Surprise: Outback Proposal: Surprise: Outback Proposal

Was it just her, or was Dom pulling out all the stops for what was supposed to be a simple working lunch, their first as business partners?

She studied him carefully as she crossed to the kitchen. His hair was slightly damp, as though he’d just had a shower. But that could mean anything. Maybe he’d slept in, maybe he’d been to the gym. Maybe he’d even had someone stay the night and they’d whiled away a weekend morning in bed together before he’d had to get ready for this meeting.

She frowned as she registered her distinct unease at the thought of Dom with another woman.

“You want to open the wine?” he asked as he began to roll out thin ropes of dough with his fingertips. He indicated a bottle of red wine.

“um, sure. Where can I find the bottle opener?”

“Top drawer, on the left,” he said.

She found the opener easily and began twisting it into the cork.

“Haven’t seen one of these for a while,” she said.

Dom frowned. “I thought pregnant women were allowed to have the occasional glass of wine these days. My sisters drank through their pregnancies.”

Lucy laughed. “I meant the cork. It’s the real deal, not plastic. And definitely not a screw cap.”

“Oh, right. I brought some bottles of Chianti back from Italy. They won’t have anything to do with screw caps over there.”

She collected the glasses from the table and poured the wine, then placed his within reach on the counter.

“Thanks.” The smile he gave her was warm. Then his gaze dropped below her face.

He did not just do an eye-drop on me, she told herself sternly, even though it had looked distinctly like he was checking out her breasts. He’s probably worried that my turtleneck won’t withstand the pressure of being stretched over my bump and that the whole thing will suddenly rip in two like the Hindenburg.

Even though she was limiting herself to just one small glass of wine, she took a healthy sip and welcomed the distracting warmth as it slid down her throat. When she dared look at Dom again he was cutting the dough into one-inch sections.

See? He’s not interested in your boobs. You’ve been spending too much time with your delusional sister.

“Do you cook often?” she asked.

She did a mental eye roll at the question. She might as well have asked about the weather. She’d had several meetings with him since he’d proposed their partnership and yet each time she seemed to feel less comfortable, not more so. Now she was trotting out the kind of polite, stiff chitchat she usually saved for new acquaintances.

“When I can. I try to make some meals on the weekend for during the week. It’s easy to get lazy when I’m home late from the market,” he said.

He began marking the gnocchi with a fork, expertly rolling each piece off the tines and onto a floured plate.

“You’ve done this before,” Lucy noted. “Don’t tell anyone, but I buy mine from the supermarket.”

He tsk-tsked and shook his head.

“Lucia, Lucia. Don’t you know that food is the way to a man’s heart?” he said in a flawless impersonation of any number of elderly Italian women she knew.

“Damn. That was where I went wrong,” she said, snapping her fingers in mock chagrin.

Dom winced.

“Sorry,” he said. His gaze dropped to her belly. “I didn’t think.”

She shrugged. “It’s okay. It wasn’t my store-bought gnocchi that scared Marcus away. He fell for his yoga instructor.”

“Yoga instructor. That’s a new one. I thought it was usually the secretary.”

“Marcus is a photographer, so he had to improvise. But he’s making out just fine. Apparently what she lacks in the dictation department she makes up for in flexibility,” Lucy said. Then she flushed as she realized how jealous and bitchy she sounded.

The corners of Dom’s eyes crinkled as he grinned at her.

“Saucer of milk, table two,” he said.

She pulled a face. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”

“Yeah, you did. It’s okay. You’re supposed to be pissed off. The only people who are cool with being betrayed are people I don’t want to know.”

He took the gnocchi over to the stove and slid them into a pan of boiling water. His arms flexed as he brushed the last pieces from the plate. He hadn’t shaved today, she noted, and his jaw was dark with stubble, enhancing his rumpled, casual appeal.

Bare feet and stubble ought to be banned, she thought. I’d have to turn the hose on Rosie if she was here.

