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
