Читать книгу Wild West Fortune - Allison Leigh - Страница 10
ОглавлениеJayden felt Ariana stiffen next to him and wished he’d said just about anything else.
That was the problem with his propensity for voicing blunt truths.
He pushed to his feet. He was soaked to the skin but he ignored the annoyance. “If I remember, there ought to be some stuff to eat and drink down here. Interested?”
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “If it’s a hundred years old like that cellar door, I don’t think so.”
He chuckled as he went over to the shelves. They were crammed with everything from tools to packing boxes that had been there since before his mom had ever set foot in Paseo. Which dated them more than thirty-six years, since he and his brothers hadn’t yet been born. In the years he’d been gone in the army, the shelves had only gotten more jumbled.
“The door’s old,” he allowed. “But not a hundred years old. It’s just the Paseo sun that makes it look that way.” He pushed aside a stack of newspapers. Who kept old newspapers these days? To him it was sort of like saving string.
Outside, the thunder had settled into a continuous rumble. He hadn’t lied to the lovely, young Ariana Lamonte. Aside from that one sight of the funnel cloud, he hadn’t seen it again when he’d been fighting with the damn cellar door. But he still wasn’t inclined to leave the safety of the cellar just yet, either. Not when the sky had that ominous blackish-green hue. Just because he hadn’t seen a funnel didn’t mean there wasn’t one. And he had no desire to tangle with a tornado.
As far as storm cellars went, this one was pretty old. Back in the day, it’d been used more as a root cellar than anything. Nowadays, it was the place where old crap—like thirty-plus-year-old newspapers—went to die.
He didn’t find the box of crackers he’d been hunting for, but he did find an old radio. He switched it on.
“Is that a radio?”
He didn’t want to dash the hopefulness in Ariana’s voice, but truth was truth. “There are only a few radio stations with a strong enough signal to reach Paseo. Television’s even worse. Hated it when I was young.”
“That’s what cable and satellite dishes are for.”
He chuckled. “No cable out here. And satellite was way too expensive. At least it used to be.” They had satellite television now, primarily so his mom could keep up with Grayson’s rodeoing when she wasn’t traveling with him. But when the weather was bad, the first thing it did was lose its signal. He held up the radio that emitted only static no matter how many times he turned the dial. He turned it off again and stuck it back on the shelf.
“And no cell phone signal, either,” she said. “Which I discovered for myself already.”
“Nope. No cell signal.” He shrugged and moved a cardboard box full of toys he vaguely remembered from his childhood. If he was really lucky, he’d find some old towels.
“Any internet?”
“The library in town has it. They’re only open on Wednesdays, last time I checked.” Admittedly, that had been a good year ago, when he’d been ironing out leftover details from leaving the service.
“This is Texas,” she muttered. “Not a third-world country.”
He smiled faintly. “We are kind of off the grid,” he allowed. “But I’ve traveled the world. Seen the best and more often the worst of people along the way. So I’ve come to appreciate Paseo’s peacefulness.”
The cellar door shuddered again.
“Usual peacefulness,” he amended, resuming his search for the crackers. From the corner of his eye, he watched Sugar cuddle up close to Ariana.
The dog was ordinarily wary as hell around strangers. But he couldn’t exactly blame Sugar.
The reporter—journalist—had curves just meant to be cuddled up close against. She had rich brown hair that reached halfway down the back of the artsy black-and-white sweater she wore open over a clinging gray top. Her snug jeans showed off shapely thighs before they tucked in impractical knee-high red boots. They ought to have looked ridiculous, those boots. Like they belonged on a fashion runway. On her, though, they were just plain sexy. Combined with darkly lashed brown eyes that had sucked him in the second she’d turned them his way out on the highway, Ariana Lamonte definitely made an impact.
And her presence now was only serving to remind him just how long it had been since he’d enjoyed an attractive woman’s company.
