Читать книгу The Debutante - Elizabeth Bevarly - Страница 9

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 to deliberately avoid Mrs. Steadmore-Duckworth by telling her mother a fib.

Bad karma will out.

Still, her bad karma couldn’t be all that bad, she decided, since it had led her to a room that was quiet, reflective and pretty, a welcome contrast to the noisy, bustling, extravagant party she’d just left. She hesitated before turning around to leave, attracted to the almost Zen-like serenity of the sunroom. It was more than a little appealing for someone who had survived as hectic a day as Lanie had. Maybe she should just take advantage of a peaceful moment and enjoy it for a few minutes before venturing back to the raucous fund-raiser.

At night like this, the sunroom was really more of a moon room. And the moon was indeed visible, shining like a newly minted silver dollar smack-dab in the middle of the dark sky above. Beyond and around it, stars glittered like tiny gemstones. If Lanie focused very hard, she thought she could see the milky gleam of the galaxy threading its way through the darkness, too. Tables and chairs dotted the room, unused at the moment, but their glass hurricane centerpieces winked in the moonlight as if a few stray stars had spilled into them. Here and there, along the perimeter of the room, pots of ferns and trailing bougainvillea hung from what, in the dim light, appeared to be magic. Coupled with the night sky above, the view made Lanie feel as if she had stumbled into a lush, deserted jungle. The only thing that prevented the impression from gelling completely was that somewhere behind her she could hear the faint strains of jazz—something soft and mellow and perfect for the nighttime hours, the metallic swish of brushes on drum skins inciting an echoing purr of delight that rumbled up from somewhere deep inside her.

It wasn’t easy being a jazz fan in Texas, where country and western and southern-fried rock reigned. Someone here at the Four Seasons must like it, too, she thought. Or maybe her karma really wasn’t so bad after all, and the Fates had simply seen fit to reward her for some good deed she couldn’t remember doing.

For another long moment, Lanie only stood in the center of the deserted sunroom, gazing up at the sky, enjoying the soft sound of music. What was the harm? By now, her mother would have decided she’d been waylaid by another partygoer and would be promising Mrs. Steadmore-Duckworth that she’d make sure her daughter called her first thing in the morning. And Lanie would, she silently promised, her guilty conscience gnawing at her. She could fit one more committee into her year, provided it was for a good cause. It was the least she could do for Mrs. Steadmore-Duckworth, since avoiding the woman had given Lanie a few moments of peace and quiet in an otherwise turbulent world.

Funny how rewards came out of nowhere sometimes. Good thing she had the good sense to enjoy it.

Not sure what compelled her to do it, Lanie strode to the other side of the room, halting between an especially dense fern and an especially fragrant bougainvillea. Gazing through the window, she thought she caught a glimpse of movement outside, in the bushes that lay just beyond the glass. She noticed then that the entire sunroom was surrounded by outdoor greenery, which, like the potted plants inside, added to the exotic feel of the place. No doubt something small and hungry was out there scavenging about, she thought. Though she doubted it was any more exotic than an armadillo. She placed her open hand against the cool glass of the window, spreading her fingers wide in an effort to block some of the reflection of the light behind her, to see if she could tell what was out there. Narrowing her eyes, she waited to see if the movement would come again.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize there was someone here.”

Lanie spun around quickly at the sound of the masculine voice, startled not only by the disruption to her solitary contentment, but also because she had genuinely forgotten she was in a public place full of people, any of whom could have wandered into the sunroom off the busy hallway beyond the door. Startled turned into delighted, however, when she realized who the masculine voice belonged to. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness by now, and she had no trouble making out with—uh, she meant making out—Miles Fortune. Of all people. Well, well, well.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I was actually just getting ready to leave.”

And why did she tell him that? she wondered. A handsome man she’d found fascinating for years shows up in a room where she’d have his undivided attention, and she tells him she has to be going? What was the matter with her?

“Don’t let me scare you off,” he said.

As if, Lanie thought. He was way too yummy to be scary. Most of the photos she’d seen of him had depicted him in casual clothes, everything from grubby ranch denim to preppy golf shirts and trousers to blazers with open-collar shirts and Dockers. Tonight, though, he’d dressed for the formal fund-raiser in a dark suit with a plum-colored dress shirt and a dappled silk necktie knotted at his throat.

