Fortune's Proposal Page 12

  Deanna really was nothing at all like her mother.

  Thank God.

  He realized Ross was slowing to a crawl, pulling off the side of the empty road onto a very narrow shoulder, and Drew pulled in behind him to park. “Wait here.”

  He waited until Deanna nodded, her expression as abruptly solemn as he felt inside, and got out of the truck.

  He met Ross halfway. “Is this the spot?”

  Ross shook his head. He unfolded a map and spread it out against the side of his truck. “From what the boys in Haggarty told me, William’s car probably went off about a mile up.” He stabbed a sharply curving line on the map. “They warned me that there’s no spot to stop there, though.”

  Drew didn’t know if he was relieved or not that he wasn’t standing in the exact spot his father’s vehicle had left the highway. He looked from the map to the road ahead and realized then that leading from the shoulder ahead of Ross’s truck was a road of sorts.

  Dirt and steep as hell, the glorified path cut through the tall brush from the main road and disappeared into the trees. “That how we get down there?”

  His cousin nodded. “The road goes about two miles before it dead-ends at a dry creek. We’ll have to go on foot the rest of the way.” He folded the map until only one square section showed. He traced his finger in a circle around a small area. “That’ll give you an idea of the lay.” He handed the map to Drew. “How long’s it been since you’ve gone four-wheeling?”

  Drew grimaced. “Not long, but that was for entertainment.”

  Ross grunted. “Sure you’re up to this? It’s not going to be a picnic to see.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Deanna?”

  Drew looked over his shoulder at the truck. Despite the distance, he could see the little frown lines on her forehead. Could see the worry in her wide eyes. “She’ll be all right.”

  “Yeah, well, she looks like she’s about ready to vomit.”

  Drew frowned. Deanna did look almost as sick as he felt. “She wouldn’t have come with me if she didn’t want to be here.”

  “You sure?”

  He nodded.

  There were more than a few things he was realizing he hadn’t known about Deanna Gurney.

  She jogged every morning for an hour before she showered with that green apple–scented shampoo of hers and headed into the hacienda’s kitchen for a cup of hot tea.

  Tea. Not coffee. Turns out she didn’t even drink the stuff.

  He’d always appreciated her incredibly bright mind and used it to his advantage. But now he knew she had a body that was made to be worshipped to go along it. And he knew that her mossy-green eyes turned to emerald when her emotions were high, which was far more often than he would ever have suspected of his pragmatic, all-about-business assistant.

  He’d learned all of that in the ten days that had passed since he’d woken up in bed with her, her seductive body unintentionally all but glued to his.

  And there were an infinite number of things more to learn that taunted him. Tempted him.

  But the one thing he did know about Deanna?

  “I’m sure. She’s stronger than you think,” he told Ross.

  Then he pushed the map in his pocket and walked back to the truck.

  Chapter Nine

  “Oh my God.” Deanna’s hushed voice seemed to echo around the small clearing where William Fortune’s luxury sedan had finally come to a crashing stop.

  Luxury was no more.

  The hood of the car was caved in thanks to the gigantic boulder, which was undoubtedly what had stopped the car from heading even farther along the wooded ravine where they’d found it. All but one of the windows were shattered out, and the roof of the car was dented in as if it had rolled.

  Probably more than once.

  And who knew what was responsible for the mangled rear of the car and the passenger door that hung off its frame in a gaping tilt as if it, too, wanted to scream.

  She turned her eyes away from the sight.

  “You okay?” Drew was standing next to her. Unlike her, he didn’t seem out of breath at all. Not from the strenuous walk they’d had once they’d left the trucks behind, nor from the grim sight of his father’s demolished vehicle.

  “I should be asking you that.” She pulled in a deep breath, scented strongly of scrub brush and dirt and biting cold air. She hadn’t realized how tiring it would be to walk on the shifting gravel and rock of a not entirely dry creek bed. But that had been easier than trying to navigate the unfriendly land beside it.

  Her jeans were caked with mud up to her knees. It even squished between her toes where it had worked into her shoes and through her socks. And neither Drew nor Ross looked any better.

  “I’d rather see it than not know,” Drew told her. Like her, he was carrying one of the bottles of water that Ross had come prepared with and he handed it to her. “Finish it if you need more,” he offered.

  She took the bottle, though she had no intention of drinking his share in addition to her own, and watched him work his way over and around the tumble of rocks and boulders where his father’s car was lodged.

  Ross was already crawling around in the front seat of it. Or as much of the front seat as was left.

  She didn’t know how either one of them could bear it and even though she was glad to have accompanied Drew, glad in some deep part of her that he’d wanted her with him, she finally had to simply look away from the wreckage.

  She propped the two water bottles on the sandy, graveled ground next to a weathered, rotting log, and carefully picked her way around the area, seeing nothing but more mud.

  More rocks.

  More scraping, poking shrubs and scarred trees.

  How could William have walked away from that devastatingly mangled vehicle, much less through such inhospitable terrain?

