Wild West Fortune

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  Even with that wink of his, Ariana still felt a curl of jealousy. She clamped down on it witheringly.

  Oftentimes when people were displaced from their homes because of some disaster, local charities lent aid. But in such a remote area as Paseo, Ariana had a feeling those services were probably hard to come by.

  “Mrs. Ybarra, do you and your husband have some place to stay?” Admittedly, she hadn’t seen all of the businesses in Paseo, but considering its size, she doubted there was a motel of any sort. “Do you have more family in the area?”

  “Graciela is our only child.” Paloma patted Ariana’s hand. “But Hector and I have each other.” She gestured toward the barn. “We have shelter.” She nodded toward Jayden, who was working his way through the dozen or so people there, greeting them all. “We have friends. We are very blessed.”

  Ariana wasn’t sure how many people would feel so blessed when confronted with similar circumstances.

  Because Paloma didn’t let go of her hand, she found herself pulled along, being introduced to everyone. “This is Jayden’s new friend,” Paloma would say. Emphasis on the friend. As if it weren’t all that ordinary to be introducing a female fitting that particular category when it came to Jayden Fortune.

  Someone started moving the folding lawn chairs, and before Ariana knew it, she was sitting in one squarely between Hector and Paloma with a plate of coleslaw and corn bread on her lap and a bottle of beer in her hand. Paloma’s husband mostly smiled benignly at everyone, Ariana included. Whatever he didn’t have to say, his wife more than made up for it as she chattered on about Paseo, about the weather, about God and the Devil and just about everything in between.

  “He was a wild one, your Jayden,” Paloma said after finally pausing to draw breath.

  Ariana had been fascinated by everything Paloma had said. But she really needed to correct this misapprehension about her and Jayden. “Mrs. Ybarra, Jayden’s not my—”

  “Never deliberately chased a fight,” Paloma said right over Ariana’s attempt to correct her. “But he never turned away from one, either. Oh, how his mama used to worry about him. He’s told you about his mama, si?”

  Ariana glanced his way. She had the feeling he’d just as easily stand out among five dozen people as he did in this small gathering. And as if he felt her attention, he turned his head and looked at her.

  His lips tilted up and the lines beside his eyes crinkled.

  Her nerve endings fizzed.

  Lord, the man did have a smile.

  Then he turned back to the three teenagers he was speaking with—Hector’s second and third cousins who were both named Arturo and who also lived in Mexico—and Ariana belatedly focused on Paloma. She casually set the beer bottle on the ground next to her boot. “Jayden’s mother? He, uh, he hasn’t said a lot.” Just that Deborah supposedly made up the surname of Fortune. She ignored the voice inside her head.

  “Raised those boys all on her own.” Paloma hadn’t waited a beat. “Course, she had a little help early on from the Thompsons. Earl and Cynthia. Deborah was a comfort to them, sure enough, after they’d lost their only daughter that horrible way just a few months before.” Paloma nodded as if all of these were details that Jayden’s friend undoubtedly already knew. “But even in tragedy there is blessing. Earl and Cynthia took in Deborah when she was in a bad way. Traveling like she was, so pregnant and all. And my, they loved those little babies when they were born a little while later. If it hadn’t been for them, I’m not sure what Earl and Cynthia would’ve done. And vice versa. They had someone to pass on their ranch to, and those babies had a safe and happy place to grow up in.” She set her wrinkled hand on top of Ariana’s and patted it gently. “Life tends to work out the way it’s supposed to if we don’t let ourselves get in the way.” Then she pushed herself off the chair, because another car had driven up and she was heading toward it.

  “My wife likes you,” Hector said in a low, raspy voice.

  “She’s lovely,” she told Hector truthfully. “But I have the feeling your wife would like everyone she meets.” Paloma obviously would find something good to say about anyone. Even the Empress of Slutville. She shoveled some coleslaw in her mouth and popped her plate into the opened trash bag that Graciela’s handsome husband was offering to everyone. “Mr. Ybarra, I don’t want to intrude, so please tell me it’s none of my business if you like. But where will you and Mrs. Ybarra be staying?” All of their relatives seemed to have come from miles and miles away. Which also had her wondering where they would stay.

  “Right here, girl.” His arm encompassed the devastated house, the temporary canopy and the barn all in one.

  “But it’s going to rain again soon.” The clouds on the horizon were nearing and they were obviously carrying rain.

  Hector looked amused. “Roof on the barn’s still sound. Was last night. And will be tonight.”

  “You’re sleeping in the barn?”

  “Unless it’s clear. There’s nothing like sleeping under a Paseo sky.” His eyes shifted to Jayden for a brief moment. “Ask him. He’ll tell you the same.” He looked back at Ariana. “Been living on this land since I was born. Not going to leave Paseo just because of some wind and rain. Stole my wife from her family in Mexico when she was just seventeen. Been married more ’n fifty years now and every night of that’s been spent here on this land whether we were under what used to be that roof or not.”

  She smiled at him. “Mr. Ybarra, I write for a magazine in Austin. Nothing you would have even heard of here in Paseo, but I’d really like to do a piece about you and your wife.”