Snazzy, she couldn’t help thinking. Not a bad dresser for a guy who made his living chasing cows. She wondered if he had a woman stashed somewhere who helped him with his wardrobe. She’d read enough about Miles Fortune to know he never stayed with one woman for very long and, in fact, had dated some of the flashiest, most sophisticated women in Texas. But he had a sister and female cousins, and everyone knew those Fortunes were very close. Maybe one of his feminine relatives helped him make his sartorial selections. Most men couldn’t be bothered with that kind of thing. Especially those whose chief interests were bovine in nature.

Then again, part of Miles Fortune’s appeal to all those flashy, sophisticated women was how great he looked all the time, Lanie reminded herself. So which was a result of the other? One of those chicken-or-the-egg things she’d probably be better off not thinking about, she supposed.

“You didn’t scare me off,” she said, remembering that he’d made a comment that had invited a reply.

He smiled in response, a smile that was sweet and dreamy and—there was just no escaping it—droolworthy. Lanie battled the temptation to swipe her hand over her mouth and smiled back.

“Good,” he said. “Because the last thing I’d want to do is scare off a nice girl like you.”

A nice girl, Lanie echoed to herself, turning fully around now to face him. Funny, she hadn’t been called that for a long time. Maybe not ever. Whenever she was mentioned in the society pages or elsewhere, she was usually tagged with some cutesy nickname by whomever was doing the mentioning, and rarely were the nicknames in any way appropriate—or earned. Every time Lanie visited a new town, she was awarded some new, usually alliterative label she didn’t deserve. The Dallas Delilah. The Houston Heartbreaker. The Fort Worth Firebrand. The San Antonio Seductress. The Amarillo Angel. The Corpus Christi Cutie. Or just the all-inclusive Texas Tornado. And then there was the one she had to suffer when she was at home in Austin: Government Goddess.

Oh, all right. So maybe she did kind of like that last one.

At any rate, “nice girl” had never been anywhere in the mix. Not even when she’d gone to Nacogdoches. No, there she’d been The Knockout. So hearing Miles Fortune refer to her as a nice girl now made a little ripple of pleasure purl right through her.

“Hi, I’m Miles Fortune,” he introduced himself. With a hint of self-consciousness—though whether real or manufactured to put her at ease, Lanie couldn’t have said—he strode slowly across the room to where she stood, stopping when there was still a good three feet separating them, obviously not wanting her to feel threatened by him. Then, looking uncertain about how welcome the gesture would be, he extended his hand for her to shake it.

Lanie took it automatically, totally comfortable with the masculine form of address, because she’d been shaking the hands of her father’s colleagues since she was a little girl. Something like that had always presented a great photo opportunity, after all. Besides, she didn’t feel at all threatened by Miles Fortune, since he was in no way a threatening guy.

“I know who you are,” she told him, still smiling warmly as she gave his hand a spirited shake.

He arched his dark eyebrows in surprise at the comment, even though Lanie was certain that what she had said couldn’t possibly come as a surprise to him. “Then you have me at a disadvantage,” he replied, still holding her hand, even though he’d stopped shaking it. “Because I don’t know who you are.”

It took a moment for the comment to register with Lanie, because she honestly didn’t think anyone had ever said such a thing to her before. Invariably, people knew who she was: the governor’s daughter. Even before her father had ascended to that lofty position, people had still known who Lanie was. When the Meyerses had lived in Dallas, she’d been the mayor’s daughter. Before that, in the third district, she’d been the alderman’s daughter. Her father had held a political office of one kind or another since before she’d been born, and Lanie had always attended functions with him and her mother where she had been introduced as his daughter.

Which made her realize, perhaps for the first time, just how intrinsically her identity was linked to whatever position her father happened to hold. Her social life before turning eighteen had always been limited to functions that were also attended by her parents, something due largely to matters of security, she knew. Even before her father had climbed the higher rungs of the political ladder, he’d deliberately stayed visible in the public eye in order to reach those rungs, and he’d made sure his family was visible, too, because it made him more sympathetic.

