Fortune's Valentine Bride

The next moment, Wendy lapsed into silence as she paused, thinking the situation over—and seeing the potential that had been staring them in the face all along. It might just work.

“You know …” Her voice trailed off as an idea began to take serious shape. And then Wendy smiled. Broadly.

Katie was on her guard instantly. “Uh-oh, I know that look.” It was Wendy’s crafty expression.

The woman was up to something.

Katie held her breath as she asked, “What are you thinking?”

Wendy beamed at her. “Just that my beloved big brother might have just given us the perfect opportunity to make him see just how desirable a woman you really are.”

“Right!” Katie laughed, shrugging off the compliment. But Wendy was obviously not kidding, she realized. “All right, I’m listening. Just how does my helping Blake put together his campaign strategy to bag the elusive Brittany-bird make him suddenly see how supposedly desirable I am?”

“Not supposedly,” Wendy insisted. “You have to start thinking positively, Katie, or this is never going to work.”

“I can think downright unshakably, that still doesn’t mean that I—”

Wendy dropped her bombshell. “He’ll have to practice on you.”

Katie blinked. Had she missed something here? “Excuse me?”

“All these moves he’s going to make on Brittany, he has to practice on someone, polish them up on someone.” To her it was a given. Rehearsals always helped attain the desired results. Wendy smiled at her. “That ‘someone’ is going to be you. Dinner—you, dancing—you, moonlight walks—you, seductive techniques—”

This time, it was Katie who halted the conversation, holding up not just a finger but a whole hand.

“I think I get it,” she said, fighting a very real blush that was swiftly advancing up along her neck and splaying across her cheeks with the force of the evening high tide.

Wendy saw the blush and smiled with satisfaction. “Yes, I can see that you do. By the time we’re finished—by the time you’re finished,” she amended with a smile, “my brother is going to forget that Brittany Everett ever existed.”

Katie had her doubts about that, but she had to admit that she really liked the way it sounded. For now, she allowed herself to savor what to her was tantamount to an impossible dream. She figured it was the least she could do after Wendy had gone to all that trouble to come up with said plan.

Even if it wasn’t going to work.

Chapter Four

“You know, if you were really concerned about me, you’d find a way to get me the hell out of here.”

Javier Mendoza struggled to keep his voice from rising as he complained to his younger brother, Marcos. He’d finally been moved out of ICU into a single care unit, but the hospital walls were only so thick and his deep voice was the kind that carried.

There was a frustrated frown on his handsome face and he looked like a man who was just about to lose the last shred of what was left of his overtaxed patience.

Marcos sympathized with his brother. He knew how he’d feel in Javier’s place, but there was just no way that his brother was leaving here, not yet.

“I am concerned about you, which is why I’m not going to help smuggle you out of here,” Marcos informed him. There was an irrefutable note of finality in his voice that most people—except for his wife, Wendy—knew not to argue with.

But Javier wasn’t listening to the sound of his brother’s voice. He was too focused on his own exasperation. One minute, he was a virile, strong man in his very prime, the next, when he opened his eyes again, he’d lost a month of his life to a coma and had to train his body to do the very basic of life’s functions. Things that most people took for granted—that he had taken for granted—were now challenges to him. His legs refused to obey him and that caused him no end of frustration—as well as scaring the hell out of him. The fear was something he wasn’t about to admit to a living soul, not even Marcos.

Although he had a sneaking suspicion when he looked into Marcos’s eyes that his brother already knew that. However, Marcos had wisely refrained from saying anything about it.

Marcos put a comforting hand on his brother’s shoulder, which, he noted, was utterly stiff with tension.

“Look, Javier, you have to give these doctors a chance,” Marcos urged. “They know what they’re doing and they’re a great deal more familiar with these kinds of … problems,” he finally said, for lack of a better word, “than you are.”

Javier’s dark eyes narrowed angrily. “It’s my body and nobody’s more familiar with it, or how it’s supposed to work, than I am,” he insisted hotly. “Don’t get all hypocritical on me,” he warned. “They wanted to keep Wendy here and she put her foot down, so they gave in and you took her home—just like she wanted,” his brother pointed out.

