Loe raamatut: «Wild West Fortune»

Chapter One

“Girl, this is not good.”

Ariana Lamonte made a face as she looked out the windows of her car. She hadn’t seen another vehicle for more than an hour. Grassland whipped in the wind all the way to the horizon in every direction. The same wind rocked her little car where she was parked on the dirt shoulder, and sent the thick clouds overhead racing across the sky. “Not good at all,” she repeated to herself.

She fished her cell phone up from the passenger side floor by the charging cord tethering it to her dashboard. Using the GPS on the phone always drained the battery quickly, so she’d at least been prepared on that score when she’d set out from Austin that morning. But she sure wished she’d been better prepared with the address she was seeking. There was a dot blinking on her phone screen, right atop a barely discernible line that indicated the laughable excuse for a road on which she sat.

But that was it. No town. No other roads.

Nothing. Nada.

For the third time, she checked her notes and verified the address she’d put into her GPS app. Everything matched.

Which meant she ought to be sitting in the middle of a place called Paseo, Texas.

Instead, she was sitting in the middle of...

“Grass,” she muttered, looking out the windows again. “Nothing but grass and more grass.” And she’d wasted nearly an entire day getting there.

The wind howled and her car rocked again. She studied her phone for a moment. The GPS dot blinked back at her, but there wasn’t a strong enough cell signal to even make a phone call or send a text message. Not that she particularly wanted to advertise to anyone that she wasn’t really home in her apartment where she was supposed to be working on an assignment for the magazine.

Instead, she’d set out on yet another wild goose chasing down facts for the real life story behind Robinson Tech’s founder, Gerald Robinson. The real life story that would prove once and for all that Ariana Lamonte wasn’t just an internet blogger who’d more or less stumbled into print journalism. That she deserved her own spot on the map.

Preferably a better map than the one her GPS was currently providing.

She dropped the useless phone on the passenger seat and opened the thick pink notebook on the console, clicking her pen a few times before sighing and drawing a line through the address as she thought about Gerald Robinson.

For one thing, he was a tech industry giant. A household name well beyond the city limits of Austin, Texas, where Robinson Tech was based and where Austinites tended to follow his family like the Brits followed the Royals.

On the surface, the billionaire had everything. Money. Power. Success. He was the father of eight children thanks to his long-standing marriage to a woman who didn’t seem outraged at all over the fairly recent revelation that he’d also fathered more than a few illegitimate children during that marriage.

But what made the situation particularly interesting to Ariana was that Charlotte Prendergast Robinson had also been resolutely closemouthed since the truth came out a year ago that the very identity of the man she’d married was a fiction. Gerald Robinson was a creation of Jerome Fortune. A black-sheep relative of an immensely wealthy, immensely powerful family who’d all believed Jerome to be dead.

Half the world had collectively gasped when that came out.

But not Charlotte. It was as if there was nothing on earth capable of shocking or surprising Gerald’s wife.

Though that wasn’t exactly accurate, either. If it weren’t for Charlotte, Ariana wouldn’t be trying to find Paseo.

She flipped a page in her notes, chewing the inside of her cheek as she studied Charlotte’s photograph. Presumably, she enjoyed the perks of her position so much that she’d rather stand by her husband’s side than publicly express even the slightest hint of outrage and possibly hinder those perks.

But would they really be hindered?

Charlotte was clearly the injured party in the Robinson marriage. Ariana had found no record of the couple ever having a prenuptial agreement. Their marriage predated Robinson Tech’s astronomical success. Success that hadn’t been hurt in the least by Gerald’s scandals. If anything, the company was stronger than ever. If Charlotte chose to walk away from a philandering husband, she’d be walking away with at least half of their fortune. The luxurious lifestyle to which she was accustomed wouldn’t be changed in the least.

And it wasn’t as if the children she and Gerald had together would necessarily be affected. They were all accomplished adults in their own rights. Ariana had profiled many of them, as well as some of Gerald’s illegitimate offspring, in her series, “Becoming a Fortune,” for Weird Life Magazine.

As she’d gotten to know them, she’d formed the opinion that Charlotte was hardly the most loving mother in the world. The woman seemed more involved with her charity work than she was in their lives—even when they had been much younger. Admittedly, none of them had derogatory things to say about their mother. They were too classy for that. But Ariana still sensed there was some curiosity regarding their mother’s steadfast loyalty to their father.

