The Debutante
Elizabeth Bevarly
Praise for Elizabeth Bevarly:
“…supersteamy…”
—Cosmopolitan
“…fresh and funny.”
—Publishers Weekly
“…the very best in love and laughter.”
—Romantic Times
“Practically perfect romance…”
—Library Journal
“Elizabeth Bevarly delivers romantic comedy at its sparkling best!”
—Bestselling author Teresa Medeiros
“I just love Elizabeth Bevarly’s sense of humor.”
—Bestselling author Julia Quinn
Don’t miss Signature Select’s exciting series:
The Fortunes of Texas: Reunion
Starting in June 2005, get swept up in
twelve new stories from your favorite family!
COWBOY AT MIDNIGHT by Ann Major
A BABY CHANGES EVERYTHING by Marie Ferrarella
IN THE ARMS OF THE LAW by Peggy Moreland
LONE STAR RANCHER by Laurie Paige
THE GOOD DOCTOR by Karen Rose Smith
THE DEBUTANTE by Elizabeth Bevarly
KEEPING HER SAFE by Myrna Mackenzie
THE LAW OF ATTRACTION by Kristi Gold
ONCE A REBEL by Sheri WhiteFeather
MILITARY MAN by Marie Ferrarella
FORTUNE’S LEGACY by Maureen Child
THE RECKONING by Christie Ridgway
The Debutante
Elizabeth Bevarly
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
Writing continuities for Silhouette is always so much fun. First, there’s the challenge of taking the story and characters the editors create and making them my own, and then there’s the joy of working with so many of my favorite writers. I was both flattered and delighted to be invited to participate in THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS: REUNION. The Debutante is my second contribution to the Fortunes saga, and it was wonderful to be able to go back and visit the family again. I had a terrific time writing about Lanie and Miles, and about their sometimes rocky, sometimes comical, journey toward finding true love. I hope you have fun reading about them, too.
Happy Reading!
For the readers.
With a million billion thanks.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Bonus Features
One
No carrot cake. Drat. She’d just have to settle for chocolate torte instead.
Lanie Meyers sighed with not-quite-heartfelt disappointment at the realization. Ah, well. One couldn’t have everything, could one? Not even at a “Dessert, the Whole Dessert, and Nothing But Dessert” fund-raiser for one’s own father’s gubernatorial campaign.
Not that Lanie understood the need for yet another fund-raiser, even if it did involve the consumption of mass quantities of sugar. Her father was already governor of Texas, and last she heard, he was still ahead in the polls, even if it was only by a small margin. And since October was nearly over, the election was less than two weeks away. She just didn’t see how a last-minute financial push like this was going to help all that much. Nevertheless, if her father’s campaign wanted to host a $100-per-person party at this point in the game, the least Lanie could do was show up for it.
And eat lots and lots of dessert.
She scooped up a modest serving of the chocolate torte—well, okay, maybe it wasn’t as modest as some—and transferred it to her plate. Then, just to be on the safe side, she forked up a little—kind of—piece of what looked like marble pound cake to go with it. And, okay, just a smallish—sort of—piece of the maple nut cake, too. It just really complemented the other two so nicely, aesthetically speaking. And maybe just a teeny slice of the white velvet cake to fill in that last empty spot on her plate.
Well, she’d written a check to her father’s campaign for a hundred dollars just like everyone else here tonight had. There was no reason why Lanie shouldn’t enjoy as much of the spread as the other guests. Besides, she’d been forced to skip dinner because her mother had wanted her to come along for moral support during the speech Luanne Meyers had given to the Austin Gardening Society. Lanie just decided not to think for now about how snug her clothes would feel in the morning. That was tomorrow, after all. Fiddle-de-dee on that. She told herself it was only her imagination that the brief, strapless sapphire-blue cocktail dress she’d donned for the occasion was already beginning to pinch.
Nudging away a stray lock of blond hair that had fallen into her face from the topknot fixed loosely at the crown of her head, she retrieved her glass of club soda from where she had left it on the table, took her mile-high pile of assorted cakes and retreated to the far side of the room where she could eat in peace, removed from the crowd. The ballroom of the Four Seasons Austin was packed with her father’s supporters, the majority of them talking politics, naturally, which was probably Lanie’s least favorite topic of conversation in the entire world. She would have rather talked about the mating habits of the luna moth, for heaven’s sake. Unfortunately, she being the daughter of a Texas governor, it seemed as if everyone assumed she was as rabid about state government as Tom Meyers was. There were even a few of her father’s cronies who had dropped hints that Lanie herself might run for office one day.
As if.
She could think of scores of occupations she’d rather pursue than stateswoman. Of course, there were those who might argue that her current occupation was hobnobber, which wasn’t that far off from politician.
Lanie just hadn’t figured out yet what she wanted to do with her life, that was all. Yes, at twenty-five she probably should have some vague notion of what path she wanted to follow—professionally, if nothing else. But she’d been groomed since childhood to be the daughter of a politician, and no one had ever encouraged her to stray from that path. Even in college, Lanie had majored in fine arts, not exactly a field of study that had made her highly employable. But she’d volunteered on both of her father’s gubernatorial campaigns, and she worked side by side with her mother in a number of charitable organizations, so she did stay busy. Income wasn’t exactly a problem, since the Meyerses were quite wealthy, and Lanie was what had commonly become referred to as a “trust-fund baby.”
Nevertheless, there were days when even she was appalled by her lack of contribution to the working world. Not that she wanted to set the world on fire or anything, but a person liked to think she was valuable somewhere, to someone, in some capacity.
No sooner had the thought unrolled in her head than Lanie glanced up from her plate to see someone very valuable indeed standing head and shoulders above a small group of people roughly twenty feet to her right. A member of the Fortune family, she realized, not at all surprised to find at least one of them in attendance tonight. Everyone in Texas knew who the Fortunes were, since they were one of the premier families of the state. It was only natural that they’d have an interest in state politics. And Lanie knew her father was presenting Ryan Fortune with the prestigious Hensley-Robinson Award later this month to honor and commemorate his many charitable contributions and volunteerism. The family no doubt wanted to reciprocate by showing their support for his campaign.
And how nice of them to send one of the yummy Fortune triplets as ambassador, Lanie thought. And how appropriate, too, since she herself had been a supporter of the Fortune triplets since she was a teenager. Just not in any political capacity.
Forget swooning over Leonardo and River in Tiger Beat and Teen People. Lanie, like so many Texas females her age, had found the Fortune triplets infinitely more worthy of admiration. She could remember more than one slumber party where copies of the newspaper and other local publications had been passed around so that all the girls could take turns cooing over photographs and stories about Steven, Clyde and Miles Fortune. Back then, the triplets were in their early twenties, eleven years older than Lanie and her friends. But everyone knew older men were so much more sophisticated and interesting than boys of twelve or thirteen. And the Fortune triplets had appealed to women of all ages.
Lanie did some quick math. She was twenty-five, so the triplets would be thirty-six now. She wondered which of the three she was looking at. Steven and Clyde, she’d read, had both recently married. But Miles, as far as she knew, was still free and clear. Not that she had any intention of approaching whichever Fortune this was, of course.
“Lanie, darling, there you are.”
At the sound of her name, Lanie glanced in the opposite direction to see her mother striding toward her, and she smiled. Although Lanie had inherited her parents’ blue eyes and blond hair, it was her mother she truly favored. But where Lanie’s hair was long and straight and golden blond, Luanne Meyers wore her tresses bobbed at chin length, and there was an equal amount of silver mingling with the gold these days.
The two women were also nearly an identical height—five feet six inches—and both wore the same dress size—eight. Not that they ever swapped outfits, even though Lanie lived with her parents at the governor’s mansion. Her mother’s taste in clothing was way too traditional and much too conservative, as befitted a Texas governor’s wife. Lanie certainly couldn’t see herself dressed in the pale, shapeless sheaths her mother favored, like the pearl-pink one she wore tonight, with no decoration and almost no jewelry. Lanie was much better suited to her little blue dress, and she had deliberately accessorized its plain design with flash and dazzle, in the form of a spectacular crystal necklace and chandelier earrings that glittered like diamonds when she stepped into the brighter lights of the ballroom.
It wasn’t that Lanie was ostentatious. But she did rather enjoy being the center of attention. Just not when she was shoveling cake into her mouth. Hence, her temporary retreat to the darker regions of the ballroom.
But her mother had found her, in spite of her efforts to remain hidden, Lanie thought. And there were a number of photographers from the press in attendance. Probably standing around pushing cake into her mouth wasn’t such a good idea, all things considered. The last thing she wanted was to have some huge photo of herself showing up in the tabloids, her mouth wide open to accept an enormous gobble of cake. So, reluctantly, Lanie surrendered her still-half-full plate to the empty tray of a passing waiter. And she watched in wistful silence as he carried away the chocolate torte she hadn’t even tasted. Maybe, she thought, if no one was looking, she could fill a to-go box before leaving.
