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Authors: Marie Ferrarella

Fortune's Just Desserts (8 page)

BOOK: Fortune's Just Desserts
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Lily began praying the moment the phone went silent. The nature of the prayer had changed now that William had been found. What hadn't changed—and wouldn't—was its intensity.

And, as she prayed, her thoughts turned to her late husband, the way they often did.

There were times that she could literally
feel
Ryan's strength here. Feel his presence. Not always, but sometimes.

Like now.

She wouldn't tell anyone, not even her children, because they'd think she was crazy or had been pushed over the edge by this latest twist involving William, but there were times that she could swear Ryan was in the room with her. Supporting her. Bolstering her.

“It is all right with you, isn't it, my darling?” she whispered softly. “You do want me to marry William, I can feel it. But I need your help, Ryan. I can't do this alone. How do I bring him around? How do I make William remember us? Remember me?” she asked.

Lily could feel tears gathering in her eyes as she spoke to the man who she could no longer see.

At that moment, she thought she felt something pass over her. A feeling.

A calming presence?

She couldn't explain it, couldn't put it into words, but she was no longer agitated or worried. And sud
denly, she thought she had an answer to the question she had put to her late husband.

Very slowly, a smile began to spread over Lily's generous mouth.

Chapter Eight

The best laid schemes of mice and men…

The classic saying went through Marcos's brain as he walked into Red's kitchen two days later and saw that there was already someone there.

The wrong someone.

He'd come in early, hoping to find an empty kitchen. With Wendy's foray into the world of creative pastries, he recalled his own roots as a cook and had become inspired to try his hand at it again.

When he'd first targeted working in the restaurant field, he'd started out in the kitchen. It seemed only natural. Growing up, he'd been the one to do most, if not all, of the cooking at his house while his parents were busy earning a living.

Cooking had been a source of comfort to him then. The tiny kitchen in his home had been the first place that he had ever felt as if he was in control of things. He'd nurtured that feeling and eventually it became the foundation he'd used to build his life. The confidence that arose from being able to cook not just passably but well had slowly spread out to all the other facets of his life.

Cooking had been the beginning of it all, the beginning of the man he had grown up to be.

He missed being in the kitchen, missed mixing things together and coming up with an unexpected taste or texture. Missed the serenity of cooking.

Wendy's success was urging him to go back and revisit his roots.

But if his intentions had been to putter around by himself and fall back on his own devices, the moment Marcos walked into the kitchen, he was sorely disappointed.

The kitchen
was
empty. Except for Wendy.

It was only eight-thirty. What the hell was she doing here?

Suppressing an exasperated sigh, he tried his best not to sound as irritated as he felt when he put the question to her. “What are you doing here?”

Though she was just as surprised to see him as he had been to see her, Wendy hid her reaction well.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she countered, then answered his question by glibly saying, “I work here, remember?”

She turned toward the walk-in refrigerator. Marcos followed her. “Not at eight-thirty in the morning you don't. Why did you come in so early?”

Reaching the refrigerator door, she stopped and looked over her shoulder, waiting. “Actually, I came in earlier,” she confessed, then opened the door and went inside.

“How much earlier?” he wanted to know.

Finding what she wanted, a large container of heavy whipping cream and what appeared to be a helping of butterscotch pudding, she took her prizes and walked out again, kicking the door shut behind her.

“Seven-thirty,” she answered as she passed him.

“How did you get in?” he asked. His eyes narrowed beneath eyebrows that were drawn together in a dark, uncompromising line. “Who gave you a key?” There was no reason for her to have one. The fact that she did meant that someone's head was going to roll.

She placed her bounty on the stainless steel work table and headed to the pantry next. “Enrique,” she replied.

“Why?” Marcos wanted to know.

She turned from the pantry so abruptly, she just narrowly avoided colliding with him. He stepped aside at the last moment, trying not to notice that his pulse rate had gone up.

“Because I told him that I wanted to get an early start on making today's desserts.”

She gestured at the ingredients she was slowly gathering on the table, then went to secure a bottle of brandy from the bar in the main dining area. “So I could concentrate on making something new for the menu today.” And then she moved those warm chocolate eyes toward him and turned the tables. “I told you mine, now you tell me yours,” she said cheerfully.