Dom turned his head and caught her staring. A slow smile spread across his mouth. She tore her gaze away and frowned down into her drink. Her heart was suddenly pounding, and she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

“So, um, what did your father say about us becoming partners?” she asked abruptly, desperate for distraction.

“I haven’t told him. It’s none of his business what I do with my investments,” Dom said.

“Wow. You guys must have had one hell of an argument.”

His mouth quirked wryly. “You could say that.”

He didn’t offer any more information, and she wasn’t about to push. They were business colleagues, not friends. On the personal front, they owed each other nothing.

“So, Lucy, the big question—do you like it hot?” he asked.

She blinked. “um, sorry?”

He laughed. “Maybe I should rephrase that. Can you eat chilies without getting heartburn?”

“Oh. So far, so good. But I’m definitely more on the coward’s side of the chili divide than the courageous.”

“Okay, why don’t you come over here and try the sauce, let me know if I’ve gone too crazy with anything.” He gestured for her to join him at the stove.

She came to a halt a few feet away, and he dipped a wooden spoon into a saucepan.

“Come a little closer so I don’t spill.”

She stepped forward, feeling acutely self-conscious. She was standing so close now that if she inhaled deeply her baby bump would jostle him. He lifted the spoon to her mouth.

“Blow on it a little, it’s hot,” he said.

She pursed her lips and blew gently. She could feel him watching her and heat stole into her cheeks. She told herself it was because she was standing near the stove and she was wearing a turtleneck, but she knew it had more to do with how broad his shoulders were up close and how good he smelled and how acutely aware she was of all of the above.

Desperate to get the moment over and done with, she leaned forward to taste the sauce. Tough luck if she burned her mouth. It would be worth it to gain some distance and some perspective.

The flavors of rich tomato, fresh basil, subtle garlic and the perfect amount of chili chased each other across her palate.

“Oh, that’s good!” she said, closing her eyes to savour the flavors.

When she opened her eyes again Dom was staring at her, his eyes very dark and very intent. Her breath got caught somewhere between her lungs and her throat and her gaze dropped to his mouth. He had great lips, the bottom one much fuller and softer-looking than the top. She wondered what it would feel like to kiss him.

Dear God.

She took a step backward.

“You know, I might go powder my nose before we eat,” she said in a high voice she barely recognized as her own.

“Second door on your right,” he said easily.

She nodded her thanks and scooped up her handbag on the way. She heaved a sigh of relief when she was safely behind the closed bathroom door. Then she dived into her bag and found her cell phone. Rosie answered on the second ring.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in a meeting with The Bianco?” her sister asked, not bothering with a greeting.

“I need advice. He’s cooking for me,” Lucy whispered into the phone.

“What? Why are you whispering? Of course he’s cooking for you—he invited you to lunch,” Rosie said.

“I’m whispering because I’m in the bathroom, and I’m in here because he’s set the table with flowers and linen napkins and he’s made gnocchi from scratch and there’s wine and he just fed me sauce and looked at me as though maybe he really does want to take a bite out of me,” Lucy explained in a rush.

“Oh boy. I need to sit down.”

“Me, too,” Lucy said. She put down the lid on the toilet and sat.

“I’m freaking out here, Rosie. I have no idea if I’m reading things into the situation that aren’t there or I don’t know what,” she whispered, glancing toward the door.

“Calm down. Let’s assess the situation logically. You said there were flowers. What kind?”

“Roses.”

“And linen napkins. And he’s making pasta for you?”

“Yep. And there’s wine. And I think I saw some kind of cake sitting on the counter for later.”

“He baked for you? Maybe I need to lie down,” Rosie said. “I can’t believe The Bianco is making a move on you.”

Lucy sucked in an outraged breath. “What do you mean you can’t believe it? You’re the one who told me he wanted me. You’re the one who told me to wear the red shirt and that this was a date, not a business lunch.”

“Yeah, but this is really happening!” Rosie said excitedly.

