SURPRISE:

OUTBACK

PROPOSAL

JENNIE ADAMS

A NATURAL

FATHER

SARAH MAYBERRY

www.millsandboon.co.uk

SURPRISE:

OUTBACK

PROPOSAL

JENNIE ADAMS

About the Author

Australian author JENNIE ADAMS grew up in a rambling farmhouse surrounded by books, and by people who loved reading them. She decided at a young age to be a writer, but it took many years and a lot of scenic detours before she sat down to pen her first romance novel. Jennie has worked in a number of careers and voluntary positions, including transcription typist and pre-school assistant. She is the proud mother of three fabulous adult children, and makes her home in a small inland city in New South Wales. In her leisure time Jennie loves long, rambling walks, discovering new music, starting knitting projects that she rarely finishes, chatting with friends, trips to the movies, and new dining experiences.

Jennie loves to hear from her readers, and can be contacted via her website at www.jennieadams.net

Dear Reader,

When I started the story of Jayne Cutter, a career-focused businesswoman in her mid-thirties, I knew Alex MacKay, the youngest of my three MacKay brothers, would be the perfect match for her.

Jayne is uncomfortable with the idea of commitment, and isn’t facing the real reasons for that. When she falls for Alex, a younger man, she worries about getting into a damaging relationship where there are age disparities, as her father has done so repeatedly since Jayne’s mother left the family many years ago.

Alex MacKay was dumped on the doorstep of a Sydney orphanage as a baby. He has two wonderful adopted brothers and they should be all the family he needs—so why can’t Alex get rid of the restlessness that plagues him, the feeling that there is something more out there somewhere?

Alex and Jayne join forces for business reasons. Life throws them into each other’s emotional journey, pulling away layer upon layer of self-protectiveness until their real emotions, needs, hopes and fears must be exposed if they are to have any hope of a future together.

Please join me as I take Jayne and Alex on a journey through some of Australia’s beautiful country, and on a personal journey that will help them both to recognise and accept all they are as individuals, and what they can mean to each other.

Love and hugs from Australia,

Jennie

Thanks to the team at Neighbours for inspiring this story, particularly you, Mr. Hannam, with your talk of delicious, barefoot Italian men making gnocchi.

As always, this book would not exist if

Chris was not by my side, mopping my fevered brow

and rubbing my shoulders and making me laugh.

And then there is Wanda, who always makes my

writing better, always knows best and always makes

me laugh even when I think I want to cry. You rock.

CHAPTER ONE

“I DON’T FEEL SO GOOD.” Lucy Basso pressed a hand to her stomach. “Maybe I should do this another time.”

Her sister Rosetta rolled her eyes and passed the menu over.

“Stop being such a wuss,” Rosie said, scanning the menu. “I’m going to have the pesto and goat’s cheese focaccia. What about you?”

“How about a nervous breakdown?” Lucy said.

Around them, the staff and patrons of their favorite inner-city Melbourne café went about their business, laughing, talking, drinking and eating as though none of them had a care in the world.

Lucy stared at them with envy.

I bet none of you are unexpectedly pregnant. I bet none of you are so stupidly, childishly scared of telling your Catholic Italian mother that you decided to do it in a public place so she couldn’t yell too loudly. I bet none of you are contemplating standing up right now and hightailing it out of here and moving to another country so you never have to look into her face and see how disappointed she is in you.

Her sister placed the menu flat on the table and gave Lucy one of her Lawyer Looks. Over the years, Rosie had perfected several, and Lucy kept a running tally of them. This was Lawyer Look Number Three—the my-client-is-an-idiot-but-I-will-endure-because-I’m-being-paid one.

“There’s no point worrying about something you can’t change. And it’s not like you’ve robbed a bank or become a Buddhist, God forbid. You made a baby with the man you love. So what if you’re not married to him? So what if he’s just left you for another woman? None of that is your fault. Well, not technically.”

Lucy narrowed her eyes, for a moment forgetting her nerves. “What’s that supposed to mean? Which bit is technically not my fault? Us not being married or his leaving me? And please do not tell me that you think us being married would have made a difference to this situation, because that’s so not true. I’d just be sitting here with a stupid ring on my finger and he’d still be having tantric sex with Belinda the Nimble.”