Ironically, however, that public life had brought with it an essential need for privacy. Anyone who held public office might become a target for some lunatic. And, by extension, so might that person’s family. So Tom and Luanne Meyers had made sure their young daughter was well protected at all times. That had meant keeping her out of public when they weren’t with her, something that had rather limited Lanie’s social life as an adolescent.

Lanie had never resented it, though. Well, not as much as she probably could or should have. She had just shrugged it off as a simple misfortune of birth. She had had benefits that a lot of teenage girls would never have, and that had provided her some compensation. Instead of a single bedroom, she’d had a suite of rooms at home. Her wardrobe had been full of party dresses and shoes for the appearances she made with her parents. She went to the salon twice a month to have her hair and nails done. She’d met the members of both *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys when they’d played Dallas. And she’d visited movie sets and met television stars. For not having a social life, Lanie had been a big part of Texas society.

And she’d reassured herself by promising herself that she’d take advantage of adulthood once she turned eighteen, then strike out on her own and make her own impression on the world. But even over the past several years, when Lanie had been struggling to stand on her own two feet, she’d still never found herself in a situation where people didn’t know who she was: the governor’s daughter.

The realization didn’t set well with her.

And maybe that was why she decided not to tell Miles Fortune her name. Well, not her full name. Because suddenly it was kind of nice not being recognized. Suddenly it was kind of nice not being the governor’s daughter. Suddenly it was kind of nice just to be—

“Lanie,” she said, noticing how she and Miles still hadn’t released each other’s hands. “I’m Lanie.”

She could tell by his expression that he was waiting for her to give him her last name, too. And when she didn’t, she could tell by his expression that he thought it was because she was a woman meeting a man for the first time and feeling cautious. He didn’t press the matter, however. And something about that made her like him even more.

“Lanie,” he said, smiling. “Pretty name.”

And she could tell by his expression that time that her name wasn’t the only thing he thought was pretty. But he didn’t press that matter, either. And something about that made her like him even more, too.

“Thanks,” she told him. “It’s short for Elaine, which was my grandmother’s name.”

“It suits you,” he said, still smiling, still not releasing her hand.

Not that Lanie minded.

But he didn’t clarify which name suited her, she noted. That was interesting, because to her way of thinking, the two names had nothing in common, even though one was derived from the other. She’d always thought of Elaine as the name of an elegant, refined, cerebral brunette. Lanie was a party girl, plain and simple, laughing and dressed in bright colors and always the last to leave the dance floor. Lanie had always suited her much better, she’d always thought. Surely that was the one Miles was referring to, since he’d said it was pretty.

Still neither seemed in any hurry to release the other’s hand, something Lanie decided not to worry too much about. Mostly because Miles’s hand in hers just felt very, very nice, and it had been a long time since she’d held hands with a guy. The fact that she was doing so now for reasons that were in no way romantic was beside the point. Just looking at Miles Fortune made her feel romantic. Besides, this was only a brief little interlude that would be over all too quickly, and soon she’d only have memories of her chance meeting with Miles to keep her company. She wanted to make sure she had as many of them as she could to treasure. It wasn’t every day a woman got to meet a Fortune, after all.

But as much as Lanie was enjoying herself at the moment, she knew better than to think that this momentary chance encounter would turn into anything more. For one thing, she wasn’t such a lucky person that she ran into dreamy men like Miles Fortune every day. For another thing, the reason Miles Fortune was so dreamy was because that was where he dwelled—in Lanie’s dreams. In reality, he wasn’t the kind of man to let anything with a woman go much beyond the chance-encounter stage. And although Lanie Meyers might have the reputation for being a wild child, and although she might have a string of suggestive nicknames following her around Texas, when all was said and done, she really did know better than to get involved with a man like him. She liked to party. She didn’t like getting her heart broken.

“So you had to escape the governor’s bash, too, huh?” Miles asked now, referring to their earlier silent toast.

“Well, it was getting a bit crowded in there,” she said.