He’d hooked up a time or two right after things ended with Tess in Germany, but that was it. Grayson had told him he was turning into a hermit and suggested he meet some of the buckle bunnies always following him around. Jayden had bluntly told his brother to stuff it.
He finally spotted the old-fashioned metal container that held a sealed box of saltine crackers. “Ah. Success.”
For all he knew, they were the same ones he’d put there when he was eighteen, but he was hoping they’d been refreshed somewhere along the way. He pulled the tin off the shelf, as well as the dusty bottle sitting behind it—definitely not his doing when he’d been eighteen. He’d been a hell-raiser, but even he hadn’t had the nerve to keep a bottle of whiskey in the cellar right under his mom’s nose. She’d have tanned his hide, regardless of his age. He’d never met a fight he didn’t like—except when it was against his mom.
Carrying both the tin and the bottle, he went back to sit on the sleeping bag.
Sugar lifted her head and shuffled over to him, curling up against his thigh and going back to sleep.
“How old is she?”
He rubbed the dog’s ruff. “About three. I brought her back from Germany with me when I got out of the army.” He left out the part that he’d basically stolen her from his master sergeant. The man had gotten Tess. As far as Jayden was concerned, he hadn’t deserved to have the dog, too.
“Was she born blind?”
“No.” He ignored her curious expression and peeled open the cracker box. Fortunately, it looked relatively new. And the outer metal box had done a good job keeping bugs from getting at the cardboard inside.
The storm was howling worse than ever outside. Rain had started lashing against the door and he hoped to keep Ariana distracted from it as much as he could. “Here.” He set a sleeve of crackers on the sleeping bag between them and wiped off the dusty bottle with his wet shirttail. “No glasses, I’m afraid.” He held the bottle closer to the lantern so she could see the label he’d exposed. “You are legal, right?” For all he knew, she could be a twenty-year-old journalism student.
She let out a soft, sexy laugh and leaned forward to take the bottle. Her fingertips brushed his. He wasn’t sure if that made more of an impression on him than the way her long, tangled hair formed a curtain around her. “More than legal,” she assured him. “I’m twenty-seven.”
Older than she looked, which was a relief. “I’ve got nine years on you.”
“Not exactly a generation gap,” she offered drily. She twisted off the cap from the bottle of whiskey, took a sip and promptly coughed. “Potent,” she finally managed. She set the bottle next to the crackers and peeled off her sweater.
The clinging shirt beneath possessed no sleeves. Just two narrow straps over shoulders that gleamed ivory-smooth in the lantern’s light. His gaze started to drift over the shadowy cleavage also on display beneath her collection of thin gold necklaces, and he grabbed the whiskey bottle for himself.
Hell of a time for that dead feeling inside him to be shocked back to life.
“Potent,” he agreed after he took a healthy swig. The liquor burned all the way down, joining the heat already pooled inside him.
Fortunately, she seemed to take his comment at face value and fiddled with her cell phone. “I couldn’t function without the internet,” she said. “How do you stand it?”
“Just fine,” he drawled. “What do I need it for?”
“Keeping up with the world?”
He smiled slightly. “Hear everything I need to know at the feed store in town.” It was an exaggeration, but not that much of one since he, personally, wasn’t all that inclined to ever turn on the television. Not when every time he did, all he saw were politicians arguing and neighbors shooting neighbors. He’d seen enough of that in the service. “What do you need the internet for?”
She’d been sitting cross-legged and she shifted, straightening out her legs, too. “My job, for one thing. Research. Filing stories.” Her lips twitched. “Keeping up with the world.”
“I kept up with the world plenty thanks to fifteen years with the army.”
She set aside her phone and lifted her hair off her neck with both hands. “It’s warm down here.”
And getting warmer. He wasn’t entirely certain that his clothes hadn’t started steaming. “Blame it on the whiskey.” Personally, he was blaming it on her.