Marcos shook his head. “No, that was different,” he countered.

“How’s that different?” Javier demanded. He realized that his voice had risen again. Biting back his temper, he made a concentrated effort to lower his tone. “Because Wendy’s your wife and I’m not?”

Marcos laughed shortly. “No offense, Javier, but you’d make a pretty ugly wife,” he cracked, hoping to get some kind of smile out of his brother. He failed. “And it’s different because we don’t know how long Wendy would have to stay here before the baby is strong enough to be born. Wendy’s four walls might have changed, but she still has to stay in bed day and night. She still can’t get up the way she wants to.” Javier had averted his face, but Marcos pressed on. “Now that the doctors have brought you out of that medically induced coma, they have a timetable for you.”

“I’m not interested in their timetable,” Javier snapped.

In his place, Marcos knew he’d feel the same way. But he wasn’t in his brother’s place and it was up to him to calm Javier down and make him be reasonable.

“Well, you should be,” he said firmly. “Trust me, those doctors don’t want to see your ugly face here any more than you want to be here. But this is the place where they can help you, where they can work with you.”

“There’s nothing to work with,” Javier retorted coldly, staring down at the two stiff limbs beneath the blanket. The limbs that refused to move. “Look, if I’ve got to stay here, okay, I’ll stay here. Doesn’t really matter anyway. But I want you to tell everyone to stop coming.”

“Why?” Marcos asked, stunned at this new curve his brother had just thrown him.

“Because I don’t want them to see me like this, that’s why,” he said through gritted teeth.

Ordinarily, because Javier was his big brother and Marcos had grown up looking up to Javier, Marcos would have backed away and not pressed the subject. But this situation didn’t come anywhere near close to fitting the description of being “ordinary.”

“Like what?” he wanted to know.

“Like half a man,” Javier shouted. “There, I said it. You happy now? Like half a man.”

“This is just temporary,” Marcos insisted.

“How do you know that?” Javier challenged. “You saw some written guarantee? How do you know that?” he shouted again.

“Because I do, that’s why,” Marcos shouted back, then caught himself and lowered his voice. “Once the swelling on your spinal cord goes down, you’ll fully regain the use of your legs—and even if you didn’t,” he insisted, “who you are isn’t trapped in any of your limbs. You’re not you because of your legs or your arms or any other damn body part. You’re Javier Mendoza because of what’s inside of you. What’s here,” he said, jabbing his forefinger into the middle of Javier’s chest. “You understand me? So stop your complaining and start focusing all that energy on getting better.”

“You’ve got some mouth on you, you know that?” Javier retorted, but his voice was a little softer now. “Marriage do that to you?” It really wasn’t a serious question, seeing as how, even though Wendy was expecting their first child at apparently any moment, Marcos and she had only been married for a little more than a month. A month that he had completely missed, Javier thought in rueful frustration.

“No, the tornado did,” Marcos replied quite seriously. “Now, I mean it. Stop complaining and just be grateful that you’re still alive and that you have the opportunity to mend. Not everyone was as lucky as you,” he concluded more quietly, grimly recalling that several people he knew had lost their lives in the disaster.

Feeling just the slightest prick of guilt, Javier shrugged defensively as he stared out the window. “Easy for you to say.”

“Easy?” Marcos echoed in disbelief. It felt as if he hadn’t slept more than five hours in the past five weeks. “Ever since that tornado hit and they dug you out, I’ve been trying to find a way to split myself in two, being there for Wendy and here for you,” he elaborated.

“I was in a coma,” Javier pointed out. “There was no need—”

“There was a need,” Marcos interrupted with conviction. “We all took turns reading to you. And there was music playing constantly. Wendy thought it might help. Just because you were in a coma didn’t mean you couldn’t hear,” Marcos insisted. “And besides running back and forth between home and San Antonio, I still had to put in time at the restaurant,” he reminded his brother, referring to Red, the restaurant that he managed for his aunt and uncle.