Finally, finally, she made herself glance down at their still-joined hands, then back up at Miles with a meaningful look. He mimicked her actions, grinned and, with obvious reluctance, released her fingers. Lanie pulled her hand back unwillingly, but she figured it was silly for the two of them to stand there as if they’d been bonded with Superglue. People should know each other at least a little bit before epoxying themselves to each other. He buried the hand that had held hers in his trouser pocket, and lifted the other, holding a glass of amber-colored liquor to his mouth for a meager sip.

Lanie watched, fascinated, as he completed the gesture, noting everything she could about him in that brief, unguarded moment. How the bright moonlight filtering through the glass ceiling overhead glinted off of the heavy onyx ring on his third finger, flickered in the cut crystal of the glass and winked off the gold cuff link fixed in his shirt. She noticed, too, the confident way his fingers curled around the glass, the square, blunt-cut but well-kept fingernails, the dark hair on the back of his hand, making that part of him so different from that part of her. Her own hands were pale and slender, the nails expertly manicured and painted bright pink. Then her gaze traveled to his face, and she saw the scant shadow of day-old beard that darkened his angular jaw, the perfect, elegant slope of his aristocratic nose, the thick, black lashes that put her own heavily mascaraed ones to shame. As he lowered his glass, she remarked the beautifully formed mouth, how his lower lip was just a shade plumper than the upper one, giving him a sort of brooding look that was at odds with his laughing brown eyes.

She hadn’t thought it would be possible for Miles Fortune to be even more handsome up close than he was from a distance. Most men who were that perfect-looking from afar became a bit less so when one drew nearer. Their eyes weren’t quite as clear as first thought, or their mouths were a bit lopsided, or their complexions were marred by some kind of imperfection. But not Miles Fortune. Up close, the flawlessness of his good looks was only cemented more completely.

After lowering his glass, his gaze met Lanie’s again, and he opened that beautiful mouth with the clear intention of saying something else. But he halted before uttering a word, his eyes widening when they met hers. And that was when Lanie realized her fascination with him must be written all over her face, and that she wasn’t the only one who could tell what others were thinking by looking at them.

Which was not good, since what she was thinking about just then didn’t bear airing anyplace other than in her own fantasies. Mostly because it involved Miles Fortune’s face. More specifically, it involved her touching Miles Fortune’s face. And then moving on to other body parts.

Immediately she snapped her eyes closed and shook her head once, as if trying to physically dislodge her wayward thoughts. “Um,” she began eloquently. “Ah,” she added articulately. “Er,” she then concluded astutely.

She heard Miles chuckle and opened her eyes to find him grinning at her again. But he was enough of a gentleman to pretend he hadn’t just caught her mentally undressing him, or noticed the sudden lapse in her vocabulary. Which went beyond making her like him even more and pretty much ensured that she would be head over heels in love with him for the rest of her life.

Damn. That was going to be tough to explain to her future husband. Whoever the poor sap turned out to be.

“So what brought you to the governor’s gig tonight?” Miles asked, thankfully changing the subject.

Then Lanie remembered they’d been talking about the governor’s gig all along, and the only thing that had changed in the last few minutes had been her body temperature. “I came with my parents,” she said, congratulating herself for having spoken the truth. “How about you?” she hurried to add, before he could ask her who her parents were.

“Dennis Stovall, the governor’s campaign manager, is a friend of mine from college,” Miles said. “I was in Austin on business this week and gave them a call the way I always do. They invited me to tag along tonight.”

Right, Lanie thought, remembering her mother’s earlier remark. She made a mental note of Miles’s connection to Dennis and Jenny Stovall, thinking she might need it someday.

“So then you’ll have to leave Austin soon,” she surmised, “and go back to…”

Most of the Fortunes lived in Red Rock, Lanie knew. About twenty miles east of San Antonio, it hadn’t become just another bedroom community and had instead held on to its own individual charm. Lanie had visited the town twice. First with her parents, when her father was stumping for his original attempt at the governor’s mansion, eight years ago. He’d lost that election by a narrow margin, something that had only made him that much more determined to win next time around—which, of course, he had. But back when Lanie had visited Red Rock, she’d been a teenager, still enamored of the Fortune triplets, and more than a little excited to be visiting their home base. Mostly what she remembered from that brief visit was an enchanting little village, complete with town square—which was actually round, she remembered, but did claim the requisite white gazebo—and whose downtown claimed for focal features a café and a knitting shop.