  “Watch out.” Ross spoke beside her and she stopped cold, startled nearly out of her wits. He pointed. “That’s a footprint.” His heavy boots—much more suited to hiking than her tennis shoes—circled a small area.

  All she saw was a drying patch of mud.

  He pulled out a slender digital camera and crouched down, taking several shots of the patch at differing angles. Then he rose, and slowly followed some path that Deanna couldn’t detect, stopping every now and then to crouch down again and take more pictures. Before long, he’d disappeared into a tangle of bushes that were so tall that she could barely see the top of his head.

  She looked back at the car, and even knowing what to expect, still felt the sight of it in some deep, uneasy portion of her stomach.

  Drew was still inside the front of the car, his wide shoulders wedged into the driver’s seat now. His legs were braced outside of the car against the pitched ground.

  She blew out a long breath, hoped she wouldn’t be sick and moved over to the side of the car.

  Inside, she could see the limp remains of spent safety airbags. Dirt and stones littered the seats and the floor where it had come in through the windows. The windshield was a mass of spidery cracks.

  “There really is no blood,” Drew murmured. “Not even the smallest spatter.”

  Deanna focused on his face instead of the wreckage. Ross had told them that the police who’d investigated the scene had reported that there wasn’t any evidence of human injury, but it still seemed hard to believe. “I don’t know how anyone can even tell, considering how much debris and dirt there is.” There was even a small tree branch caught in the seat beside him.

  Drew looked at her. “I rolled a car when I was a senior in college.” He grimaced and looked away. His hand brushed over the passenger seat. Dust puffed up and glimmered in the fractured sunlight slanting through the windshield. “Three of us were in the car. We all ended up with plenty of cuts and bruises and that was nothing as bad as this. But there was still blood smeared on a few windows and the seats and doors.”

  Deanna hastily shut off the images that brought to her mind. “We
re you hurt badly?”

  “That’s where I got this.” He touched the small scar near his hairline. “But none of us were really hurt. Thank God.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Being stupid. As usual.” He grimaced. “We’d driven down to Rocky Point in Mexico to party and were on our way back to the States. I swerved to avoid a guy pushing a cart who came out of nowhere. Missed him. Rolled the car. The only good thing was that I wasn’t drinking or it would have been a helluva mess.”

  He let out a breath and shook his head again. “The search dogs the police brought through here would have scented Dad’s blood if there’d been any to find. Inside or outside the car.”

  “Then maybe the airbags did what they were supposed to do,” Deanna posed.

  “Maybe.” He leaned over and swept his hand inside the glove compartment where the door was already hanging askew. “It’s empty.”

  “The police could have emptied it.”

  “Hmm.” He sat back up again. His hands circled the steering wheel that was sitting at an unnaturally close angle to the seat and his body. “I wonder if Dad was even in the car when it went down the embankment.”

  “Like he’d gotten thrown from the car before it went over?” She looked upward, trying to follow the line the car seemed to have taken. But they were too deep in the ravine to see the road.

  “Maybe.”

  “Or do you still think there’s a possibility of foul play?”

  “Ross doesn’t. If it were a kidnapping, we’d have gotten a ransom demand by now.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” He opened the console. Pulled out a small notepad and flipped through the pages. Deanna could see that they were blank. “Not anymore.” He tossed the notepad back in the console and closed it with a snap. Then he reached up and flipped down the sun visor.

  A slip of paper fell from it and hit his knee, then slid onto the floor.

  He reached down, his hands sweeping for it.

  “I’ve got it.” She could see where the white square had fallen, almost beneath the seat and she knelt next to him, reaching around his legs. Her muddy shoe slipped a few inches just as she felt the slick paper under her fingertip and she steadied herself with the closest object. His thigh.

  She hastily adjusted her footing and let go of him before grabbing the item as she straightened again.

  “Here.” She handed him what turned out to be a black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired woman.

  “That’s my mother.” His thumb slowly flicked the corner of the photograph as he stared thoughtfully through the crackled windshield.

  “And the baby she’s holding?”

  He didn’t even glance at the picture again. “J.R.”

  Deanna’s teeth worried the inside of her cheek when he said nothing more. But a moment later, she heard rustling and looked over to see Ross emerging from the bushes again.

  “Seen enough?” he asked as he walked closer.

  She had. More than enough. But this wasn’t about her and she knew that if Drew wanted to stay, then she would suck up her horror and stay with him for as long as he needed to be there.

  But he was working himself out of the crushed-in car and she moved away to give him more space to maneuver.

  When he was out, he looked at his cousin. “Find anything useful?”

  “A boatload of partial footprints.” Which didn’t seem to make Ross very happy, judging by the frown on his face. “Most of them probably made by the police when they came through with the tracking dogs. Hard to tell, particularly after the rain. From what I could see, the shoe treads all looked pretty rugged, like hiking boots. Because we don’t know what William was wearing—” He broke off, grimacing, and slid his small camera back in his jacket pocket. “It’s going to take us a while to get back to the trucks and we’ll lose the light if we don’t get started soon.”