What the hell was she talking about now? “What?” Marcos asked, utterly and frustratingly confused.

So she articulated her question slowly. “What are you doing here so early, Marcos?”

He resented her putting him on the defensive—and the effect she seemed to have on him.

“I thought I'd see what I could come up with in the kitchen,” he finally told her.

Wendy's stare only became more pronounced. “You cook?”

“Why does that surprise you so much?”

She shrugged in a carefree movement that made her soft peasant blouse—she'd worn her waitress uniform just in case he wanted to put her back on the floor, he noticed—slide off her slim shoulders.

Why couldn't the woman keep her clothes where they belonged, he silently demanded.

For a second, she left her blouse the way it was, though whether by choice or because she was oblivious to it wasn't clear at first. What
was
becoming progressively clearer to him was that he found the image before him exceedingly sexy. The front of her blouse
continued to move teasingly in and out with each breath she took, playing hide-and-seek with cleavage he wasn't supposed to be noticing—but did.

“I didn't know I could cook,” she told him honestly. “You seem to know you can, but I can't figure out why a man with your kind of looks would even begin to know the first thing about cooking.”

He didn't follow her at all. “What does the way I look have to do with anything?” It was only after a beat that he realized she'd complimented him. He forced himself not to dwell on that. She probably didn't mean it the way it sounded.

“I would have thought that'd be obvious.” When he said nothing, she explained her logic further. “Just that you'd have more than your share of women wanting to cook for you, that's all.”

He studied her for a moment, trying to decide whether she was just laying it on thick, trying to snow him, or if she was actually serious.

The scale tipped just the slightest bit toward serious.

He concluded that she wasn't trying to flatter him, exactly, she was just saying the words out loud as they occurred to her.

“Well, I used to cook for my brothers and parents,” he told her. “It was either that or live on a diet of fast food. And having me cook was cheaper—also healthier,” he threw in, although back then, neither his thoughts or his brothers' had run along those lines. Marcos had just been trying to create a dinner
out of whatever he found in the pantry—and doing his best to make it taste good.

If he'd failed in his attempts to make it taste at least decent, his brothers would tease him mercilessly and he'd really hated that. He'd learned to be a good cook because, very simply, he had to.

Slanting a glance in her direction, he caught Wendy grinning broadly.

“What's so funny?” he wanted to know.

Wendy pressed her lips together and began to whip the cream, drizzling powdered sugar into it at regular intervals. “Nothing.”

“You're grinning from ear to ear,” he pointed out impatiently.

After a beat, she gave in. No point in making him think that she was having terrible thoughts about him. “I was just picturing you, standing on a stool next to the stove, your mama's apron covering you from your neck down to your feet, frowning over something you were cooking up in a big old pot.”

“For the record,” he began, deciding to set her straight, “my mother's apron was folded in half and tied around my waist. And I didn't need a stool. I was this height by the time I was twelve.”

“Wow,” she said as her eyes skimmed over his frame quickly.

That wasn't exactly the way the kids in his class had reacted the September after his summer growth spurt. They'd called him beanpole and other, far less flattering names. It was because of their jeering that
he'd made a concentrated effort to put some meat on his bones, working out like crazy every morning and night, using a set of secondhand weights he'd gotten at the pawnshop.

Eventually the weight he'd packed on was sculpted and no one called him beanpole anymore. But they did call him. Especially the girls. Mostly they were girls in his class, but sprinkled in between them were a few “older women,” sophomores from the local high school. That was when he'd discovered that he could readily get by on his good looks.

It had also been possibly the most shallow time in his life, he judged now.

“You said you cooked for your brothers,” Wendy said, redirecting his attention back to the present.

He raised an eyebrow. Where was she going with this? “Yeah?”

Opening the industrial-size bottle of vanilla, she measured out an amount simply by looking and making a judgment call.

“I was just wondering how many you had. Brothers,” she prompted when Marcos just continued to look at her, apparently confused.

He was still having trouble tearing his eyes away from the front of her blouse—or lack thereof. “Three,” he finally answered, then filled in their names before she could ask. “Javier, Rafe and Miguel.”

She liked the way the names sounded. Manly and sexy. She set aside the vanilla after capping it. “Are you the baby?”

