Cowboy in Disguise Read online

  Jay offered Arabella a slightly pained shrug. “Sorry.”

  “No.” Arabella waved her hand. “I’m sorry for keeping you.” She moistened her lips. “We can, uh, we can talk later.” She was practically stuttering.

  She really wasn’t good at this. Inside her head, she pictured herself all smooth and maybe even a little sophisticated and sexy. Reality, though, fell far short.

  Fortunately—miraculously—Jay didn’t seem any more bothered by her awkwardness than Toby was by his backward socks. “That sounds good,” he said and she was pretty sure it wasn’t her imagination that his deep voice seemed to go even deeper.

  “See you later, pardners,” he told the boys as he went back inside. “Make sure you run enough to make room for birthday cake.”

  Arabella let the boys run around a little longer than the ten minutes she’d promised Brady. But since she could see him upstairs in the restaurant through the opened balcony doors, she figured he wasn’t too anxious.

  Which was fortunate because the butterflies fluttering madly inside her veins needed to burn off some energy as badly as the boys did.

  Lights were coming on around the property when she herded the twins back inside through the main entrance and upstairs.

  Fortunately, they were just in time to see Larkin smashing his way through his truck-shaped birthday cake, earning oohs from the twins who raced to the table and onto Catherine’s and Gary’s laps—proof that they were perfectly normal little boys despite the tragedy of their parents’ deaths last year.

  Arabella spotted Jay and he jerked slightly when she touched his sleeve, but his smile was warm as ever. “Hello again.”

  Aware of his responsibilities there, she snatched up an unused coffee cup from the abandoned guest table next to them. “Fill me up?”

  One of his dark eyebrows peaked. “With coffee?”

  “Are you offering anything else?”

  His eyes didn’t let go of hers as he tilted his coffee carafe over her cup. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  He shook his head slightly as if he were as bemused as she. “Arabella.”

  She moistened her lips. “Yes?”

  “I’ve never met an Arabella before.”

  Her heart had climbed into her throat and she felt almost dizzy. “Is that a good thing?”

  His dimple flirted into view. Just for a moment before disappearing again. He set the carafe aside. “I’ve really liked meeting you, Arabella. A lot.” He took her free hand in his. His thumb stroked over her wrist. She knew he had to be able to feel the insane thrumming of her pulse. “And I get off at ten.”

  Choruses sang inside her head. “Okay,” she managed almost soundlessly.

  “But I think you should know that—”

  A huge screech rent the air just then, and they both jerked. A horrible rumbling juddered up from the floor as the balcony and everything on it fell away.

  In the horrified void that followed, a balloon of dust rose silently in its place.

  Then a woman screamed.

  Followed by another.

  And suddenly people ran.

  Kids cried.

  Jay shoved Arabella to one side just in time to avoid a chair flying toward her and she stared numbly at the cause as Brady vaulted across the room to scoop up Toby and Tyler.

  She lost sight of Jay then in the melee while Callum—one of those Fortunes who’d built the hotel in the first place—ushered guests off the second floor.

  Arabella gasped when her dad grabbed her arm in an iron grip.

  “I knew it was a bad idea coming here.” He had her mother’s hand in his other and Catherine stumbled over a spilled tray of dishes trying to keep up with him.

  “Daddy!” Arabella pulled on his hand, slowing him long enough to notice her mom. She was glad at least to see the true dismay in his face when he helped her mom to her feet. But that didn’t stop him from shackling Arabella’s wrist again as if she were a wayward toddler and joining the exiting guests.

  Outside, the sound of sirens ought to have been reassuring—help was on its way—yet it only seemed to add to the horror.

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Where’s Wiley?”

  “Was it a bomb?”

  “Dear God, Grace was—”

  “The mayor’s here. She can—”

  The voices swirled and Arabella saw a mountain of rubble where only minutes earlier, Toby and Tyler had been running around the bushes below the balcony.

  Nausea assaulted her and she looked away, numbly letting her father pull her and her mother even farther away from the scene. He hustled them into the car he’d rented at the airport in Houston. He was muttering to himself the whole while, but Arabella barely heard.

  The evening wasn’t cold, but her teeth chattered hard as she looked out the back car window as her dad drove away from the hotel. Emergency lights flashed as one vehicle after another turned into the parking lot, tires squealing. She knew her brothers were safe. They’d all been inside Roja and well away from the balcony when she’d been talking with Jay.

  I think you should know that...

  “Gary, surely the entire hotel isn’t collapsing! Shouldn’t we—”

  “No,” her dad said flatly, cutting off whatever her mother had been going to suggest. “We’re going straight back to New York where we belong.”

  Jarred from her stupor, Arabella envisioned her overnight bag still sitting on the foot of her bed. Because the party was being held right there in the hotel, she’d seen no reason to take her purse to the party. “Dad, our luggage—”

  “Can be sent to us. It’s the least those Fortunes owe us.”

  “Maybe, but I’m still not going to be able to get on a plane without ID! And that’s still in my hotel room.” In his present mood, she knew he wouldn’t welcome any comments from her, but if they drove all the way to Houston only to have to turn around again, he’d be even more furious.

