Wild West Fortune
Allison Leigh
A COWBOY NAMED FORTUNEIn a small Western town with more horses than people, feisty city reporter Ariana Lamonte may have uncovered the scoop of a lifetime: not one, not two, but three secret Fortunes, hiding in plain sight. Exposing these heretofore unknown Fortune heirs could make her career. But it could also break her heart.Falling in love with cowboy/military man Jayden Fortune was never part of the plan. When Jayden offered Ariana shelter from a storm, he didn't know who she was—and she didn't know what she was in for. Trapped in a dark, damp cellar with the sexy-as-sin rancher, Ariana unlassoed her inner cowgirl, and now she's got a problem: her "secret Fortune" has become way more than just a story…
A Cowboy Named Fortune
In a small Western town with more horses than people, feisty city reporter Ariana Lamonte may have uncovered the scoop of a lifetime: not one, not two, but three secret Fortunes, hiding in plain sight. Exposing these heretofore unknown Fortune heirs could make her career. But it could also break her heart.
Falling in love with cowboy/military man Jayden Fortune was never part of the plan. When Jayden offered Ariana shelter from a storm, he didn’t know who she was—and she didn’t know what she was in for. Trapped in a dark, damp cellar with the sexy-as-sin rancher, Ariana unlassoed her inner cowgirl, and now she’s got a problem: her “secret Fortune” has become way more than just a story...
MEET THE FORTUNES
Fortune of the Month: Jayden Fortune
Age: 36
Vital Statistics: Tall, sexy cowboy. Former military with a penchant for adventure and pretty girls.
Claim to Fame: He is one of three equally gorgeous triplets. Oh, and he may be the son of a billionaire.
Romantic Prospects: Jayden has never had a problem attracting the female of the species. If anything, he’s had trouble fighting them off.
“I traveled all over the world with the army, and I used to think I’d never come back to quiet old Paseo. But I’m older now—hopefully a little wiser, too—and there’s something to be said for ‘home, sweet home.’
Not a lot happens in Paseo, usually. Who’d believe that a stunning city girl would get stuck here on the road to nowhere—and that we’d wind up trapped in a storm cellar together with no lights, no phone service and plenty of sparks? Ariana got under my skin right from the start. We’re different, all right, but I feel like she’s perfect for me. Or maybe a little too perfect? Just what is it that Ariana is hiding?”
The Fortunes of Texas: The Secret Fortunes— A new generation of heroes and heartbreakers!
Wild West Fortune
Allison Leigh
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Though she’s a frequent name on bestseller lists, ALLISON LEIGH’S high point as a writer is hearing from readers that they laughed, cried or lost sleep while reading her books. She credits her family with great patience for the time she’s parked at her computer, and for blessing her with the kind of love she wants her readers to share with the characters living in the pages of her books. Contact her at www.allisonleigh.com (http://www.allisonleigh.com).
For Susan and Marcia.
Nobody keeps our Fortune world together better than the two of you!
Contents
Cover (#u507e853d-efc6-59d0-bdde-0eede5396ac5)
Back Cover Text (#u8bb471b1-fff5-545d-8297-4d73d8d28679)
Introduction (#udd6e7d2e-46f0-5b4e-96ca-f8c279e60ae9)
Title Page (#u2c954ee6-1907-5edd-a464-c9707c546878)
About the Author (#u7589a93e-2aa9-59df-af10-44e972006c25)
Dedication (#u6729477b-804e-5b25-8762-9b773e0b89fb)
Chapter One (#u3701d991-4b25-533b-afbe-6c6cf95bfa95)
Chapter Two (#u2750aa94-844e-58f9-9cfb-cfe69d2002a1)
Chapter Three (#u37b4c5c7-4e91-5b1d-97e4-bda3ac2f6684)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ud381d953-c219-5992-844a-964f3192456a)
“Girl, this is not good.”
Ariana Lamonte made a face as she looked out the windows of her car. She hadn’t seen another vehicle for more than an hour. Grassland whipped in the wind all the way to the horizon in every direction. The same wind rocked her little car where she was parked on the dirt shoulder, and sent the thick clouds overhead racing across the sky. “Not good at all,” she repeated to herself.
She fished her cell phone up from the passenger side floor by the charging cord tethering it to her dashboard. Using the GPS on the phone always drained the battery quickly, so she’d at least been prepared on that score when she’d set out from Austin that morning. But she sure wished she’d been better prepared with the address she was seeking. There was a dot blinking on her phone screen, right atop a barely discernible line that indicated the laughable excuse for a road on which she sat.
But that was it. No town. No other roads.
Nothing. Nada.
For the third time, she checked her notes and verified the address she’d put into her GPS app. Everything matched.
Which meant she ought to be sitting in the middle of a place called Paseo, Texas.
Instead, she was sitting in the middle of...
“Grass,” she muttered, looking out the windows again. “Nothing but grass and more grass.” And she’d wasted nearly an entire day getting there.
The wind howled and her car rocked again. She studied her phone for a moment. The GPS dot blinked back at her, but there wasn’t a strong enough cell signal to even make a phone call or send a text message. Not that she particularly wanted to advertise to anyone that she wasn’t really home in her apartment where she was supposed to be working on an assignment for the magazine.
Instead, she’d set out on yet another wild goose chasing down facts for the real life story behind Robinson Tech’s founder, Gerald Robinson. The real life story that would prove once and for all that Ariana Lamonte wasn’t just an internet blogger who’d more or less stumbled into print journalism. That she deserved her own spot on the map.
Preferably a better map than the one her GPS was currently providing.
She dropped the useless phone on the passenger seat and opened the thick pink notebook on the console, clicking her pen a few times before sighing and drawing a line through the address as she thought about Gerald Robinson.
For one thing, he was a tech industry giant. A household name well beyond the city limits of Austin, Texas, where Robinson Tech was based and where Austinites tended to follow his family like the Brits followed the Royals.
On the surface, the billionaire had everything. Money. Power. Success. He was the father of eight children thanks to his long-standing marriage to a woman who didn’t seem outraged at all over the fairly recent revelation that he’d also fathered more than a few illegitimate children during that marriage.
But what made the situation particularly interesting to Ariana was that Charlotte Prendergast Robinson had also been resolutely closemouthed since the truth came out a year ago that the very identity of the man she’d married was a fiction. Gerald Robinson was a creation of Jerome Fortune. A black-sheep relative of an immensely wealthy, immensely powerful family who’d all believed Jerome to be dead.
Half the world had collectively gasped when that came out.
But not Charlotte. It was as if there was nothing on earth capable of shocking or surprising Gerald’s wife.
Though that wasn’t exactly accurate, either. If it weren’t for Charlotte, Ariana wouldn’t be trying to find Paseo.
She flipped a page in her notes, chewing the inside of her cheek as she studied Charlotte’s photograph. Presumably, she enjoyed the perks of her position so much that she’d rather stand by her husband’s side than publicly express even the slightest hint of outrage and possibly hinder those perks.
But would they really be hindered?
Charlotte was clearly the injured party in the Robinson marriage. Ariana had found no record of the couple ever having a prenuptial agreement. Their marriage predated Robinson Tech’s astronomical success. Success that hadn’t been hurt in the least by Gerald’s scandals. If anything, the company was stronger than ever. If Charlotte chose to walk away from a philandering husband, she’d be walking away with at least half of their fortune. The luxurious lifestyle to which she was accustomed wouldn’t be changed in the least.
And it wasn’t as if the children she and Gerald had together would necessarily be affected. They were all accomplished adults in their own rights. Ariana had profiled many of them, as well as some of Gerald’s illegitimate offspring, in her series, “Becoming a Fortune,” for Weird Life Magazine.
As she’d gotten to know them, she’d formed the opinion that Charlotte was hardly the most loving mother in the world. The woman seemed more involved with her charity work than she was in their lives—even when they had been much younger. Admittedly, none of them had derogatory things to say about their mother. They were too classy for that. But Ariana still sensed there was some curiosity regarding their mother’s steadfast loyalty to their father.
And Ariana was pretty curious, too. Particularly after she’d managed to get a moment alone with the excessively private woman at one of Charlotte’s recent fund-raisers. All Ariana had asked her for was a little clarification about a newspaper article she’d found at the Austin History Center. Not once had Ariana seen the woman look even remotely rattled until she’d grabbed Ariana’s arm, escorting her personally from the function with the warning that she was not going to treat kindly anyone digging up useless old dirt about Paseo.