And Ariana was pretty curious, too. Particularly after she’d managed to get a moment alone with the excessively private woman at one of Charlotte’s recent fund-raisers. All Ariana had asked her for was a little clarification about a newspaper article she’d found at the Austin History Center. Not once had Ariana seen the woman look even remotely rattled until she’d grabbed Ariana’s arm, escorting her personally from the function with the warning that she was not going to treat kindly anyone digging up useless old dirt about Paseo.

So far, Charlotte had said, she’d tolerated Ariana’s vacuous magazine series, but it would be an easy matter for her to have a “little talk” with the local magazine about the harassment her family was receiving at the hands of Ariana. After all, she and the publisher sat on a few boards together.

Ariana could have argued the harassment point, but she’d chosen to leave instead. The tacit threat about her job would have been more worrisome if not for the fact that she had bigger fish to fry than the magazine where she worked. Now she had a book deal. The kind of deal where Ariana could really make her mark as a biographer.

But she hadn’t left empty-handed. Because not once had Ariana ever mentioned Paseo in any of her pieces. She hadn’t even heard of the name before. It hadn’t been in the article Ariana had uncovered. That had simply been a decades-old society feature about Charlotte and Gerald’s wedding.

And Ariana wasn’t even certain now that Mrs. Robinson had meant the town of Paseo. It could just as easily be a person’s name. Maybe the name of a company...

Ariana looked out the window again. Not that the town seemed to exist outside of a map.

Which meant she’d have to go back to the drawing board where Gerald’s life was concerned. She wanted to tell the story that no one else had already told.

Yes, Gerald had been born as Jerome Fortune. Yes, he’d cut his ties with his real family so decisively that he’d even faked his own death. Then he’d effectively disappeared from all existence until one day springing forth as Gerald Robinson. And soon after, he’d made Charlotte Prendergast his bride.

It ought to have been a grand love story. Gerald and Charlotte went on to have eight children together, for heaven’s sake. There’d been countless articles and news stories about them. Yet now it came out that Gerald had consistently strayed. Even during the earliest years of their marriage, he’d been off Johnny-Appleseeding with other women.

Was it simply a character flaw? He wasn’t the first brilliant, powerful man to have a weakness for women. Or was there something deeper? Another secret that motived him?

What had really happened between Jerome’s “demise” and Gerald’s explosive success in the tech field?

That was a big black hole into which her book would shine a good, long light.

And that was why she was sitting on the side of the road in the middle of Grassland, USA.

She rubbed her face and wished she hadn’t finished her Starbucks coffee two hours earlier. It would take her hours to get back to Austin. She’d do better to just keep plowing onward. She knew she had to be close to the state line by now, which would put Oklahoma City much closer.

A decent hotel bed. A lot of fresh coffee. Then she could hop on the interstate and drive back to Austin in the morning. It would still take five or six hours, but at least she’d be driving faster than the snail’s pace she’d had to use during today’s wasted trek. She’d be home in plenty of time to finish up her article about the grand opening of Austin Commons, Austin’s newest multiuse complex scheduled for the end of the month. She wouldn’t even have been assigned the story if the project’s architect hadn’t been Keaton Whitfield. He’d been one of her first “Becoming a Fortune” subjects.

She sighed and tossed aside her notes, peering through the windshield again. The clouds were angrily black, and lightning flashed in the distance.

A sharp crack on the side window made her jump so hard she banged her elbow on the steering wheel.

The sight of a man standing on the road right next to her car, though, made her nearly scream.

She reared away from the window, slamming her foot on the brake and jabbing the push-button start.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the man yelled through the window. From the corner of her eye she saw him tip back his black cowboy hat. “Don’t run me over, honey! Just checking that you’re all right.”

Hesitating was stupid. Every single thing she’d ever read or written about a woman’s personal safety told her that. Her heart was lodged somewhere up in her ears, pounding so loudly she felt nauseated.

The wind ripped, yanking the hat off the man’s head, and she heard him curse before he jogged after it.

She could have driven off right then, but the sight of him chasing after his hat, reaching down more than once trying to scoop it up as it rolled and bounced along the road, kept her in place.

That, and the sight in her rearview mirror of a shaggy brown-and-black dog hanging its head out the window of the dusty pickup truck parked behind her.

Did ax murderers tie bandanna kerchiefs around their dogs’ necks?

“Get a grip, girl.” She put the car in gear but kept her foot on the brake. The guy finally caught his cowboy hat and jammed it back on his head as he strode back toward her car.

