The Debutante

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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