  “Don’t you know better than to go anywhere without your ID?” He obviously didn’t expect an answer because he was swearing under his breath as he turned around and started back to the hotel.

  She hadn’t gone anywhere until he’d dragged her out of the hotel. But she was pretty sure pointing that out wouldn’t earn her any points.

  “How many times have I told Adam that moving to Rambling Rose would be nothing but bad news? Kane’s no better. That family just invites trouble. I told you about that wedding,” he said to Catherine, repeating words that Arabella had heard again and again over the past few years. “Deranged women. Kidnapping. Car chases. Now this? Those Fortunes are cursed!”

  Her mother’s voice was meant to be soothing. “That was years ago. What happened at your brother’s wedding in Paseo—”

  “Gerald Robinson is not my brother,” Gary snapped. “How many times have I told you that?”

  Julius Fortune’s copious spreading of his gene pool said otherwise. Arabella kept that thought to herself, too. She’d never met Julius, who had fathered not only one legitimate son—Gerald—but at least four illegitimate ones, including her father. Everything she knew about the wealthy philanderer who’d died before she was even born was what she’d gained via the internet and snippets of gossip from her brothers.

  When they arrived back at the hotel, the number of fire engines and police cars had doubled.

  “Oh, dear,” Catherine fretted as they slowed for a stretcher being rolled toward the opened rear doors of an ambulance. She fumbled with her purse—she hadn’t left hers in their room—and pulled out her cell phone. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” she kept moaning under her breath as she dialed.

  Arabella could see her mother’s hands trembling and felt another wave of nausea. “Send text messages, Mom,” she advised, knowing that her brothers were likely to respond more quickly t
o a text than a phone call. For there was no question that Catherine Fortune was checking on her boys.

  After waiting for the stretcher to be loaded, her dad pulled as close to the hotel entrance as the congestion of vehicles allowed. The second the wheels stopped rolling, Arabella unsnapped her safety belt. “I have my room key.” She pulled it from her bodice where she’d tucked it and held it up.

  Her father plucked it right out of her fingertips. “Stay here,” he ordered, and got out of the vehicle.

  “I’m twenty-five years old,” she grumbled but he’d already slammed his door shut. “I’m capable of retrieving my own damn luggage.”

  “Don’t swear,” Catherine said, holding her phone to her ear. “It’s unbecoming of a young lady. Oh, why won’t Adam answer his phone? Maybe Kane.”

  “I told you, Mom,” Arabella said with a sigh. “Text.”

  Her mother clucked her tongue and redialed. “I don’t like texting. You know that.”

  And her brothers didn’t like getting dragged into lengthy conversations with their mother that inevitably went nowhere.

  It wasn’t that they didn’t love her. But Arabella also knew her brothers were frustrated with the chip their father had on his shoulder against the rest of the world—and of late, those Fortunes—and their mother’s support of her husband no matter how unreasonable his attitudes were.

  Was it any wonder that Arabella had spent most of her childhood with her nose buried in the books she loved? It was so much more pleasant losing herself in the excitement of a mystery or the throes of a love story than dwell on her overprotective big brothers, her old-fashioned mother and her perennially disgruntled father.

  She pushed open her car door and got out.

  “Arabella, where are you going?”

  “Just to see what’s happening.” She childishly crossed her fingers where her mother couldn’t see and started weaving around cars to get closer to the side of the hotel where the action was most concentrated.

  Arabella spotted Jay at once.

  He stood on the far side of the debris. Yellow police tape already cordoned off the area. He was looking in her direction and she lifted her hand, hoping he would notice, but she got jostled aside by the arrival of a television crew headed by a helmet-haired woman who was clearly ready to bat her pathway clear with her big microphone.

  “Focus on that pile of debris and crushed landscaping,” she was ordering her cameraman. “And cut back to me in five, four, three—”

  Arabella looked toward Jay again.

  But he was gone.

  Disappointment sagged inside her.

  I think you should know that...

  What had he intended to say?

  ...I do believe in love at first sight. With you, Arabella.

  Her arm was grabbed again, this time from behind.

  “I told you to stay in the car,” Gary said tightly. “You want to get hurt out here?”

  “The person who got hurt was on that stretcher we saw.” She craned her neck, trying to find Jay again.

  “Police,” Gary muttered, obviously not listening. He was practically frog-marching her back to the car. “Everywhere.”

  “Doing their job, it looks like to me.”

  “Yeah and those Fortunes give them plenty to do.” Her dad pushed her into the back seat and tossed her overnighter in after her. “Just watch. They’ll buy their way out of this latest trouble. That’s what people like them do.” He slammed her door shut and got behind the wheel while Arabella was trying to untangle her high heel from where it had punctured her hem. “Who would have thought that Arabella would be the one to show the most common sense? She’s perfectly happy in New York. Not trying to act like some hifalutin Fortune.”

  “Gary,” her mother started again. “If you just gave them a chance, maybe—”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Catherine.”

