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
