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“He mistook me for a prostitute. That’s hardly a good basis for a relationship.”
“Who said anything about a relationship? I was thinking more along the lines of head-reeling, toe-curling, mind-boggling sex.”
“Get real.”
“I am real. One hundred percent.” Adrienne glanced at her chest. “It’s what cost me the crown. My mother reminded me of it a little while ago over the phone. Now, if I would have been born with a chest like yours, I would have been a shoe-in, but I didn’t develop large breasts naturally, and I just couldn’t put silicone in my body, not even for a title and a shiny tiara. My mother still hasn’t forgiven me.”
“I thought you said it was the congeniality contest that got you.”
“Oh, that.”
Hannah smiled. Adrienne joked about that fated beauty contest from time to time, but she’d once confided in Hannah that the real reason she’d lost was much more scandalous and heart-breaking. Rather than reminding Adrienne of painful memories, she said, “Besides, if you had a chest like mine, you’d have to wear a bra.”
Adrienne wrinkled up her nose. “That wouldn’t be any fun. But we digress. I thought he was sort of cute.”
“Sort of cute? The man was a god in a suit and an imported silk tie, which you’ll probably be sued for, by the way.” Adrienne waved the notion away, and Hannah added, “And even if I was interested, I don’t know his name.”
“Parker.”
Hannah looked up from the wing chair where she’d been curled up for the past hour, and slowly lowered her feet to the floor. “What did you say?”
“His name is Parker.” The trendy Southern blonde had Hannah’s undivided attention now, but Adrienne continued to stare at the chipped purple nail polish on her big toe. “Parker Malone.”
“How do you know that?”
“He told me.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Somebody had to save my newest waiter from the interrogation your john was giving him.”
“J—John?”
Adrienne laughed at the stricken expression on Hannah’s face. “You know I love to kid. Did you really dump a whole box of pastel-colored condoms at his feet then politely tell him to follow you? My, but you do know how to make an impression. No wonder he was so interested.”
“He wasn’t interested.”
“He wanted to know your name. Actually, I think he would have appreciated any information he could have weaseled out of us. Your phone number, your driver’s license number, your social security number, your birth date, address, star sign, shoe size, whatever.”
“You didn’t tell him!” Hannah was on her feet, and Adrienne raised noisily to a sitting position.
“Relax,” she said, pushing her short blond hair behind her ears. “Jason doesn’t know you yet, and I’m not intimidated by the Parker Malones in this world.”
Hannah fell back into her chair. “How did you get so much backbone?”
“I was raised in the South, remember? Y’all don’t think those finishing schools only teach girls how to drink tea with their pinkies in the air, do you? What are you working on, anyway?”
“Plans for my mother’s wedding.”
Adrienne paused in the middle of picking up their used paper plates to glance at the lists Hannah was making. “I still can’t believe your mother is going to marry one of the Fortunes of Texas. My mother would die to marry me off to a rich man. I’m thirty-three. I think she’s giving up hope. But Ryan Fortune is rich, and his ranch, the Double Crown, is one of the biggest, most prestigious and profitable ranches in the entire state. It’s just so romantic that your mother loved him when they were both practically children, and now they’re finally being reunited. Have y’all decided what you’re going to wear to the engagement party next weekend?”
“Mother refuses to call it an engagement party. It’s just a get-together.” Hannah motioned to a tiny closet in the alcove between the living room and her bedroom. “I picked up a dress the other day.”
“Tell me it isn’t beige.” At the expression on Hannah’s face, Adrienne said, “Sugar pie, you should wear something bright pink or purple, or better yet, red.” She spoke into the closet, causing the words to sound muffled. “Something that’ll make y’all shine.”
“It’s my mother’s big night, Adrienne. She’s the one I want to shine.”
Adrienne swung around so suddenly the long dress in her hand swished. Her eyebrows formed two identical blond arches, her lips shaped around a long whistle. Holding a filmy, wispy dress the color of walnut shells up to Hannah, she said, “It may not be pink or red, but lordy, I do believe you’re gonna be doing a little shining of your own. What a shame you’re going alone. Whoever could you call? Perhaps some tall, dashing man with an adorable little cleft in his chin?”
Leave it to Adrienne to have noticed that.
Hannah stared past the other woman, picturing the stranger’s strong face. Now that she knew his name, their brief encounter seemed even more intimate. It didn’t change the fact that he’d assumed she was a woman who made her living on her back. It stung her pride, and her pride was important to her.
