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  “I would stay out of her way if I were you,” Enrique advised. “She’s been a little dynamo since you ‘left on business.’”

  His tone caught Marcos’s attention. Did Enrique know, or just suspect, that he hadn’t gone anywhere? Or was he just being paranoid?

  Either way, he needed the man to absent himself for a few minutes. “Can you give us a minute, Enrique?” he requested.

  “I can give you five,” Enrique countered. “But after that, I need to get started myself. This rack of lamb is not going to prepare itself.”

  A minute later, the door leading to the main dining area closed again.

  He and Wendy were alone.

  Marcos had no idea where to begin. He’d never been at a loss for words before. But Wendy had changed a lot of things in his life. And now he realized that he wanted her to continue changing them. Wanted her to stay in his life.

  So he pushed forward, saying the first thing that came to his mind. He needed to apologize, to accept blame where blame was due.

  “You’re angry, I get that.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Wendy thought. But to admit that would be to give him more control over her than she was willing to relinquish.

  So instead she said, “What I am, Marcos, is busy. You might have left Enrique in charge when you went off on your little trip to L.A., but I’m the one who’s been picking up the slack, doing double duty in the kitchen and out there in the dining area. If what you have to say is really important, I’d appreciate you holding your tongue until after we close, when I can give you my full attention.”

  With that, Wendy moved past him to the refrigerator. She was going to need chilled heavy cream for this one.

  She’d just reached the stainless-steel door when Marcos spoke again, addressing the words to her back. “I love you.”

  Wendy froze. She couldn’t have heard him right. That had to be her ears playing tricks on her.

  Still, she couldn’t just continue walking away from him, doing what she was doing, without verifying what she’d just thought she’d heard.

  Very slowly, she turned around to look at him, telling her heart it had no business lodging itself in her throat.

  “What did you say?” The words came out in a hoarse whisper.

  He wanted to take a step closer to her, but he remained where he was. For now it was enough that she wasn’t walking away from him.

  “I said I love you.”

  Okay, what kind of a game was he playing? “Just like that?”

  He didn’t want her thinking that he’d said that to every woman who’d come into his life. Because he hadn’t. Not even once. She needed to understand that.

  “No, not just like that,” Marcos told her. “Those words don’t come easy to me. Hell, they don’t come at all.”

  Disbelief fought with a new surge of joy. She knew she should just contradict him. After all, so many men used that line to soften up the women who caught their momentary fancy. Used those words to get what they wanted from a woman.

  But the more she thought about it, the more she realized that Marcos was telling her the truth. Never once had he said or even murmured that term of endearment. Or any other term of endearment, for that matter.

  She was the one who had almost blurted it out that first night, but she’d managed to stop herself just in time.

  “So why are those words coming now?” she asked Marcos quietly.

  This wasn’t going to be easy, he thought. But then, something real, something lasting, normally wasn’t easy. Because “easy” didn’t count.

  “Because I wanted you to know what I was feeling,” he told her honestly. “Wanted you to know that I left because of that feeling.”

  He had just lost her. Wendy shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does to me.” Feeling on slightly safer ground, very slowly, he crossed to her, cutting the distance an inch at a time. Letting what was happening, what he was saying, sink in for her as well as himself. “I left because you scared the hell out of me. I’d never felt that for any woman before and it made me feel vulnerable. Exposed. Naked.”

  She smiled and her eyes lit up with the warmth that she was suddenly feeling. “I like that image. Naked,” she qualified, “not vulnerable or exposed.” She didn’t want him to feel either.

  Now Marcos could feel himself smiling, as well. “I can do naked.”

  “Not here you can’t,” she cautioned with a straight face. “I’d wind up being killed in the stampede.”

  He laughed. “I was thinking more along the lines of at home, in our bedroom.”

  The description hit her a moment after he’d said it. This time she knew she had to be hearing things.

  “Back up,” she instructed him. He raised a quizzical eyebrow, waiting for her to elaborate. “Our bedroom?” she questioned, emphasizing the first word.

  “That’s what I said,” he agreed. Did she have a problem with that? He was making plans for them, but what if they weren’t her plans? “Something wrong?”

  “Not wrong, exactly, but did I miss something?” she asked. “Just when did we go from ‘yours’ to ‘ours’?”