“Hello, Mother,” she said as Luanne Meyers drew nearer. Automatically, Lanie turned her cheek to receive her mother’s kiss, then dutifully kissed her mother’s cheek in return.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” her mother asked.
Without even realizing she was doing it, Lanie turned to look at her Fortune again. Whichever triplet it was continued to converse with one of the men in the group, and she smiled as she watched him. Oh, yes. She was enjoying herself very much.
She nodded in response to her mother’s question, then surreptitiously tilted her head toward the man she had been observing. “Do you know which Fortune triplet that is?” she asked.
Her mother followed Lanie’s gaze, and she smiled, too, when she found her target. Even her mother’s generation wasn’t immune to the triplets’ handsomeness, Lanie thought.
“I believe that’s Miles,” her mother said, turning back to Lanie. “He’s a friend of Dennis’s.”
Dennis Stovall, her father’s campaign manager, Lanie translated.
“Plus, you can tell by the dimple,” her mother added. “For some reason, Miles is the only one of the three boys who has it.”
Ah, yes, the dimple, Lanie thought. The utterly adorable, swoonworthy dimple. She turned to look at the man again, just as he was throwing his head back to laugh. Yep. There it was. That was Miles Fortune, for sure. And he was utterly adorable. Not to mention swoonworthy.
As if she’d just spoken the thought loud enough for him to hear, he suddenly glanced over and met her gaze. His eyes widened for a split second, as if he were surprised to find himself being watched. Then he smiled, which brought out that luscious dimple again, and lifted his wineglass toward Lanie, as if toasting her. She blushed, but she wasn’t sure whether it was because he’d caught her ogling him, or because he was flirting with her, or because of the errant thoughts that suddenly exploded in her brain. Unable to help herself, though, she smiled back and lifted her own glass of club soda in silent salute.
My brush with fame, she thought. Sharing a smile and a silent toast with Miles Fortune. The sad thing was, even that minuscule contact was enough that it would probably sustain her for the rest of her life. She really did need to get out more and meet people. Male people. Male people who might eventually come to mean more to her than someone with whom to have a good time.
It wasn’t that Lanie was shallow. And it wasn’t that she feared commitment. But her upbringing and lifestyle hadn’t exactly lent themselves to forming long-standing, serious relationships. Not with the opposite sex. Not with anyone, really.
Of course, much of that was probably due to the fact that her father had spent virtually Lanie’s entire life building a political career with his wife at his side, something that had prevented both him and Luanne from being the kind of parents Lanie would have liked them to be. It wasn’t that her parents hadn’t been attentive and affectionate when they were around—they had been. The times Lanie had spent in their company had always been wonderful. Those times had just ended too soon.
So Lanie had never been good at establishing and maintaining sturdy relationships with other people. And she hadn’t exactly been molded into the most responsible, reliable person, either. She’d just never known what it meant to have boundaries. Since no one had ever really said no to her while she was growing up, she had always been one to act on whim. Hey, why not? No one had ever told her she couldn’t.
So when she was five years old and had wanted a kitten, she’d brought one home from a neighbor’s litter and had kept it hidden in her room…until the smell from the closet alerted the housekeeper to the animal’s presence. Well, how was Lanie supposed to know kittens needed a litter box?
And when she was ten and had decided after bedtime one night that she wanted to spend the night with her friend Susan, she’d packed her backpack and crept down the stairs so as not to wake her nanny—her parents, of course, hadn’t been at home—then she’d ridden her bike the two miles to Susan’s house. Well, how was she supposed to know the nanny would be frantic about her disappearance? The woman wasn’t even supposed to know she was gone!
And when she was fifteen and had figured it was time to learn to drive a car, she’d gotten into her daddy’s convertible and started driving. Well, how was she supposed to know how to work a stick shift? Crashing through the garage door that way could have happened to anyone!
Regardless of how often Lanie had found herself in a bind, though, her father had always been there to bail her out of it, one way or another. Either he’d used his money or his influence—or both—and somehow, the problem just always went away. Looking back, Lanie supposed it had just been easier and less time-consuming for her father to do that than to sit down and talk with his daughter and try to help her learn from her mistakes. He was a very busy man, after all. He had a lot of important things to do. And a lot of important places to go. And a lot of important people to meet. He took his obligations very seriously.
Unlike Lanie, who was never serious for a minute. Life was for living, however she wanted to live it. She’d decided a long time ago that she’d just do what she wanted when she wanted to do it, and she’d never be serious for a moment.
Unfortunately, no one tended to take a person like that seriously. So any romantic relationships Lanie had over the years ended up being frivolous. Oh, sure, she always liked the guys she got involved with—one or two of them she’d even loved for a little while—and she always had a good time with them. But that was all those associations ever were—a good time. Of course, some had ended on a sour note when Lanie found out the guy’s only interest in her was as a conduit to her father or her family fortune. But even those guys had been surprisingly easy to get over.
Fun. That was all Lanie had ever wanted out of life. And that was all she ever really looked for. And invariably, in one way or another, she found it.
Now Luanne Meyers caught Lanie’s free hand in her own, bringing her daughter’s attention back around to where she was standing. “There’s someone here tonight who wants to talk to you,” her mother told her, her eyes fairly sparkling with glee, her lips turning up at the ends with just the hint of a secret smile.
Uh-oh, Lanie thought. The last time her mother’s eyes had sparkled like that, it had been because she was about to introduce her daughter to an eighty-two-year-old millionaire rancher who’d just buried his fifth wife.
“Um, who?” Lanie asked warily.
“Oneida Steadmore-Duckworth,” her mother told her, beaming.
Yikes, Lanie thought. Oneida Steadmore-Duckworth was the chairwoman of the annual Women of the Lone Star charity auction. If she wanted to talk to Lanie, it was because she wanted to put her on a committee of some kind. And Lanie had hit her committee quota for the year, thank you very much. Six months ago, as a matter of fact.
“Tell her I’ll be right there,” Lanie said. “I need to go to the ladies’ room first and make myself presentable.”
It was only a small lie, she consoled herself. After three club sodas, she did, without question, need to go to the ladies’ room. And she did doubtless need to make herself presentable, since she’d been pigging out on desserts for the last half hour. And she would certainly be right there—only after Mrs. Steadmore-Duckworth had moved on to another unsuspecting victim.
Before excusing herself from her mother, Lanie stole another glance in the direction of Miles Fortune, only to find that he had disappeared. She scanned the crowd for some sign of him, but he was gone.
Ah, well, she thought. Easy come, easy go.
Scurrying off to the ladies’ room, Lanie took her time seeing to her various needs. Then she tucked a few errant strands of hair back into the topknot and adjusted the shoulder-length tendrils that dangled free. She applied a fresh layer of Rouge Rage to her mouth and dabbed at a smudge of eyeliner beneath her lashes. She tugged her little blue dress back into place and smoothed a hand over the silky, barely there fabric. Then she glanced at her diamond wristwatch and sighed.
Damn. It had only been ten minutes since she’d left her mother. No way would Mrs. Steadmore-Duckworth be put off yet. That woman was tenacious when it came to organizing committees. Now Lanie was going to have to go to the extra trouble of “accidentally” getting lost on her way back to the ballroom.
Exiting the ladies’ room, she veered right when she should have turned left to get back to the ballroom and made her way down a hallway identical to the one she had traveled after leaving the ballroom. Gee, if she wasn’t careful, she really would get lost, she thought. She’d never realized how big this hotel was, or how so many parts of it resembled so many other parts of it. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all….
Miles Fortune couldn’t believe he’d allowed himself to be dragged to a $100-a-plate fund-raiser where the focal point of the event was dessert. And not normal dessert like apple pie or peach cobbler or chocolate chip cookies, either. Now, had it been a bourbon whiskey tasting, he could understand going to all the trouble and expense. But truffles? Tiramisu? Sorbet? Soufflé? What the hell kind of self-respecting male attended an event where such words were commonplace, without even putting on a disguise and assuming a fake name first?
And why did desserts have such sissy names to begin with? Miles wondered further as he looked around. Even a perfectly good word like punch got ruined at an event like this by having someone put the word fruit in front of it. If he ruled the world, after-dinner fare would have names like Cherry Flamethrower or Coconut Jackhammer or good old-fashioned Rocky Road. Hell, where was a good beer pie when you needed one?
“Miles, you must try the chocolate bombe.”
Yeah, Chocolate Bomb, that’d be a good one, too, he thought. Oh, wait. Evidently, that was one.
He turned to the woman who had just suggested it, Jenny Stovall, who’d been on the planning committee of the event. She was also the woman who’d roped Miles into attending it. Her husband, Dennis, was Governor Meyers’s campaign manager, and a friend of Miles’s from college. Jenny, Miles saw, was busily sampling one of everything she’d been able to get her hands on. But since the normally petite brunette was seven months pregnant with twins, and therefore eating for three, he supposed it wasn’t unexpected that she would have enough food on her plate for six. Or maybe it was just that her serving of chocolate bomb had exploded all over everything else.
“What the hell is a chocolate bomb?” he asked warily, just in case it did have the potential to detonate.
