Page 17 of Inheriting Miss Fortune

We moved down to the row of sky-blue packages. “What size?”

“She’s like… yea big.” He held out his hands several inches apart. “Like… her hips are this wide.”

A sudden bubble of laughter fought its way up my throat. “We’re going to get arrested,” I said in a low voice. “We cannot go up there and say we need diapers for someone with a butt about the width of a cantaloupe.”

Tully reached forward and picked a package off the shelf and rotated it until he found a size chart on the back. “Okay, says here she might be a… oh hell. This is by weight, not age. How the fuck are we supposed to know?”

We both turned to look at Lellie, who was glancing around with big eyes while still clutching the leather halter she’d wanted to hold when I’d introduced her to one of the horses earlier this morning.

Tully snorted. “When we get arrested, I’m telling them that’s your harness, not mine.”

I rubbed my face with both hands and tried to hide my smile. I was so fucking tired. “This is ridiculous.”

After reaching down to unbuckle her, I pulled her out of the stroller and hefted her up and down, trying to determine how much she weighed.

“She weighs a little less than a bag of fertilizer,” I said.

Tully blinked at me. “That’s… a strange comparison.”

“And those are twenty-five-pound bags.”

He closed his eyes and exhaled. “Fine. Then I’m getting the size three, and we’ll make it work. What else do we need?”

“I’m already worn-out,” I admitted, shifting Lellie and her leather harness to my hip.

“You good with the bed situation?”

I forced myself not to think about Tully Bowman andbedin the same sentence. It was too tempting, and I was tired enough for my defenses to be scattered all to hell.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

As we headed to the cashier to buy the supplies we’d grabbed, Lellie reached out and yanked a package of candy off a nearbydisplay, causing several other packages to scatter on the ground. Tully and I both jumped to grab it out of her hand and clean up the mess, knocking heads in the process.

When we finally got to the cashier stand, Connie eyed the three of us as if trying to do the same relationship calculus JoJo had done. Were we brothers? Friends? Coworkers? Babysitters? Actors in a poorly executed farce?

“You need anything else? Wipes?” she asked.

I glanced at Tully, who looked unsure. “Uh…” I swallowed. “Yes?”

She nodded and moved out from behind the counter to fetch the wipes from the area where we’d found the diapers.

“Can we go home after this?” I asked in a low voice. I wasn’t sure how many more townsfolk encounters I could handle.

“Not unless you have a safe place for her to run out her energy,” Tully responded in the same low voice. “I was thinking we should take her to a playground or something first so she’ll nap afterward.” He looked over and met my eyes before adding, “And we need to have a conversation about why I’m here.”

I gritted my teeth. The last thing I wanted to do was have a conversation in which I’d have to spend more than half a second confronting the loss of Katie and the new reality of being a parent to her…our… child. But he was right. I’d been avoiding the conversation since his arrival, and I could no longer put it off. The sooner he laid out all the facts, the sooner he could leave…

And let me focus on finding a good family to raise Lellie.

“Fine,” I said just as Connie came back with a thick pack of wipes and plonked them on the counter next to the other items.

“How old is your…?” Connie asked Tully as she scanned the barcodes.

“Fifteen months,” I blurted.

Connie looked confused at my participation in the conversation. “What’s her name?”

I opened my mouth to answer her when Tully jumped in. “Eleanor,” he said.

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