She took the dress from Adrienne and hung it in the closet. “He’s pompous, he’s arrogant, he’s shrewd and he has a sharp tongue. A man like that wouldn’t think twice about using a woman like me and then tossing me aside.”
Hands full of containers, Adrienne headed for the door. “From what you’ve told me about that little episode in the storage room, he didn’t take you up on what he thought you were offering. He must have at least one scruple.”
“Maybe you should call him.”
“He wasn’t after my phone number, sweetie. I still say you should give it the old college try.”
With a wink the Southern belles of old would have never gotten away with, Adrienne left. It didn’t take long for Hannah to notice the flat, gray object on the table where she always dumped the mail. She padded over and reached out with one finger, sliding the card closer as if it might bite her.
Malone, Malone & Associates, P.C. Attorneys At Law
Adrienne was about as subtle as her bright pink capri pants.
There was a business address, a business phone number. Hannah turned the card over. On the back was another telephone number, this one written in black ink in a distinctive, masculine scrawl.
She knew his name. She knew his phone number. Now what? she wondered.
Now nothing, she told herself. Her encounter with Parker Malone was over. It didn’t matter that he’d been the most ruggedly attractive man she’d ever seen in a suit. He’d embarrassed her. Worse, he’d jumped to conclusions, the most degradingly possible kind.
Striding to an antique desk, she bent to drop the card into the wicker basket filled with wadded-up notes and paper plates. She stared at the card for a long time, then opened a drawer and dropped it inside.
Hannah accepted a glass of white wine from a pleasant, friendly woman who spoke with a Mexican accent. Taking a small sip, Hannah glanced around. She’d seen Ryan Fortune several times since he’d come back into her mother’s life. The first time she’d visited his home, she’d been in awe of its size. She’d heard someone say the house had eight bedrooms. It was grand, and at the same time warm and lovely. The ceiling in the great room was high and beamed. An old stone fireplace dominated an entire wall. Handwoven blankets hung on the other three walls, pottery made by local artists from the same type of clay on which the house sat leant warmth and interest to shelves, corners and on the top of a painted armoire that probably hid a television and stereo system from view.
The house was large, opulent and cordial, as was its owner. Hannah had liked both on sight. Ryan Fortune had promised her mother the party would be a small, friendly gathering. Hannah was beginning to realize that to a man of Ryan’s wealth and social standing, sixty-five to seventy people constituted a small group.
Hannah stood with her mother near the entryway leading to the dining room. Following the course of her mother’s gaze to the group of men on the other side of the room, one of whom was Lily’s future husband, Hannah smiled. Lily Redgrove Cassidy was lovely, and perhaps even more exotic-looking at fifty-three than she’d been at seventeen. Her firstborn and only son, Cole, stood across the room with Ryan and two men whose backs were to Hannah and her mother.
“He’ll be back in a moment, Mom.”
Lily glanced around sharply at Hannah. “I know that, dear.”
“Then what is it?” Hannah asked, trying to understand the reason for her mother’s obvious discomfiture. “Maria isn’t coming, is that it? Is that why you’re chewing on your bottom lip?”
Smoothing an errant strand of hair back into the intricate knot on the back of her head, Lily said, “I’m disappointed that your sister isn’t here, but that’s not it.”
“Then, what is it?”
Lily squeezed her middle child’s hand. “You know me so well. Am I really so transparent?”
“You’re beautiful, and you know it. I can tell when something’s bothering you, that’s all. What could possibly be marring this happy occasion?”
“I’ve learned that Ryan’s attorney is dead-set against Ryan and I making our engagement public. Ryan won’t listen, but what if he’s right? He started divorce proceedings long before he and I found one another again, but what if my presence in his life makes it even more difficult for him to finally break free of Sophia?”
Hannah shook her head sadly. Her own brother was an attorney, so she didn’t dislike all lawyers, but at that moment she very much disliked the attorney who had put the worry in her mother’s brown eyes. “Ryan Fortune has been to hell and back with that woman he married when he was too blind with grief to see her for what she was. He deserves happiness, Mom, and so do you. I’m proud of him for wanting to proclaim his love for you to the world. Maybe Ryan should tell his attorney to take a flying leap the next time he sees him.”