Over the past five or six years, though, Red Rock had grown into a more bustling community, which Lanie had seen for herself when she’d gone there a second time last month as an emissary of her father to meet with Ryan Fortune with regard to his receiving the Hensley-Robinson Award. Its quaint Main Street had become a booming thoroughfare by then, one that included more upscale shops and restaurants. The café and knitting shop had still been thriving, though, so the town was maintaining its roots well.

Ryan Fortune’s ranch, the Double Crown, had been a Fortune family stronghold for decades, and lay just outside of Red Rock. Not far from it was the Flying Aces, which Miles Fortune and his brothers had built several years ago. Now, though, Steven Fortune lived near Austin. That was where her father’s party for Ryan would take place next month. Lanie was already looking forward to it. Not just because it promised to be a very nice event, but because she’d bet good money Miles Fortune would be there, too, and it might provide her with another opportunity to run into him for another momentary chance encounter.

Well, it might.

All right, all right, so Lanie’s fascination with the triplets hadn’t ended when her adolescence had. Sue her. Maybe someday she’d get back to Red Rock again. After all, it wasn’t that far from Austin. You never knew whom you might run into once you got there.

“Red Rock,” he said now, answering the question she already knew the answer to. “It’s near San Antonio. A small town. Making me a small-town guy. Pretty boring when you get right down to it.”

Oh, Lanie wouldn’t say that.

“Do you and your folks live here in Austin?” he asked.

“We do, actually,” she replied without thinking. Not that Miles was going to make the leap that she was the governor’s daughter by virtue of her living in Austin. Still, she didn’t want to give him too many hints.

“Nice city,” he said.

“It is,” she agreed.

“Did you grow up here?”

She shook her head, content now to be making small talk. “I grew up in Texas,” she said, “but I’ve lived in several different cities. Dallas, Fort Worth. I was born in Houston. And I spent a lot of my summers in Corpus Christi and Galveston.”

He smiled. “You really are a Texas girl.”

“How about you?” she asked, again already knowing the answer, but wanting to hear him speak it in that luscious, velvety baritone of his anyway.

“I actually grew up in New York City,” he said. “But I spent summers here when I was a kid, and I just fell in love with the place. Couldn’t wait to move out here permanently. Same for my brothers. The Fortunes have deep roots in Texas. Steven and Clyde and I wanted to put down roots right alongside them.”

“That’s right,” Lanie said, feigning a vague recollection. “I think I remember reading about you Fortunes from time to time,” she added in an oh-yeah-now-I-remember voice that she hoped masked her intense, youthful crush on him and his brothers. “You’re one of the triplets, aren’t you?”

He smiled this time in a way that let her know how genuinely delighted he was by being one of three—and which told her again which of the three he was, thanks to that yummy dimple. “Yeah, I am. But I have another, older, brother named Jack, and a younger sister, too. Violet.”

“That must be interesting being a triplet. Identical, at that. I can’t imagine another person in the world looking like me, let alone two other people in the world.”

He shrugged, but continued to smile. “I’ve never known what it’s like not to have two people in the world who look like me,” he said. “Besides, Steven and Clyde and I are totally different personality-wise. I think it’s kind of great, actually.”

“I can see that,” Lanie told him. “Five kids, though. That’s a big family you come from.”

“Don’t you have brothers or sisters?” he asked. And something about the way he asked it made Lanie think he’d never even considered the possibility that there might be people in the world who didn’t claim siblings at all.

She shook her head. “I’m an only child.”

“Wow,” he said, sounding impressed. “I can’t imagine what that must be like. To never have anyone to play with or scuffle with or talk to when you need to confide in someone.”

Lanie couldn’t imagine why his comment put her on the defensive, but it did. “I had lots of people to play with growing up,” she said, not quite able to mask the indignation that bubbled up inside her for some reason, and for which she was totally unprepared. “And I had lots of people to confide in. I was very, very popular at school and I was never, ever lonely.”

