The Debutante. Elizabeth Bevarly

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СКАЧАТЬ would have enough food on her plate for six. Or maybe it was just that her serving of chocolate bomb had exploded all over everything else.

      “What the hell is a chocolate bomb?” he asked warily, just in case it did have the potential to detonate.

      “Not sure,” Jenny said. “Ice cream, though, for certain. And chocolate, of course. This white stuff seems to be whipped cream. Have some. You’ll love it.”

      “I’d rather look for the bar,” he said, gazing at his still-full wineglass and thinking that a bourbon whiskey tasting would be pretty good about now. “The real bar, I mean. Not one of the ones they set up for this thing. Those don’t serve what a man likes to drink. Not a Texan, anyway.” No, all those bars had were wine and champagne and stuff in triangular-shaped glasses that were pale, pretty colors Miles didn’t want to get within fifty feet of.

      “The real bar is through the far exit,” Jenny told him without breaking stride in her eating, waving her fork airily toward the other side of the room. “To the right and down a ways.”

      Miles eyed her suspiciously. “You know, Jenny, it occurs to me that a woman who’s seven months pregnant with twins shouldn’t know where the bar is.”

      “Of course she should,” Jenny countered, “when that’s where the closest women’s room is.”

      Miles supposed that would mean something to another woman—especially another pregnant woman—and manfully decided not to dwell on it himself. Instead, he took Jenny’s directions to heart, and after making sure she had someone else to talk to, he excused himself and wandered off in that direction. As he went, he found himself scanning the crowd, looking for someone. A female someone, to be precise. A female someone with blond hair twisted onto the top of her head in a way that made a man’s fingers itch to loosen it, and with eyes that were as blue and enormous as her dress was blue and tiny.

      He wondered who the young woman was with whom he’d shared an impromptu toast. And he wondered why he was still thinking about her now, a full fifteen minutes after the fact. Out of sight usually meant out of mind for Miles when it came to women. He was a firm believer in the “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with” philosophy. Probably mostly because he’d never been in love. Not a heart-stopping, storybook, ever-after kind of love, anyway. So loving the one he was with was about as good as it got for him.

      Tonight, however, for this occasion, he wasn’t with anyone. Which meant his recent, brief, if silent, exchange with the blonde was, for now, the equivalent to a love that would span all time.

      As he threaded his way carefully through the crowd, Miles wondered where she might have gone. She’d looked the way he felt—out of his element—and that as much as anything, he supposed, had cemented a weird sort of bond between them. He knew he shouldn’t feel uncomfortable here, though. He was a Fortune, after all, and no stranger to wealth and refinement. And God knew, he’d always been one to jump at any excuse to party.

      But Miles wasn’t much one for the political crowd. Sure, he cared about his country and the great state of Texas, but both had been moving along just fine for centuries without his input and would continue to do so for centuries after he was gone. He figured that as long as he was reading the newspaper regularly to keep himself informed and voting his conscience every time election day came around, then he was doing his civic duty. He’d just leave the actual running of things to the people who knew more about it than he did.

      But he’d been in Austin on business this weekend and had, as he always did, made plans to see Dennis and Jenny while he was in town. This event for the governor was too big a deal for either of them to miss, though, so Miles had agreed to meet them here instead of for dinner somewhere, which was their normal arrangement. Once Jenny delivered those twins, she and Dennis weren’t going to have a lot of free time to do things like dinner out with their still blissfully single and delightedly child-free friends.

      He smiled at the thought of his friend Dennis becoming a dad. The guy was suited to it. In fact, Miles wondered why he and Jenny hadn’t done this years ago. He admired the two of them for their commitment to each other and to the family they were creating, but he didn’t understand it for a minute. Not that Miles didn’t think family was important. He was a Fortune, after all, and to the Fortunes, family was everything.

      He hadn’t always known that, though. His grandfather, Mark Fortune, had estranged himself from the rest of the Fortune clan years ago, both literally and figuratively. And Miles had done most of his growing up in New York, where his parents had moved before he was born so that his father could pursue a career in finance, and Patrick and Lacey both could work for the social and political causes they felt passionately about. By the time Miles had hit adolescence, however, his parents had reunited with the rest of the Fortune clan, and Miles and Steven and Clyde had begun spending every summer in Texas. It was those summers here that had caused the three boys to fall in love with the place, and when they’d come of age, they’d invested together in the Flying Aces, a modest ranch near Red Rock.

      Steven, however, still feeling restless, had struck out on his own and purchased his own spread, which had only recently become habitable, outside Austin. That was where he and his new wife, Amy, were living now. But Miles and Clyde still called the Flying Aces home. And so did Clyde’s new wife, Jessica. Fortunately, the main house was large and separated into suites for each of the triplets. Clyde and Jessica had their own space in one part of the house, and Miles had his in another. Which was good, because he had a feeling Clyde and Jessica were already talking about starting a family.

      But Miles didn’t have any desire to grow his own branch on the family tree, even in light of the way that tree suddenly seemed to be leafing out. Not only were two thirds of the triplets now committed to matrimony, but their sister Violet was engaged, too. And their oldest brother, Jack, had just married recently and settled in Texas. There was no way, however, that Miles would be upholding that particular family tradition. He was having too much fun as a single man. And he didn’t want to be responsible for anyone but himself.

      He found the bar easily enough after following Jenny’s directions, and ordered a bourbon straight up. Restless, though, he didn’t feel like sitting at the bar and drinking alone. But he didn’t feel like returning to the fund-raiser, either. Wrapping his fingers around the heavy glass tumbler, he turned—

      —and saw a flash of sapphire-blue speeding past the bar’s entrance on the other side of the room.

      Instinctively, Miles headed toward the door and walked through it, just in time to see that flash of blue disappear around a corner at the end of the hall. And although he couldn’t be positive, he was pretty sure there had been a blond topknot attached to the woman wearing it.

      In a word, hmm…

      There was a glass-enclosed sunroom at the end of that hallway, he knew. And it had been a nice evening, cool and crisp and cloudless, when he’d arrived at the hotel. No doubt it had turned into one of those crystal-clear nights by now, the kind where the constellations were all very easy to find.

      Yeah, he thought as his fingers wrapped more firmly around his glass and he began to walk in the same direction as the blue dress, maybe a little stroll would do him good….

      Two

      Okay, she was well and truly lost now, no mistaking or faking it. As Lanie stood in the middle of a darkened sunroom, gazing at the inky, star-spattered sky through the glass ceiling overhead, she asked herself where she could have possibly gone wrong.

      Probably, she immediately answered herself, it was when she had decided СКАЧАТЬ