  “I’ve seen enough of the car.” Drew closed his hand over Deanna’s shoulder and nudged her forward.

  “Wait.” She turned back after several steps to grab their water bottles and hurried back to them and then, aside from the slip of gravel under their feet, they silently began their trek back to their trucks.

  Just as Ross had predicted, by the time they reached the two vehicles, the sun was hanging low, reddening the sky with an impossibly beautiful sunset.

  Ross pulled two fresh water bottles out of the pack in his vehicle and held them out. “I’m going to book it to Haggarty. I can still catch the guy who caught the call before his shift ends. You coming or heading back?”

  Drew tossed their empty bottles into the truck bed and took the fresh supply, handing one to Deanna. “Back.”

  “I’ll let you know if I learn anything. Drive careful up the road.” And then with a wave, he climbed in his big truck and was heading off, bumping over the rocky bank of the creek bed.

  Deanna headed around their truck for the passenger side, but stopped short of getting in when she realized Drew hadn’t moved.

  Instead, he’d balanced his water bottle on the side of the truck and remained there with his arms propped next to the water.

  He was holding up the photograph.

  “He used to keep this same picture on his desk at the office. A larger one, I mean.” He squared the picture between his long fingers. “He had six in all. One of the two of them on their wedding day. And one each of her with all of us as babies.”

  “That’s lovely,” she said softly.

  “Why’d he keep this picture in his car?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why not one of Lily?”

  “Sentiment,” Deanna suggested. “You just said how he kept the ones in his office.”

  “True,” he mused softly and looked at the photo again. Then he smiled slightly. “I remember one time she was redecorating Dad’s office for him and took away all those old pictures. Gave him one framed picture instead—some family portrait she’d made us all get spit-shined for when I was in junior high. But he made her bring all the other ones back.”

  He glanced across the truck bed at Deanna, holding up the photo between his fingers. “She wanted to know why he wanted those old photos when there was such a nice new one where she was looking the best she’d ever looked in her life, and he told her because the others were reminders of every moment in his life when his love for her had doubled.”

  Her heart squeezed. Not just from the story, but because Drew was actually sharing it. She almost didn’t want to say a word, afraid he’d stop if she did. But she couldn’t keep silent. She set her water bottle inside on her seat. “He must have loved her very much.”

  “We all did,” he murmured. He looked back at the photograph. “She would have liked you.”

  She swallowed. “Why?”

  “You’re here. Even after I tried to get you to go, you’re here.”

  Just that easily, she felt tears burning deep behind her eyes.

  She blinked them back, hard, before he could notice and moved around the truck beside him.

  She slipped the photograph out of his fingers and looked into the long-ago face of his mother. Molly Fortune was sitting up in a hospital bed wearing a pale-colored bed jacket and staring into the camera with a serene smile.

  It was a small photograph. Maybe three inches square. But the woman’s contented happiness as she held her firstborn son in her arms still managed to shine out of it.

  Deanna couldn’t recall ever seeing photos of her mother holding her as a baby. If there had been photos from her childhood, they’d disappeared somewhere along the way.

  “Your mother probably kept a baby book for each of you,” she guessed. Along with the woman he described, the image in the photograph seemed to suggest that Molly had been the kind of mother who would have done so. As well as making sure they had family portraits through the years.

  Something else that had been absent from Deanna’s upbringing. A happy-looking family, rec
orded for posterity.

  For the Gurneys, there had been no happiness. No family. Just a mother who basically blamed her only daughter for existing.

  Deanna focused on Drew, who was looking at her with a small frown.

  “Didn’t your mom keep a baby book?”

  “I doubt it.” She shrugged, not entirely comfortable having the focus back on her. “If she did, she’s never showed it to me. And Gigi’s not big on that sort of thing anyway.”

  “What is she big on, aside from the home shopping channels?”

  “Grandiose dreams of finding the perfect romance.”

  “Sounds like a lot of women I know.”

  Deanna made a face. “She just chooses to continually look in the wrong place.”

  “Is there a right place?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not the one with the experience. Where’d you meet your ex-wife?”

  “College. But that doesn’t count because it obviously wasn’t real.”

  “Or she wouldn’t have cheated on you?”

  His lips twisted. “Presumably.”

  She chewed the inside of her lip. “Cheating has no place in true love.”

  “So you’ve been in love? With who? That Mike guy?”

  “Mark.” She shook her head. “And no. But you still haven’t said whether or not you had a baby book.”

  He gave her a sideways look that told her he knew she was being evasive, then shrugged. “Yeah. Baby books for all of us. Scrapbooks. My mother did ’em all. Filled with hair from our first haircuts and birthday cards and report cards once we got into school.” He grinned crookedly. “Even though some of those report cards definitely weren’t worth saving, at least on my part.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Why?”

  She laughed a little. “Because you’re fiercely brilliant, which you very well know. Aside from the whole spelling thing, that is.”