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 to 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