“Not sure,” Jenny said. “Ice cream, though, for certain. And chocolate, of course. This white stuff seems to be whipped cream. Have some. You’ll love it.”
“I’d rather look for the bar,” he said, gazing at his still-full wineglass and thinking that a bourbon whiskey tasting would be pretty good about now. “The real bar, I mean. Not one of the ones they set up for this thing. Those don’t serve what a man likes to drink. Not a Texan, anyway.” No, all those bars had were wine and champagne and stuff in triangular-shaped glasses that were pale, pretty colors Miles didn’t want to get within fifty feet of.
“The real bar is through the far exit,” Jenny told him without breaking stride in her eating, waving her fork airily toward the other side of the room. “To the right and down a ways.”
Miles eyed her suspiciously. “You know, Jenny, it occurs to me that a woman who’s seven months pregnant with twins shouldn’t know where the bar is.”
“Of course she should,” Jenny countered, “when that’s where the closest women’s room is.”
Miles supposed that would mean something to another woman—especially another pregnant woman—and manfully decided not to dwell on it himself. Instead, he took Jenny’s directions to heart, and after making sure she had someone else to talk to, he excused himself and wandered off in that direction. As he went, he found himself scanning the crowd, looking for someone. A female someone, to be precise. A female someone with blond hair twisted onto the top of her head in a way that made a man’s fingers itch to loosen it, and with eyes that were as blue and enormous as her dress was blue and tiny.
He wondered who the young woman was with whom he’d shared an impromptu toast. And he wondered why he was still thinking about her now, a full fifteen minutes after the fact. Out of sight usually meant out of mind for Miles when it came to women. He was a firm believer in the “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with” philosophy. Probably mostly because he’d never been in love. Not a heart-stopping, storybook, ever-after kind of love, anyway. So loving the one he was with was about as good as it got for him.
Tonight, however, for this occasion, he wasn’t with anyone. Which meant his recent, brief, if silent, exchange with the blonde was, for now, the equivalent to a love that would span all time.
As he threaded his way carefully through the crowd, Miles wondered where she might have gone. She’d looked the way he felt—out of his element—and that as much as anything, he supposed, had cemented a weird sort of bond between them. He knew he shouldn’t feel uncomfortable here, though. He was a Fortune, after all, and no stranger to wealth and refinement. And God knew, he’d always been one to jump at any excuse to party.
But Miles wasn’t much one for the political crowd. Sure, he cared about his country and the great state of Texas, but both had been moving along just fine for centuries without his input and would continue to do so for centuries after he was gone. He figured that as long as he was reading the newspaper regularly to keep himself informed and voting his conscience every time election day came around, then he was doing his civic duty. He’d just leave the actual running of things to the people who knew more about it than he did.
But he’d been in Austin on business this weekend and had, as he always did, made plans to see Dennis and Jenny while he was in town. This event for the governor was too big a deal for either of them to miss, though, so Miles had agreed to meet them here instead of for dinner somewhere, which was their normal arrangement. Once Jenny delivered those twins, she and Dennis weren’t going to have a lot of free time to do things like dinner out with their still blissfully single and delightedly child-free friends.
He smiled at the thought of his friend Dennis becoming a dad. The guy was suited to it. In fact, Miles wondered why he and Jenny hadn’t done this years ago. He admired the two of them for their commitment to each other and to the family they were creating, but he didn’t understand it for a minute. Not that Miles didn’t think family was important. He was a Fortune, after all, and to the Fortunes, family was everything.
He hadn’t always known that, though. His grandfather, Mark Fortune, had estranged himself from the rest of the Fortune clan years ago, both literally and figuratively. And Miles had done most of his growing up in New York, where his parents had moved before he was born so that his father could pursue a career in finance, and Patrick and Lacey both could work for the social and political causes they felt passionately about. By the time Miles had hit adolescence, however, his parents had reunited with the rest of the Fortune clan, and Miles and Steven and Clyde had begun spending every summer in Texas. It was those summers here that had caused the three boys to fall in love with the place, and when they’d come of age, they’d invested together in the Flying Aces, a modest ranch near Red Rock.
Steven, however, still feeling restless, had struck out on his own and purchased his own spread, which had only recently become habitable, outside Austin. That was where he and his new wife, Amy, were living now. But Miles and Clyde still called the Flying Aces home. And so did Clyde’s new wife, Jessica. Fortunately, the main house was large and separated into suites for each of the triplets. Clyde and Jessica had their own space in one part of the house, and Miles had his in another. Which was good, because he had a feeling Clyde and Jessica were already talking about starting a family.
But Miles didn’t have any desire to grow his own branch on the family tree, even in light of the way that tree suddenly seemed to be leafing out. Not only were two thirds of the triplets now committed to matrimony, but their sister Violet was engaged, too. And their oldest brother, Jack, had just married recently and settled in Texas. There was no way, however, that Miles would be upholding that particular family tradition. He was having too much fun as a single man. And he didn’t want to be responsible for anyone but himself.
He found the bar easily enough after following Jenny’s directions, and ordered a bourbon straight up. Restless, though, he didn’t feel like sitting at the bar and drinking alone. But he didn’t feel like returning to the fund-raiser, either. Wrapping his fingers around the heavy glass tumbler, he turned—
—and saw a flash of sapphire-blue speeding past the bar’s entrance on the other side of the room.
Instinctively, Miles headed toward the door and walked through it, just in time to see that flash of blue disappear around a corner at the end of the hall. And although he couldn’t be positive, he was pretty sure there had been a blond topknot attached to the woman wearing it.
In a word, hmm…
There was a glass-enclosed sunroom at the end of that hallway, he knew. And it had been a nice evening, cool and crisp and cloudless, when he’d arrived at the hotel. No doubt it had turned into one of those crystal-clear nights by now, the kind where the constellations were all very easy to find.
Yeah, he thought as his fingers wrapped more firmly around his glass and he began to walk in the same direction as the blue dress, maybe a little stroll would do him good….
Two
Okay, she was well and truly lost now, no mistaking or faking it. As Lanie stood in the middle of a darkened sunroom, gazing at the inky, star-spattered sky through the glass ceiling overhead, she asked herself where she could have possibly gone wrong.
Probably, she immediately answered herself, it was when she had decided to deliberately avoid Mrs. Steadmore-Duckworth by telling her mother a fib.
Bad karma will out.
Still, her bad karma couldn’t be all that bad, she decided, since it had led her to a room that was quiet, reflective and pretty, a welcome contrast to the noisy, bustling, extravagant party she’d just left. She hesitated before turning around to leave, attracted to the almost Zen-like serenity of the sunroom. It was more than a little appealing for someone who had survived as hectic a day as Lanie had. Maybe she should just take advantage of a peaceful moment and enjoy it for a few minutes before venturing back to the raucous fund-raiser.
At night like this, the sunroom was really more of a moon room. And the moon was indeed visible, shining like a newly minted silver dollar smack-dab in the middle of the dark sky above. Beyond and around it, stars glittered like tiny gemstones. If Lanie focused very hard, she thought she could see the milky gleam of the galaxy threading its way through the darkness, too. Tables and chairs dotted the room, unused at the moment, but their glass hurricane centerpieces winked in the moonlight as if a few stray stars had spilled into them. Here and there, along the perimeter of the room, pots of ferns and trailing bougainvillea hung from what, in the dim light, appeared to be magic. Coupled with the night sky above, the view made Lanie feel as if she had stumbled into a lush, deserted jungle. The only thing that prevented the impression from gelling completely was that somewhere behind her she could hear the faint strains of jazz—something soft and mellow and perfect for the nighttime hours, the metallic swish of brushes on drum skins inciting an echoing purr of delight that rumbled up from somewhere deep inside her.
It wasn’t easy being a jazz fan in Texas, where country and western and southern-fried rock reigned. Someone here at the Four Seasons must like it, too, she thought. Or maybe her karma really wasn’t so bad after all, and the Fates had simply seen fit to reward her for some good deed she couldn’t remember doing.
For another long moment, Lanie only stood in the center of the deserted sunroom, gazing up at the sky, enjoying the soft sound of music. What was the harm? By now, her mother would have decided she’d been waylaid by another partygoer and would be promising Mrs. Steadmore-Duckworth that she’d make sure her daughter called her first thing in the morning. And Lanie would, she silently promised, her guilty conscience gnawing at her. She could fit one more committee into her year, provided it was for a good cause. It was the least she could do for Mrs. Steadmore-Duckworth, since avoiding the woman had given Lanie a few moments of peace and quiet in an otherwise turbulent world.
Funny how rewards came out of nowhere sometimes. Good thing she had the good sense to enjoy it.