This time, when he leaned down to look in her window, he kept his hand clamped on top of his hat, holding it in place. “Got a bad storm coming, ma’am. I can give you directions if you’re lost.”

“I’m not lost.”

He squinted his clear brown eyes at her, clearly skeptical.

Her heart was back in her chest again, pounding harder than usual, but at least in the right sector of her body. She need only hit the gas to drive off.

And she’d already wasted a whole day...

She surreptitiously double-checked that her doors were locked and squinted back at him. If he was an ax murderer, he was a fine-looking one. And what his rear end did for his plain old blue jeans was a work of art. He wouldn’t have any difficulty getting a woman to follow him most anywhere.

Not her, of course. She was too smart to get bowled over by a stranger just because he happened to be—as her mama would have said—a handsome cuss. If he was an ax murderer, he was going to have to work a little harder than that.

She reined in her stampeding imagination and wondered if she should give writing fiction a try, since she was so far doing such a bang-up job on the biography.

Despite common sense and caution, she rolled down her window. Her hair immediately blew around her face. She grabbed her phone and held it out for the stranger to see the map displayed on the screen. “I’m looking for a town called Paseo. Paseo, Texas,” she elaborated just in case she had crossed into Oklahoma without knowing it.

He ducked his head when another dirty gust blew across them. “What kinda business you got there?”

She squinted at him. “Well, that’s my business, isn’t it?”

He yanked off his hat, evidently tired of trying to keep it in place. The wind chopped through his brown hair and pulled at the collar of his gray-and-white plaid shirt, revealing more of his suntanned throat. “Gonna be my business if I have to haul your toy car here out of a ditch when this storm gets worse.” He thumped the top of her car with his hand. “You want Paseo, you almost found it. Up the road a ways, you gotta cross a small bridge and then you’ll see the sign. But you’d better get your pretty self going before those clouds open up. This isn’t a road you want to be on in a storm.”

“So you live around here?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stuck out his hand toward her. “Jayden Fortune.”

The phone slipped out of her fingers.

He caught it. “Whoa, there. Looks too expensive to be tossing around on the highway.” He held it toward her.

“Not much of a highway,” she managed as her mind spun with excitement. Could it be so easy? Fortune? “There are more dirt ruts than pavement.”

The corner of his mouth curled upward. “Well, we’re not exactly looking for strangers around here. Which—” he ducked his head against a gust of wind accompanied by a crash of thunder “—pleasant as this may be, is what you are.”

She was blinking hard from the dust blowing into her eyes. “My name is Ariana Lamonte. From Austin. I’m working on a magazine article.” It was true. Just not the whole truth.

“A magazine article about Paseo?” He snorted, looking genuinely amused. “Don’t want to disappoint you, ma’am, but there isn’t a damn thing interesting enough around these parts to merit something like that.”

“I don’t know about that. Considering a Fortune lives here.” She yanked her hair out of her eyes, holding it behind her head so she could see him better. If this man was one of Gerald’s illegitimate offspring, then he’d be the first one she’d encountered who already knew he was a Fortune. Or maybe he wasn’t even illegitimate. She’d already entertained the idea that Gerald could have had a family before his Robinson one. There were certainly enough missing years in his life to allow for one. And it would definitely account for Charlotte’s antagonism toward Ariana bringing up the past.

Could there have been another wife? Maybe one whom Gerald had never even bothered to divorce before he’d married Charlotte Prendergast?

The wheels in her head spun fresh again as she gave Jayden a closer look.

“The name Fortune doesn’t mean I possess one,” he was saying. His smile was very white, very even, except for one slightly crooked cuspid that saved him from looking a little too perfect. Maybe there was a resemblance to Gerald Robinson. Or maybe that was just hopeful thinking on her part.

He rested his arm on top of her car and angled his head, his gaze roving over her and the interior of her car. He glanced over the empty coffee cups and discarded fast-food wrappers lying untidily on the floor as well as the thick notebook laden with news clippings and photographs spread open on her passenger seat.

“Only thing I’m rich in is land, and land round here isn’t all that valuable, either. So what’s interesting enough about Paseo to bring a reporter like you all the way from the big city?”

Her car rocked again and several fat raindrops splattered on her windshield. “I’m not a reporter for the local news or anything. I’m a journalist.”

“There’s a difference?”