“It’s June but the rain still ought to cool things off.” She twisted her hair, managing to tie it into a knot atop her head. She inhaled deeply and Jayden did blame the whiskey then, because he should have looked away from the lush curves pushing against that thin excuse for a shirt, but he didn’t.
And the heat inside his gut just increased.
The only thing that distracted him was the thumping of the cellar door as the storm buffeted against it. It sounded like it was hailing, but in the lantern light, he could see the glimmer of rain dripping through the slats of the wood door.
If he’d met Ariana Lamonte under just about any other circumstance, he wouldn’t hesitate to pursue the attraction. But she was in his storm cellar. Essentially under his protection.
Which changed the rules entirely.
Or should.
“So what do you do in Austin when you’re not chasing around stories for your magazine?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “The usual. I have friends. Parents.” As if she realized the spare details were hardly the way to keep a conversation going, she pushed to her feet and paced the short distance to the shelves, arching her back a little as she stretched. Then she bent over in half, her bracelets jingling softly, and pressed her fingers against the dirt floor.
He damn near swallowed his tongue.
The knot in her hair wasn’t holding up. As he watched, it seemed to uncoil in almost slow motion. Then she straightened again, caught her hands behind her back and stretched once more.
He closed his eyes, stifling an oath. “Grow up there?” He had to raise his voice over the noise from outside.
“In Austin? Born and raised. Same as my mom and dad before me. I love the city. I have an apartment that overlooks the skyline. Ridiculously expensive, so I barely have it furnished, but I can walk or ride my bicycle to work if I want. I can get most anywhere I want, really, without even taking out my car.”
He looked at her again and was both relieved and chagrined that she’d stopped stretching and was pacing once more. “Except here,” he said drily.
Her lips curved. They were full and luscious, like the rest of her. Not overblown. Just...right.
Exactly right.
“Except here,” she agreed. “What about you? Did you grow up in Paseo?”
“Born and raised,” he parroted. “Right here on this very ranch.”
She propped her hands on her hips and looked at him. “And your parents?”
He wasn’t accustomed to telling strangers his business. But she was easy to talk to. And it kept her from turning to see the water that had begun streaming down the steps.
The cellar had stone walls and a dirt floor. He’d never known it to flood more than a foot. Still, if it got worse, he was already figuring they’d have to leave the shelter. In a flood, being inside the house higher up was better than being below ground. If there really were tornadoes in the area, they’d have to take their chances. His mom’s bedroom closet in the house would be the best bet. First floor. Interior room.
There wouldn’t be much space for the two of them. It would definitely be close quarters—
“Never knew my father,” he said, pulling his thoughts away. “My mom was pregnant when she came to Paseo.”
Her expression shifted a little. “So your mom is a Fortune?”
“Not one of those Fortunes,” he reminded her. “The ones you’ve been writing about for your magazine. Like I said. The name’s just a coincidence. So if that’s what brought you to Paseo, you’ve wasted a trip. My mother’s definitely not related to them.”
She tilted her head slightly. “It’s not that common a name.”
“It’s the one my mom decided on when she was making a fresh start here. She wanted a new life. A new identity. Said my brothers and I were the only fortune she needed. Thus the name. I’m pretty sure she was running from the guy who’d gotten her pregnant. She could have chosen any surname she wanted.” He raised his voice over a crack of thunder. “Always figured Fortune was better than Smith.”
Ariana jerked to attention at his words. His mother had been running?
“It’s just thunder.” Jayden’s deep voice was calm. The kind of voice to inspire trust. “It can’t hurt you.”
“The lightning that causes it can.” Much as she disliked thunderstorms, she was glad to blame her reaction on it. “So why do you think she was hiding from him?” she asked casually, concealing her intense interest. Gerald Robinson had a history of being a womanizer. But not a violent one. Even now, in his seventies, he was a compellingly attractive man. She’d only had a few brief encounters with him—he was not a proponent of her magazine articles, to say the least, and had no idea about the book of course—but it wasn’t difficult to understand how women had flocked his way. But none of the women—even his wife—seemed to hold his heart.