So far, Charlotte had said, she’d tolerated Ariana’s vacuous magazine series, but it would be an easy matter for her to have a “little talk” with the local magazine about the harassment her family was receiving at the hands of Ariana. After all, she and the publisher sat on a few boards together.
Ariana could have argued the harassment point, but she’d chosen to leave instead. The tacit threat about her job would have been more worrisome if not for the fact that she had bigger fish to fry than the magazine where she worked. Now she had a book deal. The kind of deal where Ariana could really make her mark as a biographer.
But she hadn’t left empty-handed. Because not once had Ariana ever mentioned Paseo in any of her pieces. She hadn’t even heard of the name before. It hadn’t been in the article Ariana had uncovered. That had simply been a decades-old society feature about Charlotte and Gerald’s wedding.
And Ariana wasn’t even certain now that Mrs. Robinson had meant the town of Paseo. It could just as easily be a person’s name. Maybe the name of a company...
Ariana looked out the window again. Not that the town seemed to exist outside of a map.
Which meant she’d have to go back to the drawing board where Gerald’s life was concerned. She wanted to tell the story that no one else had already told.
Yes, Gerald had been born as Jerome Fortune. Yes, he’d cut his ties with his real family so decisively that he’d even faked his own death. Then he’d effectively disappeared from all existence until one day springing forth as Gerald Robinson. And soon after, he’d made Charlotte Prendergast his bride.
It ought to have been a grand love story. Gerald and Charlotte went on to have eight children together, for heaven’s sake. There’d been countless articles and news stories about them. Yet now it came out that Gerald had consistently strayed. Even during the earliest years of their marriage, he’d been off Johnny-Appleseeding with other women.
Was it simply a character flaw? He wasn’t the first brilliant, powerful man to have a weakness for women. Or was there something deeper? Another secret that motived him?
What had really happened between Jerome’s “demise” and Gerald’s explosive success in the tech field?
That was a big black hole into which her book would shine a good, long light.
And that was why she was sitting on the side of the road in the middle of Grassland, USA.
She rubbed her face and wished she hadn’t finished her Starbucks coffee two hours earlier. It would take her hours to get back to Austin. She’d do better to just keep plowing onward. She knew she had to be close to the state line by now, which would put Oklahoma City much closer.
A decent hotel bed. A lot of fresh coffee. Then she could hop on the interstate and drive back to Austin in the morning. It would still take five or six hours, but at least she’d be driving faster than the snail’s pace she’d had to use during today’s wasted trek. She’d be home in plenty of time to finish up her article about the grand opening of Austin Commons, Austin’s newest multiuse complex scheduled for the end of the month. She wouldn’t even have been assigned the story if the project’s architect hadn’t been Keaton Whitfield. He’d been one of her first “Becoming a Fortune” subjects.
She sighed and tossed aside her notes, peering through the windshield again. The clouds were angrily black, and lightning flashed in the distance.
A sharp crack on the side window made her jump so hard she banged her elbow on the steering wheel.
The sight of a man standing on the road right next to her car, though, made her nearly scream.
She reared away from the window, slamming her foot on the brake and jabbing the push-button start.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the man yelled through the window. From the corner of her eye she saw him tip back his black cowboy hat. “Don’t run me over, honey! Just checking that you’re all right.”
Hesitating was stupid. Every single thing she’d ever read or written about a woman’s personal safety told her that. Her heart was lodged somewhere up in her ears, pounding so loudly she felt nauseated.
The wind ripped, yanking the hat off the man’s head, and she heard him curse before he jogged after it.
She could have driven off right then, but the sight of him chasing after his hat, reaching down more than once trying to scoop it up as it rolled and bounced along the road, kept her in place.
That, and the sight in her rearview mirror of a shaggy brown-and-black dog hanging its head out the window of the dusty pickup truck parked behind her.
Did ax murderers tie bandanna kerchiefs around their dogs’ necks?
“Get a grip, girl.” She put the car in gear but kept her foot on the brake. The guy finally caught his cowboy hat and jammed it back on his head as he strode back toward her car.
This time, when he leaned down to look in her window, he kept his hand clamped on top of his hat, holding it in place. “Got a bad storm coming, ma’am. I can give you directions if you’re lost.”
“I’m not lost.”
He squinted his clear brown eyes at her, clearly skeptical.
Her heart was back in her chest again, pounding harder than usual, but at least in the right sector of her body. She need only hit the gas to drive off.
And she’d already wasted a whole day...
She surreptitiously double-checked that her doors were locked and squinted back at him. If he was an ax murderer, he was a fine-looking one. And what his rear end did for his plain old blue jeans was a work of art. He wouldn’t have any difficulty getting a woman to follow him most anywhere.
Not her, of course. She was too smart to get bowled over by a stranger just because he happened to be—as her mama would have said—a handsome cuss. If he was an ax murderer, he was going to have to work a little harder than that.
She reined in her stampeding imagination and wondered if she should give writing fiction a try, since she was so far doing such a bang-up job on the biography.
Despite common sense and caution, she rolled down her window. Her hair immediately blew around her face. She grabbed her phone and held it out for the stranger to see the map displayed on the screen. “I’m looking for a town called Paseo. Paseo, Texas,” she elaborated just in case she had crossed into Oklahoma without knowing it.
He ducked his head when another dirty gust blew across them. “What kinda business you got there?”
She squinted at him. “Well, that’s my business, isn’t it?”
He yanked off his hat, evidently tired of trying to keep it in place. The wind chopped through his brown hair and pulled at the collar of his gray-and-white plaid shirt, revealing more of his suntanned throat. “Gonna be my business if I have to haul your toy car here out of a ditch when this storm gets worse.” He thumped the top of her car with his hand. “You want Paseo, you almost found it. Up the road a ways, you gotta cross a small bridge and then you’ll see the sign. But you’d better get your pretty self going before those clouds open up. This isn’t a road you want to be on in a storm.”
“So you live around here?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He stuck out his hand toward her. “Jayden Fortune.”
The phone slipped out of her fingers.
He caught it. “Whoa, there. Looks too expensive to be tossing around on the highway.” He held it toward her.
“Not much of a highway,” she managed as her mind spun with excitement. Could it be so easy? Fortune? “There are more dirt ruts than pavement.”
The corner of his mouth curled upward. “Well, we’re not exactly looking for strangers around here. Which—” he ducked his head against a gust of wind accompanied by a crash of thunder “—pleasant as this may be, is what you are.”
She was blinking hard from the dust blowing into her eyes. “My name is Ariana Lamonte. From Austin. I’m working on a magazine article.” It was true. Just not the whole truth.
“A magazine article about Paseo?” He snorted, looking genuinely amused. “Don’t want to disappoint you, ma’am, but there isn’t a damn thing interesting enough around these parts to merit something like that.”
“I don’t know about that. Considering a Fortune lives here.” She yanked her hair out of her eyes, holding it behind her head so she could see him better. If this man was one of Gerald’s illegitimate offspring, then he’d be the first one she’d encountered who already knew he was a Fortune. Or maybe he wasn’t even illegitimate. She’d already entertained the idea that Gerald could have had a family before his Robinson one. There were certainly enough missing years in his life to allow for one. And it would definitely account for Charlotte’s antagonism toward Ariana bringing up the past.
Could there have been another wife? Maybe one whom Gerald had never even bothered to divorce before he’d married Charlotte Prendergast?
The wheels in her head spun fresh again as she gave Jayden a closer look.
“The name Fortune doesn’t mean I possess one,” he was saying. His smile was very white, very even, except for one slightly crooked cuspid that saved him from looking a little too perfect. Maybe there was a resemblance to Gerald Robinson. Or maybe that was just hopeful thinking on her part.
He rested his arm on top of her car and angled his head, his gaze roving over her and the interior of her car. He glanced over the empty coffee cups and discarded fast-food wrappers lying untidily on the floor as well as the thick notebook laden with news clippings and photographs spread open on her passenger seat.
“Only thing I’m rich in is land, and land round here isn’t all that valuable, either. So what’s interesting enough about Paseo to bring a reporter like you all the way from the big city?”
Her car rocked again and several fat raindrops splattered on her windshield. “I’m not a reporter for the local news or anything. I’m a journalist.”
“There’s a difference?”