“If I was a news reporter, I’d probably have a better salary,” she admitted ruefully. She casually closed the notebook as she reached behind her seat and grabbed the latest edition of Weird Life Magazine and passed it through the window. A photograph of Ben Fortune Robinson—Gerald’s eldest son, who was the Chief Operating Officer of Robinson Tech—was on the cover. “I’m not just writing an article. I’m working on an entire series about the members of the Fortune family, actually, for Weird Life Magazine. You have heard of Gerald Robinson, right? Robinson Tech? His real name used to be Jerome Fortune.” She watched Jayden’s face. But the only expression her admission earned was more humor.

“Then you’re really gonna be disappointed,” he drawled, barely giving the magazine a glance before giving it back to her. “I’m not related. My last name might be Fortune, but only because my mom made it up.”

The sky suddenly opened up in earnest and he shoved his hat back on his head. “Storms around here’re pretty unpredictable, ma’am. Last year we had hail that damaged the town hall so badly it looked like a bomb had hit it. Might be best if you come with me.”

She rolled up the window, stopping shy a few inches, but rain still blew in. Just because he had the last name Fortune—which she wasn’t ready to attribute to coincidence no matter what he said—didn’t mean she planned to get into his truck. The weather hadn’t worried her before, but the rain was coming down so hard now, she could barely see out the windshield. “I’ll follow you.”

He was already drenched, rain sheeting off the brim of his hat. He looked like he was going to argue, but then just tilted his head. “Suit yourself.”

She closed the window the rest of the way and switched on her windshield wipers, watching through her rearview mirror as he yanked open his truck door. Even the bandanna-wearing dog had ducked back inside the cab of the truck.

The car rocked again, whether from the vibration of another violent thunderclap or the wind, she couldn’t tell. “Not good, Ariana,” she muttered. “Not good at all.”

The truck passed her, and even through the curtain of rain between them, she could see Jayden Fortune looking at her.

A shiver danced down her spine.

Okay. So not all not good.

She gave him a thumbs-up sign and steered back onto the road to follow him.

Less than a mile had passed before she was starting to wish she’d taken his offer and left her car on the side of the road. It might have washed off in the deluge but at least she wouldn’t have been in it. As it was, she’d nearly driven off the side of the road twice, her wheels slipping and spinning in the slick mud.

Her knuckles white, her windshield wipers going full blast, she followed as closely as she dared. She didn’t want to lose sight of his taillights, but she was also afraid of running right into the back of his truck.

“Times like this make you want to be a waitress again,” she muttered, then screeched a little when she felt her tires sliding sideways again. Her heart in her throat and her father’s lectures spinning inside her head, she finally regained traction only to see Jayden’s truck had turned off the highway and those red taillights were getting fainter by the second.

She couldn’t tell where the road was that he’d turned onto, but she followed him anyway, her chest knocking the steering wheel and her head hitting the headrest as she bounced down a small hill.

“Next time just get in the dang truck,” she said loudly when water splashed up over the hood of her car, dousing her windshield with mud.

The only saving grace was the force of the rain that washed away the mud and allowed her a moment to see the road—yes, it was a road—in front of her and Jayden’s taillights still ahead.

She exhaled loudly, focusing on them like a lifeline as they drove onward. It felt like they’d been driving for miles when the rain suddenly eased up, and she spotted buildings nearby that soon became distinct enough to identify as a two-story house and an enormous barn.

“Thank you, God,” she breathed, unclenching her fingers as she pulled up next to where Jayden had parked. She jabbed the ignition button and her car went still.

She hadn’t even had time to unbuckle her seat belt when she saw him streak from his truck to the side of her car again, yanking open the door.

“What—”

“Hurry up.”

Ariana automatically reached over for her phone that had once again fallen onto the passenger side floor.

“Leave it.” His voice was sharp and her hackles started to rise.

She deliberately closed her hand around the phone before straightening in her seat once more. Annoyed or not with his tone, she still needed to explore this whole Fortune thing. And a girl usually got further with honey than she did with vinegar. “I appreciate your—”

“Sweetheart, in gear. Now.” He grabbed her arm, practically hauling her out of the car.

Horror mingled with annoyance as she struggled against his iron grip, nearly tripping before she found steady footing. If it weren’t for her high-heeled boots, he would have towered over her. As it was, her forehead had a close encounter with the faint cleft in his sharp chin. “I don’t know who you think you are, but—”

“I’m the guy who’s trying to get us to cover.”

She dragged her blowing hair out of her eyes again. “Are you going to melt in the rain? Seems to me you’re already soaked through.”

“No, but I don’t want a house coming down on those ruby slippers of yours.” He gestured and her mouth went dry all over again at the sight of the funnel cloud snaking downward from the clouds.

