Elizabeth Bevarly - The Debutante

“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.”