in her life, significant or otherwise. Sierra shrugged. There was nothing to lose. “Okay.”

Christina laughed. It was obvious by her expression that the idea amused her. And maybe it had merit. “Fine by me.”

They still weren’t taking this seriously. She could tell.

Adamant, Gloria shook her head. “You say that now, but the first minute some cute, rotten guy crosses your path—”

“I’ll ignore him,” Christina concluded.

She had to up the ante, Gloria thought. Otherwise her sisters weren’t going to give this the attention it needed. She firmly believed that men were the distracting force. Worse, they were the destructive force. If she and her sisters were going to accomplish anything with their lives, they had to remain focused.