Fortuity (Fortuity Duet Book 1) Read online

  Fortuity

  Fortuity Duet #1

  Rochelle Paige

  Copyright © 2018 by Rochelle Paige

  Edited by Manda Lee

  Cover designed by LJ Anderson, Mayhem Cover Creations

  Photographer: Sara Eirew Photography

  Models: Daniel Rengering and Pamela Tremblay Mcallen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  A Note From The Author

  Fortuity

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Rochelle Paige

  About the Author

  A Note From The Author

  My decision to write romance novels was heavily influenced by my mom—the person who’s responsible for me falling in love with them. I was dealing with some radical life changes, as well as helping my mom with the eleven-month process it took to get her placed on the transplant list. Reading became my escape more than ever, and that's when I discovered indie authors.

  Writing had always been a dream of mine, so I started looking into what self-publishing was all about. When I mentioned it to my mom, she was excited about something for the first time in too long. With the fear that the call from the transplant team would never come hanging over our heads, we made a deal—I'd publish within a year and she would do her best to hold on to hope and stay as healthy as possible while we waited for the call. We were extremely lucky it came only a couple of months later.

  I wrote part of Sucked Into Love from her hospital room and kept my side of the deal when I published Push the Envelope about nine months later. Without the desperation I felt over my mom’s health and that random conversation about indie publishing which led to our deal, I don’t know that I ever would have found the courage to fulfill my dream.

  A few months later, the idea for Fortuity hit me. It’s a story close to my heart because the heroine is a transplant patient. Fortuity has been building in my head for four years, and I’m so excited to share it with everyone.

  Thank you for coming on this journey with me,

  Rochelle Paige

  The only kinds of luck I knew were bad and worse...until my life hung in the balance. I finally caught a break in the form of a second chance.

  I vowed not to let it go to waste.

  To make a difference.

  But I didn’t start really living until I met him.

  Dillon Montgomery.

  My complete opposite—except for our matching tortured souls.

  I couldn’t resist him for long.

  How could I when his smallest touch made my heart race?

  When it felt like we were destined to be together?

  But sometimes luck and sorrow are intertwined...

  Fortuity is the first part of Faith and Dillon’s story, which will be completed in Serenity.

  Prologue

  Faith

  To say I had a difficult childhood was a major understatement. Being raised by an eighteen-year-old mom who had no idea who my father was came with certain complications. The kind that meant she was always pissed at me because it cost so much money to raise a kid, and she blamed me for not being able to go out and have fun all the time like her friends were doing. Her frustration quickly turned into bitterness; which led her down the path of destruction. Hers—and mine if she had her way and was able to take me along for the ride.

  Once I was in Kindergarten, she was leaving me home alone for a couple of hours at a time when she wanted to go out with friends. When third grade rolled around, she had moved away from drinks with friends to meeting up with her drug dealer. One year later, it was overnight motel stays for “dates” she went on with “uncles” I knew I didn’t have. As her need for drugs grew, she stopped checking in to a motel and started bringing them home instead.

  By home, I meant the one-bedroom apartment she rented for us. Whenever she had a visitor, I needed to make myself scarce and there weren’t many places to go. When I was in the fifth grade, I started using the laundry room in the basement as my safe haven. I’d drag my homework down there, along with a blanket and a pillow in a laundry bin. If I fell asleep in the corner where the sink was, I could squeeze part-way under it so nobody would see me unless they were specifically looking for me. I’d seen enough in my young life to be scared something bad could happen to me in the middle of the night, but I never considered the danger my mom was in. Not until when I was twelve and returned to our apartment one night only to find her naked body sprawled on the floor with vomit surrounding it.

  “Mom!” I screamed as I shook her still form and tried to wake her up. When the chilliness of her skin registered in my brain, I realized she wasn’t just passed out and something was seriously wrong. I ran to my room and grabbed blankets to toss over her body to try and warm her up. Then I dug through her purse for her cell phone and called 9-1-1. I was frantic as I explained what was happening, and the operator stayed on the line until an ambulance and the police arrived.

  The paramedics didn’t spend a lot of time working over my mom’s body before they loaded her onto a stretcher and carried her down to the waiting ambulance. By this time, I was sobbing uncontrollably and the policeman was trying to calm me down and ask some questions. Fear of the unknown kept me silent because as horrible as my mom was, at least I knew what to expect with her. I didn’t know who my father was and there wasn’t anyone else I could call to take me in if she was going to be in the hospital for long. I didn’t know what the police would do when they found out I was on my own, and it terrified me.

