The Debutante
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.