Wild West Fortune. Allison Leigh
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hoped she wasn’t hearing things when she heard a faint, indecipherable response.
“Yeah, we’re stuck,” Jayden yelled, pressing his head close to the wood.
Once again, her adrenaline seemed to want to blow the top of her head right off. She wiped off her muddy hand and scrambled up the few steps behind him. “Who’s out there?”
“My brother Nathan. So you, uh, might—” He gestured and she flushed, realizing her camisole was bunched around her waist.
Suddenly embarrassed, she turned and tugged the stretchy fabric back where it belonged, hiding her still-tight nipples and the butterfly tattoo. She would have put on her sweater for good measure, except when she picked it up from where she’d left it bunched by the base of the stairs, it was soaking wet.
As was her cell phone.
She grimaced. It was supposed to be waterproof, but she wasn’t sure that meant it could withstand sitting in several inches of water. She was drying it off the best she could against her jeans when Sugar started barking, pacing back and forth across the sleeping bag, leaving muddy paw prints all over it.
“Sugar, come here.” Ariana reached out so the dog could sniff her hand and then closed her fingers around the bandanna to hold her still. “Good girl.” She tucked the phone in her back pocket and looked back at Jayden. “I can’t hear what your brother is saying. What’s blocking the door?”
“Your car.”
“What?”
“It’s on its side.” He pressed his ear against the door again. “Yeah,” he shouted. Then he looked back at her. “He’s hooked up the winch from my truck to drag it off.”
She hadn’t even had the car for three months yet. She’d bought it outright with her book advance. Her savings account wasn’t quite sucking air, but it was close. What if she had to pay for car repairs? “Is it going to be damaged very badly?”
“I doubt the winch will do anything worse to it than the wind that turned it on its side in the first place.”
She grimaced, knowing it had been a foolish question.
Jayden was listening again at the wood panels, and then he backed down the steps, sliding his arm around her waist to pull her away as well. “Sugar, come on.” The dog moved also, sitting against his leg, thumping her tail and looking up at him with an adoring expression on her pointed face. “Just to be safe,” he told Ariana and brushed his lips over her temple.
She closed her eyes for a moment, fighting the strong urge to put her arm around him, too.
“Relax,” Jayden said. His long fingers squeezed her hip. “Everything’s going to be fine. We’re getting out.”
She smiled weakly. She was relieved about that. More than she could say. But it also meant that getting carried away like she had with Jayden Fortune could not happen again. Not when she was far from convinced his name was merely a coincidence. Getting personally involved with someone she was writing about was out of the question.
“I thought you never had any doubt about us getting out.”
“I didn’t.” He gave her a quick wink, and then they both went silent as they heard what could only be the sound of her car being dragged away from the cellar door.
A few moments later, the door was opened from the outside. Rain pounded through the opening and then a drenched man appeared, shining a heavy-duty light down on them. “Well, well, bro. Glad to see you still like bringing the pretty girls to see your underground bachelor pad.”
Ariana flushed. She had no right to feel jealous of what Jayden had done in the past or would do in the future with anyone. But that didn’t stop her from feeling it anyway.
Jayden grabbed her hand and started up the stairs. “Be careful,” he warned her. “The stones are slippery as hell.”
She found that out quickly enough when Sugar slipped and lost her footing. Jayden immediately let go of Ariana to pick up the dog and carry her up the rest of the stairs.
Grabbing hold of the handrail, Ariana followed. She was soaked even before she accepted the hand that Jayden’s brother offered when she reached the top of the stairs.
“Out you go,” Nathan said, practically lifting her right out onto the ground. “You guys all right?”
Ariana nodded. Even though it was pouring buckets and it was nearly dark, the sky no longer had that terrible, angry black look, as if it were ready to explode. “Thank you.” He’d set the big flashlight on the top of her car—make that the side of her car, because she saw right away that it was, indeed, lying on its side. “How could this happen? Was it a tornado after all?” She looked up into Nathan’s face, and now that the flashlight wasn’t shining in her face, she nearly did a double take. “You’re twins?”
Nathan grinned. “Triplets, actually. But I’m the best-looking one of the lot.”
Jayden let Sugar jump to the ground. The dog, mostly blind or not, raced immediately across the muddy ground toward the house. “I’ll disagree with that,” he said, reaching out to give his brother’s hand a pump. “But I’m glad as hell that you’re the most unpredictable of us. Thought you were still in Oklahoma City.”
Nathan shrugged, offering no explanation.
Ariana took the flashlight to shine it over her car.
Not only was it sitting on its side, but half the windows were broken out. The copy of the magazine was gone. Worst of all, though, her thick notebook was nowhere in sight.
She’d had nearly a year’s worth of research packed in that notebook. It had contained everything that her laptop—which was sitting safely in her apartment back home—did not. And the thought of losing it was almost overwhelming.
“It’s not so bad,” Jayden said. “We’ll get it turned right side up and replace the windshield—”
She nodded and blinked her eyes hard.
“Hey.” Nathan took the flashlight from her nerveless hand. “I’m used to being waterlogged, but maybe we could get out of the rain and take this inside the house.”
“Getting out of the rain sounds good,” she agreed.
She followed the two men who were so alike that they were two peas in a pod. And evidently, there was a third pea from that pod as well.
Multiple births ran in Gerald Robinson’s family. His two eldest sons with Charlotte were twins.
Ariana didn’t need her notes to know that.
She didn’t need her notes to know a lot of things.
But she honestly couldn’t recall from her biology classes whether multiples happened from the mother’s side or the father’s. Which meant she needed to do a little research.
The very thought of it energized her.
Her car would get fixed. And her notes could be re-created. When it came to some things, she had an excellent memory for detail.
Maybe Paseo wasn’t turning out to be a wild-goose chase after all. She’d just found three more sons of Gerald Robinson. Possibly three more sons.
That in itself was huge.
But Jayden and his brothers were also thirty-six. Which meant if Gerald was their father, they were his eldest heirs.
Was that the reason Charlotte Robinson had shown her fangs to Ariana?
Because she knew?
“Still dead?”
Jayden nodded as he hung up the wall phone. The dead