Not sure what compelled her to do it, Lanie strode to the other side of the room, halting between an especially dense fern and an especially fragrant bougainvillea. Gazing through the window, she thought she caught a glimpse of movement outside, in the bushes that lay just beyond the glass. She noticed then that the entire sunroom was surrounded by outdoor greenery, which, like the potted plants inside, added to the exotic feel of the place. No doubt something small and hungry was out there scavenging about, she thought. Though she doubted it was any more exotic than an armadillo. She placed her open hand against the cool glass of the window, spreading her fingers wide in an effort to block some of the reflection of the light behind her, to see if she could tell what was out there. Narrowing her eyes, she waited to see if the movement would come again.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize there was someone here.”
Lanie spun around quickly at the sound of the masculine voice, startled not only by the disruption to her solitary contentment, but also because she had genuinely forgotten she was in a public place full of people, any of whom could have wandered into the sunroom off the busy hallway beyond the door. Startled turned into delighted, however, when she realized who the masculine voice belonged to. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now, and she had no trouble making out with—uh, she meant making out—Miles Fortune. Of all people. Well, well, well.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I was actually just getting ready to leave.”
And why did she tell him that? she wondered. A handsome man she’d found fascinating for years shows up in a room where she’d have his undivided attention, and she tells him she has to be going? What was the matter with her?
“Don’t let me scare you off,” he said.
As if, Lanie thought. He was way too yummy to be scary. Most of the photos she’d seen of him had depicted him in casual clothes, everything from grubby ranch denim to preppy golf shirts and trousers to blazers with open-collar shirts and Dockers. Tonight, though, he’d dressed for the formal fund-raiser in a dark suit with a plum-colored dress shirt and a dappled silk necktie knotted at his throat.
Snazzy, she couldn’t help thinking. Not a bad dresser for a guy who made his living chasing cows. She wondered if he had a woman stashed somewhere who helped him with his wardrobe. She’d read enough about Miles Fortune to know he never stayed with one woman for very long and, in fact, had dated some of the flashiest, most sophisticated women in Texas. But he had a sister and female cousins, and everyone knew those Fortunes were very close. Maybe one of his feminine relatives helped him make his sartorial selections. Most men couldn’t be bothered with that kind of thing. Especially those whose chief interests were bovine in nature.
Then again, part of Miles Fortune’s appeal to all those flashy, sophisticated women was how great he looked all the time, Lanie reminded herself. So which was a result of the other? One of those chicken-or-the-egg things she’d probably be better off not thinking about, she supposed.
“You didn’t scare me off,” she said, remembering that he’d made a comment that had invited a reply.
He smiled in response, a smile that was sweet and dreamy and—there was just no escaping it—droolworthy. Lanie battled the temptation to swipe her hand over her mouth and smiled back.
“Good,” he said. “Because the last thing I’d want to do is scare off a nice girl like you.”
A nice girl, Lanie echoed to herself, turning fully around now to face him. Funny, she hadn’t been called that for a long time. Maybe not ever. Whenever she was mentioned in the society pages or elsewhere, she was usually tagged with some cutesy nickname by whomever was doing the mentioning, and rarely were the nicknames in any way appropriate—or earned. Every time Lanie visited a new town, she was awarded some new, usually alliterative label she didn’t deserve. The Dallas Delilah. The Houston Heartbreaker. The Fort Worth Firebrand. The San Antonio Seductress. The Amarillo Angel. The Corpus Christi Cutie. Or just the all-inclusive Texas Tornado. And then there was the one she had to suffer when she was at home in Austin: Government Goddess.
Oh, all right. So maybe she did kind of like that last one.
At any rate, “nice girl” had never been anywhere in the mix. Not even when she’d gone to Nacogdoches. No, there she’d been The Knockout. So hearing Miles Fortune refer to her as a nice girl now made a little ripple of pleasure purl right through her.
“Hi, I’m Miles Fortune,” he introduced himself. With a hint of self-consciousness—though whether real or manufactured to put her at ease, Lanie couldn’t have said—he strode slowly across the room to where she stood, stopping when there was still a good three feet separating them, obviously not wanting her to feel threatened by him. Then, looking uncertain about how welcome the gesture would be, he extended his hand for her to shake it.
Lanie took it automatically, totally comfortable with the masculine form of address, because she’d been shaking the hands of her father’s colleagues since she was a little girl. Something like that had always presented a great photo opportunity, after all. Besides, she didn’t feel at all threatened by Miles Fortune, since he was in no way a threatening guy.
“I know who you are,” she told him, still smiling warmly as she gave his hand a spirited shake.
He arched his dark eyebrows in surprise at the comment, even though Lanie was certain that what she had said couldn’t possibly come as a surprise to him. “Then you have me at a disadvantage,” he replied, still holding her hand, even though he’d stopped shaking it. “Because I don’t know who you are.”
It took a moment for the comment to register with Lanie, because she honestly didn’t think anyone had ever said such a thing to her before. Invariably, people knew who she was: the governor’s daughter. Even before her father had ascended to that lofty position, people had still known who Lanie was. When the Meyerses had lived in Dallas, she’d been the mayor’s daughter. Before that, in the third district, she’d been the alderman’s daughter. Her father had held a political office of one kind or another since before she’d been born, and Lanie had always attended functions with him and her mother where she had been introduced as his daughter.
Which made her realize, perhaps for the first time, just how intrinsically her identity was linked to whatever position her father happened to hold. Her social life before turning eighteen had always been limited to functions that were also attended by her parents, something due largely to matters of security, she knew. Even before her father had climbed the higher rungs of the political ladder, he’d deliberately stayed visible in the public eye in order to reach those rungs, and he’d made sure his family was visible, too, because it made him more sympathetic.
Ironically, however, that public life had brought with it an essential need for privacy. Anyone who held public office might become a target for some lunatic. And, by extension, so might that person’s family. So Tom and Luanne Meyers had made sure their young daughter was well protected at all times. That had meant keeping her out of public when they weren’t with her, something that had rather limited Lanie’s social life as an adolescent.
Lanie had never resented it, though. Well, not as much as she probably could or should have. She had just shrugged it off as a simple misfortune of birth. She had had benefits that a lot of teenage girls would never have, and that had provided her some compensation. Instead of a single bedroom, she’d had a suite of rooms at home. Her wardrobe had been full of party dresses and shoes for the appearances she made with her parents. She went to the salon twice a month to have her hair and nails done. She’d met the members of both *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys when they’d played Dallas. And she’d visited movie sets and met television stars. For not having a social life, Lanie had been a big part of Texas society.
And she’d reassured herself by promising herself that she’d take advantage of adulthood once she turned eighteen, then strike out on her own and make her own impression on the world. But even over the past several years, when Lanie had been struggling to stand on her own two feet, she’d still never found herself in a situation where people didn’t know who she was: the governor’s daughter.
The realization didn’t set well with her.
And maybe that was why she decided not to tell Miles Fortune her name. Well, not her full name. Because suddenly it was kind of nice not being recognized. Suddenly it was kind of nice not being the governor’s daughter. Suddenly it was kind of nice just to be—
“Lanie,” she said, noticing how she and Miles still hadn’t released each other’s hands. “I’m Lanie.”
She could tell by his expression that he was waiting for her to give him her last name, too. And when she didn’t, she could tell by his expression that he thought it was because she was a woman meeting a man for the first time and feeling cautious. He didn’t press the matter, however. And something about that made her like him even more.
“Lanie,” he said, smiling. “Pretty name.”
And she could tell by his expression that time that her name wasn’t the only thing he thought was pretty. But he didn’t press that matter, either. And something about that made her like him even more, too.
“Thanks,” she told him. “It’s short for Elaine, which was my grandmother’s name.”
“It suits you,” he said, still smiling, still not releasing her hand.
Not that Lanie minded.
But he didn’t clarify which name suited her, she noted. That was interesting, because to her way of thinking, the two names had nothing in common, even though one was derived from the other. She’d always thought of Elaine as the name of an elegant, refined, cerebral brunette. Lanie was a party girl, plain and simple, laughing and dressed in bright colors and always the last to leave the dance floor. Lanie had always suited her much better, she’d always thought. Surely that was the one Miles was referring to, since he’d said it was pretty.
Still neither seemed in any hurry to release the other’s hand, something Lanie decided not to worry too much about. Mostly because Miles’s hand in hers just felt very, very nice, and it had been a long time since she’d held hands with a guy. The fact that she was doing so now for reasons that were in no way romantic was beside the point. Just looking at Miles Fortune made her feel romantic. Besides, this was only a brief little interlude that would be over all too quickly, and soon she’d only have memories of her chance meeting with Miles to keep her company. She wanted to make sure she had as many of them as she could to treasure. It wasn’t every day a woman got to meet a Fortune, after all.
But as much as Lanie was enjoying herself at the moment, she knew better than to think that this momentary chance encounter would turn into anything more. For one thing, she wasn’t such a lucky person that she ran into dreamy men like Miles Fortune every day. For another thing, the reason Miles Fortune was so dreamy was because that was where he dwelled—in Lanie’s dreams. In reality, he wasn’t the kind of man to let anything with a woman go much beyond the chance-encounter stage. And although Lanie Meyers might have the reputation for being a wild child, and although she might have a string of suggestive nicknames following her around Texas, when all was said and done, she really did know better than to get involved with a man like him. She liked to party. She didn’t like getting her heart broken.