  His bushy gray eyebrows shot up. “The heck you say!”

  “I think our readers would be inspired by your story.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “If that ain’t loco. Long as you don’t say something untrue, I guess I don’t see the harm. Paloma’ll be real pleased, I’m sure.”

  “Hector,” Jayden drawled as he stopped in front of them, “you married the prettiest woman already. Then Graciela didn’t wait for me to get out of short pants before she married Tomas. So don’t be smiling like that at the next beauty to come along.”

  Ariana laughed at that. She had never made the mistake of considering herself beautiful. She was reasonably passable when she had a bag of armor to brighten up her face and plenty of hair products to tame her unruly, long hair. But that was okay, because she was generally comfortable in her own skin. A trait that made the people she talked with more comfortable in theirs.

  “Mr. Ybarra has agreed to let me write a story about him and his wife for Weird,” she told Jayden.

  “Weird?” Hector looked suddenly alarmed. “What kinda magazine is that?”

  She smiled reassuringly. “Weird Life Magazine,” she clarified. “It’s a lifestyle magazine published in Austin. It’s named after ‘Keep Austin Weird’—the town’s unofficial slogan. Trust me, you have nothing to worry about.”

  He looked somewhat appeased. “You vouch for your girl, Jayden?”

  It felt like a rope suddenly sneaked its way around Ariana’s throat.

  “Sure I do, Hector.” Jayden grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Nathan and I will come by tomorrow and help with some of the cleanup. You and Paloma can talk yourselves hoarse with Ariana then.”

  The older man pushed to his feet and shook Jayden’s hand. Then he bowed slightly over the one Ariana offered, as if he weren’t particularly accustomed to shaking women’s hands.

  Paloma was in the clinch of a sausage-curled woman wailing about the tornado when they started to leave. Paloma just spread her hands behind the woman’s stranglehold and smiled as she caught their eye. Then she patted the woman’s back. “It’s all right, Molly,” they heard her soothe. “Don’t upset yourself this way.”

  “I think Paloma must be a saint or something,” Ariana said in
a low voice once she and Jayden returned to his truck. “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be up to comforting someone else if my house was a pile of kindling around my feet.”

  “They’re good people.” He pulled open the passenger door for her and she climbed up inside. “You really want to write a story about them?”

  She nodded. Her gaze went from the destroyed house to the canopy. “I really do.” She picked up her cell phone. It still looked like it was charging, though nothing happened when she pressed the power button. “Hopefully, this thing will be working again and I can record the interview and take some photographs of them. Whether I can use it as a phone or not, it has a really good camera.”

  She’d love to take a photograph of Jayden, too, but she kept that tidbit to herself. Particularly considering she wasn’t sure if she wanted it for personal reasons or professional.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t have a laptop or something with you. But you never mentioned one getting lost in the storm.”

  She waited until he got behind the wheel. “I only use my laptop when I actually get down to the business of writing. I had one crash on me once without a backup—my fault entirely—but it made me superstitious, I guess. I take most of my notes by hand.”

  “So you’re not tied quite so much to technology as I had you pegged,” he drawled.

  She smiled and turned her hands upward. “We’ll see.”

  He worked their way around the collection of haphazardly parked vehicles and it dawned on Ariana that, while Hector and Paloma slept in the barn, many of their callers were probably sleeping in those campers.

  A fact that Jayden confirmed when she voiced it. “Unless it’s clear out and they’ll move their sleeping bags under the stars.”

  She couldn’t help but smile, thinking of what Hector had said.

  “So what other kinds of stories do you write? Besides your Fortune thing and guys’ fixations on things that go zoom.”

  She grabbed her hair before it could start blowing around too much from the opened windows. She was already going to have a heck of a time getting a comb through it. “I mostly do human interest stories.” That was entirely true. Even her bio on the magazine’s website said so. It just didn’t say a thing about her current pursuit into one man’s secretive past.

  She shifted in her seat, pulling the shoulder belt a few inches away from her chest because it felt strangely tight.

  “Mostly?”

  She reminded herself that she wasn’t really hiding secrets. Jayden already knew about her “Becoming a Fortune” series for the magazine. And when it came to her book, she’d deal with the facts as she learned them.

  She realized she still hadn’t answered him and shifted again. “I still do a weekly blog on the club scene around Austin. That’s pretty much how I started out. With the blog, I mean. I check out popular venues. Grand openings. New concerts. New shows. That sort of thing. I was supposed to do a place called Twine last night. I have a couple of friends who bartend there. Surprisingly enough, my editor hadn’t reassigned it to someone else when I called in yesterday.”

  “Lot of competition among the writers?”

  “Enough to keep you on your toes.” Enough to know that her book deal would add considerable weight when it came time to negotiate her next contract with Weird Life. “So you had a crush on Graciela? She’s very beautiful.”

  “That’s a quick change of subject.”

  “What can I say? People interest me, obviously.”

  “That’s all it is?” A small smile played around his lips as he shot her a quick look. “Professional interest?”

  He charmed her way too easily.

  “I’m not going to answer that,” she said calmly.

