Fortune's Christmas Baby. Tara Taylor Quinn

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      When he and Lizzie had made love, they’d agreed that there’d be no promises. They’d just met and he was only in town a couple of weeks. And while they’d left open the possibility of being in touch after Nolan Forte’s gig was up and he had to leave with the band, they’d never promised to be.

      Back at the hotel that Friday afternoon a year later to the day he’d first met Lizzie, Nolan showered, pulled on black jeans and rolled up the sleeves of his white cotton shirt, leaving the top buttons undone. He put on a black leather vest with silver studs, stepped into his black leather cowboy boots and grabbed his sax.

      Lizzie was the past.

      He was ready to move into his future.

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