“If I was a news reporter, I’d probably have a better salary,” she admitted ruefully. She casually closed the notebook as she reached behind her seat and grabbed the latest edition of Weird Life Magazine and passed it through the window. A photograph of Ben Fortune Robinson—Gerald’s eldest son, who was the Chief Operating Officer of Robinson Tech—was on the cover. “I’m not just writing an article. I’m working on an entire series about the members of the Fortune family, actually, for Weird Life Magazine. You have heard of Gerald Robinson, right? Robinson Tech? His real name used to be Jerome Fortune.” She watched Jayden’s face. But the only expression her admission earned was more humor.
“Then you’re really gonna be disappointed,” he drawled, barely giving the magazine a glance before giving it back to her. “I’m not related. My last name might be Fortune, but only because my mom made it up.”
The sky suddenly opened up in earnest and he shoved his hat back on his head. “Storms around here’re pretty unpredictable, ma’am. Last year we had hail that damaged the town hall so badly it looked like a bomb had hit it. Might be best if you come with me.”
She rolled up the window, stopping shy a few inches, but rain still blew in. Just because he had the last name Fortune—which she wasn’t ready to attribute to coincidence no matter what he said—didn’t mean she planned to get into his truck. The weather hadn’t worried her before, but the rain was coming down so hard now, she could barely see out the windshield. “I’ll follow you.”
He was already drenched, rain sheeting off the brim of his hat. He looked like he was going to argue, but then just tilted his head. “Suit yourself.”
She closed the window the rest of the way and switched on her windshield wipers, watching through her rearview mirror as he yanked open his truck door. Even the bandanna-wearing dog had ducked back inside the cab of the truck.
The car rocked again, whether from the vibration of another violent thunderclap or the wind, she couldn’t tell. “Not good, Ariana,” she muttered. “Not good at all.”
The truck passed her, and even through the curtain of rain between them, she could see Jayden Fortune looking at her.
A shiver danced down her spine.
Okay. So not all not good.
She gave him a thumbs-up sign and steered back onto the road to follow him.
Less than a mile had passed before she was starting to wish she’d taken his offer and left her car on the side of the road. It might have washed off in the deluge but at least she wouldn’t have been in it. As it was, she’d nearly driven off the side of the road twice, her wheels slipping and spinning in the slick mud.
Her knuckles white, her windshield wipers going full blast, she followed as closely as she dared. She didn’t want to lose sight of his taillights, but she was also afraid of running right into the back of his truck.
“Times like this make you want to be a waitress again,” she muttered, then screeched a little when she felt her tires sliding sideways again. Her heart in her throat and her father’s lectures spinning inside her head, she finally regained traction only to see Jayden’s truck had turned off the highway and those red taillights were getting fainter by the second.
She couldn’t tell where the road was that he’d turned onto, but she followed him anyway, her chest knocking the steering wheel and her head hitting the headrest as she bounced down a small hill.
“Next time just get in the dang truck,” she said loudly when water splashed up over the hood of her car, dousing her windshield with mud.
The only saving grace was the force of the rain that washed away the mud and allowed her a moment to see the road—yes, it was a road—in front of her and Jayden’s taillights still ahead.
She exhaled loudly, focusing on them like a lifeline as they drove onward. It felt like they’d been driving for miles when the rain suddenly eased up, and she spotted buildings nearby that soon became distinct enough to identify as a two-story house and an enormous barn.
“Thank you, God,” she breathed, unclenching her fingers as she pulled up next to where Jayden had parked. She jabbed the ignition button and her car went still.
She hadn’t even had time to unbuckle her seat belt when she saw him streak from his truck to the side of her car again, yanking open the door.
“What—”
“Hurry up.”
Ariana automatically reached over for her phone that had once again fallen onto the passenger side floor.
“Leave it.” His voice was sharp and her hackles started to rise.
She deliberately closed her hand around the phone before straightening in her seat once more. Annoyed or not with his tone, she still needed to explore this whole Fortune thing. And a girl usually got further with honey than she did with vinegar. “I appreciate your—”
“Sweetheart, in gear. Now.” He grabbed her arm, practically hauling her out of the car.
Horror mingled with annoyance as she struggled against his iron grip, nearly tripping before she found steady footing. If it weren’t for her high-heeled boots, he would have towered over her. As it was, her forehead had a close encounter with the faint cleft in his sharp chin. “I don’t know who you think you are, but—”
“I’m the guy who’s trying to get us to cover.”
She dragged her blowing hair out of her eyes again. “Are you going to melt in the rain? Seems to me you’re already soaked through.”
“No, but I don’t want a house coming down on those ruby slippers of yours.” He gestured and her mouth went dry all over again at the sight of the funnel cloud snaking downward from the clouds.
“Oh, my God!” She grabbed his wet shirtfront. “That’s a tornado? Is it coming this way?”
“Let’s not wait around to see, okay?” His hand was like iron as he pulled her along with him—not toward the nearby stone-sided house surrounded by a wraparound porch, but well off to the side of it in the direction of the barn. He stopped halfway there, though, letting go of her long enough to lean down and pull open a storm-cellar door angled into the earth. “Get in.”
She looked nervously from the house to the barn, then stared into the black abyss below the cellar door. Ax murderer? Tornado? It was no time to weigh odds, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Sweetheart, I’ll carry you down those steps myself if you don’t get your butt moving.” He whistled sharply, making her jump. But the bandanna-clad dog simply trotted past her, brushing against Ariana’s leg before sniffing the ground in front of the cellar entrance. “Steps, Sugar,” Jayden said and the dog hesitantly took a gingerly step down into the darkness. “She’s mostly blind. Don’t trip over her on your way down. There’s a handrail. Use it.”
A blind dog.
She couldn’t have made up such a detail if she’d tried.
She held her arm around her head, trying to keep her hair from blowing in his face as well as hers as she took the first step beyond the wooden door. “Is that, uh, that door going to keep out a tornado?” The wood was faded nearly gray and looked to be a hundred years old. It was a fitting complement to the steep stairs, which seemed to be carved from stone.
“Guess we’ll see, won’t we.” He was right on her heels, pulling the door closed as he followed her.
“I’ve never been in a tornado.” Or gone down into a dark storm cellar with a blind dog and her handsome cuss of an owner.
“I have. There’s usually a flashlight right here by the door, but I’ll find one soon as I can. The walls are stone, but the floor’s dirt. You’ll feel the difference when you get to the bottom.”
She did, but was glad for the warning. She felt as blind as Sugar and leaned over to pet the dog, who seemed to plant herself immediately in front of Ariana’s shins. Then she felt Jayden brush against the back side of her as he, too, reached the base of the steps.
She straightened like a shot.
“Sorry,” he murmured. His hand cupped her shoulder as he sidled around her. “No electricity down here.”
She wasn’t so sure about that. Both her butt and her shoulder were tingling from his brush against her, even after his touch left her and she heard him moving around.
A deafening clap of thunder made her jump. Sugar whined and she knelt down to rub her hand over the shaggy dog, all the while looking up at the wooden cellar door. She had some serious doubts about that door. “Was that tornado a few years back in Paseo? Are we even still near Paseo?”
“My address says so.” She heard a few clanks, and then a narrow but reassuring flashlight beam shone across the floor as he moved back to her side. “Here.” He handed her the sturdy, metal flashlight and retreated once more to what she could now see were shelving units lined up against two walls. “And there was a tornado around here a few years ago, but I wasn’t here for it. Shine that up here, would you?”
“Sorry.” She immediately turned the flashlight in his direction again. But she’d seen enough of the rest of the cellar to know that it was larger than she’d expected. Her vivid imagination was conjuring any number of creepy crawlies hanging out in the far corners of the dirt-floored cellar.
She realized her flashlight was trained squarely on his extremely excellent rear end and angled it upward where his hands were. “So where were you, then?”
“Two years ago? Germany. The close-up brush I had with a tornado was further back than that. In Italy.”
He spoke with a distinct Texas drawl that said he’d grown up here. “World traveler?”
He shot her a grin over his shoulder. “Courtesy of the United States Army, ma’am.”
She was glad he quickly turned back to his task. His grin was positively lethal.
She sat down on the bottom step and rubbed Sugar’s warm head when the dog rested it on her lap. It was hard not to keep looking up at that cellar door. It was hard not wondering what unmentionable creatures they were disturbing in the dirt cellar with their very presence. “You don’t look like a soldier.” She jerked the flashlight upward again and jumped at another crack of thunder.