“Miguel is. Why?” Why was she asking all these questions? What was her angle?

“No reason,” she replied innocently. Picking up the whisk, she began to whip the concoction in earnest this time. “I'm the baby in my family. The baby and the black sheep,” she added with just a touch of ruefulness she hadn't managed to cover.

“Why black sheep?” he asked, curious despite his silent promise to himself not to ask her any personal questions. The less he asked, the more quickly she'd work and run out of her own questions. Or at least that had been the plan until her comment piqued his curiosity.

Wendy sighed a little before answering. He got the impression that, though she was breezy and the closest thing to a nonstop talker he ever hoped to encounter, this was apparently difficult for her to talk about.

The whisk slowed and began to travel in an anemic semicircle as she talked.

“The Atlanta Fortunes are all high achievers. The whole lot of them are power-oriented and driven. I've never known a one of them to fail at anything they set out to do—they refuse to.” She stopped abruptly and looked at Marcos. He'd be right at home with her parents, she thought. “I guess you could relate to that.”

He blinked, caught off guard by the observation. She did that a lot to him, he thought. Caught him off guard. “Me?”

“Yeah, you're a lot like them,” she told him, leaning back a little in order to look him over from head to toe. “They'd approve of you.”

The way she emphasized the last word made him wonder what she was
really
saying. It wasn't as if he wanted to get to know her and this was wedging the door open, allowing him to get a better look inside her life.

Still, there was no missing her tone, so he heard himself asking, “And you think that they don't approve of you?”

A rueful smile curved her delicate mouth. What he really hadn't expected was his reaction to the hint of sadness. He found himself wanting to put his arms around her, to chase away that look. It didn't really suit her.

But it did make her more real.

“They never said that in so many words,” Wendy admitted with a careless shrug of her shoulders, as if to make little of the matter. Her blouse slipped a little lower. He forced himself to look at her face. “But it's there, in their eyes. Oh, I know they love me,” she was quick to add in case he thought she was feeling sorry for herself. She wasn't, she really wasn't. “But I've actually been a major disappointment to them for most of my life.”

It really hurt her to admit it, to actually put it in so many words, but she knew that it was best for her if she got right out in front of it.

So that no one else could throw it in her face.

And then the grin was back, a little forced, but there. “That's why they've sent me out here. They keep hoping I can find something to do with my life besides just taking up space.”

She reached for the canister of powdered sugar and measured out a cup, then drizzled it along the outline of the new black-and-white pudding she'd managed to create while talking to him.

“I'm the last one of six,” she continued, then paused as she pressed her lips together. “Nobody's ever come right out and confirmed it, but I've got a feeling that only five of us were planned.” The smile never reached her eyes. “I was the surprise they hadn't counted on.”

This was a far different Wendy than the one he'd gotten accustomed to.

Maybe that was why he heard himself saying, “Sometimes a surprise turns out to be the best part.”

The sigh that escaped her lips was larger this time. She quickly pulled back her lips in another grin, attempting to cover up the moment of weakness that allowed him to peek behind the mask of cheer she tried so hard to keep up.

“Maybe. But sometimes maybe not.” She pushed forward the single dessert she'd been working on almost unconsciously. It was done. When he made no move to taste it, Wendy raised her head and looked up at him. She was clearly waiting for his approval. “So, what do you think?” she coaxed.

“Looks pretty enough,” he allowed.

“It's got to do more than that and we both know it.” She moved the dessert a little closer to Marcos on the table.

They were still very much alone in the kitchen. No one had come in yet. The momentary silence pervaded all the corners of the wide, open room.

Somehow, as she'd lowered her guard and allowed him to look into the family dynamics she'd grown up with, she had let him see that beneath the banter and the sparkling, snapping brown eyes was a little girl who, no matter how much she said or did to deny the fact, still craved her parents' approval.

Still wanted to hear that they were finally proud of her.

In a way, Marcos could relate to that. In his estimation, anyone from a larger family could. It was hard carving out your own individuality while caught up in a group scene. Hard to be your own person and still be the daughter—or son—your parents hoped you would be.

He was fortunate enough to know that his parents were proud of the man he'd become. But if things had gone a different way…

BOOK: Fortune's Just Desserts
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