“Here.”
She wanted the ground to swallow her up. Spinning anything to a positive slant was her stock-in-trade, but there was just no positive way to spin throwing up on the side of the road.
She took the bottle of water from Pax. Ignoring him, she took a swig, swirled it in her mouth and spit it out.
Several yards away, her car crested the edge of the road and the horrible whining finally came to a stop. The short tow-truck driver began pushing levers on the side of his truck and the back of it began tilting down toward the ground.
“I wasn’t speeding,” she told the sheriff when she thought she could speak without vomiting again. “I wasn’t texting on my cell.” She had no idea if her phone had remained inside the car. But he definitely hadn’t found it when he’d been traipsing all over taking his pictures. She felt certain he’d be examining it for God knew what if he had.
“My whole life is on my phone,” she said, more to herself than to him. “If it’s not still in the car—” She broke off, shaking her head.
“Nobody’s whole life should be on a cell phone,” the sheriff said dismissively before he walked away from her, heading toward the wrecker. She could see him talking into that small speaker thing attached by a strap to his shoulder as he went.
She made a face at the back of him. It was childish but it still made her feel a tiny bit better. Leaning against the rail, she sipped the water and studied him as he spoke with the driver. Charlie, he’d called him.
Unlike Charlie, the sheriff was tall. Her brothers were tall, too, so it was easy enough to peg the man as several inches past six feet. Her brothers tended more toward wiry builds, though. The sheriff was stockier. Broader. Not heavy. More like a quarterback than a runner. All broad shoulders, narrow hips and muscular—
Her mouth felt cottony and she swished more water around, turning to spit it out again.
When she straightened, he was approaching her again. It was easier to focus on the tear in his shirt than it was his face, with its square jaw and slashing eyebrows.
“Here.” He extended a small pink purse and she snatched it greedily, flipping it open to find her wallet still tucked safely inside.
She extracted her driver’s license and held it up. “Check me out,” she challenged. “You’ll learn I do have a perfect driving record. I have a respectable job with Fortune Investments as the director of public relations. I own my own home and I have never gotten so much as a ticket for jaywalking!” She slid a business card free as well and barely managed to keep from tossing it in his face. “My cell phone number is on there. You want to know what I was doing on my phone for the last twenty-four hours, feel free to contact my provider. I’ll agree to whatever you need.”
His fingers brushed hers as he took the license. “Charlie was able to get into your glove compartment, if I have your permission to look at the contents.”
Oh, for crying out loud. She rubbed her aching temples. “Yes, you can look at the contents. I’ve been trying to tell you I don’t have anything to hide.”
He walked back to the wrecker again.
Her eyes burned and she swiped her nose. She was not going to cry again.
Her purse might have contained her wallet and a few business cards, but there was little else in it, and certainly not her phone. She closed her eyes, trying to remember where it had been in the car. Lying on the passenger seat with her sandals? Tucked in the console?
Her stomach churned as she tried to think. She’d taken one call that morning from her assistant, Julie, about the media campaign they were launching. After that, her phone had remained silent as she’d neared Paseo and the campground where the wedding guests were being lodged.
The campground was one of the selling points she’d used with her folks when she’d told them that she, too, wanted to attend the wedding, along with her siblings. In Georgia’s case, not only was she attending the nuptials, but she was also actually going to stand up in the wedding party. Even though none of them had ever even met the bride or groom.
That fact was only one of the interesting aspects of this whole wedding business. It was Gerald and Deborah’s desire to bring together all the branches of the overgrown Fortune tree. They were showing it again and again with the incredible task of mounting a large wedding in such a small town. Once they’d known Georgia and her brothers and sisters were coming—even though their father flatly refused—they’d asked if one of them would be part of the wedding party. They wanted someone from each family to be represented.
Georgia had basically drawn the short straw at that point because—as her sisters Savannah and Belle liked to point out—Georgia had the most practice at being a bridesmaid.
Nineteen times, in fact.
For her dad’s sake, she’d pitched the whole thing as a lark. A summer getaway, camping under the Texas sky for a few weeks before the launch of the new campaign. For herself, she’d mostly thought it would be highly entertaining to be part of the wedding for a man who was actually her father’s half brother.
Of course, her father didn’t believe anything about the situation was the least bit entertaining. He certainly didn’t appreciate the fact that he might be somewhat similar to his half brother. Gerald Robinson of Texas had been born Jerome Fortune of New York. It was only after his father, Julius, died that he’d remade himself as Gerald, far, far away from his true family. He’d even gone so far as to fake “Jerome’s” death, presumably to be good and sure nobody came looking for him.
Georgia’s father, Miles, on the other hand, had been born Miles Melton in Louisiana. He was just one of Julius’s illegitimate sons with various women other than his wife. Aside from her father, there were at least three more that she knew of: Kenneth Fortunado, who hailed from Houston, David Fortune from Florida and Gary Fortune from New York. Other than those few details, she had no real knowledge of the relationships—or lack of—that they’d had with Julius while he’d been alive.
As for her dad, when he’d finally divulged the truth last Christmas to his family that they were, in fact, related to the famous Fortunes after all—something he had been denying all of Georgia’s life—he’d admitted that he’d only taken on his father’s name when he’d been a young college graduate as an “up yours” against the man who’d never acknowledged him.
The similarities between Miles and Julius ended there, though.
Miles had married Georgia’s mom when he was only a year older than Georgia was now. They’d had seven children together and were the only truly happy couple Georgia had ever seen.
Gerald, on the other hand, had inherited Julius’s penchant for infidelity. For the last few years especially, the scandal sheets had chronicled the tech mogul’s indiscretions. How he’d cheated on his society wife, Charlotte. How he’d produced even more illegitimate children than Julius had.
Then, when the news had broken a couple years ago about Robinson’s real identity, the media hounds had gone into a feeding frenzy. It would have died down eventually. When a fresher scandal hit the light of day. That’s the way scandals always worked.
But the flames were fueled all over again by Gerald and Charlotte’s highly acrimonious divorce when word got out that he’d actually dumped her in favor of marrying his first love, Deborah Fortune, who wasn’t really a Fortune at all, but had assumed the name herself when she’d given birth to Gerald’s triplet sons nearly forty years ago. Before Gerald had even married Charlotte.
It was either the worst of reality-television-style trashiness, or the most outlandishly romantic story in modern-day history.
Georgia, nineteen times a bridesmaid, didn’t expect that Gerald’s marriage to Deborah would be any more successful than his first one. But she definitely expected the whole scene to be pretty entertaining.
Particularly