hers as he took the license. “Charlie was able to get into your glove compartment, if I have your permission to look at the contents.”
Oh, for crying out loud. She rubbed her aching temples. “Yes, you can look at the contents. I’ve been trying to tell you I don’t have anything to hide.”
He walked back to the wrecker again.
Her eyes burned and she swiped her nose. She was not going to cry again.
Her purse might have contained her wallet and a few business cards, but there was little else in it, and certainly not her phone. She closed her eyes, trying to remember where it had been in the car. Lying on the passenger seat with her sandals? Tucked in the console?
Her stomach churned as she tried to think. She’d taken one call that morning from her assistant, Julie, about the media campaign they were launching. After that, her phone had remained silent as she’d neared Paseo and the campground where the wedding guests were being lodged.
The campground was one of the selling points she’d used with her folks when she’d told them that she, too, wanted to attend the wedding, along with her siblings. In Georgia’s case, not only was she attending the nuptials, but she was also actually going to stand up in the wedding party. Even though none of them had ever even met the bride or groom.
That fact was only one of the interesting aspects of this whole wedding business. It was Gerald and Deborah’s desire to bring together all the branches of the overgrown Fortune tree. They were showing it again and again with the incredible task of mounting a large wedding in such a small town. Once they’d known Georgia and her brothers and sisters were coming—even though their father flatly refused—they’d asked if one of them would be part of the wedding party. They wanted someone from each family to be represented.
Georgia had basically drawn the short straw at that point because—as her sisters Savannah and Belle liked to point out—Georgia had the most practice at being a bridesmaid.
Nineteen times, in fact.
For her dad’s sake, she’d pitched the whole thing as a lark. A summer getaway, camping under the Texas sky for a few weeks before the launch of the new campaign. For herself, she’d mostly thought it would be highly entertaining to be part of the wedding for a man who was actually her father’s half brother.
Of course, her father didn’t believe anything about the situation was the least bit entertaining. He certainly didn’t appreciate the fact that he might be somewhat similar to his half brother. Gerald Robinson of Texas had been born Jerome Fortune of New York. It was only after his father, Julius, died that he’d remade himself as Gerald, far, far away from his true family. He’d even gone so far as to fake “Jerome’s” death, presumably to be good and sure nobody came looking for him.
Georgia’s father, Miles, on the other hand, had been born Miles Melton in Louisiana. He was just one of Julius’s illegitimate sons with various women other than his wife. Aside from her father, there were at least three more that she knew of: Kenneth Fortunado, who hailed from Houston, David Fortune from Florida and Gary Fortune from New York. Other than those few details, she had no real knowledge of the relationships—or lack of—that they’d had with Julius while he’d been alive.
As for her dad, when he’d finally divulged the truth last Christmas to his family that they were, in fact, related to the famous Fortunes after all—something he had been denying all of Georgia’s life—he’d admitted that he’d only taken on his father’s name when he’d been a young college graduate as an “up yours” against the man who’d never acknowledged him.
The similarities between Miles and Julius ended there, though.
Miles had married Georgia’s mom when he was only a year older than Georgia was now. They’d had seven children together and were the only truly happy couple Georgia had ever seen.
Gerald, on the other hand, had inherited Julius’s penchant for infidelity. For the last few years especially, the scandal sheets had chronicled the tech mogul’s indiscretions. How he’d cheated on his society wife, Charlotte. How he’d produced even more illegitimate children than Julius had.
Then, when the news had broken a couple years ago about Robinson’s real identity, the media hounds had gone into a feeding frenzy. It would have died down eventually. When a fresher scandal hit the light of day. That’s the way scandals always worked.
But the flames were fueled all over again by Gerald and Charlotte’s highly acrimonious divorce when word got out that he’d actually dumped her in favor of marrying his first love, Deborah Fortune, who wasn’t really a Fortune at all, but had assumed the name herself when she’d given birth to Gerald’s triplet sons nearly forty years ago. Before Gerald had even married Charlotte.
It was either the worst of reality-television-style trashiness, or the most outlandishly romantic story in modern-day history.
Georgia, nineteen times a bridesmaid, didn’t expect that Gerald’s marriage to Deborah would be any more successful than his first one. But she definitely expected the whole scene to be pretty entertaining.
Particularly since she had a not-so-private fascination with reality TV.
Plus, she came from a family of seven kids but had never had cousins. Now that she knew that she did, she was unabashedly curious to meet them.
So, with a brand-new car she’d worked hard to buy and a chance for the first vacation she’d taken in years, what else was a girl to do but plan a road trip?
It was all perfect.
In planning, at least.
Reality had turned out to be something entirely different.
The winch was whining again and she realized her car—what was left of it—was being pulled onto the back of the tow truck.
She pushed away from the guardrail and hurried toward the two men standing beside the vehicle. “What about the rest of my stuff? My suitcase is in the trunk.”
“Only thing I could get at was this, miss.” The short man wiped a greasy hand on the front of his overalls before he handed her the small overnighter. “It’ll take more equipment than I’ve got here to get that trunk open. Don’t you worry none, though. Once I do, I’ll get your stuff to you wherever you’re at.”
She clutched the overnighter against her. It held her toiletries and not much more. Except for the yoga gear she’d tossed in it that morning, all of her clothes were inside the suitcase.
She felt shaky all over again.
The sheriff must have noticed because he wrapped his hand around her arm. “You need to sit down again.”
She preferred the weedy highway shoulder than the back of his SUV, but she never had the chance to tell him, because an ambulance pulled up then. The sheriff turned her over to the two people who hopped out of the boxy white vehicle. One male. One female. Both young and harried-looking, though they didn’t act it as they took charge of Georgia and settled her on the wide back bumper. They introduced themselves. Sean and Sarah.
“My mother’s name is Sarah,” she told them faintly and closed her eyes again, resting her head on the vehicle behind her. She answered their questions while they tended to her cuts and scrapes and produced a cold pack that she pressed against her forehead.