“Oh, his attorney is here tonight, dear.”
“He is?”
Laughter erupted on the other side of the room. Ryan slapped the man closest to him on the back, then held up a glass, his eyes meeting Lily’s. “I’d like to propose a toast.”
Little by little, conversations throughout the room ceased and everyone looked toward Ryan. It was common knowledge that Ryan had gotten his height and build from his father, the late Kingston Fortune, but his dark hair and eyes came from his mother, Selena. Ryan’s personality, drive and conviction were all his own. “To my future wife.”
Suddenly all eyes turned to Lily. Lily Redgrove Cassidy stood out in every crowd, but the smile she cast at her future husband made her appear radiant in a way Hannah had never seen. A smile tugged at Hannah’s mouth, as well. She raised her glass, her gaze darting over people all around the room. There were plenty of Fortunes present, of course, but the rest of the guests were a mixture of people who wore power and prestige as if it were their right, and others who had worked for Ryan Fortune for years and had earned a permanent place in the Fortune household as well as in all the Fortunes’ hearts.
Pleased that all these people were welcoming her mother into their circle, Hannah smiled warmly at her brother, who winked, eliciting a broader smile from her. Her glass was almost to her lips when her gaze meandered to the man standing to Cole’s right. Her eyes widened, her head turning automatically for a more direct look.
Disbelief had her lowering her glass. She might have glanced right past the piercing blue eyes that were staring directly at her, the chiseled jaw, prominent cheekbones and slightly arrogant tilt of the man’s head, but she couldn’t have overlooked the shadow in the tiny cleft in Parker Malone’s chin even if she’d tried.
Two
Hannah couldn’t believe her eyes. Unless Parker Malone had an identical twin, he was staring at her across this very room. Surely every ounce of blood had drained out of her face. It stood to reason, since her heart seemed to have stopped beating.
She managed to turn her attention to her mother and arrange her features into what she hoped passed for a normal, nonplussed expression. Hannah believed in fate and in chance. She even believed in luck, good and bad. But what in the world were the chances that the same man who had mistaken her for a hooker not only knew the man who was going to marry her mother but knew him well enough to be invited to an intimate party honoring his intended engagement to her mother? If the odds of that weren’t slim enough to constitute bad luck, they were close.
“Do you know the dark-haired man on Ryan’s left, Mom?”
Still smiling, Lily answered, barely breaking eye contact with Ryan across the room. “That’s Parker Malone.”
So much for Hannah’s identical twin theory. “Is he a friend of the Fortunes?”
“Their families go way back, but Parker is Ryan’s divorce attorney.”
Malone, Malone & Associates. Ryan’s divorce attorney, who was adamantly opposed to Ryan’s wish to make his engagement to Lily public. And the first man Hannah had been completely attracted to in a long, long time. Three separate identities all rolled into one. Hannah couldn’t believe her run of lu—
“Luck,” Ryan said.
Hannah started, because Ryan said the word in the exact moment she’d been thinking it.
“It was a fluke, really,” he added, “that has reunited Lily and me. Therefore, I’d like to propose another toast. To the divine wheel of fortune that brought Lily back into my life. To chance and circumstance and a marvelous coincidence that changed my life.”
Hannah’s gaze was inexplicably drawn to Parker once again. He lifted his glass to her in a private toast and graced her with a smile that was stark and white and so intimate she had to remind herself to breathe.
While Ryan made his way toward Lily, people throughout the room drank to his health and future and patted him on the back as he passed. Hannah admired the way her mother held her ground, raised her chin, as regal as a queen, and waited for Ryan to stroll gallantly across the room. She was old-fashioned that way, wanting the man to come to her. The Cassidys had never had the Fortunes’ money, but they equaled them in pride.
Although Ryan accepted congratulations on his way by, his attention on Lily was steadfast. The degree of his devotion to her mother brought a lump to Hannah’s throat. It was the kind of love she was waiting for.
Ryan kissed Lily’s lips, and then Hannah’s cheek. “Thanks for coming, Hannah,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean it,” he said. “It means so much to me to have both you and Cole here. I understand Maria isn’t as pleased about Lily’s and my upcoming wedding as you and Cole. I only hope that in time, she will come to realize how deeply I care for your mother.”