Even she could see how obvious it was that she was protesting way too much. And okay, so maybe she was stretching the truth, she immediately conceded. Maybe the lots she had mentioned was really only… Well, zero.

And, anyway, she had had friends. A few. Just because she’d never felt all that close to any of them didn’t mean anything.

“I’m sorry,” he hastily apologized. “I didn’t mean to imply that you were lonely. Or unpopular. Or anything like that.”

“Good,” Lanie said, still feeling a bit snippy, mostly because Miles Fortune had just struck a little too close to home, in spite of her protests to the contrary.

“Look, for what it’s worth,” he said, his voice softening some, “my family’s got its share of dysfunctions, too.”

“I never said my family was dysfunctional,” Lanie said, the indignation returning. “Because we’re not. We’re totally normal,” she assured him. “Totally, completely, utterly, absolutely normal.”

If one considered being the first family of Texas normal. If one considered having a father with his eye on the White House normal. If one considered having lived in almost a half-dozen cities by the time one was ten years old normal. If one considered having buckets of money and unlimited social status normal.

So maybe the Meyerses weren’t exactly normal. They certainly weren’t dysfunctional. Well, no more than any normal family.

Now Miles laughed outright. “I didn’t mean to imply that you’d been neglected and mistreated,” he said. “I just meant—” He blew out an exasperated breath. “Ah, hell. I’m sorry, Lanie.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” she said, letting go of her uneasiness. “I guess, really, my family isn’t all that normal. But it’s not a bad family.”

“Neither is mine,” he said. “There are just times when I wish they’d been more…” He shrugged, then smiled again. “Normal,” he concluded.

“What do you mean?”

Belatedly, she realized what a personal, inappropriate question it was to ask him. The two of them had just met, after all, even if Lanie had known who Miles Fortune was for years. It was none of her business what the Fortune family dynamics were out of the public eye. Or even in the public eye, really. Unfortunately, thanks to reality television and infotainment shows, no one’s life was really private anymore. Voyeurism had become a real spectator sport in this country. And Miles was the one who’d brought it up, she reminded herself. Not that that made it okay for Lanie to pry.

But he didn’t seem offended by the question. On the contrary, he told her readily enough, “My parents were—and still are—very busy people, and sometimes they got stretched pretty thin. Don’t get me wrong. We always knew how much they loved us, and family was more important to my folks than anything. But with five kids and being passionate about so many things, they needed more hours in the day. I just would have liked to have them around more. Does that make sense?”

Oh, it made perfect sense to Lanie. Not so much about the Fortunes. But she knew herself what it was like to have too-busy parents who weren’t always around. It was hard to be resentful, though, because she knew they loved her, and what they were doing was to make her life better as much as their own. But it was hard to understand that when you were just a kid.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” she said in response to Miles’s question, not sure when she’d made the decision to speak aloud. “My folks are like that, too. They have important stuff to do. They’re important people,” she added.

“Same here,” Miles said. “Good people, but busy people.”

Lanie and Miles began to talk a lot after that, about so many things. Their childhoods, their schooling, their families. Things they hoped to do in the future, things they wished they had never done in the past. By the end of an hour together, they were seated at one of the tables in the corner of the sunroom as comfortably as if they were enjoying dinner at a restaurant. Miles had gone to the bar for another drink and returned with not only a glass of wine for Lanie, as well, but a book of matches to light the candle on the table so that the two of them would have some light.

Gradually, it occurred to Lanie that this was, without question, the most enjoyable evening she’d ever spent anywhere, with anyone. Miles was just so easy to talk to, and something inside both of them connected in a way that felt easy, natural and right. She kept telling herself she needed to get back to the fund-raiser, that her parents would be looking for her. Then she’d remind herself that it was still early, that these things usually lasted till well past midnight and that she could spare a little more time to talk to Miles.

Unfortunately, just as Lanie was thinking that maybe she wouldn’t go back to the fund-raiser ever again—or anywhere else where Miles Fortune wasn’t—their conversation came to an abrupt halt. Because that was when the fern hanging immediately behind him and just above his head suddenly snapped free of its mooring, sending what looked like its entire contents raining down onto his head, his shoulders and into his jacket and shirt. In fact, she felt more than a little dirt splatter her own face and hair as it cascaded over Miles, skittering over her bare shoulders and working its way down the front of her dress.