Lucy closed her eyes. She felt dizzy, scared, even a little sweaty. She couldn’t handle this. She didn’t want Dom to look at her with bedroom eyes. She didn’t want to be aware of him as a woman. She was pregnant. A tiny little person was growing inside her body. Soon, she’d be looking after that little person night and day.

“I think I should leave,” she told her sister. “I’ll tell him I don’t feel well and come home.”

“Are you kidding me? Stay. Stay and see what happens.”

Lucy clutched the phone.

“Rosie. Be serious. This is not a game. This is my life. Isn’t it complicated enough already? I just signed a contract to share my business with Dom. If anything happened between us—” She broke off, shaking her head. She couldn’t even allow herself to go there. It was so absurd, so crazy. She still couldn’t believe that she’d seen what she’d thought she’d seen in his eyes.

“But he likes you,” Rosie said, as though that resolved everything.

“I don’t like him,” Lucy fired back.

“Liar. If you didn’t like him, you wouldn’t be hiding out in the bathroom calling me because he looked at you.”

“Rosie. Be serious. I just gave half my business to this man.”

Rosie sighed. “Fine, be sensible then. Tell him you’re not interested. Get it out of the way now, off the agenda. That way you both know where you stand.”

Lucy realized that every muscle in her body was tense and made a conscious effort to relax.

“Okay, good. That’s what I’ll do, nip it in the bud,” she said, nodding her agreement. “Thanks, Rosie. I needed to hear that.”

“Did you?”

“Stop trying to be Dr. Freud. You don’t have the beard for it.”

She ended the phone call after promising to call Rosie the moment the meeting was over. Then she flushed the toilet and washed her hands and eyed herself sternly in the mirror.

The very next time Dom smiled at her in that special way or looked at her as though she were chocolate-coated, she’d call him on it. They’d lay their cards on the table, establish some ground rules and move on. Problem solved.

Dom was dressing a salad when she returned to the living room.

“We’re about two minutes away. Would you mind taking our wineglasses over to the table?” he asked.

“Sure.”

She placed the wine on the coasters he’d provided and hovered awkwardly beside one of the chairs.

“Does it matter where I sit?” she asked.

“Help yourself.”

He brought the salad to the table, then served the pasta. Aromatic flavors wafted up from her meal as he placed it in front of her.

“This looks wonderful,” she said.

“I take no credit. My ma perfected this recipe over twenty years. All I did was follow instructions,” he said.

He smiled and she searched his face for any of the heated intent she’d registered earlier. But for the life of her she could find nothing apart from friendly warmth and welcome.

“You want Parmesan?” he asked, offering her a small bowl of freshly grated cheese.

She sprinkled Parmesan on her gnocchi and took her first mouthful. It really was fantastic—the tomatoes tangy, the chili providing the exact right amount of background burn. The gnocchi was light and fluffy, with the hint of something elusive in the mix.

“This is great,” she said, gesturing toward her plate with her fork.

“Yeah? Glad you like it. I made so much, you can take some home with you, save you cooking dinner.”

There was a solicitous note in his voice. She darted a look at him, ready to deliver her clear-the-air speech at the first sign of anything remotely unbusinesslike. But again he simply looked friendly and interested. The perfect business partner, in fact: cooperative, personable, intelligent.

She was on tenterhooks throughout the entire meal, waiting for a repeat of the moment by the stove. It never happened. After they cleared the table, he brought out his paperwork and notepad and got down to business in earnest. Not once over the subsequent hours did he so much as hint that he saw her as anything other than his business partner.

No hot looks. No lingering glances. No intimate smiles. Nothing except sensible, incisive business discussion.

After two hours of intense strategizing, Lucy retreated to the bathroom again.

She was confused. She’d been so sure…. The butterflies in her stomach, the pounding of her heart, the steamy intent in his eyes—was it really possible that she was so out of practice with all things male-female that she’d misread his signals? Could she have simply imagined that moment of connection? Was that really possible?

She checked her reflection in the bathroom mirror and groaned as she realized she’d spilled sauce on herself, her baby bump having obligingly caught it. She stared at the red splodge, bright against the dark of her turtleneck, like a beacon drawing attention to her belly.

