The Debutante. Elizabeth Bevarly

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