Lily and Hannah shared a long look and a heartfelt sigh. Maria was every bit as beautiful as Lily, but there was a hard edge to Maria that simply didn’t exist in her mother and sister. Although Lily had spoken with Maria by telephone a month ago, neither she nor Hannah had been successful in connecting on a meaningful level with the youngest Cassidy in a very long time.
“I don’t like to admit it,” Lily said, looking earnestly into Ryan’s eyes, “but I’m afraid Maria is ashamed of her meager roots.”
Ryan placed his hand on Lily’s cheek as if he couldn’t get enough of touching her. “Families are complicated. God knows, mine is.” His gaze strayed over Lily’s head where his son, Matthew stood, all alone.
Hannah had heard rumors that Matthew and his wife, Claudia, had separated. Her heart went out to the couple, whose lives had become twisted in tragedy and haunted by unanswered questions since their newborn son had been kidnapped and another child returned in his place. Matthew and Claudia were both here, but not together, the events of the past year etched in each of their faces.
Ryan shook his head. “My family history is riddled with enough twists and turns to fill several books. My son, Zane, thinks I should write them down. Maybe I will. In my old age. Suddenly, at fifty-three, I feel like a very young man.”
He took Lily’s hand and turned to the guests. Raising his voice above the laughter and noise, he motioned to the wide double doors Rosita Perez, his devoted friend and long-serving housekeeper, had just opened. “Some of the finest musicians in San Antonio have been tuning their instruments for the better part of the past hour,” he said good-naturedly. “Let’s all go outside where we can appreciate their music as well as the stars on such a beautiful summer night.”
Hannah was swept forward with Lily and Ryan and the throng of guests heading outdoors. She found herself in the courtyard, surrounded by people she didn’t know. Ryan had been right about the beautiful summer evening. Night had tamed the scorching temperature, turning it gentle, touching it with mystery. Lily had once told Hannah that Ryan’s mother, and later, his first wife, had been avid gardeners. The courtyard and the grounds were testimony to the love and care they’d given the lawns and gardens surrounding the sprawling adobe-styled house. Masses of large, purple sage plants looked almost black beneath the pale glow of artificial lights. Roses covered arbors, and flowering vines climbed the sandstone walls that surrounded Ryan’s home.
The orchestra was playing, and several people moved onto the dance floor. Hannah had gotten separated from her mother and Ryan. Making small talk with an older couple nearby, it occurred to her that she and Cole were the only guests present who were connected more closely to Lily than to Ryan. She made a mental note to remind the ushers, when the time came, to seat guests on either side of the church, so as to better balance the guests, rather than in the traditional manner of the bride’s guests on the left, the groom’s on the right.
“It’s a small world.”
Hannah recognized the deep voice spoken a few feet behind her. She took a calming breath, then turned to face Parker Malone. “Sometimes it seems that way.”
There was something deliberate in the step he took in her direction, something just as deliberate in his smile. He’d removed his navy jacket, loosened his tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. By all rights, he should have looked less intimidating. Her heart pounded an erratic rhythm because he didn’t look less anything. She cleared her throat, pretending not to be affected.
“I’m Parker Malone.”
Since it would have been impolite to refuse it, she took his outstretched hand, but only briefly. “I know.”
Parker waited to see if she would add anything, for instance, her name. She didn’t say a word. Evidently she knew her etiquette, but she only took civility so far. He’d always been under the assumption that women were uncomfortable with long stretches of silence. Hell, now that he thought about it, most of the women he knew never shut up long enough to find out. There was something different about this woman. He’d tried to dismiss memories of their brief meeting, but he’d had very little success putting her out of his mind. That wasn’t so surprising. He’d always believed that first impressions were the most potent, and his first impression of Hannah Cassidy had been a fantasy in the making.
“Are you enjoying the party, Hannah?”
She acknowledged his use of her name with the barest lift of her eyebrows. Parker would have preferred a proper introduction even though he’d grilled Ryan regarding all the Cassidys weeks ago.
“Yes, I am.”
It might have been her intention to instill her voice with an overlying coldness, but Parker earned a very good living by paying attention to the most subtle nuances and inflections in his clients’ voices. She wasn’t as cold as she wanted him to believe. A smug feeling of satisfaction settled over him. No matter what she pretended, she was aware of him. He’d venture a little further to say she was attracted to him, too.
“Nice night.”
She glanced at the guests, the orchestra, and the lawns far beyond the patio, and slowly nodded.
“Hannah?”