“So you had to escape the governor’s bash, too, huh?” Miles asked now, referring to their earlier silent toast.
“Well, it was getting a bit crowded in there,” she said.
Finally, finally, she made herself glance down at their still-joined hands, then back up at Miles with a meaningful look. He mimicked her actions, grinned and, with obvious reluctance, released her fingers. Lanie pulled her hand back unwillingly, but she figured it was silly for the two of them to stand there as if they’d been bonded with Superglue. People should know each other at least a little bit before epoxying themselves to each other. He buried the hand that had held hers in his trouser pocket, and lifted the other, holding a glass of amber-colored liquor to his mouth for a meager sip.
Lanie watched, fascinated, as he completed the gesture, noting everything she could about him in that brief, unguarded moment. How the bright moonlight filtering through the glass ceiling overhead glinted off of the heavy onyx ring on his third finger, flickered in the cut crystal of the glass and winked off the gold cuff link fixed in his shirt. She noticed, too, the confident way his fingers curled around the glass, the square, blunt-cut but well-kept fingernails, the dark hair on the back of his hand, making that part of him so different from that part of her. Her own hands were pale and slender, the nails expertly manicured and painted bright pink. Then her gaze traveled to his face, and she saw the scant shadow of day-old beard that darkened his angular jaw, the perfect, elegant slope of his aristocratic nose, the thick, black lashes that put her own heavily mascaraed ones to shame. As he lowered his glass, she remarked the beautifully formed mouth, how his lower lip was just a shade plumper than the upper one, giving him a sort of brooding look that was at odds with his laughing brown eyes.
She hadn’t thought it would be possible for Miles Fortune to be even more handsome up close than he was from a distance. Most men who were that perfect-looking from afar became a bit less so when one drew nearer. Their eyes weren’t quite as clear as first thought, or their mouths were a bit lopsided, or their complexions were marred by some kind of imperfection. But not Miles Fortune. Up close, the flawlessness of his good looks was only cemented more completely.
After lowering his glass, his gaze met Lanie’s again, and he opened that beautiful mouth with the clear intention of saying something else. But he halted before uttering a word, his eyes widening when they met hers. And that was when Lanie realized her fascination with him must be written all over her face, and that she wasn’t the only one who could tell what others were thinking by looking at them.
Which was not good, since what she was thinking about just then didn’t bear airing anyplace other than in her own fantasies. Mostly because it involved Miles Fortune’s face. More specifically, it involved her touching Miles Fortune’s face. And then moving on to other body parts.
Immediately she snapped her eyes closed and shook her head once, as if trying to physically dislodge her wayward thoughts. “Um,” she began eloquently. “Ah,” she added articulately. “Er,” she then concluded astutely.
She heard Miles chuckle and opened her eyes to find him grinning at her again. But he was enough of a gentleman to pretend he hadn’t just caught her mentally undressing him, or noticed the sudden lapse in her vocabulary. Which went beyond making her like him even more and pretty much ensured that she would be head over heels in love with him for the rest of her life.
Damn. That was going to be tough to explain to her future husband. Whoever the poor sap turned out to be.
“So what brought you to the governor’s gig tonight?” Miles asked, thankfully changing the subject.
Then Lanie remembered they’d been talking about the governor’s gig all along, and the only thing that had changed in the last few minutes had been her body temperature. “I came with my parents,” she said, congratulating herself for having spoken the truth. “How about you?” she hurried to add, before he could ask her who her parents were.
“Dennis Stovall, the governor’s campaign manager, is a friend of mine from college,” Miles said. “I was in Austin on business this week and gave them a call the way I always do. They invited me to tag along tonight.”
Right, Lanie thought, remembering her mother’s earlier remark. She made a mental note of Miles’s connection to Dennis and Jenny Stovall, thinking she might need it someday.
“So then you’ll have to leave Austin soon,” she surmised, “and go back to…”
Most of the Fortunes lived in Red Rock, Lanie knew. About twenty miles east of San Antonio, it hadn’t become just another bedroom community and had instead held on to its own individual charm. Lanie had visited the town twice. First with her parents, when her father was stumping for his original attempt at the governor’s mansion, eight years ago. He’d lost that election by a narrow margin, something that had only made him that much more determined to win next time around—which, of course, he had. But back when Lanie had visited Red Rock, she’d been a teenager, still enamored of the Fortune triplets, and more than a little excited to be visiting their home base. Mostly what she remembered from that brief visit was an enchanting little village, complete with town square—which was actually round, she remembered, but did claim the requisite white gazebo—and whose downtown claimed for focal features a café and a knitting shop.
Over the past five or six years, though, Red Rock had grown into a more bustling community, which Lanie had seen for herself when she’d gone there a second time last month as an emissary of her father to meet with Ryan Fortune with regard to his receiving the Hensley-Robinson Award. Its quaint Main Street had become a booming thoroughfare by then, one that included more upscale shops and restaurants. The café and knitting shop had still been thriving, though, so the town was maintaining its roots well.
Ryan Fortune’s ranch, the Double Crown, had been a Fortune family stronghold for decades, and lay just outside of Red Rock. Not far from it was the Flying Aces, which Miles Fortune and his brothers had built several years ago. Now, though, Steven Fortune lived near Austin. That was where her father’s party for Ryan would take place next month. Lanie was already looking forward to it. Not just because it promised to be a very nice event, but because she’d bet good money Miles Fortune would be there, too, and it might provide her with another opportunity to run into him for another momentary chance encounter.
Well, it might.
All right, all right, so Lanie’s fascination with the triplets hadn’t ended when her adolescence had. Sue her. Maybe someday she’d get back to Red Rock again. After all, it wasn’t that far from Austin. You never knew whom you might run into once you got there.
“Red Rock,” he said now, answering the question she already knew the answer to. “It’s near San Antonio. A small town. Making me a small-town guy. Pretty boring when you get right down to it.”
Oh, Lanie wouldn’t say that.
“Do you and your folks live here in Austin?” he asked.
“We do, actually,” she replied without thinking. Not that Miles was going to make the leap that she was the governor’s daughter by virtue of her living in Austin. Still, she didn’t want to give him too many hints.
“Nice city,” he said.
“It is,” she agreed.
“Did you grow up here?”
She shook her head, content now to be making small talk. “I grew up in Texas,” she said, “but I’ve lived in several different cities. Dallas, Fort Worth. I was born in Houston. And I spent a lot of my summers in Corpus Christi and Galveston.”
He smiled. “You really are a Texas girl.”
“How about you?” she asked, again already knowing the answer, but wanting to hear him speak it in that luscious, velvety baritone of his anyway.
“I actually grew up in New York City,” he said. “But I spent summers here when I was a kid, and I just fell in love with the place. Couldn’t wait to move out here permanently. Same for my brothers. The Fortunes have deep roots in Texas. Steven and Clyde and I wanted to put down roots right alongside them.”
“That’s right,” Lanie said, feigning a vague recollection. “I think I remember reading about you Fortunes from time to time,” she added in an oh-yeah-now-I-remember voice that she hoped masked her intense, youthful crush on him and his brothers. “You’re one of the triplets, aren’t you?”
He smiled this time in a way that let her know how genuinely delighted he was by being one of three—and which told her again which of the three he was, thanks to that yummy dimple. “Yeah, I am. But I have another, older, brother named Jack, and a younger sister, too. Violet.”
“That must be interesting being a triplet. Identical, at that. I can’t imagine another person in the world looking like me, let alone two other people in the world.”
He shrugged, but continued to smile. “I’ve never known what it’s like not to have two people in the world who look like me,” he said. “Besides, Steven and Clyde and I are totally different personality-wise. I think it’s kind of great, actually.”
“I can see that,” Lanie told him. “Five kids, though. That’s a big family you come from.”
“Don’t you have brothers or sisters?” he asked. And something about the way he asked it made Lanie think he’d never even considered the possibility that there might be people in the world who didn’t claim siblings at all.
She shook her head. “I’m an only child.”
“Wow,” he said, sounding impressed. “I can’t imagine what that must be like. To never have anyone to play with or scuffle with or talk to when you need to confide in someone.”
Lanie couldn’t imagine why his comment put her on the defensive, but it did. “I had lots of people to play with growing up,” she said, not quite able to mask the indignation that bubbled up inside her for some reason, and for which she was totally unprepared. “And I had lots of people to confide in. I was very, very popular at school and I was never, ever lonely.”
Even she could see how obvious it was that she was protesting way too much. And okay, so maybe she was stretching the truth, she immediately conceded. Maybe the lots she had mentioned was really only… Well, zero.
And, anyway, she had had friends. A few. Just because she’d never felt all that close to any of them didn’t mean anything.
“I’m sorry,” he hastily apologized. “I didn’t mean to imply that you were lonely. Or unpopular. Or anything like that.”
“Good,” Lanie said, still feeling a bit snippy, mostly because Miles Fortune had just struck a little too close to home, in spite of her protests to the contrary.
