LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      Liam Jones leaned back in his chair, nursing his beer and listening to two of his younger brothers, Jude and Toby, talking about a third younger brother, Christopher, who had recently picked up and moved to the nearby town of Red Rock.

      As he listened, Liam’s frown, already a fixture on his face from the beginning of this conversation, deepened, highlighting his increasing disapproval.

      Christopher, apparently, at least in his eyes, had gone and sold his soul to the devil.

      Liam’s initial intent in coming to the bar at the Horseback Hollow Grill with two of his brothers was to unwind a little. Instead as he listened to Toby and Jude, he found himself getting progressively more and more annoyed. The current discussion was merely a theme and variation of the same old thing; a topic that had taken center stage in his family for months now: his mother’s rediscovered wealthy siblings.

      Liam had always known his mother, Jeanne Marie, had been adopted and, like her, he’d thought nothing of it. Countless people were adopted; it was no big thing. Just this past year his own brother Toby had taken in three foster children.

      What made it such a big thing, not just in his eyes but in everyone else’s, was that it turned out his mother had been given up for adoption, along with a sister she hadn’t even known about until just recently, by none other than a member of the highly revered Fortune family.

      And that little bit of news had turned all of their worlds upside down.

      The ironic thing was that his mother might have very well gone to her grave not knowing a thing about her roots if her brother, James Marshall Fortune, hadn’t come poking around, telling her that she was not only his sister but that she, he and the sister she had previously known nothing about—a British woman named Josephine May—were actually triplets.

      The whole thing sounded like something out of a movie and if it had been a movie, he would have walked out on it right in the middle. Specifically around the part where this “long-lost brother” of hers gave her a whole wad of money. That had been James Marshall’s way of “making it up to her” for having lived a life that hadn’t been embedded in the lap of luxury.

      As if money could fix everything and anything.

      Liam found the whole money thing offensive and degrading. He resented the offering of a “consolation prize” to make up for the fact that his mother had lived a life that James Fortune obviously felt was beneath her.

      When his mother gave Fortune back his money, Liam had never been prouder of her. But then she’d gone and spoiled it all by turning around and asking him and his siblings to not just recognize these interlopers as their blood relatives but to actually take on their surname.

      Oh, they’d still be the Jones family, but now they’d all be known as the Fortune Joneses.

      The hell they would, Liam thought angrily as he took another swig of his beer, which by now was decidedly no longer cold. But he hardly noticed.

      In all honesty, he had expected his six siblings to feel exactly the way he did and was utterly stunned to discover that the whole thing didn’t even begin to bother them as much as it did him.

      In fact, it felt as if his brothers and sisters were dropping like flies around him, taking on the Fortune name and forgetting just who the hell they were to begin with: Deke Jones’s offspring.

      Granted, their father wasn’t an emotional, verbally effusive man. But at the same time, he was a decent, hardworking man who had always made sure they had food in their bellies, a roof over their heads and more opportunity to make something of themselves than he had. Some men showed they cared by talking, others by doing. Deke Jones fell into the latter category.

      Liam sensed that this rush to embrace the Fortune name was a slap in the face for his father,

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