He didn't fault her for it. He knew how deep she wanted to bury her modest beginnings, a small, dusty farm outside Odessa. The clear image of her family in attendance at her grand wedding came suddenly into his mind. They were a worn-out, sad-looking bunch, and their ill-fitting formal clothes were so far out of style that they might have been a troop of comics. But there hadn't been anything comical about them. They drank too much and grew louder as the evening wore on. Casey, everyone knew, had been mortified. A lesser woman would have been reduced to tears when her father stood on his chair in the midst of Texas society and flipped his middle finger to the band when they were unable to play a rendition of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."
But Casey came through it like she came through everything else, with her chin held high. She had run from her past in search of a glamorous life. All anyone had to do was look at her now to know she had made it. Still, there were times when Tony thought she was overeager to please a set of people who paled in comparison to her. He had subtly suggested on more than one occasion that she not demean herself by pandering to them, but she would only slap his arm playfully and say, "Oh, Tony," the way she did when she was refusing to talk about something. So he'd given up years ago. In fact, he'd given up on the day that she married into that "society."
He supposed that if she had to join the company of such an overrated bunch that at least she'd taken the best they had to offer. Her husband did something anyway, or at least he pretended to. Taylor Jordan never stopped talking about the deals he made all over the globe. But Tony looked at the man and had to wonder. Right now, he was covertly leering past the centerpiece at old-man Rienholf 's twenty-eight-year-old blond bride.