“You’re an idiot,” she told her reflection.

The tension she’d been carrying with her all afternoon dissipated as she sponged her top clean, shaking her head all the while.

Call it hormones, call it nerves, call it whatever—she’d clearly misinterpreted Dom’s behavior. Of course she had. She was pregnant. Hardly an object of desire. She had to have been temporarily deranged to even entertain the idea in the first place.

Feeling calm and centered for the first time all afternoon, she returned to their meeting.

Thank God she hadn’t delivered her little speech.

CHAPTER SIX

DOM COULDN’T STOP thinking about Lucy. While he cleaned up after their lunch, he thought about how she didn’t take herself too seriously, how she liked to laugh. How smart she was in a school-of-hard-knocks kind of way.

During his run afterward, he thought about how gutsy and brave she was.

He liked her. He liked her a lot. The admiration and curiosity and attraction he’d felt for her previously had been based on what little he knew of her via their brief daily encounters at his father’s stall. Now, however, he’d seen Lucy at home, watched her interact with her sister, had numerous meetings with her, and he was beginning to understand just how special she was.

As he paused at a traffic light, he registered that he’d spent the past hour thinking about Lucy Basso. And not in a business kind of way.

Sweat ran down his back and the smile faded from his lips as he remembered the moment by the stove. He’d almost kissed her. She’d been standing so close and he’d been staring into her face and the need to taste her lips, to touch her to see if she was as smooth and warm and soft as he imagined had almost overwhelmed him.

He was a bastard. The light changed and he took off across the intersection.

The moment he’d decided to offer her a partnership, he’d known it meant the end of his chances with her. Lucy did not need her new business partner lusting after her. She needed help, support, money. Anything beyond that was simply not on the agenda. And he was a selfish prick for even letting himself go there. He lengthened his stride, angry with himself. He needed to get a grip on his attraction to her.

Ten minutes later, he slowed his pace, switched off his iPod and opened the gate to his parents’ house. His mother looked up from the kitchen table when he entered via the back door.

“Dominic! At last you come. I was beginning to forget what my boy looks like,” she said, pushing herself to her feet with an effort.

Like his father, his mother had turned into a round little barrel as she aged, her love of pasta and rich meats catching up with her. Her long gray hair was pinned on the back of her head, and she wore a voluminous apron over her dress. Her hands were dusted with flour, and she held them out from her sides as he kissed her.

“You all sweaty,” his mother said, eyeing him with concern. “You should get out of those damp clothes. Have a shower. Put on something of your father’s.”

“I’m fine. I just dropped in for a quick hello,” he said.

His mother’s lips immediately thinned.

“I never see you anymore. First you go away for six months, then you come home and still you are stranger.”

Guilt stabbed him. He had been avoiding home—or, more accurately, he’d been avoiding his father. At the market, work acted as a buffer between them, but at home there was no place to hide the fact that he and his father were barely on speaking terms.

“I’ve been busy. Work and some other things.”

His mother sat back at the table and resumed rolling out the mixture for her biscotti.

“Your father is in the front room. You should go say hello to him,” she said.

He hesitated a fraction of a second before nodding.

“Sure.”

He could feel her watching him as he walked up the hallway.

His father was in his favorite chair, the seat reclined as far as it could go, the Italian-language newspaper, Il Globo, spread across his belly. Dom watched him sleep for a moment, noting how old his father looked without his larger-than-life personality to distract from the new wrinkles in his face and the sag of his jaw. Age spots had appeared on his hands in the past few years and the gray in his hair was turning white. He was fifty-nine and still he woke every day at 5:00 a.m. to tend the stall at the market, despite the fact that they could easily afford to hire staff to cover the early shift.

Stubborn bastard.

“Pa,” he said quietly.

Tony started, the newspaper rustling. He frowned, jerking the chair into the upright position.

“Was reading newspaper,” he said.

Dom gestured back toward the kitchen.

“I dropped in to see Mama for a bit,” he said.