Some said that Gerald Robinson didn’t really have one.
But maybe he’d had one and left it in Paseo.
“Was your mother afraid of your father?”
“I probably should have phrased it differently.” He adjusted the rolled sleeping bag behind him, stretching out even more fully on the one spread beneath him. He tore open the sleeve of crackers and fed one to Sugar. “I think she was running from a broken heart. And that’s it.”
Another frequent refrain when it came to the women in Gerald’s past. The only heart that seemed to have not broken along the way belonged to his wife.
Then she realized what else Jayden had said. “You have brothers?”
He’d uncapped the whiskey again and held up two fingers as he took a sip. When he was finished, he held the bottle toward her.
Even though she knew she oughtn’t, she took the bottle again and this time managed not to choke on the alcohol as it burned down her throat.
But she dropped the bottle completely when a loud crash vibrated through the very walls, making even the metal shelving shudder and squeal.
She froze, forgetting entirely her interest in his brothers, and warily looked up at the low ceiling, half-afraid it was getting ready to collapse in on them. It was covered in wood. But above that, she really had no idea what was there. Except earth and that awful, awful howling wind. “That was not thunder.”
He’d sat up, too, and shook his head. He righted the whiskey bottle she’d dropped. “No, it wasn’t.” He went up the stairs and pried the flashlight out of the metal latch where he’d jammed it. Only then did she realize the stairs were flowing with water.
“Are you sure you should go out there?”
“No, but I want to know what the hell that noise was. I’m not worried about the house—nobody is here but us—but I’ve got horses in the barn.” He pushed up on the cellar door and swore.
Her stomach curled in on itself nervously. “What’s wrong?”
“Something’s blocking the door.” He put his shoulder to it and heaved.
The door that had blown open from the wind now stayed stubbornly closed.
She felt like choking on a whole new lump of misgivings. “So we’re trapped?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
She picked up the lantern and carried it with her up a few steps until she was just below him. In the light she couldn’t see the faintest glimmer of anything between the wood slats. She could, however, see the muscles standing out in his arms as he pushed futilely against the door. And she could also see the stream of water pouring steadily down the stone steps. How it was getting around whatever blocked the door was a mystery.
But water had a way of going where it wanted.
Take the Grand Canyon, for example.
“What would you say, then?”
His answer was curt. And unprintable.
Her mouth went dry. She backed down the wet steps.
He followed her and took the lantern from her fingers that had gone numb. “Don’t look like that.”
“Like what?” She wrapped her arms around herself. It was humid and warm in the cellar but she suddenly felt cold. How much water would the dirt absorb before it started to fill the cellar? “You just said nobody was here but us.”
“Not for a few days.”
She gaped. “A few days? So someone will find our bodies sooner or later?”
He set the lantern on the ground and put his arms around her. “You do have an imagination, don’t you?”
She nodded against his shoulder, breathing in the warm, comforting scent of him. “My teachers always told me that was a good thing. But this is not at all how I expected this day to go.”
“Me, either.” His hands slid down her spine. “We’ll get out of here before we’re reduced to bodies. The cellar has never flooded much more than ten, twelve inches before.”
The details were not a comfort. “I don’t know how to swim.”
“You’re not going to need to,” he promised.
She tilted her head back, looking up into his face. It really was a cussedly handsome one. From the cleft in his chin to the straight brows over his level gaze. “My mother will never forgive me for not giving her grandchildren.” Karen Lamonte had been going on about it ever since Ariana had broken off with Steven.
His eyebrows shot up and the corner of his lips lifted. “Pretty sure that’s not going to be decided here and now, sweetheart.”
She really didn’t know what was wrong with her. She’d never particularly been prone to panic before. But she’d also never found herself stuck in a storm cellar in a town nobody could seem to find except for those who actually lived there, in the company of a man who might or might not be another son of Gerald Robinson, but who definitely had an overwhelming appeal for her personally.