“Oh, my God!” She grabbed his wet shirtfront. “That’s a tornado? Is it coming this way?”

“Let’s not wait around to see, okay?” His hand was like iron as he pulled her along with him—not toward the nearby stone-sided house surrounded by a wraparound porch, but well off to the side of it in the direction of the barn. He stopped halfway there, though, letting go of her long enough to lean down and pull open a storm-cellar door angled into the earth. “Get in.”

She looked nervously from the house to the barn, then stared into the black abyss below the cellar door. Ax murderer? Tornado? It was no time to weigh odds, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Sweetheart, I’ll carry you down those steps myself if you don’t get your butt moving.” He whistled sharply, making her jump. But the bandanna-clad dog simply trotted past her, brushing against Ariana’s leg before sniffing the ground in front of the cellar entrance. “Steps, Sugar,” Jayden said and the dog hesitantly took a gingerly step down into the darkness. “She’s mostly blind. Don’t trip over her on your way down. There’s a handrail. Use it.”

A blind dog.

She couldn’t have made up such a detail if she’d tried.

She held her arm around her head, trying to keep her hair from blowing in his face as well as hers as she took the first step beyond the wooden door. “Is that, uh, that door going to keep out a tornado?” The wood was faded nearly gray and looked to be a hundred years old. It was a fitting complement to the steep stairs, which seemed to be carved from stone.

“Guess we’ll see, won’t we.” He was right on her heels, pulling the door closed as he followed her.

“I’ve never been in a tornado.” Or gone down into a dark storm cellar with a blind dog and her handsome cuss of an owner.

“I have. There’s usually a flashlight right here by the door, but I’ll find one soon as I can. The walls are stone, but the floor’s dirt. You’ll feel the difference when you get to the bottom.”

She did, but was glad for the warning. She felt as blind as Sugar and leaned over to pet the dog, who seemed to plant herself immediately in front of Ariana’s shins. Then she felt Jayden brush against the back side of her as he, too, reached the base of the steps.

She straightened like a shot.

“Sorry,” he murmured. His hand cupped her shoulder as he sidled around her. “No electricity down here.”

She wasn’t so sure about that. Both her butt and her shoulder were tingling from his brush against her, even after his touch left her and she heard him moving around.

A deafening clap of thunder made her jump. Sugar whined and she knelt down to rub her hand over the shaggy dog, all the while looking up at the wooden cellar door. She had some serious doubts about that door. “Was that tornado a few years back in Paseo? Are we even still near Paseo?”

“My address says so.” She heard a few clanks, and then a narrow but reassuring flashlight beam shone across the floor as he moved back to her side. “Here.” He handed her the sturdy, metal flashlight and retreated once more to what she could now see were shelving units lined up against two walls. “And there was a tornado around here a few years ago, but I wasn’t here for it. Shine that up here, would you?”

“Sorry.” She immediately turned the flashlight in his direction again. But she’d seen enough of the rest of the cellar to know that it was larger than she’d expected. Her vivid imagination was conjuring any number of creepy crawlies hanging out in the far corners of the dirt-floored cellar.

She realized her flashlight was trained squarely on his extremely excellent rear end and angled it upward where his hands were. “So where were you, then?”

“Two years ago? Germany. The close-up brush I had with a tornado was further back than that. In Italy.”

He spoke with a distinct Texas drawl that said he’d grown up here. “World traveler?”

He shot her a grin over his shoulder. “Courtesy of the United States Army, ma’am.”

She was glad he quickly turned back to his task. His grin was positively lethal.

She sat down on the bottom step and rubbed Sugar’s warm head when the dog rested it on her lap. It was hard not to keep looking up at that cellar door. It was hard not wondering what unmentionable creatures they were disturbing in the dirt cellar with their very presence. “You don’t look like a soldier.” She jerked the flashlight upward again and jumped at another crack of thunder.

“I’m not anymore. You don’t look like a reporter.”

“I told you. I’m a journalist.”

“Working on a magazine article. I remember.”

Which brought her mind squarely back to her purpose for being there in the first place. She blamed the fact that she’d been even momentarily sidetracked by the storm.

She jerked the flashlight—and her gaze—away from his butt when he turned with a lantern in his hand. She’d seen ones like it pictured in the advertising section of Weird. She herself, however, had never had any personal experience with the things.

Primarily because her idea of roughing it meant being somewhere without a handy Starbucks.