Surprise: Outback Proposal: Surprise: Outback Proposal

“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.