  Neither did Arabella. She closed her eyes, envisioning Jay’s brilliant green ones. Remembering the touch of his hand on hers.

  I think you should know that...

  Chapter Two

  Five months later

  “Come on, Cross. Why don’t you make things easy here and just confess?”

  Jay shoved his fingers through his hair and stared blearily at the cop on the other side of the hardwood table.

  Supposedly, he was just there at the Rambling Rose Police Station to have a “conversation.”

  Except he’d been sitting in this room with the detective for two hours. And even before that, he’d been sitting in the room alone for twice that long.

  “Confess what?” he asked for about the millionth time.

  “What were you doing that afternoon back in January when the balcony collapsed at Hotel Fortune?”

  He rubbed the pain centered between his eyebrows. “My job,” he said. Again. For about the millionth time.

  “Which is what?”

  He dropped his hand onto the table a little harder than he probably should have. The sound of it echoed loudly in the stark room.

  He stretched out his fingers, mentally counting to ten, then relaxed them again and looked at the investigator, Detective John Teas. “Whatever the GM decides I should be doing.”

  “GM?”

  “General manager.”

  “That’s Grace Williams.”

  “She’s the general manager now, but she wasn’t in January.”

  “No. She was standing on the balcony when it collapsed. And every single witness that we’ve interviewed about that day can’t recall where you were prior to that collapse. Why is that?”

  Jay sighed again. If he told the detective the whole truth and nothing but the truth, would it make things better for him?

  Or worse?

  “I have no idea,” he replied evenly. “On that particular day in January, I was one of the servers at the birthday party being held at Roja. I spent the day running back and forth from the kitchen to the banquet room.”

  “Doing?”

  The vision of a petite blue-eyed redhead swam easily in his head. “Delivering a lot of bread baskets,” he deadpanned.

  The detective didn’t look amused.

  Jay sighed. “I served food. Cleared away plates. Poured coffee. You know. Waited tables at a birthday party.” Avoided getting caught on camera when that news crew arrived after the balcony collapse.

  He pushed away the thought.

  “The day before I was helping out in maintenance. The day after, I was off.” As was most everyone else, which the detective knew perfectly well since Jay was pretty certain the man had already questioned everyone who worked at Hotel Fortune, from the owners on down to the lowliest of low—which included Jay Cross.

  Just simple Jay Cross.

  “One of your coworkers stated that you were seen outside the hotel prior to the balcony collapse.”

  “Yes. I’d escorted one of the guests and her nephews—” he figured the description was close enough since Brady Fortune, the boys’ guardian, had been hired as the hotel concierge and gossip had it that he was in the process of adopting them “—outside so the two little boys could get some fresh air.”

  “It was early January.”

  “And the weather was beautiful,” Jay returned, exasperated. He shifted on the hard chair and spread his hands, palms upward. “Come on, Detective. Do you have kids? These two boys had energy to spare and had been behaving through an entire dinner. I showed them a back way down to the first floor and outside so they could run around a little.”

  “Near the balcony.”

  “The entire back side of the hotel is near the balcony,” he pointed out. “What possible reason would I have to be involved in that collapse?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it, Mr. Cross?” Detective Teas leaned back on two chair legs, seemingly obliviou
s to the danger that his generous girth presented to them. He tapped a pencil eraser against the tabletop. “You’re aware of the food tampering incident during the Give Back barbecue at the hotel just last month.”

  If the guy expected Jay to blink, he would be disappointed. “I worked the barbecue. Like usual.” Except there’d been a news crew on the premises that day, too. Not to cover a disaster—though they’d gotten that in the end—but to promote the community event. Jay had spent more time finding excuses to be out of sight in the kitchen than out in the open where the reporter and cameras were.

  He hadn’t thought it was all that likely he’d be recognized. Not the way he looked now. But he hadn’t wanted to take any chances, either. He was already living proof that life could change on a dime. And if it could happen once, it could happen again.

  “Running food back and forth from the kitchen to the buffet line,” the detective said with a goading little smile. “Any period of time when you were alone?”

  Detective Teas undoubtedly already knew the answer to that, too. “Yes, but not for very long.”

  “Do you know how many people had adverse reactions to the food?”

  Jay sighed faintly. “It wasn’t the food. It was the pepper powder someone—not me—sprinkled on it.” He also knew that everyone had recovered. That, in fact, the one individual caught on camera having an allergic reaction to the pepper had set off more of a panic among the crowd than anything, and Nicole Fortune, who was the chef of Roja, had worked very hard to prove there’d been no mismanagement.

  The damage was done, though.

  Like all things caught in the media, sensationalism was more popular than truth. And this—the latest of the mishaps to hit Hotel Fortune—had everyone in town, including those who actually worked there, wondering if the new hotel could even survive.

  For Jay, losing the job would be an inconvenience. Rambling Rose didn’t exactly offer the plentiful job opportunities that Los Angeles did, but he’d find something. He was nothing if not adaptable.

  If the people looking for him, however, found out where he was, it’d cause a lot more than mere inconvenience.