“I’m not anymore. You don’t look like a reporter.”
“I told you. I’m a journalist.”
“Working on a magazine article. I remember.”
Which brought her mind squarely back to her purpose for being there in the first place. She blamed the fact that she’d been even momentarily sidetracked by the storm.
She jerked the flashlight—and her gaze—away from his butt when he turned with a lantern in his hand. She’d seen ones like it pictured in the advertising section of Weird. She herself, however, had never had any personal experience with the things.
Primarily because her idea of roughing it meant being somewhere without a handy Starbucks.
Or traveling to a tiny map-dot called Paseo, Texas, where cell phone signals were apparently unheard of.
Along with the lantern, he’d also found a box of kitchen matches. But instead of lighting a match by scraping it against the box, he just scraped his thumbnail over the top. Then he set the flame to the lantern, and a moment later, another source of light countered the gloom. He set the lantern on the floor near her feet. “Turn off the flashlight. Might as well save the batteries.”
She turned it off before handing it to him. He stepped around her, going up a few stairs before tucking the flashlight between the wall and the handrail near the door. “That’s where we usually keep it.” She leaned to one side for him to go past her again as he came back down.
Then he picked up the lantern, holding it high as he looked around the rest of the room, making a satisfied sound as he headed into one of those far corners. When he came back into the small circle of light, he was carrying a puffy, orange sleeping bag that he flipped open a foot from her toes.
Her alarm level started rising again. “We’re, uh, not going to be down here all day, are we?”
“Probably not.” He set the lantern on the floor next to the brightly colored bag and disappeared into the shadows again. He came back with another sleeping bag, though he left this one rolled up and tossed it down on the one he’d spread out. “There used to be a small table and a couple chairs down here. Don’t know what happened to them. But we might as well be a little more comfortable while we’re here.” Suiting action to words, he knelt down and stretched out on one side of the opened sleeping bag and propped the rolled-up one behind his head.
Then he patted the area beside him. “C’mere, girl.”
Her mouth went dry.
Then she felt her face flush when Sugar sniffed her way along the edge of the sleeping bag before circling a few times next to Jayden’s hip and lying down.
Of course he’d meant his dog.
“Room for you, too,” he said.
She pressed her lips together in an awkward smile and shook her head. She was twenty-seven years old. Hardly inexperienced when it came to men. But lying on the floor next to a soaking wet stranger—even a handsome cuss of one—was not exactly in her wheelhouse.
Though it had been over a year since she’d broken up with Steven—
The thought blew away when the cellar door suddenly flew open.
Dirt and debris rained down the stairs and she shot off the step where she’d been sitting. She would have collided with Jayden, who’d bolted upright to his feet, if not for the quick way he set her aside.
She wrapped her arms around her midriff, but that didn’t really help the quaking inside her. She didn’t know how it was possible, but the sky outside was even blacker than before. So black that she almost questioned the time of day, even though logic told her it was still afternoon. “Can I help?”
He was halfway up the stairs, reaching out of the cellar opening to grab the door that kept slamming against the ground. “Stay there.” His voice was terse.
It seemed the nerves inside her stomach had found a whole new set of hoops to toss around.
The wind was whipping down the stairwell so violently that it blew his shirt away from his back like a maniacal parachute. The end of the sleeping bag flipped up and over her boots. Her hair felt like it was standing on end and Sugar shot off to hide in one of the dark corners.
She sat down on the sleeping bag and patted her hands together. “Come here, Sugar. It’s okay.” After a moment, the dog slunk back. Her tail was tucked. Her pointed ears were nearly flat against her head. She was more terrified than Ariana. She put her arm around the dog, wanting to bury her face in the dog’s silky fur.
Then Jayden finally won his battle with the door and it slammed shut with such force that even more dust came down, settling over his head.
He secured the latch again and jammed the flashlight through it as well.
“Is that going to hold it?”
“It’ll hold the latch.” He came back down the stairs. “Whether the door holds together is another matter.”
Sugar whined.
Ariana wished she could, too.
“Hey.” He crouched down next to them both. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
The door blew again, metal and wood seeming to scream against the pressure.
“You don’t know that,” she told him.
“You’re too pretty to be so pessimistic.” He put his arm around her and his dog.
She didn’t move away. Because, whether she wanted to admit it or not, just like Sugar obviously did, she felt safer with him right there even though the wetness of his clothes seeped through hers.
Still... “There’s a tornado out there,” she said, as if she needed to point that out to him.
“Not yet. At least I didn’t see the funnel cloud again. Hopefully, it’s just one hellacious storm.”
Right on cue, thunder shook the very walls. She couldn’t help flinching. “I never liked thunderstorms, either,” she admitted.
His hand squeezed her shoulder. “I don’t know. This one’s not so bad.”
She huffed out a disbelieving laugh. “Right.”
“It brought you, didn’t it?”
Chapter Two (#ud381d953-c219-5992-844a-964f3192456a)
Jayden felt Ariana stiffen next to him and wished he’d said just about anything else.
That was the problem with his propensity for voicing blunt truths.
He pushed to his feet. He was soaked to the skin but he ignored the annoyance. “If I remember, there ought to be some stuff to eat and drink down here. Interested?”
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “If it’s a hundred years old like that cellar door, I don’t think so.”
He chuckled as he went over to the shelves. They were crammed with everything from tools to packing boxes that had been there since before his mom had ever set foot in Paseo. Which dated them more than thirty-six years, since he and his brothers hadn’t yet been born. In the years he’d been gone in the army, the shelves had only gotten more jumbled.
“The door’s old,” he allowed. “But not a hundred years old. It’s just the Paseo sun that makes it look that way.” He pushed aside a stack of newspapers. Who kept old newspapers these days? To him it was sort of like saving string.
Outside, the thunder had settled into a continuous rumble. He hadn’t lied to the lovely, young Ariana Lamonte. Aside from that one sight of the funnel cloud, he hadn’t seen it again when he’d been fighting with the damn cellar door. But he still wasn’t inclined to leave the safety of the cellar just yet, either. Not when the sky had that ominous blackish-green hue. Just because he hadn’t seen a funnel didn’t mean there wasn’t one. And he had no desire to tangle with a tornado.
As far as storm cellars went, this one was pretty old. Back in the day, it’d been used more as a root cellar than anything. Nowadays, it was the place where old crap—like thirty-plus-year-old newspapers—went to die.
He didn’t find the box of crackers he’d been hunting for, but he did find an old radio. He switched it on.
“Is that a radio?”
He didn’t want to dash the hopefulness in Ariana’s voice, but truth was truth. “There are only a few radio stations with a strong enough signal to reach Paseo. Television’s even worse. Hated it when I was young.”
“That’s what cable and satellite dishes are for.”
He chuckled. “No cable out here. And satellite was way too expensive. At least it used to be.” They had satellite television now, primarily so his mom could keep up with Grayson’s rodeoing when she wasn’t traveling with him. But when the weather was bad, the first thing it did was lose its signal. He held up the radio that emitted only static no matter how many times he turned the dial. He turned it off again and stuck it back on the shelf.
“And no cell phone signal, either,” she said. “Which I discovered for myself already.”
“Nope. No cell signal.” He shrugged and moved a cardboard box full of toys he vaguely remembered from his childhood. If he was really lucky, he’d find some old towels.
“Any internet?”
“The library in town has it. They’re only open on Wednesdays, last time I checked.” Admittedly, that had been a good year ago, when he’d been ironing out leftover details from leaving the service.
“This is Texas,” she muttered. “Not a third-world country.”
He smiled faintly. “We are kind of off the grid,” he allowed. “But I’ve traveled the world. Seen the best and more often the worst of people along the way. So I’ve come to appreciate Paseo’s peacefulness.”
The cellar door shuddered again.
“Usual peacefulness,” he amended, resuming his search for the crackers. From the corner of his eye, he watched Sugar cuddle up close to Ariana.
The dog was ordinarily wary as hell around strangers. But he couldn’t exactly blame Sugar.
The reporter—journalist—had curves just meant to be cuddled up close against. She had rich brown hair that reached halfway down the back of the artsy black-and-white sweater she wore open over a clinging gray top. Her snug jeans showed off shapely thighs before they tucked in impractical knee-high red boots. They ought to have looked ridiculous, those boots. Like they belonged on a fashion runway. On her, though, they were just plain sexy. Combined with darkly lashed brown eyes that had sucked him in the second she’d turned them his way out on the highway, Ariana Lamonte definitely made an impact.