And focusing on Jayden was far preferable to thinking about what could happen if that water kept coming down the stairs.
“You have a scar,” she murmured inconsequentially and touched the faint white line above his eyebrow. “Right there.”
“Bar fight.” His lashes drooped and she knew instinctively that he was looking at her lips.
Without conscious thought, she moistened them. His fingertips were tracing her spine, setting off all manner of sensations inside her. “Are you, ah, in a lot of bar fights?”
“One or two. I stopped more of them.” He shifted slightly, pulling her in closer till her breasts were pressed against his chest. “I was an MP in the army.”
Her breasts were pressed against his chest. “MP?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Military Police.” His head dropped toward hers. “Former badass Sergeant First Class Fortune at your service.” As he said the words his head lowered toward hers. His breath fanned her mouth as he said, “I’m going to kiss you, you know.”
Heat flushed through her veins, collecting in her center. Her head felt heavy as she looked up at him. Any hope of maintaining a professional distance had gotten washed away. “Former Sergeant, I sure hope so,” she breathed.
One of his hands left her back to slide along her jaw.
Her lips parted and she drew in a deep breath. She felt the way he went still when she slid her hands around his neck. His thumb brushed over her lower lip and she couldn’t help the soft sound that rose in her throat.
“Damn,” he murmured. And then his mouth found hers.
His kiss didn’t feel damned. If anything, his kiss felt glorious.
And if she was going to go in a storm cellar, at least she was going to go like this.
He lifted his head way too soon. His eyes were dark and unreadable in the dim lantern light, but the searching in them felt as real as the moisture leaching from his clothes into hers.
She pulled his head down. “If you’re going to kiss me,” she said as she caught his lower lip between hers and lightly tugged, “kiss me.”
He groaned, kissing her even more deeply. His hands traveled down her back, down her hips, her rear, pulling her up and into him. He was hard and her head whirled even more. All she wanted to do right then and there was twine herself around him and he seemed to know it because he yanked his mouth away from her and lifted her right off her feet.
“Put your legs around me.”
She didn’t need the request. She was already linking her boots behind him and wishing there weren’t two layers of denim between them. She couldn’t do anything about that at the moment, but she could do something about his shirt. She yanked it upward, hearing a few buttons scatter before he let out a low, groaning laugh and managed to pull it off his head.
She pressed her open mouth against his collarbone, tasting the moist, salty heat of his skin. He cradled her backside as he crouched down, finally lowering her onto the sleeping bag. One corner of her mind wondered if the thing was floating in water yet, but that didn’t stop her from reaching greedily between them for his belt.
He jerked and caught her hands in his, pinning them above her head against the sleeping bag.
“Don’t tell me you want me to stop.” In any other world, she’d have been shocked by her own boldness. But this wasn’t any other world. The only world that existed was contained in a flooding dirt cellar from which they had no way out. She angled her hips against his. “I can feel what you want.”
“Yeah?” His hair brushed her cheek as he kissed the side of her neck. “Does that mean I have to hurry?” His mouth burned along the curve of her shoulder. Over the thin strap of her camisole and down to where her achingly tight nipples pushed against the cotton fabric. “You’re not wearing a bra.”
Was there any point in explaining the built-in shelf bra? “Maybe you do need to hurry, if we’re going to be flooded in this cellar.”
“We’re not getting flooded,” he said again.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.” Still holding her wrists above her head with one hand, he peeled down the top of her camisole with the other, until she felt his breath on her bare breasts. She was coming positively unglued, anticipating the brush of his mouth, the slide of his tongue—
But instead of tasting her, he lifted his head a little. “What is that?” He reached for the lantern, pulling it near so he could look more closely at her exposed breasts. “A butterfly?”