  He’d gotten ahead of himself, he realized.

  “We didn’t,” Marcos admitted, slipping his arms around her and drawing her closer to him. “Yet. But I’m hoping we will. Once you say yes.”

  Ordinarily she was the speedy one, but this was going way too fast for her to keep up. She had deliberately refrained from spinning the same kind of dreams about Marcos that she had once had about Channing. Refrained because she was afraid of having her hopes dashed and her heart broken.

  The heartbreak would be her first—she realized now that she had never really loved Channing. And, since she hadn’t loved him, then he hadn’t broken her heart when he’d suddenly announced he was leaving her.

  All he’d done was injure her pride. Pride had a way of recovering.

  She was trying to make sense of what Marcos was saying, to prevent suddenly finding that she had walked off a cliff like some cartoon character.

  “Are you asking me to move in with you?”

  Marcos inclined his head. Not wanting to be disappointed, he was still feeling her out. “In a way, yes.”

  Now she was confused. Maybe she was reading more into this than he’d meant. “In what way?” she wanted to know.

  Okay, here goes everything, he thought, taking a breath and plunging into the deep end of the pool. No more net.

  His eyes never left her face as he said, “Well, I was raised to believe that husbands and wives were supposed to live together.”

  She was still confused. “What does that have to do with— Wait!” she cried, suddenly stunned more than she thought possible. “Wait,” she repeated, pressing her hand against his chest as if to physically keep any more words from coming out until she succeeded in untangling the ones already spoken. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  But even as she began to ask, Wendy knew she had to be making a mistake. A mistake she desperately wanted to be true.

  “Are you asking me to marry you, Marcos?”

  He nodded his head. “Yes.”

  Wendy surprised him by swinging and cuffing him on the back of the head. “Ow!” he cried in protest.

  But before he could ask her what that had been for, she said, “Well, then, do it. Ask me already, don’t just go through the motions.”

  She wasn’t going to say no, he thought, relieved. He felt as if he could leap up and touch the moon. “Wendy Fortune, will you marry me?”

  She wanted to believe this was happening, she really did. But once burned, twice wary—wasn’t that the saying? “You’re serious?”

  What did it take to make her believe him? “Would you like me to write it in blood?” Even as he offered, Marcos began rolling up his right sleeve.

  “No!” she cried, grabbing his arm. “What I’d like is for you to kiss me.”

  “After you answer my q
uestion,” he told her.

  She looked stunned. Was there even a question what her answer would be? Hadn’t she already made herself clear about that?

  “Yes,” she cried. “Of course I’ll marry you. I’ve been in love with you practically from the first time you scowled at me. How could you even think I’d say no?”

  “Because you’re unpredictable.” God, but he loved this woman. And he would go on loving her until the last breath in his body was gone. “And I’m looking forward to spending the rest of my life being surprised,” he told her.

  “Whatever you say.” Wendy wound her arms around his neck and leaned her body into his, just as his mouth began to come down on hers.

  But not before Marcos responded, “I’ll hold you to that.”

  She didn’t care. “Just as long as you go on holding me,” she murmured.

  “Happy to oblige,” Marcos told her, sealing his mouth to hers.

  “Okay, your five minutes are up,” Enrique announced, walking back into the kitchen.

  Neither Wendy nor Marcos appeared to hear him or even realize that he had walked back into the room.

  He took one look, nodded and backed out. “Maybe I’ll give you five more minutes,” Enrique allowed with a wide grin.

  Don’t miss FORTUNE’S SECRET BABY, the next book in

  THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS:

  LOST…AND FOUND

  Coming to Silhouette Special Edition.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4268-8925-7

  FORTUNE’S JUST DESSERTS

  Copyright © 2011 by Harlequin Books S.A.

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  §§Forever Texas

  §Talk of the Neighborhood

  *Cavanaugh Justice

  ‡The Doctors Pulaski

  **The Sons of Lily Moreau

  ‡‡The Wilder Family

  †Kate’s Boys

  ††The Fortunes of Texas: Return to Red Rock

  ‡‡‡The Baby Chase

  †††Matchmaking Mamas

  °The Fortunes of Texas: Lost…and Found