And her presence now was only serving to remind him just how long it had been since he’d enjoyed an attractive woman’s company.
He’d hooked up a time or two right after things ended with Tess in Germany, but that was it. Grayson had told him he was turning into a hermit and suggested he meet some of the buckle bunnies always following him around. Jayden had bluntly told his brother to stuff it.
He finally spotted the old-fashioned metal container that held a sealed box of saltine crackers. “Ah. Success.”
For all he knew, they were the same ones he’d put there when he was eighteen, but he was hoping they’d been refreshed somewhere along the way. He pulled the tin off the shelf, as well as the dusty bottle sitting behind it—definitely not his doing when he’d been eighteen. He’d been a hell-raiser, but even he hadn’t had the nerve to keep a bottle of whiskey in the cellar right under his mom’s nose. She’d have tanned his hide, regardless of his age. He’d never met a fight he didn’t like—except when it was against his mom.
Carrying both the tin and the bottle, he went back to sit on the sleeping bag.
Sugar lifted her head and shuffled over to him, curling up against his thigh and going back to sleep.
“How old is she?”
He rubbed the dog’s ruff. “About three. I brought her back from Germany with me when I got out of the army.” He left out the part that he’d basically stolen her from his master sergeant. The man had gotten Tess. As far as Jayden was concerned, he hadn’t deserved to have the dog, too.
“Was she born blind?”
“No.” He ignored her curious expression and peeled open the cracker box. Fortunately, it looked relatively new. And the outer metal box had done a good job keeping bugs from getting at the cardboard inside.
The storm was howling worse than ever outside. Rain had started lashing against the door and he hoped to keep Ariana distracted from it as much as he could. “Here.” He set a sleeve of crackers on the sleeping bag between them and wiped off the dusty bottle with his wet shirttail. “No glasses, I’m afraid.” He held the bottle closer to the lantern so she could see the label he’d exposed. “You are legal, right?” For all he knew, she could be a twenty-year-old journalism student.
She let out a soft, sexy laugh and leaned forward to take the bottle. Her fingertips brushed his. He wasn’t sure if that made more of an impression on him than the way her long, tangled hair formed a curtain around her. “More than legal,” she assured him. “I’m twenty-seven.”
Older than she looked, which was a relief. “I’ve got nine years on you.”
“Not exactly a generation gap,” she offered drily. She twisted off the cap from the bottle of whiskey, took a sip and promptly coughed. “Potent,” she finally managed. She set the bottle next to the crackers and peeled off her sweater.
The clinging shirt beneath possessed no sleeves. Just two narrow straps over shoulders that gleamed ivory-smooth in the lantern’s light. His gaze started to drift over the shadowy cleavage also on display beneath her collection of thin gold necklaces, and he grabbed the whiskey bottle for himself.
Hell of a time for that dead feeling inside him to be shocked back to life.
“Potent,” he agreed after he took a healthy swig. The liquor burned all the way down, joining the heat already pooled inside him.
Fortunately, she seemed to take his comment at face value and fiddled with her cell phone. “I couldn’t function without the internet,” she said. “How do you stand it?”
“Just fine,” he drawled. “What do I need it for?”
“Keeping up with the world?”
He smiled slightly. “Hear everything I need to know at the feed store in town.” It was an exaggeration, but not that much of one since he, personally, wasn’t all that inclined to ever turn on the television. Not when every time he did, all he saw were politicians arguing and neighbors shooting neighbors. He’d seen enough of that in the service. “What do you need the internet for?”
She’d been sitting cross-legged and she shifted, straightening out her legs, too. “My job, for one thing. Research. Filing stories.” Her lips twitched. “Keeping up with the world.”
“I kept up with the world plenty thanks to fifteen years with the army.”
She set aside her phone and lifted her hair off her neck with both hands. “It’s warm down here.”
And getting warmer. He wasn’t entirely certain that his clothes hadn’t started steaming. “Blame it on the whiskey.” Personally, he was blaming it on her.
“It’s June but the rain still ought to cool things off.” She twisted her hair, managing to tie it into a knot atop her head. She inhaled deeply and Jayden did blame the whiskey then, because he should have looked away from the lush curves pushing against that thin excuse for a shirt, but he didn’t.
And the heat inside his gut just increased.
The only thing that distracted him was the thumping of the cellar door as the storm buffeted against it. It sounded like it was hailing, but in the lantern light, he could see the glimmer of rain dripping through the slats of the wood door.
If he’d met Ariana Lamonte under just about any other circumstance, he wouldn’t hesitate to pursue the attraction. But she was in his storm cellar. Essentially under his protection.
Which changed the rules entirely.
Or should.
“So what do you do in Austin when you’re not chasing around stories for your magazine?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “The usual. I have friends. Parents.” As if she realized the spare details were hardly the way to keep a conversation going, she pushed to her feet and paced the short distance to the shelves, arching her back a little as she stretched. Then she bent over in half, her bracelets jingling softly, and pressed her fingers against the dirt floor.
He damn near swallowed his tongue.
The knot in her hair wasn’t holding up. As he watched, it seemed to uncoil in almost slow motion. Then she straightened again, caught her hands behind her back and stretched once more.
He closed his eyes, stifling an oath. “Grow up there?” He had to raise his voice over the noise from outside.
“In Austin? Born and raised. Same as my mom and dad before me. I love the city. I have an apartment that overlooks the skyline. Ridiculously expensive, so I barely have it furnished, but I can walk or ride my bicycle to work if I want. I can get most anywhere I want, really, without even taking out my car.”
He looked at her again and was both relieved and chagrined that she’d stopped stretching and was pacing once more. “Except here,” he said drily.
Her lips curved. They were full and luscious, like the rest of her. Not overblown. Just...right.
Exactly right.
“Except here,” she agreed. “What about you? Did you grow up in Paseo?”
“Born and raised,” he parroted. “Right here on this very ranch.”
She propped her hands on her hips and looked at him. “And your parents?”
He wasn’t accustomed to telling strangers his business. But she was easy to talk to. And it kept her from turning to see the water that had begun streaming down the steps.
The cellar had stone walls and a dirt floor. He’d never known it to flood more than a foot. Still, if it got worse, he was already figuring they’d have to leave the shelter. In a flood, being inside the house higher up was better than being below ground. If there really were tornadoes in the area, they’d have to take their chances. His mom’s bedroom closet in the house would be the best bet. First floor. Interior room.
There wouldn’t be much space for the two of them. It would definitely be close quarters—
“Never knew my father,” he said, pulling his thoughts away. “My mom was pregnant when she came to Paseo.”
Her expression shifted a little. “So your mom is a Fortune?”
“Not one of those Fortunes,” he reminded her. “The ones you’ve been writing about for your magazine. Like I said. The name’s just a coincidence. So if that’s what brought you to Paseo, you’ve wasted a trip. My mother’s definitely not related to them.”
She tilted her head slightly. “It’s not that common a name.”
“It’s the one my mom decided on when she was making a fresh start here. She wanted a new life. A new identity. Said my brothers and I were the only fortune she needed. Thus the name. I’m pretty sure she was running from the guy who’d gotten her pregnant. She could have chosen any surname she wanted.” He raised his voice over a crack of thunder. “Always figured Fortune was better than Smith.”
Ariana jerked to attention at his words. His mother had been running?
“It’s just thunder.” Jayden’s deep voice was calm. The kind of voice to inspire trust. “It can’t hurt you.”
“The lightning that causes it can.” Much as she disliked thunderstorms, she was glad to blame her reaction on it. “So why do you think she was hiding from him?” she asked casually, concealing her intense interest. Gerald Robinson had a history of being a womanizer. But not a violent one. Even now, in his seventies, he was a compellingly attractive man. She’d only had a few brief encounters with him—he was not a proponent of her magazine articles, to say the least, and had no idea about the book of course—but it wasn’t difficult to understand how women had flocked his way. But none of the women—even his wife—seemed to hold his heart.
Some said that Gerald Robinson didn’t really have one.
But maybe he’d had one and left it in Paseo.
“Was your mother afraid of your father?”
“I probably should have phrased it differently.” He adjusted the rolled sleeping bag behind him, stretching out even more fully on the one spread beneath him. He tore open the sleeve of crackers and fed one to Sugar. “I think she was running from a broken heart. And that’s it.”
