The Debutante. Elizabeth Bevarly

really don’t know who I am, do you?” she asked.

      “I know enough,” he said. “I know you’re Lanie, and that you’re nice, and that you’re sweet, and that you’re easy to talk to, and that you make me smile, and that you’re surprisingly comfortable to be with. What else do I need to know?”

      Now her smiled turned sad. “Well, there’s my last name, for starters.”

      “What difference does your last name make?”

      “Normally, it wouldn’t make any difference at all. But in this case, Miles, it makes a huge difference. Because my last name is Meyers. I’m Lanie Meyers.” She could tell by his expression that he understood then. That the two names put together told him everything he needed to know. Nevertheless, she continued, “My father is Tom Meyers, the governor of Texas.”

      To herself, she added silently, But after this, he may not be governor for long….

      Miles studied Lanie for several moments in silence. The governor’s daughter. He realized now he probably should have recognized her right off the bat, but who paid attention to such things? Whenever he’d seen the first family of Texas on TV, he’d been listening to what the governor was saying, not ogling the man’s daughter. And Miles had better things to do than read the parts of the newspaper that only talked about who went to what parties with whom, and what designers’ fashions they were wearing when they did. And that was where Lanie Meyers was whenever she made the news. Which was fairly often. Miles did know that. He’d heard his sister and cousins talk about the girl from time to time, and he supposed he’d absorbed some of the stories through osmosis. Still, she’d seemed harmless enough. A party girl. Not really unexpected when your daddy was a big-time politician.

      But she hadn’t seemed like a party girl tonight. Well, maybe at first she had, he amended. But after just five minutes alone with her, Miles knew she was a lot more than that. Lanie Meyers was a nice girl who was witty and funny and easy to talk to. And she was maybe a little bit lonely, too. And that last had been what had ultimately cemented Miles’s connection to her, because he’d recognized in Lanie so much of what was inside himself.

      How about that? You really couldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.

      He grimaced involuntarily as he thought about what kind of stories would be appearing about Lanie in the papers over the next several days. Although they wouldn’t be true, that didn’t mean people wouldn’t lap up every last word as the gospel truth and talk about it at the office water cooler. Or the backyard clothesline. Or the grocery counter. Or the tennis nets. Or wherever else they happened to be.

      Lanie Meyers. Miles Fortune had just been photographed in what could easily be misconstrued as a compromising position with the governor’s daughter. Had the situation not been so unfair, it would have been funny.

      He supposed he should have expected something like this would happen sooner or later. If not with that bastard Kaminski, then with another slimy photographer. Miles Fortune was something of a hothead when it came to having his photo taken. As a result, he’d become a real challenge for the members of the local paparazzi. It wasn’t that he was especially famous or notorious. But he did hate to have his photo in the paper, and he’d reacted badly on occasion in the past.

      Truthfully, though, it wasn’t as much because Miles valued his privacy as it was because he didn’t want the women he was escorting at any given time to be portrayed in a less-than-stellar light. And because he tended not to stay in relationships for very long—because he was a womanizer, he acknowledged with some distaste—the papers always intimated that the women he dated were little more than warm bodies to keep him entertained through the night.

      Truthfully, Miles thought they were, too, for the most part. But that didn’t make it okay for the press to cast the women in a bad light. His endless parade of girlfriends couldn’t help it if each thought she’d be the one to make him change his ways and settle down. He just wasn’t the settling-down type. They couldn’t help it if they looked all besotted with him every time they showed up in a photo standing next to him. Hey, he was a very likable guy. That didn’t mean the press had to hang those women out to dry the way they invariably did.

      Now Lanie Meyers was going to be portrayed as little more than another notch on his bedpost. That was going to cast her in a much darker light than party girl, and it would inevitably reflect badly on her father and, as a result, on her father’s campaign.

      “Lanie Meyers,” Miles repeated slowly, carefully, his head still too full of repercussions and implications to say much else.

      She nodded as slowly and carefully as he had spoken. “Lanie Meyers,” she confirmed.

      “Governor Meyers’s daughter,” Miles echoed.

      “Governor Meyers’s daughter,” she likewise confirmed.

      “Bad dream?” he asked, hoping she’d confirm that, too.

      She smiled, albeit not entirely happily. “Reality,” she assured him.

      He lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “Hey, it was worth a shot.”

      “So who’s going to end up being most embarrassed by this?” she asked.

      Hell, Miles didn’t even have to think about that. And he was pretty sure it was a hypothetical question anyway. “Well, I imagine it’ll be your old man.”

      “No imagining about it,” Lanie told him. “It will definitely be my father. This is going to make him look incredibly bad.”

      It was an interesting comment on a number of levels, Miles thought, not the least of which was that at a time when Lanie should be worried more about herself and her own reputation than anyone else’s, she was concerned only about her father’s. She had yet to utter one word of concern for herself.

      “But nothing happened,” Miles pointed out, knowing how ridiculous it was to even say such a thing when Nelson Kaminski was anywhere in the same time zone.

      “No, it didn’t,” she agreed. “But you and I both have had enough experience with the press to know that that’s beside the point.”

      Miles nodded disconsolately. There was nothing either of them could do now but hope for the best. But he couldn’t seem to let it go. Sighing with much exasperation, he added, “If I hadn’t had my shirt off, we probably could have salvaged this.”

      “If you hadn’t had your shirt off, there never would have been any photographs,” Lanie pointed out. But there was no censure in her voice, no bitterness or resentment.

      “Don’t be so sure,” Miles said, nevertheless. “Kaminski sniffed a potential photo the minute he saw us through the glass. Hell, for all I know, he’d gotten bored at the party because nothing scandalous enough was happening and went on the prowl specifically to find—or manufacture—a situation. Who knows how long he was out there lurking in the bushes? He was just waiting for one of us to do something that he could make look bad. Hell, you could have picked a loose thread off of my lapel, and he would have snapped a shot and worked with it until it looked like the two of us were groping each other.”

      “You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” Lanie said.

      “Unfortunately I am,” Miles told her. “But even knowing what I do about him, I still can’t believe how low the guy will sink.” He’d used a lot of restraint by calling the photographer a guy instead of a more accurate description. There was a lady present, after all. “Do you know,” he continued, “that he actually developed and patented a way to use a camera flash so that it doesn’t reflect off of glass? You know why? So he could take pictures of people through windows, like tonight. That’s his specialty. And as long as he takes the pictures in a public place like this, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Unless he’s skulking around bedroom windows, he’s free and clear to prey on whoever he wants to.”

      That was exactly what Kaminski was, he thought. A predator. The kind of lowlife that just slithered around in