The Debutante

“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.”