Read Online Fortune's Legacy by Maureen Child - Free Book Online Page A

Isa. And that was only because Isabella Sanchez refused to cut her loose. Thank heaven.
    Heading into the kitchen, Kyra opened the fridge, pulled out a jug of iced tea and poured herself a tall glass. Taking a sip, she looked around the room and realized that but for the calendar tacked to the refrigerator with silly flower-shaped magnets, the kitchen was devoid of the slightest personal stamp. It could have been an empty room in a model house.
    And that theme stretched through the rest of the condo, too. She’d had some ideas for decorating when she’d bought the place, but they’d gone by the wayside, buried under her determination to build a name for herself at Voltage.
    The walls were still beige, the carpet was still boring and the curtains were the same ones that had been hanging there when she’d bought the unit four years ago.
    â€œNot exactly a nester, are you, Kyra?” she murmured. Once upon a time, she recalled, leaning back against the tiled counter, she’d had other plans. Plans to buy an old house and restore it. Plans to paint each room in her house a different, vibrant color. To fill her world with all of the bright, silly “fripperies” that her father had never allowed in the home where she’d grown up.
    Her hand clenched tightly around the icy-cold glass as memories flooded her mind. As if it were yesterday, she could see the empty barrenness of her childhood home. She saw her mother slipping through the house like a ghost, afraid to be noticed, afraid to catch her husband’s attention.
    And she saw her older brother, Vincent, always tall and strong, standing between Kyra and the fury of her father’s embittered rage. Leonard Fortune had never been the man he’d always imagined himself to be, and that failure had colored everything in his life. He’d madehis wife miserable, his children terrified and himself unbearable.
    But all those years under Leonard Fortune’s thumb had forged steel in his children. God knew, he hadn’t meant to do them any favors. If anything, he’d done his best to break them all.
    Except for her.
    Guilt pinged around inside her like an old familiar ache. She’d never had to suffer the same kind of abuse her siblings had, because Vincent, her oldest brother, had protected her from it. He’d given up a lot to keep her safe. To keep her from buckling beneath their father’s self-hatred.
    She owed Vincent more than she could ever repay.
    So, if she had to live in an impersonal little condo, she would. If she had to work twenty hour days, she would.
    And if she had to travel to Colorado with the devil himself, she damn well would .
    Carrying her tea back to the bedroom, she set it down on the pine bedside table and turned back to her packing.
    When the phone rang a few minutes later, Kyra snatched it up, tucked it between her chin and shoulder and kept packing. “Hello?”
    â€œHi, Kyra, it’s me.”
    Smiling, she dropped her royal-blue sweater on top of the packed clothes in her suitcase, then turned and plopped down onto the side of her bed. “Hi, Susan,” she said, picturing her sister sitting at her cozy kitchen table with a cup of steaming herbal tea in front of her. “What’s up?”
    There was a long pause, and a flash of worry darted through Kyra. “What is it? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
    â€œI’m fine.”
    â€œEthan?” Kyra prodded, instinctively responding to the heaviness in her sister’s voice.
    â€œHe’s fine, too,” Susan assured her, and Kyra relaxed a little when she heard the smile in her sister’s voice. It happened every time the woman spoke about her new husband.
    Pulling her legs up, Kyra folded them beneath her, cross-legged and stared across the room at the open window and the trees beyond. As always, the sight of the wind sighing through the new green leaves calmed her.
    â€œTell me,” she said