She groaned, twisting beneath him. “Yes, it’s a butterfly.” All of an inch big in pale pink and black, tattooed on the upper curve of her right breast when she’d been twenty-one. She still couldn’t free her hands, so she arched her back, rubbing her rigid nipples and the tattoo against his hard chest. “You were in the army, Sergeant Fortune. Surely you’ve seen tattoos before.” In the scheme of things, her little butterfly was hardly a record breaker. Neither was the floral curlicue on her left shoulder blade.
His teeth flashed. “Sweetheart, I’ve seen things that would turn your hair white.” He ducked his head and kissed the point of her shoulder. Then the butterfly.
Heat flowed under the surface of her tingling skin and she bit back a moan when his lips finally surrounded her nipple. Even though she twisted her wrists, halfheartedly trying to free them, he kept them bracketed. She pressed her face against the top of his head. “Jayden, please,” she breathed.
In answer, he pushed his thigh between her legs and palmed her other breast.
Pleasure rocketed through her and she cried out.
Jayden made a low sound. Utterly male. Utterly triumphant. Then his mouth was on hers again, and her wrists were finally free, and he rolled over, pulling her over him.
Noise seemed to rage beyond the storm cellar, but she was far more aware of her heart pounding loudly inside her head, of the low sounds coming from Jayden, of the clink of his belt when he finally loosened it. Breathless, she braced one hand on the floor, reaching to undo her own jeans with the other. But instead of dirt, her hand sank into mud. “Jayden, the water—”
“I know.” He cursed and kissed her hard again while the pounding outside the cellar door got even louder.
Then suddenly, he went still. “Wait.” He sat up, dumping her somewhat unceremoniously onto her butt as he stood. Instead of finishing the job of undressing, though, he fastened his belt and headed up the stairs. He pounded on the door. “Nate,” he yelled. “That you?”
Ariana hoped she wasn’t hearing things when she heard a faint, indecipherable response.
“Yeah, we’re stuck,” Jayden yelled, pressing his head close to the wood.
Once again, her adrenaline seemed to want to blow the top of her head right off. She wiped off her muddy hand and scrambled up the few steps behind him. “Who’s out there?”
“My brother Nathan. So you, uh, might—” He gestured and she flushed, realizing her camisole was bunched around her waist.
Suddenly embarrassed, she turned and tugged the stretchy fabric back where it belonged, hiding her still-tight nipples and the butterfly tattoo. She would have put on her sweater for good measure, except when she picked it up from where she’d left it bunched by the base of the stairs, it was soaking wet.
As was her cell phone.
She grimaced. It was supposed to be waterproof, but she wasn’t sure that meant it could withstand sitting in several inches of water. She was drying it off the best she could against her jeans when Sugar started barking, pacing back and forth across the sleeping bag, leaving muddy paw prints all over it.
“Sugar, come here.” Ariana reached out so the dog could sniff her hand and then closed her fingers around the bandanna to hold her still. “Good girl.” She tucked the phone in her back pocket and looked back at Jayden. “I can’t hear what your brother is saying. What’s blocking the door?”
“Your car.”
“What?”
“It’s on its side.” He pressed his ear against the door again. “Yeah,” he shouted. Then he looked back at her. “He’s hooked up the winch from my truck to drag it off.”
She hadn’t even had the car for three months yet. She’d bought it outright with her book advance. Her savings account wasn’t quite sucking air, but it was close. What if she had to pay for car repairs? “Is it going to be damaged very badly?”
“I doubt the winch will do anything worse to it than the wind that turned it on its side in the first place.”
She grimaced, knowing it had been a foolish question.
Jayden was listening again at the wood panels, and then he backed down the steps, sliding his arm around her waist to pull her away as well. “Sugar, come on.” The dog moved also, sitting against his leg, thumping her tail and looking up at him with an adoring expression on her pointed face. “Just to be safe,” he told Ariana and brushed his lips over her temple.
She closed her eyes for a moment, fighting the strong urge to put her arm around him, too.