  “She’s in no condition to answer now,” his female partner said. “We better call CPS and have someone meet us at the hospital.”

  He glanced at me before nodding. “Go ahead and get changed, sweetie. We’ll make sure we take you to your mom.”

  I walked into the bedroom I shared with her and started to shut the door for some privacy, but then their conversation drifted towards me. With the door open a crack, I leaned as close to it as I could get without making any noise so I could listen to what they were saying.

  “When we call CPS we better tell them to send someone to meet us at the hospital,” the policeman said.

  “I know,” his partner agreed.

  “Did you see that shit?” he hissed.

  “Yeah. Hopefully it’s not too late for CPS to get her some help before she winds up just like her mom.”

  I wanted to run back into the living room and yell at him for daring to suggest that I would turn out anything like the woman who had given birth to me. My life might be crap, but that didn’t mean I planned to eat shit for the rest of my life. But I resisted the temptation because I knew it wouldn’t do any good. There wasn’t anything I could say or do to change their minds.

  I wasn’t in control of much in my life, but I’d learned to focus on the few things I was because it made me feel like I was organizing the chaos a little bit. For the moment, all I could do was throw some stuff into my backpack so I had t
hings to do while I was at the hospital with my mom. After checking to make sure I had everything I needed to do my homework, I grabbed a couple of books that I had borrowed from the school library and a change of clothes.

  “I’m ready,” I said as I walked down the hall, making sure they stopped talking about me and my sucky life before I made it into the room.

  Being hustled into the back seat of the squad car parked at the curb in front of my building wasn’t one of the best moments of my life. I felt like everyone was staring at me and thought I’d done something illegal. There was an awkward silence as we drove to the hospital. The guy cop was driving, and his gaze kept drifting back to where I sat brooding with my arms crossed protectively around my body. I was still pissed about what I’d heard him say and figured my hostility must have been shining through.

  When we got to the hospital, the cops handed me off to a caseworker from Children’s Protective Services. She asked me a ton of questions before she sat me down in the waiting room to go in search of someone who could let us know what was going on with my mom. She wasn’t alone when she returned. There was a doctor with her, and both of them had serious expressions on their faces as they walked over to where I was sitting. After the caseworker sat down next to me, she took my hand in hers and squeezed. I knew the news wasn’t going to be good before the doctor said a word.

  “You’re Faith?” he asked. I nodded in response, fear making my throat swell up so I couldn’t speak. “I’m sorry to tell you that your mom didn’t make it.”

  He said more after that, but I couldn’t hear him over the buzzing sound in my ears. When I noticed his lips had stopped moving, I cleared my throat. “She’s dead?” I asked disbelievingly.

  “Yes, she was already gone when the paramedics arrived,” he confirmed before looking at the caseworker. She nodded her head, and it must have been a signal to let him know it was okay for him to leave because he got up and walked away.

  Once we were alone, the caseworker turned in her seat to stare into my eyes. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she began. “I bet you’re probably scared right now, but I’m here to help. You’re not alone. I’ll make sure you have somewhere safe to go where you’ll be taken care of while I work with the police to find family who can take you in.”

  I nodded to let her know I understood what she was saying, but I was too stunned to think about how to react right now. After she was done talking with some of the hospital staff, it was time to go. Getting into the car with her, I felt like my life had hit rock bottom. I was only twelve and hadn’t even hit puberty yet, but I’d already learned the world could be a cruel place when there wasn’t anyone in it who cared if you lived or died.

  Chapter One

  Faith

  Five Years Later

  Miss Stevens, the caseworker I met the day my mom died, tried her best to find family members who were willing to take me in, but there just wasn’t much information for her to work with. My mom hadn’t listed anyone as my father on my birth certificate, confirming what she’d told me growing up; she just didn’t know for sure. That left me with only one option...the grandparents I had never met because they kicked my mom out of their house when they found out she was pregnant with me. It wasn’t a surprise when they refused to take me into their home even though I had nowhere else to go. They’d washed their hands of me before I was born and had no desire to change their minds twelve years later.

  I didn’t have high expectations of other people, and my outlook served me well in the foster system. The kids who were soft had it the hardest because the transition was rougher for them. The absolute worst were the ones whose entire world had changed in the blink of an eye. The parents who had loved them were gone, and nobody was left to take them in, so they were tossed into the system with us throw-away kids. They weren’t just soft, they were sad. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone around to give a damn or help them adjust to life without their family so they had to figure it out for themselves.