“Look, for what it’s worth,” he said, his voice softening some, “my family’s got its share of dysfunctions, too.”
“I never said my family was dysfunctional,” Lanie said, the indignation returning. “Because we’re not. We’re totally normal,” she assured him. “Totally, completely, utterly, absolutely normal.”
If one considered being the first family of Texas normal. If one considered having a father with his eye on the White House normal. If one considered having lived in almost a half-dozen cities by the time one was ten years old normal. If one considered having buckets of money and unlimited social status normal.
So maybe the Meyerses weren’t exactly normal. They certainly weren’t dysfunctional. Well, no more than any normal family.
Now Miles laughed outright. “I didn’t mean to imply that you’d been neglected and mistreated,” he said. “I just meant—” He blew out an exasperated breath. “Ah, hell. I’m sorry, Lanie.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” she said, letting go of her uneasiness. “I guess, really, my family isn’t all that normal. But it’s not a bad family.”
“Neither is mine,” he said. “There are just times when I wish they’d been more…” He shrugged, then smiled again. “Normal,” he concluded.
“What do you mean?”
Belatedly, she realized what a personal, inappropriate question it was to ask him. The two of them had just met, after all, even if Lanie had known who Miles Fortune was for years. It was none of her business what the Fortune family dynamics were out of the public eye. Or even in the public eye, really. Unfortunately, thanks to reality television and infotainment shows, no one’s life was really private anymore. Voyeurism had become a real spectator sport in this country. And Miles was the one who’d brought it up, she reminded herself. Not that that made it okay for Lanie to pry.
But he didn’t seem offended by the question. On the contrary, he told her readily enough, “My parents were—and still are—very busy people, and sometimes they got stretched pretty thin. Don’t get me wrong. We always knew how much they loved us, and family was more important to my folks than anything. But with five kids and being passionate about so many things, they needed more hours in the day. I just would have liked to have them around more. Does that make sense?”
Oh, it made perfect sense to Lanie. Not so much about the Fortunes. But she knew herself what it was like to have too-busy parents who weren’t always around. It was hard to be resentful, though, because she knew they loved her, and what they were doing was to make her life better as much as their own. But it was hard to understand that when you were just a kid.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” she said in response to Miles’s question, not sure when she’d made the decision to speak aloud. “My folks are like that, too. They have important stuff to do. They’re important people,” she added.
“Same here,” Miles said. “Good people, but busy people.”
Lanie and Miles began to talk a lot after that, about so many things. Their childhoods, their schooling, their families. Things they hoped to do in the future, things they wished they had never done in the past. By the end of an hour together, they were seated at one of the tables in the corner of the sunroom as comfortably as if they were enjoying dinner at a restaurant. Miles had gone to the bar for another drink and returned with not only a glass of wine for Lanie, as well, but a book of matches to light the candle on the table so that the two of them would have some light.
Gradually, it occurred to Lanie that this was, without question, the most enjoyable evening she’d ever spent anywhere, with anyone. Miles was just so easy to talk to, and something inside both of them connected in a way that felt easy, natural and right. She kept telling herself she needed to get back to the fund-raiser, that her parents would be looking for her. Then she’d remind herself that it was still early, that these things usually lasted till well past midnight and that she could spare a little more time to talk to Miles.
Unfortunately, just as Lanie was thinking that maybe she wouldn’t go back to the fund-raiser ever again—or anywhere else where Miles Fortune wasn’t—their conversation came to an abrupt halt. Because that was when the fern hanging immediately behind him and just above his head suddenly snapped free of its mooring, sending what looked like its entire contents raining down onto his head, his shoulders and into his jacket and shirt. In fact, she felt more than a little dirt splatter her own face and hair as it cascaded over Miles, skittering over her bare shoulders and working its way down the front of her dress.
For a moment, neither of them spoke, or moved, or blinked. They just sat there, frozen in the moon-kissed and candlelit darkness, their hands held up impotently to stop what had already finished happening. Or maybe they were surrendering to the inevitable, Lanie couldn’t help thinking, whatever that inevitable might be. In any event, she suspected they both looked pretty foolish. Miles must have thought so, too, because in the next moment, as one, they both began to laugh. Hard.
Miles, gentleman that he was—however involuntarily in this case—took the worst of the hit, she saw. Where her own dress would probably be fine after a thorough shaking, his jacket and shirt might very well be goners. Little piles of soil perched on each of his shoulders like epaulets, and a veritable pyramid sat atop his head. Without thinking, he gave his hair a good shake, toppling the pyramid and sending a good bit of it down on Lanie. She gasped as she jumped up from her seat and took a few steps backward. Miles halted immediately, standing to help her. But that just sent more dirt flying.
“Oh, man, I am so sorry,” he apologized. But he didn’t quite manage to hide his grin. “I didn’t mean to get you even dirtier.”
Instead of being offended, Lanie began to laugh again. “I don’t know that it’s possible for either one of us to get dirtier at this point,” she told him. She looked at the offending planter, still swinging haphazardly behind him. “How on earth did that happen?”
He turned around, too, to inspect the culprit, and Lanie was surprised to see it hadn’t quite emptied, since there was still dirt trickling out of it. The poor fern, though, was a definite casualty, lying in a heap on the floor behind him.
“I have no idea,” he said when he turned back around. “Must have had a loose link in the chain or something.” He shook his arms this time, less vigorously than he had his head, and dirt tumbled off of him quite liberally.
“I guess we should be grateful they hadn’t watered the plants for a while,” she said, fighting another fit of giggles. “Otherwise it might have been a mudslide. I hope you didn’t pay a lot for that jacket.”
“It wasn’t the jacket that was expensive,” he said.
“No?”
He shook his head slowly in response…something that just made more dirt fall to his shoulders and into the garment in question. “No, it was the whole suit,” he said. Thankfully, he didn’t specify a price, but Lanie, who had an excellent eye for fashion, figured it had been at least four figures.
“What about you?” he said, jutting his chin up in the direction of her person. “Are you going to be able to salvage that dress?”
She shrugged…and felt the dirt in her bodice shift into her bra. Okay, so maybe she’d taken a worse hit than she’d thought. “What, this old thing?” she asked with a smile, even though she’d only worn the dress once before. “I dust with this.”
He laughed outright at that and began brushing halfheartedly at his shirt again. “We can’t go back into the party like this,” he said. “Not only do we look a mess, but people will wonder what the hell we’ve been up to all this time. It won’t look good.”
“And people do tend to gossip a lot after an event like this,” Lanie concurred wearily. She, too, began to brush at her clothing again, but really, when all was said and done, she wasn’t that big a mess. Miles had far more to worry about than she did.
“Give me your jacket,” she said. “I’ll try to shake out as much as I can. Maybe if you free your shirttail, you can get most of the dirt out of your shirt.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I can manage. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you all dirty, too. You go on back. There’s a ladies’ room before you get back to the ballroom. You can get yourself cleaned up in there.”
“Not until we’ve gotten you cleaned up in here,” Lanie objected. “Come on. There’s no one around. Give me your jacket and shake out your shirt. It will only take a minute.”
With clear reluctance, he shrugged out of his jacket and handed it to her. She turned away from him as he began to untuck his shirt, in an effort to give him a little privacy, regardless of how innocent the action was. Holding his jacket out at arm’s length, she gave it a gentle shake, but that one movement freed a considerable cloud of dirt, so she turned the jacket upside down, releasing handfuls of dirt from the pockets. She scooped her hand inside each one to free as much of the leftover soil as she could. Then, spreading the jacket open wide in front of her, she started to give it another shake…
Only to be blinded by a flash of glaring white light from the other side of the window in front of her.
Three
No, it wasn’t just one flash of light, Lanie realized as she blinked against the dizzying display, but dozens of them, one right after the other. Flash, flash, flash, flash, flash. Then a brief pause. Then another round. The flashes were so bright, and so fast, and there were so many of them, that Lanie instinctively closed her eyes and pulled Miles’s jacket up over her face to block them.
She wasn’t sure what happened after that. She heard Miles utter a few choice oaths and epithets behind her; then he dashed between her and the window to block her from view of whatever was on the other side. She started to lower his jacket, but he stayed her hands and jerked the garment back up in front of her again, preventing her from seeing what was going on.
“Don’t,” he told her in a voice edged with something vicious and dangerous. “Keep your face covered.”
“What’s happening?” Lanie asked, completely befuddled now.
Instead of receiving an answer from him, she felt him wrap an arm around her shoulders, his other hand holding the jacket in a way that allowed her to see where she was going but kept her face hidden. He hurried her out of the sunroom, but instead of turning left, to go back to the party—and a crowd of people—he turned right and hurried them both in that direction. Lanie let him do it, figuring he knew more about what was going on than she did, since he’d seized control of the situation so quickly and expertly. They didn’t slow down until Miles was leading them down a narrow corridor, and she could see just well enough through the slightly parted lapels of his jacket to know he was leading her to a men’s restroom.
For the first time that evening, she felt real fear.