“Relax,” Jayden said. His long fingers squeezed her hip. “Everything’s going to be fine. We’re getting out.”
She smiled weakly. She was relieved about that. More than she could say. But it also meant that getting carried away like she had with Jayden Fortune could not happen again. Not when she was far from convinced his name was merely a coincidence. Getting personally involved with someone she was writing about was out of the question.
“I thought you never had any doubt about us getting out.”
“I didn’t.” He gave her a quick wink, and then they both went silent as they heard what could only be the sound of her car being dragged away from the cellar door.
A few moments later, the door was opened from the outside. Rain pounded through the opening and then a drenched man appeared, shining a heavy-duty light down on them. “Well, well, bro. Glad to see you still like bringing the pretty girls to see your underground bachelor pad.”
Ariana flushed. She had no right to feel jealous of what Jayden had done in the past or would do in the future with anyone. But that didn’t stop her from feeling it anyway.
Jayden grabbed her hand and started up the stairs. “Be careful,” he warned her. “The stones are slippery as hell.”
She found that out quickly enough when Sugar slipped and lost her footing. Jayden immediately let go of Ariana to pick up the dog and carry her up the rest of the stairs.
Grabbing hold of the handrail, Ariana followed. She was soaked even before she accepted the hand that Jayden’s brother offered when she reached the top of the stairs.
“Out you go,” Nathan said, practically lifting her right out onto the ground. “You guys all right?”
Ariana nodded. Even though it was pouring buckets and it was nearly dark, the sky no longer had that terrible, angry black look, as if it were ready to explode. “Thank you.” He’d set the big flashlight on the top of her car—make that the side of her car, because she saw right away that it was, indeed, lying on its side. “How could this happen? Was it a tornado after all?” She looked up into Nathan’s face, and now that the flashlight wasn’t shining in her face, she nearly did a double take. “You’re twins?”
Nathan grinned. “Triplets, actually. But I’m the best-looking one of the lot.”
Jayden let Sugar jump to the ground. The dog, mostly blind or not, raced immediately across the muddy ground toward the house. “I’ll disagree with that,” he said, reaching out to give his brother’s hand a pump. “But I’m glad as hell that you’re the most unpredictable of us. Thought you were still in Oklahoma City.”
Nathan shrugged, offering no explanation.
Ariana took the flashlight to shine it over her car.
Not only was it sitting on its side, but half the windows were broken out. The copy of the magazine was gone. Worst of all, though, her thick notebook was nowhere in sight.
She’d had nearly a year’s worth of research packed in that notebook. It had contained everything that her laptop—which was sitting safely in her apartment back home—did not. And the thought of losing it was almost overwhelming.
“It’s not so bad,” Jayden said. “We’ll get it turned right side up and replace the windshield—”
She nodded and blinked her eyes hard.
“Hey.” Nathan took the flashlight from her nerveless hand. “I’m used to being waterlogged, but maybe we could get out of the rain and take this inside the house.”
“Getting out of the rain sounds good,” she agreed.
She followed the two men who were so alike that they were two peas in a pod. And evidently, there was a third pea from that pod as well.
Multiple births ran in Gerald Robinson’s family. His two eldest sons with Charlotte were twins.
Ariana didn’t need her notes to know that.
She didn’t need her notes to know a lot of things.
But she honestly couldn’t recall from her biology classes whether multiples happened from the mother’s side or the father’s. Which meant she needed to do a little research.
The very thought of it energized her.
Her car would get fixed. And her notes could be re-created. When it came to some things, she had an excellent memory for detail.
Maybe Paseo wasn’t turning out to be a wild-goose chase after all. She’d just found three more sons of Gerald Robinson. Possibly three more sons.
That in itself was huge.
But Jayden and his brothers were also thirty-six. Which meant if Gerald was their father, they were his eldest heirs.
Was that the reason Charlotte Robinson had shown her fangs to Ariana?
Because she knew?