  The only constant in my life was Miss Stevens. Even when they tried to transfer me over to someone else, she insisted on keeping me as one of her “kids” as she liked to call us. She was always on my case about giving my foster parents a chance. “They’re good people who just want to help you,” she would say any time I got kicked out of one and sent to another, usually because I kept to myself so much it made people wonder if I had a personality disorder or something.

  Maybe there really were good foster parents out there who did it for the love of kids, but I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet any of them yet. And honestly, as nice as she was, what did she know about it anyway? In my experience, foster parents put on a good show when one of our caseworkers did a visit, but it was just temporary. Once it was over, we were back to our regular programming of disinterest and sometimes flat-out neglect.

  It was the latter of the two which landed me in the hospital. When I first got sick, I thought it was just a sore throat and didn’t worry much about it. By the time I could barely swallow and complained to my foster mother about it, her real child was sick too. Of course, she took him to the doctor right away and didn’t even think that maybe I should go along since I’d been the first to catch whatever was starting to spread through the house. The doctor diagnosed him with strep throat; a highly contagious disease that any reasonable person would guess to also be the cause of my illness since our symptoms were identical. But since I was the brat who had infected her precious boy, my foster mother wasn’t in a hurry to seek medical help for me. Almost a week later, when two of the other foster children got sick, she finally bothered to take me to an urgent care clinic. But the damage had already been done.

  About a week later, I started having weird symptoms. It began with some swelling in my feet and I figured it was just from the insanely hot weather we were having. Then it moved to my belly, which could easily be blamed on my period since it was supposed to start soon. When my face started looking puffy, I finally wondered what might be wrong with me. An online search at the school library gave me a huge list of things that could be the cause of the swelling. Anything from my period to all the salty food my foster mother fed us. Deciding either of those were the most likely culprit, I told myself not to worry too much about it.

  When my fingers, wrists, and elbows started to ache, I figured it was from the swelling. Then my pee turned an odd color, but I thought it was probably from some of the candy I had eaten at lunch when a classmate shared it with me. But the next morning, when I found blood on the toilet paper after I went to the bathroom, I couldn’t explain it away. My period hadn’t started yet so it was enough to freak me the hell out. I didn’t trust my foster mother enough to take me to see a good doctor, and I was scared that maybe I was dying or something. So I called Miss Stevens to ask for her help. It was the first time I’d ever reached out to her, and I think she was too stunned to do anything but agree to take me.

  I met her at the curb when she came to pick me up because I didn’t want anyone to ask questions about what was going on. Offering her a weak smile, I climbed into the car and quickly buckled up so we could get out of there before one of the other kids saw me. “Thanks,” I whispered.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied before an awkward silence filled the vehicle. She tried to strike up a conversation a few minutes later, but I was even more uncommunicative than usual. I was less than a year away from aging out of the system and didn’t know what would happen to me if I was really sick.

  Although it was only half an hour later, I felt like I’d waited hours before I was sitting across from the doctor and he was doing the physical examination. “I’ll need to run some tests to make sure, but I think it’s post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis,” he said when he was finished. “It’s a kidney disorder that sometimes occurs after infection with certain strains of Streptococcus bacteria.”

  “Like the strep throat I had a couple of weeks ago?” I asked.

  Instead of answering right away, he click
ed the mouse on his laptop a couple times and peered at the monitor. “I don’t see anything in your chart about strep. Were you treated for it here?”

  Sneaking a glance at Miss Stevens, I knew she was going to be angry I hadn’t talked to her about this sooner. “No, my foster mom took me to the urgent care clinic, along with a couple of the other kids who had it too.”

  “I’ll give them a call to get your records transferred over here. It’s pretty rare for a case of strep that’s been treated in someone your age to cause post-strep GM.”

  “Maybe we should have the other kids brought in to be checked over too,” Miss Stevens suggested. “Since all of you caught it at the same time, they might be at risk too.”

  “I had it longer than everyone else,” I whispered.

  “How much longer?” the doctor asked.

  Miss Stevens leaned over and took my hand in hers when I hesitated. “Faith, when did you get sick?”

  “Maybe a week and a half before we went to the clinic,” I answered softly.

  She gasped at my response and turned to the doctor. “Could the delay in her care be responsible for her being ill now?”

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “Letting strep go untreated can lead to further complications.”

  “Oh, Faith,” she sighed. “I’m so sorry.”