But she immediately tamped it down. Whatever his reason was for leading her this way, it had to be a good one, she told herself. He didn’t mean her any harm. Even though she still didn’t know what the hell was going on, she felt absolutely certain that Miles Fortune was no threat to her. They’d passed a perfectly nice evening in conversation and had shared some pretty intimate parts of themselves with each other during that time. They’d laughed together. Hoped together. Dreamed together. They’d made each other feel good. Miles was a nice man. Period. Hey, maybe he didn’t even realize he was leading her into a men’s room.
So she told him, “I can’t go in there.” She dug her feet into the lush pile of the carpeting. “That’s the men’s room.”
He muttered something unintelligible under his breath and released her. “Wait here, then,” he said softly, pushing past her to enter first.
Although Lanie told herself she must be seeing things, that her skewed view from beneath the jacket was playing tricks on her vision, she could have sworn Miles wasn’t wearing a shirt when he entered.
Nah, she told herself immediately. Couldn’t be.
But in a matter of seconds, the men’s room door was swinging open again, and there stood Miles in front of her. Sure enough, his chest was as bare as the day he was born, and his shirt was clutched in one hand.
What the…? she thought.
“What the…?” she began to speak her thoughts aloud.
But Miles didn’t give her the chance. “It’s empty,” he told her. Then he grabbed her hand and tugged hard, pulling her into the men’s room behind him, whether she liked it or not.
And Lanie didn’t.
Strangely, however, it wasn’t because she felt any fear about the situation. No, it was because the moment she’d seen Miles bare-chested, she hadn’t been able to push her brain any further forward. Not even the confusion and chaos of whatever the hell was going on bothered her anymore. The only thing that bothered her then was that Miles was half-naked and she wasn’t.
She hated it when that happened.
He was magnificent, she thought. Splendidly formed, his torso and shoulders and arms were solid and muscular without being overblown. Some of that was no doubt due simply to the physical labor of ranch work, as was the burnished bronze of his skin that lingered even now, in November. But he’d taken care with his abs, too, no mistaking that, because each and every one was exquisitely outlined. A dark, rich scattering of hair winged its way from one brawny shoulder to the other, spiraling down to disappear into what Lanie now saw was an unfastened belt and button on his trousers.
Just what the hell was going on?
“Just what the hell is going on?” she demanded, once again speaking her thoughts out loud, only this time having the presence of mind to complete them. She jerked his jacket off and tossed it at him, heedless of how the gesture sent strands of blond hair flying around her face. Pushing them haphazardly out of her eyes, she further demanded, “Why are you undressed? Why did you throw your jacket over my head? What was on the other side of the window, making that flash—”
And then, like a poorly potted fern, it hit her. She realized what had happened. She understood because it had happened to her before. She’d just been too caught up in falling head over heels for Miles Fortune to figure it out before now.
A photographer. She’d been the subject of enough photo opportunities with her father to recognize the rapidity and white light of the flashes. And not just from her father’s campaign, either, but because she was often followed by photographers herself when she visited new places. She was a regular feature in the society pages, after all, however evenhandedly she was portrayed—which was usually not evenhandedly at all. The fallout from tonight, she was certain, would be no exception.
Oh, no, she thought, dread filling her stomach. Tonight. Tonight, she’d been ambushed worse than ever before. She and Miles both. They’d been together, alone, in the sunroom. And they’d been…
Oh, no.
She looked at his bare chest and unfastened pants again, unable to look at anything else. Miles must have noticed her scrutiny, because he hastily shrugged back into his shirt and even more hastily began to button it. But he missed one somewhere along the way and had to start over again. And Lanie could have no more averted her gaze from him then than she could have stopped the sun from rising in the morning.
For a moment, she forgot all about the fact that she’d just been photographed in a compromising position with Miles Fortune. Because the only thing filling her brain was how he looked dressing and undressing and dressing again, and how it might be if his reasons for doing so were different.
Get a grip, Lanie, she told herself. This is serious. Stop drooling.
“What the hell happened?” Miles echoed her question of a moment ago. “I’ll tell you what the hell happened. What the hell happened is that you and I were just photographed by Nelson Kaminski, one of the vilest, scummiest, son-of-a-bitch photographers in the paparazzi, that’s what. And ever since I had him busted for harassment, he’s made it his life’s work to make my life hell.”
Lanie nodded, not because she recognized the name of the photographer, but because she understood the tactics of the paparazzi. Nothing was sacred to them. They were a breed unto themselves, completely set apart from the legitimate photojournalists she’d met during her father’s political career-building. Those guys waited for planned photo ops to snap pictures, or, at the very least, waited until she or a member of her family was at a public gathering in a public place. And for the most part, they did a fairly decent job of accurately portraying the situation.
Guys like this Nelson Kaminski, on the other hand, went out of their way to ambush their subjects at the most inopportune or inappropriate moments, and they did their best to make their photos as sensational as possible. If they couldn’t find a situation that was legitimately sensational, then they altered their photos—and even the situation—to create the sensation themselves.
Lanie looked at Miles again, watching as he fastened the last button and began to stuff his shirttail back into his pants. “What were you doing with your shirt off?” she asked halfheartedly, even though she pretty much knew the answer.
He glanced up from what he was doing and met her gaze, his eyes full of an apology he really wasn’t obligated to give. “You had your back turned,” he said. “Shaking out my jacket. I turned around, too, thought I could just shake out my shirt in a couple seconds and put it back on before you even noticed. My trousers…” He inhaled deeply and exhaled the breath in a long, exasperated sigh. “Well, I was just trying to work quickly, you know? I never thought you’d see me. And if you did, well… I thought the position was innocent enough. I had my back turned to you,” he said again. Then, more softly, he added, “Until the first flash went off. That’s when I turned around, still half-dressed. And that was when the flashes really started popping.”
He shrugged, looking tired and defeated. “When I said I didn’t mean to get you dirty earlier, Lanie, this wasn’t what I was talking about. Unfortunately, I think I just got you dirtier than you ever thought you could get. Thanks to your association with me, you’ve just become fodder for the tabloids. Tomorrow morning, you might just wake up and find yourself under a headline that says something about you being a mystery woman who’s the latest acquisition of Miles Fortune.”
Lanie appreciated his effort to take responsibility for what had happened, and under other circumstances she might have let him. Because under other circumstances, Miles Fortune would have been the target of the photographer. But not this time, she was sure. Not when there were less than two weeks left before the election. Not when she’d heard so many lectures from her father about how important it was for her to maintain some semblance of propriety, now more than ever, because anything she said or did in public might be misconstrued and used against him. As much as she wished she could be a mystery woman right now, she knew it just wasn’t realistic—or likely.
“I don’t think it was you the photographer was after tonight,” she told Miles softly. “At least, he wasn’t after you alone.”
Miles narrowed his eyes at her in clear puzzlement. “What do you mean?”
She smiled weakly. “You really don’t know who I am, do you?” she asked.
“I know enough,” he said. “I know you’re Lanie, and that you’re nice, and that you’re sweet, and that you’re easy to talk to, and that you make me smile, and that you’re surprisingly comfortable to be with. What else do I need to know?”
Now her smiled turned sad. “Well, there’s my last name, for starters.”
“What difference does your last name make?”
“Normally, it wouldn’t make any difference at all. But in this case, Miles, it makes a huge difference. Because my last name is Meyers. I’m Lanie Meyers.” She could tell by his expression that he understood then. That the two names put together told him everything he needed to know. Nevertheless, she continued, “My father is Tom Meyers, the governor of Texas.”
To herself, she added silently, But after this, he may not be governor for long….
Miles studied Lanie for several moments in silence. The governor’s daughter. He realized now he probably should have recognized her right off the bat, but who paid attention to such things? Whenever he’d seen the first family of Texas on TV, he’d been listening to what the governor was saying, not ogling the man’s daughter. And Miles had better things to do than read the parts of the newspaper that only talked about who went to what parties with whom, and what designers’ fashions they were wearing when they did. And that was where Lanie Meyers was whenever she made the news. Which was fairly often. Miles did know that. He’d heard his sister and cousins talk about the girl from time to time, and he supposed he’d absorbed some of the stories through osmosis. Still, she’d seemed harmless enough. A party girl. Not really unexpected when your daddy was a big-time politician.
But she hadn’t seemed like a party girl tonight. Well, maybe at first she had, he amended. But after just five minutes alone with her, Miles knew she was a lot more than that. Lanie Meyers was a nice girl who was witty and funny and easy to talk to. And she was maybe a little bit lonely, too. And that last had been what had ultimately cemented Miles’s connection to her, because he’d recognized in Lanie so much of what was inside himself.
How about that? You really couldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.
He grimaced involuntarily as he thought about what kind of stories would be appearing about Lanie in the papers over the next several days. Although they wouldn’t be true, that didn’t mean people wouldn’t lap up every last word as the gospel truth and talk about it at the office water cooler. Or the backyard clothesline. Or the grocery counter. Or the tennis nets. Or wherever else they happened to be.