Another frequent refrain when it came to the women in Gerald’s past. The only heart that seemed to have not broken along the way belonged to his wife.
Then she realized what else Jayden had said. “You have brothers?”
He’d uncapped the whiskey again and held up two fingers as he took a sip. When he was finished, he held the bottle toward her.
Even though she knew she oughtn’t, she took the bottle again and this time managed not to choke on the alcohol as it burned down her throat.
But she dropped the bottle completely when a loud crash vibrated through the very walls, making even the metal shelving shudder and squeal.
She froze, forgetting entirely her interest in his brothers, and warily looked up at the low ceiling, half-afraid it was getting ready to collapse in on them. It was covered in wood. But above that, she really had no idea what was there. Except earth and that awful, awful howling wind. “That was not thunder.”
He’d sat up, too, and shook his head. He righted the whiskey bottle she’d dropped. “No, it wasn’t.” He went up the stairs and pried the flashlight out of the metal latch where he’d jammed it. Only then did she realize the stairs were flowing with water.
“Are you sure you should go out there?”
“No, but I want to know what the hell that noise was. I’m not worried about the house—nobody is here but us—but I’ve got horses in the barn.” He pushed up on the cellar door and swore.
Her stomach curled in on itself nervously. “What’s wrong?”
“Something’s blocking the door.” He put his shoulder to it and heaved.
The door that had blown open from the wind now stayed stubbornly closed.
She felt like choking on a whole new lump of misgivings. “So we’re trapped?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
She picked up the lantern and carried it with her up a few steps until she was just below him. In the light she couldn’t see the faintest glimmer of anything between the wood slats. She could, however, see the muscles standing out in his arms as he pushed futilely against the door. And she could also see the stream of water pouring steadily down the stone steps. How it was getting around whatever blocked the door was a mystery.
But water had a way of going where it wanted.
Take the Grand Canyon, for example.
“What would you say, then?”
His answer was curt. And unprintable.
Her mouth went dry. She backed down the wet steps.
He followed her and took the lantern from her fingers that had gone numb. “Don’t look like that.”
“Like what?” She wrapped her arms around herself. It was humid and warm in the cellar but she suddenly felt cold. How much water would the dirt absorb before it started to fill the cellar? “You just said nobody was here but us.”
“Not for a few days.”
She gaped. “A few days? So someone will find our bodies sooner or later?”
He set the lantern on the ground and put his arms around her. “You do have an imagination, don’t you?”
She nodded against his shoulder, breathing in the warm, comforting scent of him. “My teachers always told me that was a good thing. But this is not at all how I expected this day to go.”
“Me, either.” His hands slid down her spine. “We’ll get out of here before we’re reduced to bodies. The cellar has never flooded much more than ten, twelve inches before.”
The details were not a comfort. “I don’t know how to swim.”
“You’re not going to need to,” he promised.
She tilted her head back, looking up into his face. It really was a cussedly handsome one. From the cleft in his chin to the straight brows over his level gaze. “My mother will never forgive me for not giving her grandchildren.” Karen Lamonte had been going on about it ever since Ariana had broken off with Steven.
His eyebrows shot up and the corner of his lips lifted. “Pretty sure that’s not going to be decided here and now, sweetheart.”
She really didn’t know what was wrong with her. She’d never particularly been prone to panic before. But she’d also never found herself stuck in a storm cellar in a town nobody could seem to find except for those who actually lived there, in the company of a man who might or might not be another son of Gerald Robinson, but who definitely had an overwhelming appeal for her personally.
And focusing on Jayden was far preferable to thinking about what could happen if that water kept coming down the stairs.
“You have a scar,” she murmured inconsequentially and touched the faint white line above his eyebrow. “Right there.”
“Bar fight.” His lashes drooped and she knew instinctively that he was looking at her lips.
Without conscious thought, she moistened them. His fingertips were tracing her spine, setting off all manner of sensations inside her. “Are you, ah, in a lot of bar fights?”
“One or two. I stopped more of them.” He shifted slightly, pulling her in closer till her breasts were pressed against his chest. “I was an MP in the army.”
Her breasts were pressed against his chest. “MP?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Military Police.” His head dropped toward hers. “Former badass Sergeant First Class Fortune at your service.” As he said the words his head lowered toward hers. His breath fanned her mouth as he said, “I’m going to kiss you, you know.”
Heat flushed through her veins, collecting in her center. Her head felt heavy as she looked up at him. Any hope of maintaining a professional distance had gotten washed away. “Former Sergeant, I sure hope so,” she breathed.
One of his hands left her back to slide along her jaw.
Her lips parted and she drew in a deep breath. She felt the way he went still when she slid her hands around his neck. His thumb brushed over her lower lip and she couldn’t help the soft sound that rose in her throat.
“Damn,” he murmured. And then his mouth found hers.
His kiss didn’t feel damned. If anything, his kiss felt glorious.
And if she was going to go in a storm cellar, at least she was going to go like this.
He lifted his head way too soon. His eyes were dark and unreadable in the dim lantern light, but the searching in them felt as real as the moisture leaching from his clothes into hers.
She pulled his head down. “If you’re going to kiss me,” she said as she caught his lower lip between hers and lightly tugged, “kiss me.”
He groaned, kissing her even more deeply. His hands traveled down her back, down her hips, her rear, pulling her up and into him. He was hard and her head whirled even more. All she wanted to do right then and there was twine herself around him and he seemed to know it because he yanked his mouth away from her and lifted her right off her feet.
“Put your legs around me.”
She didn’t need the request. She was already linking her boots behind him and wishing there weren’t two layers of denim between them. She couldn’t do anything about that at the moment, but she could do something about his shirt. She yanked it upward, hearing a few buttons scatter before he let out a low, groaning laugh and managed to pull it off his head.
She pressed her open mouth against his collarbone, tasting the moist, salty heat of his skin. He cradled her backside as he crouched down, finally lowering her onto the sleeping bag. One corner of her mind wondered if the thing was floating in water yet, but that didn’t stop her from reaching greedily between them for his belt.
He jerked and caught her hands in his, pinning them above her head against the sleeping bag.
“Don’t tell me you want me to stop.” In any other world, she’d have been shocked by her own boldness. But this wasn’t any other world. The only world that existed was contained in a flooding dirt cellar from which they had no way out. She angled her hips against his. “I can feel what you want.”
“Yeah?” His hair brushed her cheek as he kissed the side of her neck. “Does that mean I have to hurry?” His mouth burned along the curve of her shoulder. Over the thin strap of her camisole and down to where her achingly tight nipples pushed against the cotton fabric. “You’re not wearing a bra.”
Was there any point in explaining the built-in shelf bra? “Maybe you do need to hurry, if we’re going to be flooded in this cellar.”
“We’re not getting flooded,” he said again.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.” Still holding her wrists above her head with one hand, he peeled down the top of her camisole with the other, until she felt his breath on her bare breasts. She was coming positively unglued, anticipating the brush of his mouth, the slide of his tongue—
But instead of tasting her, he lifted his head a little. “What is that?” He reached for the lantern, pulling it near so he could look more closely at her exposed breasts. “A butterfly?”
She groaned, twisting beneath him. “Yes, it’s a butterfly.” All of an inch big in pale pink and black, tattooed on the upper curve of her right breast when she’d been twenty-one. She still couldn’t free her hands, so she arched her back, rubbing her rigid nipples and the tattoo against his hard chest. “You were in the army, Sergeant Fortune. Surely you’ve seen tattoos before.” In the scheme of things, her little butterfly was hardly a record breaker. Neither was the floral curlicue on her left shoulder blade.
His teeth flashed. “Sweetheart, I’ve seen things that would turn your hair white.” He ducked his head and kissed the point of her shoulder. Then the butterfly.
Heat flowed under the surface of her tingling skin and she bit back a moan when his lips finally surrounded her nipple. Even though she twisted her wrists, halfheartedly trying to free them, he kept them bracketed. She pressed her face against the top of his head. “Jayden, please,” she breathed.
In answer, he pushed his thigh between her legs and palmed her other breast.
Pleasure rocketed through her and she cried out.
Jayden made a low sound. Utterly male. Utterly triumphant. Then his mouth was on hers again, and her wrists were finally free, and he rolled over, pulling her over him.
