“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” Jeremy told him. If this man they were going to check out turned out to be their missing father, they would most likely need a doctor, and that would be him.
“You ready?” Drew asked, his hand poised to turn the key in the ignition.
“Let’s go,” Jeremy gestured toward the open road.
The sheriff had responded to the missing person bulletin they had posted and said that he might have found their father in town. They’d almost given up hope when they’d found their father’s sedan, abandoned and smashed, so this was definitely a turn for the better.
“Think that homeless man really is Dad?” Jeremy did his best not to sound as nervous as he felt.
Drew hated getting his hopes up, but at the same time, he needed to be optimistic. “Sure looked like it might be from that photo the sheriff emailed. A lot less dapper and pretty disheveled, but that definitely looked like Dad’s face to me. Anyway, Lily’s sure it’s him,” he added, referring to the woman his father was supposed to have married the day he disappeared, leaving a churchful of confused and concerned people in his wake.
Formerly married to Ryan Fortune, their father’s cousin, the still exceedingly attractive Lily Cassidy Fortune had turned to William in her grief when her husband died of a brain tumor six years ago. Their friendship slowly blossomed into something more. But now the wedding was on hold—indefinitely.
Drew glanced at his older brother, looking for some insight. The sheriff had said that the homeless man was distraught, saying over and over again that he needed to find his baby. “What do you think all that talk about looking for his baby might mean?”
Jeremy hadn’t a clue, although, he reasoned, it might have something to do with his amnesia. Maybe the last thing William Fortune had seen before he lost his memory was the baby they had since discovered. A baby whose origins was shrouded in as much mystery as their father’s sudden disappearance.
“The only baby we’ve seen recently is the one that was found by the groundskeeper at the church around the same time Dad disappeared,” Jeremy commented. Currently, he and his fiancée, Kirsten, had temporary custody until the baby’s parents could be located. There was talk that one of the Fortune men might have fathered the child, but he couldn’t see how that actually connected to his father. Right now, there were far more questions floating around than answers.
Shaking his head, Jeremy laughed shortly. “Wouldn’t it be something if the baby turned out to be Dad’s?”
Drew frowned. “Don’t be an idiot, Jer. Dad’s a one-woman man and he picked Lily. There’s no way he would have fathered another woman’s baby.”
Jeremy inclined his head, conceding the point. But there was still a glaring question left. “So why did he disappear?”
“Hell if I know.” Out of town now, he stepped down on the accelerator, picking up speed. “When he gets his memory back, we’ll ask him.”
“If he gets him memory back,” Jeremy cautiously qualified.
Trust Jeremy to ground him in reality. “Yeah, there’s that, too,” Drew conceded. “For Lily’s sake, I hope this guy does turn out to be Dad and that his memory loss is just temporary.”
Amnesia was a tricky condition, and if William was in fact suffering from it, there was no knowing how long it would last—or if it would ever clear up.
“Amen to that.”
Drew gave him a long glance, surprised. “You turning religious on me, Jeremy?”
Jeremy’s shoulders rose and fell in a dismissive shrug. “Everyone needs a little help every now and then,” he allowed. “In our family’s case, I think we could stand to use an extra dose of it.”
This is more like it. Wendy wove her way around the tables, heading toward the ones that comprised her station. Working at Red had turned out to be a far better fit for her than she’d initially expected.
Her parents had first sent her to work at the Fortune Foundation, located right here in Red Rock. It had taken her only a couple of weeks to discover that she was psychologically allergic to claustrophobic-size offices. She felt too confined, too hemmed in. She just didn’t belong in a nine-to-five job inside a building whose windows didn’t open.
Granted, out here in the spacious dining area there weren’t any windows to speak of, either, but the windows in the front of the restaurant kept the space bright and airy as did the ones in Marcos’s office.
That room was actually smaller than her office at the Foundation, but somehow, it still felt a lot more airy.
That probably had something to do with the man in it.
If the word gorgeous in the dictionary had a photo next to it, she had no doubts that it would be Marcos’s.
Especially if he was smiling.
She’d seen Marcos smiling—not at her, of course. For some reason, she only seemed to elicit frowns from the man whenever he turned his attention to her. But when he was mingling with Red’s patrons, he always had a wide, sexier-than-sin smile on his lips.
Despite the hectic pace during business hours, she’d managed to observe him with the customers—in particular the female patrons—and Marcos was nothing if not charismatic. He even smiled at the kitchen help and some of the other staff.
Smiled, she thought, at everyone but her.
Boss or not, she was determined to find out what it was about her that seemed to coax those dour looks from him.
Wendy wasn’t used to a man deliberately scowling at her instead of going out of his way to curry her favor and approval. All of her life she’d been the recipient of admiring looks, wide grins, broad winks and a great deal of fawning.
A lot more fawning than she actually cared for. But that was predominantly because she was her father’s daughter and the fawning person usually thought that he could flatter her into getting an audience with the famous Fortune.
As if, she thought with a toss of her head that managed to loosen her bound-up hair a little.
Wendy paused and sighed. That was the part she didn’t care for. She liked having her hair loose, flowing. But those were the rules. Customers, Marcos had told her when he’d handed her a barrette, didn’t like finding hair in their meals.
When she’d asked, “Even if it’s mine?” it had been meant as a joke, but Marcos had snapped no at her, and the look in his eyes told her that he thought she was genuinely a few cards short of an actual deck.
Obviously when God had given the man an extra dose of sexiness, He had subtracted any and all fragments of humor. From their interactions, she’d come away with the feeling that Marcos Mendoza was born without a funny bone.
Too bad, because, aside from that, the man was practically perfect in every way. But he fell short of the mark to ever have a serious chance at entering her daydreams.
A man without a sense of humor was like a day without sunshine. Not really too pleasant.
Reaching
