A Baby Changes Everything by Marie Ferrarella

anything?”
    â€œNot hungry.” She glanced down at the cup of tea on the table in front of her. “What else are they saying?”
    â€œThat maybe the guy was going to expose Ryan if he didn’t come through with a sizable chunk of the Fortune empire as hush money.” Cruz couldn’t help wondering if it was true. If all those years of respectability had been an attempt to bury the man Ryan Fortune really was. It wouldn’t be the first time a wealthy man tried to bury his past with good deeds.
    Savannah frowned at the idea. “Expose Ryan? As what?”
    He knew Savannah liked the man. Hell, he liked the man. Ryan Fortune had always treated him decently. But that wouldn’t change the facts if they turned out to be true.
    â€œAs being something other than the upstanding pillar of the community we all think he is.”
    Savannah took offense for Ryan. Not against her husband, but against the faceless people of Red Rock and beyond, the ones who lived for gossip and dirt as a way to take away the dullness of their own small, boring lives.
    â€œRyan is the man we think he is. He’s kind, noble and charitable to a fault. I’ve never seen that man talk down to anyone. He was very kind to me when I had nowhere to turn.” She’d lost her teaching position at the school because of her pregnancy and no one would hire a pregnant woman. It was Ryan who took her on to help with the accounting when he clearly didn’t have to.
    Cruz felt she was forgetting one important thing. After all, Ryan Fortune wasn’t a saint. Nobody was. “That was because of Vanessa.”
    Savannah wondered if Cruz was deliberately taking the other side of the argument to start a fight so that he could call off the trip.
    Struggling not to make any accusations, she approached the situation logically.
    â€œIf it was in Ryan Fortune’s character to be a bastard, it would have come out way before now,” she pointed out. “He’s dealt with too many people to keep his true nature a secret—if that was his true nature. Which,” she concluded, “it isn’t.”
    Cruz couldn’t help grinning as he ate his breakfast. “Pretty loyal, aren’t you?”
    Savannah raised her chin proudly. “It’s one of my good points. I stick with things even when the road gets bumpy.”
    He heard the inflection in her voice, saw the look in her eyes as she gazed at him. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what she was talking about. “Meaning me?”
    â€œMeaning us,” she corrected. And while she was at it, she shot down any attempt he might make at wiggling outof his promise because there was no one to look after their son. “And if Vanessa couldn’t take Luke for some reason, there’s always your mom or one of your sisters.” She gave him a knowing look. “Can’t use that to fall back on, mister.”
    â€œI wasn’t using that to fall back on,” he informed her. And then he frowned. “But…”
    She braced herself, ready to shoot down anything else he came up with. They just had to get away. She had this feeling that if they didn’t, their marriage was doomed. “‘But?’”
    He’d had to pay cash for the four horses. Cash against the money he hoped to collect from the man who was going to pay him once the animals had been trained to be cutting horses.
    â€œWe really don’t have that much cash available.” He could sense that this was important to her, so he qualified it rather than try to postpone the trip the way he’d first thought to do. “Can’t be a very expensive place.”
    She did a little quick thinking. Compromise was the essence of survival. “It won’t be,” she told him brightly. “It’ll be free.”
    â€œFree? Why?” The next moment, he came up with his own answer to that. This had been Vanessa’s