Lanie Meyers. Miles Fortune had just been photographed in what could easily be misconstrued as a compromising position with the governor’s daughter. Had the situation not been so unfair, it would have been funny.
He supposed he should have expected something like this would happen sooner or later. If not with that bastard Kaminski, then with another slimy photographer. Miles Fortune was something of a hothead when it came to having his photo taken. As a result, he’d become a real challenge for the members of the local paparazzi. It wasn’t that he was especially famous or notorious. But he did hate to have his photo in the paper, and he’d reacted badly on occasion in the past.
Truthfully, though, it wasn’t as much because Miles valued his privacy as it was because he didn’t want the women he was escorting at any given time to be portrayed in a less-than-stellar light. And because he tended not to stay in relationships for very long—because he was a womanizer, he acknowledged with some distaste—the papers always intimated that the women he dated were little more than warm bodies to keep him entertained through the night.
Truthfully, Miles thought they were, too, for the most part. But that didn’t make it okay for the press to cast the women in a bad light. His endless parade of girlfriends couldn’t help it if each thought she’d be the one to make him change his ways and settle down. He just wasn’t the settling-down type. They couldn’t help it if they looked all besotted with him every time they showed up in a photo standing next to him. Hey, he was a very likable guy. That didn’t mean the press had to hang those women out to dry the way they invariably did.
Now Lanie Meyers was going to be portrayed as little more than another notch on his bedpost. That was going to cast her in a much darker light than party girl, and it would inevitably reflect badly on her father and, as a result, on her father’s campaign.
“Lanie Meyers,” Miles repeated slowly, carefully, his head still too full of repercussions and implications to say much else.
She nodded as slowly and carefully as he had spoken. “Lanie Meyers,” she confirmed.
“Governor Meyers’s daughter,” Miles echoed.
“Governor Meyers’s daughter,” she likewise confirmed.
“Bad dream?” he asked, hoping she’d confirm that, too.
She smiled, albeit not entirely happily. “Reality,” she assured him.
He lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “Hey, it was worth a shot.”
“So who’s going to end up being most embarrassed by this?” she asked.
Hell, Miles didn’t even have to think about that. And he was pretty sure it was a hypothetical question anyway. “Well, I imagine it’ll be your old man.”
“No imagining about it,” Lanie told him. “It will definitely be my father. This is going to make him look incredibly bad.”
It was an interesting comment on a number of levels, Miles thought, not the least of which was that at a time when Lanie should be worried more about herself and her own reputation than anyone else’s, she was concerned only about her father’s. She had yet to utter one word of concern for herself.
“But nothing happened,” Miles pointed out, knowing how ridiculous it was to even say such a thing when Nelson Kaminski was anywhere in the same time zone.
“No, it didn’t,” she agreed. “But you and I both have had enough experience with the press to know that that’s beside the point.”
Miles nodded disconsolately. There was nothing either of them could do now but hope for the best. But he couldn’t seem to let it go. Sighing with much exasperation, he added, “If I hadn’t had my shirt off, we probably could have salvaged this.”
“If you hadn’t had your shirt off, there never would have been any photographs,” Lanie pointed out. But there was no censure in her voice, no bitterness or resentment.
“Don’t be so sure,” Miles said, nevertheless. “Kaminski sniffed a potential photo the minute he saw us through the glass. Hell, for all I know, he’d gotten bored at the party because nothing scandalous enough was happening and went on the prowl specifically to find—or manufacture—a situation. Who knows how long he was out there lurking in the bushes? He was just waiting for one of us to do something that he could make look bad. Hell, you could have picked a loose thread off of my lapel, and he would have snapped a shot and worked with it until it looked like the two of us were groping each other.”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” Lanie said.
“Unfortunately I am,” Miles told her. “But even knowing what I do about him, I still can’t believe how low the guy will sink.” He’d used a lot of restraint by calling the photographer a guy instead of a more accurate description. There was a lady present, after all. “Do you know,” he continued, “that he actually developed and patented a way to use a camera flash so that it doesn’t reflect off of glass? You know why? So he could take pictures of people through windows, like tonight. That’s his specialty. And as long as he takes the pictures in a public place like this, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Unless he’s skulking around bedroom windows, he’s free and clear to prey on whoever he wants to.”
That was exactly what Kaminski was, he thought. A predator. The kind of lowlife that just slithered around in the dark waiting for an opportunity. He could have crouched out there till sunup waiting for Lanie and Miles to do something indiscreet. And when they had done nothing indiscreet, Kaminski had jumped on a perfectly innocent episode to turn it into something tawdry.
That was exactly what that son of a bitch would do, Miles knew. He might be too late to make tomorrow’s papers, but the day after, Miles and Lanie were going to be in every rag in Texas. And Kaminski would make damned sure it wasn’t their best side showing.
“I feel responsible,” he told Lanie now. “That guy’s had it in for me for a long time. I had him busted after he photographed me with a woman who—”
There Miles stopped, because he wasn’t sure how to say the rest. The woman he’d been with at the time was married, but he hadn’t been seeing her romantically. In fact, she’d been seeking his advice because her husband was one of Miles’s close friends. They’d met at a restaurant outside of Dallas, off the beaten path, not knowing that a rising Hollywood starlet who was in town filming a movie was also having dinner there. Kaminski had gone to the place hoping for a shot of her, but when he’d seen a member of the Fortune family, he’d figured he might as well make a couple extra bucks off of Miles, too.
He’d waited until an especially emotional outburst from the woman had caused Miles to reach across the table and touch her shoulder, then had snapped the shot and made it look as if Miles had been making a play for his best friend’s wife. When her husband saw the photo in the paper two days later, the marriage she had been trying so hard to save was well and truly over.
“Let’s just say he photographed me with someone he shouldn’t have, in a situation he shouldn’t have, and I made him regret it. Big-time.”
First by punching the guy in the nose in the hope that he could snatch the camera out of Kaminski’s hand. But when Kaminski had scuttled off like the cockroach he was and sold the photo to the highest bidder, Miles had turned to legal avenues. It hadn’t saved the woman’s marriage but ultimately, Miles had settled out of court for a tidy financial sum from Kaminski and the paper that had printed the photograph, money he’d turned around and donated to a local charity.
“Ever since then, the guy’s been gunning for me,” he told Lanie. “I can make him regret this, too,” he added, “but not fast enough to keep those pictures out of the papers. I’m sorry,” he said again, even though he knew the apology was cold comfort.
“How bad could it be?” she said, obviously trying to inject a cheerfulness into her voice that she didn’t feel. “I mean, we weren’t doing anything. Yeah, you had your shirt off, but we weren’t standing close to each other. We weren’t even facing each other. We’ll just explain what happened and have a good laugh over it. And who knows? Maybe the pictures will be so innocent, there won’t be anything for Kaminski to sell to anyone. This could all wind up being one huge nonevent.”
Miles wished he could believe that was true. But he knew Kaminski. And he knew the American public. Kaminski would do his best to make Miles and Lanie look their worst. And the public would eat it up with a spoon, because everyone loved scandal. Especially a sex scandal. Especially a political sex scandal. Especially close to an election. Even if Lanie’s father wasn’t involved, the publicity could do damage to what Miles recalled now was a narrow lead in the polls.
“I hope you’re right,” he told Lanie, feeling a cold lump settle in the pit of his stomach. “I really hope you’re right.”
“Just wait,” she said, smiling again, a smile that was so unbelievably hopeful Miles wanted to put an arm around her and pull her close. “Everything will be just fine,” she said brightly. Too brightly. “Probably, no one will even see the photos, because they’ll be buried on page nine of the society section, and they’ll just look like two people who had a little too much to drink at a party. God knows, it won’t be the first time a paper has said I was overly intoxicated. In spite of the fact that I never drink anything but club soda at public parties.”
Miles wished he could share her conviction. But deep down inside, he had a very bad feeling about this.
Four
Governor Tom Meyers leaned back in the big, gubernatorial chair behind the big, gubernatorial desk in his big, gubernatorial office at the big, gubernatorial mansion in the not-so-big—but still gubernatorial—city of Austin and sighed with much satisfaction. The new polls had come out yesterday morning, and he was still ahead. Not by much, maybe, but he was still there, firmly entrenched in the hearts and minds of most Texans. Unless something went very wrong, the office was his for a second term.
He loved being governor of Texas. He loved being numero uno in the biggest, baddest, most kick-ass state in the union. Yeah, people said Alaska was really bigger, and, geographically speaking, he supposed that was true. But Alaska wasn’t near as seasoned as Texas was. It didn’t have the population, the big cities, the history, the character, the reputation.
And it sure as hell didn’t send governors to the White House.
Yeah, the White House. That was Tom Meyers’s ultimate destination. Someday he would be president of the United States of America. Nothing was going to stand in his way. He’d win this election, and then he’d run for national office. Maybe senator. Hell, maybe even president. Depended on how his second term went. But he knew the party had its eye on him, and he knew he was performing exactly the way it wanted him to. And once he won a second term, he would be well and truly on his way.
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