Tony nodded. “Good, good. She worries when she not see you.”

Conversation dried up between them. Dom felt the silence acutely. He and his father had had their moments over the years, but he’d never felt as distant as he had recently.

He cleared his throat. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Lucy Basso was looking for an investor in Market Fresh, so I’ve bought in. We’re partners.”

“What is this? Partners? How can you be partners with another business when you have Bianco Brothers?”

“It’s not a full-time gig. At the moment, at least. When things pick up, I might have to rethink. But in the meantime nothing has to change.”

His father’s face reddened. “You work for me! You always work for me.”

“I’m not resigning, Pa. I’m just exploring other opportunities.”

His father glared at him for a long moment.

“This is because of computers.”

“I want to make my own business successes,” Dom said, sidestepping the issue.

“After everything I give you, everything I do for you. You tell me this, no discussion, nothing.”

Dom refused to feel guilty. He had a life to live, too.

“I’m not a kid, I don’t need to ask your permission.” He felt like he’d been saying that a lot lately. “I just thought you’d like to know what was going on.”

He headed for the kitchen. His mother looked up from spooning biscotti mixture onto a tray when he entered.

“Listen, I have to go. But maybe I could come around for dinner during the week?”

His mother frowned, then her gaze slid over his shoulder.

“Bianco Brothers is for you. For all my children. And you throw back in my face,” Tony said from the doorway.

Dom saw his father’s hands were shaking and his eyes were shiny with tears. Dom rubbed the bridge of his nose and reached for patience.

“What am I supposed to do, Pa? I have a business degree, I have ideas, but you won’t listen to any of them. So either I sit around and suck it up and stew in my own juices, or I do something for myself. I chose Option B. You still have Vinnie and the rest of the staff. There’s nothing I do that they can’t.”

“What is going on? What is happening here?” his mother asked.

“Dominic is leaving business,” Tony said, his chin stuck out half a mile.

Dom raised his eyebrows. “That’s not what I said.”

“What do you call when you buy another business?”

“I’m a partner. Lucy will still run it. I’m just helping out. I promise this won’t be a problem, okay?” he said. “Look, we can talk about this more tomorrow at work.”

When you’ve had a chance to cool down and think instead of react.

He turned to his mother.

“Save some biscotti for me,” he said. She nodded absently and kissed him good-bye.

Out in the street, Dom took a deep breath, then let it out again. He’d done it. It hadn’t been pleasant, but it was over.

The look on his father’s face flashed across his mind. He’d looked betrayed. Hurt. Baffled.

Dom started to run, lengthening his stride with each step. Soon he was breathing heavily, sweat running down his chest and spine.

He refused to look back, and he couldn’t stand still forever. His father was going to have to come to terms with his decision. And if he didn’t … well, they would cross that bridge when they came to it.

LATER THAT EVENING, Rosie stood in the kitchen making spaghetti with meatballs with her husband. As usual, he was cutting the onions because they made her howl like a baby and she was mashing the canned tomatoes in the saucepan.

“Do you think it would be wrong for me to invite Dominic Bianco to the Women’s Institute fund-raiser next week without telling Lucy first?” she asked during a lull in their conversation.

“Why would you do that?” Andrew asked.

“Because if I tell Lucy, she’ll tell me not to invite him.”

“Okaaaay,” Andrew said, frowning. “Why do I feel like I’m missing a vital part of this conversation?”

“I think Dom likes Lucy.”

His eyebrows rose toward his hairline.

“She’s pregnant,” he said.

“So?”

He clanked a frypan onto the stove.

“You’re serious? You need me to explain?”

“It’s happened before in the history of the world.” Rosie was aware she sounded defensive. Was she the only one who saw the potential here? “Lucy is still gorgeous and fantastic. Would it be any different if she was a single mom and she met a guy?”

Andrew looked confused for a minute as he thought it over.

“Yes. And I don’t know why, it just is. Pregnant women are for protecting and admiring, not lusting after,” he said unequivocally.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.