For a moment, neither of them spoke, or moved, or blinked. They just sat there, frozen in the moon-kissed and candlelit darkness, their hands held up impotently to stop what had already finished happening. Or maybe they were surrendering to the inevitable, Lanie couldn’t help thinking, whatever that inevitable might be. In any event, she suspected they both looked pretty foolish. Miles must have thought so, too, because in the next moment, as one, they both began to laugh. Hard.

Miles, gentleman that he was—however involuntarily in this case—took the worst of the hit, she saw. Where her own dress would probably be fine after a thorough shaking, his jacket and shirt might very well be goners. Little piles of soil perched on each of his shoulders like epaulets, and a veritable pyramid sat atop his head. Without thinking, he gave his hair a good shake, toppling the pyramid and sending a good bit of it down on Lanie. She gasped as she jumped up from her seat and took a few steps backward. Miles halted immediately, standing to help her. But that just sent more dirt flying.

“Oh, man, I am so sorry,” he apologized. But he didn’t quite manage to hide his grin. “I didn’t mean to get you even dirtier.”

Instead of being offended, Lanie began to laugh again. “I don’t know that it’s possible for either one of us to get dirtier at this point,” she told him. She looked at the offending planter, still swinging haphazardly behind him. “How on earth did that happen?”

He turned around, too, to inspect the culprit, and Lanie was surprised to see it hadn’t quite emptied, since there was still dirt trickling out of it. The poor fern, though, was a definite casualty, lying in a heap on the floor behind him.

“I have no idea,” he said when he turned back around. “Must have had a loose link in the chain or something.” He shook his arms this time, less vigorously than he had his head, and dirt tumbled off of him quite liberally.

“I guess we should be grateful they hadn’t watered the plants for a while,” she said, fighting another fit of giggles. “Otherwise it might have been a mudslide. I hope you didn’t pay a lot for that jacket.”

“It wasn’t the jacket that was expensive,” he said.

“No?”

He shook his head slowly in response…something that just made more dirt fall to his shoulders and into the garment in question. “No, it was the whole suit,” he said. Thankfully, he didn’t specify a price, but Lanie, who had an excellent eye for fashion, figured it had been at least four figures.

“What about you?” he said, jutting his chin up in the direction of her person. “Are you going to be able to salvage that dress?”

She shrugged…and felt the dirt in her bodice shift into her bra. Okay, so maybe she’d taken a worse hit than she’d thought. “What, this old thing?” she asked with a smile, even though she’d only worn the dress once before. “I dust with this.”

He laughed outright at that and began brushing halfheartedly at his shirt again. “We can’t go back into the party like this,” he said. “Not only do we look a mess, but people will wonder what the hell we’ve been up to all this time. It won’t look good.”

“And people do tend to gossip a lot after an event like this,” Lanie concurred wearily. She, too, began to brush at her clothing again, but really, when all was said and done, she wasn’t that big a mess. Miles had far more to worry about than she did.

“Give me your jacket,” she said. “I’ll try to shake out as much as I can. Maybe if you free your shirttail, you can get most of the dirt out of your shirt.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I can manage. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you all dirty, too. You go on back. There’s a ladies’ room before you get back to the ballroom. You can get yourself cleaned up in there.”

“Not until we’ve gotten you cleaned up in here,” Lanie objected. “Come on. There’s no one around. Give me your jacket and shake out your shirt. It will only take a minute.”

With clear reluctance, he shrugged out of his jacket and handed it to her. She turned away from him as he began to untuck his shirt, in an effort to give him a little privacy, regardless of how innocent the action was. Holding his jacket out at arm’s length, she gave it a gentle shake, but that one movement freed a considerable cloud of dirt, so she turned the jacket upside down, releasing handfuls of dirt from the pockets. She scooped her hand inside each one to free as much of the leftover soil as she could. Then, spreading the jacket open wide in front of her, she started to give it another shake…

Only to be blinded by a flash of glaring white light from the other side of the window in front of her.