Noise seemed to rage beyond the storm cellar, but she was far more aware of her heart pounding loudly inside her head, of the low sounds coming from Jayden, of the clink of his belt when he finally loosened it. Breathless, she braced one hand on the floor, reaching to undo her own jeans with the other. But instead of dirt, her hand sank into mud. “Jayden, the water—”
“I know.” He cursed and kissed her hard again while the pounding outside the cellar door got even louder.
Then suddenly, he went still. “Wait.” He sat up, dumping her somewhat unceremoniously onto her butt as he stood. Instead of finishing the job of undressing, though, he fastened his belt and headed up the stairs. He pounded on the door. “Nate,” he yelled. “That you?”
Ariana hoped she wasn’t hearing things when she heard a faint, indecipherable response.
“Yeah, we’re stuck,” Jayden yelled, pressing his head close to the wood.
Once again, her adrenaline seemed to want to blow the top of her head right off. She wiped off her muddy hand and scrambled up the few steps behind him. “Who’s out there?”
“My brother Nathan. So you, uh, might—” He gestured and she flushed, realizing her camisole was bunched around her waist.
Suddenly embarrassed, she turned and tugged the stretchy fabric back where it belonged, hiding her still-tight nipples and the butterfly tattoo. She would have put on her sweater for good measure, except when she picked it up from where she’d left it bunched by the base of the stairs, it was soaking wet.
As was her cell phone.
She grimaced. It was supposed to be waterproof, but she wasn’t sure that meant it could withstand sitting in several inches of water. She was drying it off the best she could against her jeans when Sugar started barking, pacing back and forth across the sleeping bag, leaving muddy paw prints all over it.
“Sugar, come here.” Ariana reached out so the dog could sniff her hand and then closed her fingers around the bandanna to hold her still. “Good girl.” She tucked the phone in her back pocket and looked back at Jayden. “I can’t hear what your brother is saying. What’s blocking the door?”
“Your car.”
“What?”
“It’s on its side.” He pressed his ear against the door again. “Yeah,” he shouted. Then he looked back at her. “He’s hooked up the winch from my truck to drag it off.”
She hadn’t even had the car for three months yet. She’d bought it outright with her book advance. Her savings account wasn’t quite sucking air, but it was close. What if she had to pay for car repairs? “Is it going to be damaged very badly?”
“I doubt the winch will do anything worse to it than the wind that turned it on its side in the first place.”
She grimaced, knowing it had been a foolish question.
Jayden was listening again at the wood panels, and then he backed down the steps, sliding his arm around her waist to pull her away as well. “Sugar, come on.” The dog moved also, sitting against his leg, thumping her tail and looking up at him with an adoring expression on her pointed face. “Just to be safe,” he told Ariana and brushed his lips over her temple.
She closed her eyes for a moment, fighting the strong urge to put her arm around him, too.
“Relax,” Jayden said. His long fingers squeezed her hip. “Everything’s going to be fine. We’re getting out.”
She smiled weakly. She was relieved about that. More than she could say. But it also meant that getting carried away like she had with Jayden Fortune could not happen again. Not when she was far from convinced his name was merely a coincidence. Getting personally involved with someone she was writing about was out of the question.
“I thought you never had any doubt about us getting out.”
“I didn’t.” He gave her a quick wink, and then they both went silent as they heard what could only be the sound of her car being dragged away from the cellar door.
A few moments later, the door was opened from the outside. Rain pounded through the opening and then a drenched man appeared, shining a heavy-duty light down on them. “Well, well, bro. Glad to see you still like bringing the pretty girls to see your underground bachelor pad.”
Ariana flushed. She had no right to feel jealous of what Jayden had done in the past or would do in the future with anyone. But that didn’t stop her from feeling it anyway.
Jayden grabbed her hand and started up the stairs. “Be careful,” he warned her. “The stones are slippery as hell.”
She found that out quickly enough when Sugar slipped and lost her footing. Jayden immediately let go of Ariana to pick up the dog and carry her up the rest of the stairs.
Grabbing hold of the handrail, Ariana followed. She was soaked even before she accepted the hand that Jayden’s brother offered when she reached the top of the stairs.
“Out you go,” Nathan said, practically lifting her right out onto the ground. “You guys all right?”
Ariana nodded. Even though it was pouring buckets and it was nearly dark, the sky no longer had that terrible, angry black look, as if it were ready to explode. “Thank you.” He’d set the big flashlight on the top of her car—make that the side of her car, because she saw right away that it was, indeed, lying on its side. “How could this happen? Was it a tornado after all?” She looked up into Nathan’s face, and now that the flashlight wasn’t shining in her face, she nearly did a double take. “You’re twins?”
Nathan grinned. “Triplets, actually. But I’m the best-looking one of the lot.”
Jayden let Sugar jump to the ground. The dog, mostly blind or not, raced immediately across the muddy ground toward the house. “I’ll disagree with that,” he said, reaching out to give his brother’s hand a pump. “But I’m glad as hell that you’re the most unpredictable of us. Thought you were still in Oklahoma City.”
Nathan shrugged, offering no explanation.
Ariana took the flashlight to shine it over her car.
Not only was it sitting on its side, but half the windows were broken out. The copy of the magazine was gone. Worst of all, though, her thick notebook was nowhere in sight.
She’d had nearly a year’s worth of research packed in that notebook. It had contained everything that her laptop—which was sitting safely in her apartment back home—did not. And the thought of losing it was almost overwhelming.
“It’s not so bad,” Jayden said. “We’ll get it turned right side up and replace the windshield—”
She nodded and blinked her eyes hard.
“Hey.” Nathan took the flashlight from her nerveless hand. “I’m used to being waterlogged, but maybe we could get out of the rain and take this inside the house.”
“Getting out of the rain sounds good,” she agreed.
She followed the two men who were so alike that they were two peas in a pod. And evidently, there was a third pea from that pod as well.
Multiple births ran in Gerald Robinson’s family. His two eldest sons with Charlotte were twins.
Ariana didn’t need her notes to know that.
She didn’t need her notes to know a lot of things.
But she honestly couldn’t recall from her biology classes whether multiples happened from the mother’s side or the father’s. Which meant she needed to do a little research.
The very thought of it energized her.
Her car would get fixed. And her notes could be re-created. When it came to some things, she had an excellent memory for detail.
Maybe Paseo wasn’t turning out to be a wild-goose chase after all. She’d just found three more sons of Gerald Robinson. Possibly three more sons.
That in itself was huge.
But Jayden and his brothers were also thirty-six. Which meant if Gerald was their father, they were his eldest heirs.
Was that the reason Charlotte Robinson had shown her fangs to Ariana?
Because she knew?
Chapter Three (#ud381d953-c219-5992-844a-964f3192456a)
“Still dead?”
Jayden nodded as he hung up the wall phone. The dead line wasn’t surprising, considering the weather. He didn’t particularly care, except it meant if their mom heard about the storm, she might be concerned.
He pulled a mug from the cabinet and tossed Sugar a treat that she snagged when it landed on her bed, then sat down at the kitchen table across from his brother.
From over their heads, they could hear the sound of a shower running.
“She’s a looker,” Nathan said.
It took no effort at all to imagine Ariana standing beneath the running water.
It took considerable effort to squelch the inevitable result of that image. He grabbed the coffeepot his brother had set in the center of the table and filled his cup. “True enough.” He considered warning Nathan off, but decided against it. His brother would probably make something of it.
“Didn’t mention you were having company when I talked to you last week.”
“Didn’t know I was going to have company.”
“Sure about that? You guys were looking pretty cozy down in the cellar. Makes me wonder if my timing couldn’t have been a little better.”
Jayden ignored the devilry in his brother’s eyes. What he and Ariana had been doing in the cellar was none of Nathan’s business. “She’s a journalist from Austin,” he said. “She came to Paseo for some magazine she works for.”
Nathan gave a bark of laughter. “Paseo? What the hell is interesting around here?”
“She’s writing about the Fortune family. The real one. With all the money over in Austin.”
Nathan made a face. “Only one in the money around here is Grayson and he doesn’t even use our last name. Disappointing for her, I guess. What’s she been doing? Going through all the Texas phone books looking up anyone with the last name Fortune?”
Jayden sipped the coffee. Grimacing, he got up to get some milk from the refrigerator. Usually, he liked his coffee black, but Nathan made the worst coffee in the world. “I don’t know how she knew about us. Doesn’t matter, anyway. I told her the truth. Mom made up the name when she had us.” He dumped milk into the mug, then added a spoonful of sugar. “When did you get back from OK City?”