  His laugh was low.

  It still managed to send shivers straight down her spine that didn’t ever really stop, not even when they arrived back at his ranch almost an hour later.

  They did beat the clouds back to the ranch, but not by much. Nathan and Sugar met them when Jayden drove up and it started to rain as the two men unhitched the trailer.

  Hovering around watching them only meant getting wet or getting in their way, so she headed back to the house. She plugged her phone into one of the kitchen outlets and left it on the counter to charge, then went into the bedroom and sat on the bed to pull off her boots.

  Mismatched stockinged feet freed, she dropped the boots on the floor and lay back on the mattress, wiggling her toes and rotating her ankles. “Oh, yessss.”

  “I suppose it would be wrong of me to take that as an invitation.”

  She looked to where Jayden was standing in the open doorway. His shirt was speckled with raindrops. And she had to fight the strong urge to hold out her hand to him in invitation.

  Instead, she rolled onto her side and propped her head on that hand just to make sure it didn’t do something it shouldn’t.

  “Unless you’re offering a foot massage,” she said drily, “yes, it would be very wrong.” She leaned over and picked up one of her bedraggled-looking boots. The red color had turned patchy and the suede itself was flattened and shiny. “Aside from the sad state of the suede, these boots weren’t quite made for walkin’. At least not anymore.”

  “They have kind of taken a beating.”

  “That’s one way to put it. I don’t know if they shrank after getting wet, but they sure fit tighter now than they did before yesterday’s storm.” She let the boot drop back onto the floor next to its mate and swung her legs off the bed and stood.

  Lying there didn’t feel all that wise. It was too easy for her mind to skip down seductive paths.

  “That’s why you pretreat suede,” he said, walking past her to open the closet door. “So it doesn’t shrink. Doesn’t stain, either.” He gestured at the interior of the closet. “Find something in there that’ll be more comfortable. Shoes. Clothes. Whatever. I doubt anything of my mom’s clothing is going to be too small for you. She’s taller ’n you. And she wouldn’t mind,” he added before she could open her mouth to protest. “That’s what people do in these parts, in case you missed it. We look out for each other. It’s a necessity when there’re so few to depend on. Hell, that’s how Mom came to settle in Paseo in the first place. Depending on the kindness of strangers.” He gestured again at the clothing. “Find some shoes. Then come on outside. I’ll get the grill going soon for supper. You like steak?”

  “Couldn’t call myself a Texan in good conscience if I didn’t.”

  He grinned and left the room.

  Ariana drew in a deep, needy breath that was owed entirely to the wallop packed into that grin.

  Even though she still felt strange about it, she crouched down and plucked a pair of faded black tennis shoes from the neat row on the closet floor and pulled them on.

  Jayden had been right. They were at least one size too large. She tied them tightly, but still had to be careful not to step right out of them as she left the room.

  She found him and his brother sitting in two of the wooden rockers that were scattered along the wraparound porch. Sugar, sprawled between them, lifted her head as Ariana approached, sniffed a few times, then lowered her head again to her paws and closed her eyes.

  Jayden pulled a third chair closer to him. “Sit.”

  She sat. She stretched out her legs and crossed them at the ankles the same way the two men were doing.

  “Now just watch,” he said. “And listen.”

  So she did.

  Beyond the overhanging roof, the light rain fell. She could hear the sound of it striking the roof, pinging on the gutters, splashing on the stones. The air filled with the redolent scent of moist, rich earth.

  She wasn’t going to think about Gerald Robinson. About Deborah Fortune. What their relationship might have been and what, if anything, Charlotte had known ab
out it. Not while Ariana was wearing Deborah’s shoes and sitting beside two of her sons.

  Ariana drew in a deep breath and let it out.

  She felt Jayden’s dark gaze on her and looked his way.

  He smiled slowly.

  Warmth—comfortable and sweet—seemed to fill her, rising right up through her from the soles of her feet to the top of her head.

  He was right.

  Watching the rain from Jayden’s porch was about the most peaceful thing in the world.

  Chapter Six

  The following day, after Jayden and his brother had already spent several early-morning hours working the cattle—whatever that meant—Ariana went with him again back into town to retrieve the window glass he’d ordered.

  While he was busy with that, she made a beeline for the aisle two rows over from where she’d found the cell phone charger. There, she flipped through the neatly folded pile of neon-colored tie-dyed T-shirts emblazoned with Paseo Is Paradise that she’d seen the day before and found two size mediums at the very bottom. She took them both. Then she found a tube of lip balm and a travel toothbrush in the camping supply aisle and was just thinking wryly how lucky she was not to be needing any type of feminine supply items anytime soon when Jayden found her.

  “Find everything you want?”

  She nodded and followed him to the checkout counter where his panes of window glass were already waiting, padded and packed in wooden crates.

  “I’m keeping a list,” she said once he’d paid and was strapping the crates upright in the truck bed. To prove it, she showed him the screen of her cell phone, which had finally powered up even though she still couldn’t use it to make calls. “I’ll pay you back every dime.”

  His lips twitched and his eyes squinted against the bright morning sun. “Or we could work it out in trade.”