“Ten minutes before I saw that dinky red car sitting on its side.”
Jayden was the eldest of his brothers by a matter of minutes. “You shouldn’t have been driving in this weather.”
Nathan gave him a look. “Dude.”
“I don’t care if you used to be a SEAL or not. It was stupid.” He glanced up at the ceiling when the sound of the shower cut off.
He’d put a clean towel in the bathroom for Ariana to use. About now, she’d be running the pale blue terry cloth over that sexy little butterfly. Then, when she was all nice and dry, she’d be pulling on a pair of his sweatpants and one of his T-shirts.
He buried his nose in his coffee mug, taking a big swig of the nasty stuff. He choked it down and it was almost enough to overpower the images in his head. He should have found something for her to wear from his mother’s closet. It would have made more sense. And he wouldn’t be thinking about her skin, bare and soft, beneath his own clothes.
Banishing the image, he asked his brother, “Did you notice any other damage around the place?”
“Barn’s damaged on the north side, but the roof’s intact. Horses were restless, but okay. Haven’t checked anywhere else. I saw your truck. When I realized you weren’t in the barn or the house—” His brother didn’t finish. Just shrugged.
He didn’t need to finish. Nathan had come looking for Jayden. Period. Everything else could wait.
Through the window over the sink, he could see Ariana’s car. The wind was finally gone, but the rain showed no sign of slowing. Rivers of water had formed, crisscrossing the saturated ground around the storm cellar.
Well beyond the cellar was the barn. Only the corner of it was visible from where he stood. He was glad the barn roof was okay. But even gladder that the horses were okay. Property damage was bad enough without adding damage to their livestock.
“We’ll need to check the rest of the stock,” he said.
“I’ve spent enough time in the water for today. I never saw any cows flying through the air, so I figure it can wait until the rain lets up.”
His brother hadn’t been joking. Still, Jayden found himself smiling a little. “Weird, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“You went to the navy. I went to the army. Neither one of us wanted to be here.”
“And we both came back,” Nathan finished the thought.
Jayden knew why he’d come back. So far, though, Nathan wasn’t saying much about his reasons. Since he himself didn’t feel inclined to talk about his military separation, his brother’s similar silence didn’t strike him as particularly unusual.
“We should check and make sure there are no broken windows in the house.”
“That your way of getting rid of me so you can go on about entertaining your...journalist?”
He’d never known not having brothers. But there were moments when the idea was more than a little appealing. He lifted a brow and looked over the coffee mug.
Nathan didn’t bother hiding his amusement. “Hey. I think it’s great. About time you showed some of the old Jayden spirit.” But he pushed away from the table anyway. Like Jayden, he’d already changed into dry jeans and a shirt. “I’ll check this floor. You can check upstairs.”
It hadn’t been Jayden’s plan to go upstairs anytime soon. Keeping a little distance between him and Ariana didn’t sound appealing, but he knew it was only smart.
She’d been panicking in the storm cellar. Before he’d fallen for Tess, he’d been no saint when it came to women. But taking advantage of the situation with Ariana like he had was all sorts of wrong.
Not that he had even been thinking real straight at the time. Soon as she had tried undoing his belt, his resistance had been laughable. And when she’d come apart the way she had—
“Jayden?”
He jerked slightly, realizing that his brother had left the kitchen and Ariana had entered it. And the way she was looking at him made him suspect she’d been there for more than just a second.
He dumped the rest of the undrinkable coffee down the sink, trying not to dwell on the way the V-neck of the white undershirt he’d loaned her hung off one of her bare shoulders. On her, the shirt was loose, thank God. Way too loose to give any hint of the gorgeous breasts he knew were beneath.
“Shower okay?”
Her wet hair was slicked back from her face and twisted in a thick braid down the center of her back. “Yes, thank you.” She held up the towel in her arms and he realized she’d wrapped it around her wet clothes. “Do you have a washer and dryer I could use?”
“Sorry. I should have thought of that already.” His wet clothes were still lying in a heap on the floor in his bedroom.
“Why?” Her face was shiny and clean, yet she still had the thickest, darkest eyelashes he’d ever seen. And they surrounded the brownest gaze he’d ever fallen into. “We’ve both had a little distraction lately.” She moistened her lips. “What with the, uh, storm. So—” She lifted the bundle slightly.
“Laundry room’s back here.” He led the way from the kitchen to the mudroom in the back where the washer and dryer sat. “Grayson bought ’em for my mom a few years ago, so they’re fairly new.” His neck went a little hot. Like he was bragging or something.
She slid around him and pulled open the washing machine. “Grayson?”
“My other brother. He’s gone a lot. Rides rodeo.”
She chuckled. “There’s a famous rodeo rider who goes by just Grayson.”
At his silence, she looked up at him.
His neck felt even hotter.
“Wait a sec. Your brother?” She looked astonished. “He’s The Grayson?”
“Guess you’ve heard of him.”
“Well, yeah. One of my coworkers does a blog for Weird Life entirely devoted to rodeo. She never stops talking about it.”
“Blog?”
“Online journal. You know.”
“I guess. Never been particularly interested in that sort of thing. And around here...no internet.”
“Except for at the library.”
He smiled slightly. “Right.” He reached above her head to open the cabinet. “Soap and stuff. Use whatever you need.”
She shook her wet things out of the towel into the machine. Thin excuse for a shirt. Jeans. One red sock. One blue sock. A tiny scrap of something white that caught on the edge of the machine before she flicked it inside with the towel and hastily closed the door.
He looked at her bare feet below the rolled-up legs of the sweatpants he’d provided. For some reason, he’d expected her toenails to be painted some bright, shocking color. But they were naked. No color at all.
And who knew why, but the sight of her entirely naked feet turned him on all over again.
God, he was a head case.
“I should check for storm damage upstairs,” he said abruptly. And take his own damn shower. An icy one. “You need anything else?”
She looked a little startled. “I appreciate everything you’ve already done,” she said swiftly. “I’ll be fine. Do what you need to do.” She tugged at the neckline of the shirt, pulling it up her shoulder where it promptly slid right back down again. “Go.”
“Look, about what happened—”
She shrugged, which sent the shirt sliding even farther. She reached up to snatch the oversized bottle of laundry soap from the cupboard. “There’s no reason to talk about it. We’re two consenting adults—” Her eyes rounded and she gave him a quick look. “And unattached adults...right?”
“I sure hope so.” Tess hadn’t been unattached at all. She’d just neglected to share that fact with Jayden.
Ariana looked away from him again, nodding. “So, no harm, no foul. It’s not like we, uh, actually—” She broke off and cleared her throat slightly. “You know.”
Not for lack of wanting, he answered silently. Particularly after she’d writhed against him the way she had, making the sexiest sounds he’d ever heard. Sounds that were sure to haunt his sleep for some time to come.
“I mean, I don’t sleep with men I don’t know,” she added. She filled the soap dispenser and jabbed a few buttons on the front of the fancy machine. “I imagine you’re more discriminating than that, too.”
He took the heavy soap bottle from her and replaced it in the cabinet. “I don’t sleep with men I don’t know, either.”
“Sweetie,” she drawled sweetly without missing a beat, “if you swing both ways, I’m not going to judge.”
He let out a bark of laughter. “Do you?”
Her face was rosy, belying her seemingly bold expression. “As a matter of fact, I don’t, but—”
“Neither do I,” he assured her. “I like women.” Despite his better intentions, he moved closer to her. Crowding her back against the machine. Standing close enough to smell the minty toothpaste on her breath and inhale the warmth from her smooth skin. “Particularly the one I’m looking at right now.”
Her lips parted like she was struggling to breathe. He knew she wasn’t, though, because he could feel the rise and fall of her breasts against him just fine.
“You smell like toothpaste.”
“I didn’t use your toothbrush or anything.” Her voice was faint. “I...made do without.”
He wasn’t sure he’d have cared all that much if she had used his toothbrush. “Sweetheart, I was in the army a long time. I know all about making do. I am a little sorry my brother found us when he did,” he murmured. “Another hour—”
“Hour?” She pressed her lips together again and looked away. Her cheeks were even redder.
“Okay.” He smiled slightly. “Fifteen minutes.”
She let out a breathy laugh and shook her head. She crossed her arms between them. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that only plumped up her creamy, butterfly-kissed breasts, making them plainly visible for him within the neck of the loose shirt.
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