Rosie smiled. “There, see? All you needed was to get a little temper going, and you’re fine.”

She looked so pleased with herself, Lucy had to laugh.

“You are the worst. Please tell me you have a trick like that up your sleeve for when Ma starts crossing herself and beating her chest.”

“She hasn’t beaten her chest for years. Not since we told her it was making her boobs sag prematurely,” Rosie said. “And what’s with the nimble thing, by the way? You always call Belinda that. Personally, I prefer ‘that slut,’ but I’m hard like that.”

Lucy reached for the sugar bowl and dug the teaspoon deep into the tiny, shiny crystals.

“It’s one of the things Marcus said when he told me he was leaving. That he’d met someone, and she was beautiful and captivating and nimble.”

Even though two months had passed since that horrible, soul-destroying conversation, Lucy still felt the sting of humiliation and hurt. She’d been so secure in Marcus’s love. So certain that no matter what else was going wrong in her life—and the list seemed to be growing longer by the day—he’d always be there for her.

Ha.

“Nimble. What the hell does that mean? That she can put her ankles behind her ears? Like that’s going to see them through the hard times,” Rosie said.

Lucy shrugged miserably, then caught herself. She was wallowing again. The moment she knew she was pregnant, she’d made a deal with herself that self-pity was out the window. The days of self-indulgent cannoli pig-outs were over. She had another person to consider now. A person who was going to be totally dependent on her for everything for so many years it was almost impossible to comprehend.

“Hello, my darlings, so sorry I’m late.”

Lucy and Rosie started in their seats. When it came to sneaking up on people unawares, their mother was a world champion. It was a talent she’d mastered when they were children, and it never failed to unsettle them both.

“Why you had to choose this place when the parking is so bad and my cornetti are ten times better, I don’t know,” Sophia Basso said as she scanned the busy café, clearly unimpressed. “We could have had a nice quiet time at home with no interruptions.”

“Ma, you’ve got to stop sneaking up on us like that. You’re like the Ninja Mom,” Lucy said.

“I can’t help that I step lightly, Lucia,” Sophia said.

Small and slim, she was dressed, as always, with elegance in a silk shirt in bright aquamarine with a bow at the neck, a neat black skirt and black court shoes. Over it all she wore the black Italian wool coat her daughters had bought her for her birthday last year.

“I know it’s hard to park here, but Brunetti’s make the best hot chocolate in town,” Rosie said.

Sophia sniffed her disagreement as she folded her coat carefully over the back of her chair. Then she held her arms wide and Rosie stood and stepped dutifully into her embrace, followed by Lucy a few seconds later.

“My girls. So beautiful,” Sophia Basso said, her fond gaze cataloging their tall, slim bodies, dark shiny hair and deep-brown eyes with parental pride.

She sank into her chair and Lucy and Rosie followed suit.

Sometimes, Lucy reflected, meeting with her mother was like having an audience with the queen. Or maybe the pope was a better comparison, since there was usually so much guilt associated with the occasion, mixed in with the love and amusement and frustration.

“You’ve put on weight, Lucia,” Sophia said as she spread a napkin over her lap. “It’s good to see. You’re always much too skinny.”

Lucy tensed. She was twelve weeks pregnant and barely showing. If she lay on her back and squinted, she could just discern the concave bump that would soon grow into a big pregnancy belly. How could her mother possibly notice such a subtle change?

Lucy exchanged glances with her sister.

Just say it. Spit it out, get it over and done with.

Ever since she found out she was pregnant five weeks ago, she’d been coming up with excuses for why she couldn’t tell her mother. First, she’d decided to wait to make sure the pregnancy was viable before saying anything. Why upset her mother for no reason, after all? But the weeks had passed and she’d realized she was going to start to show soon. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to find out from someone else. She could just imagine Mrs. Cilauro from the markets or old Mr. Magnifico, one of her customers, asking her mother when Lucia was due.

The thought was enough to make her feel light-headed. For sure the chest-beating would make a reappearance. And she would never be able to forget causing her mother so much pain. Not that being single and pregnant wasn’t going to score highly on that front. Her mother had struggled to raise her and Rosie single-handedly after their father died in a work-site accident when they were both just toddlers. Sophia’s most fervent wish, often vocalized, was that her two daughters would never have to go through the uncertainty and fear of single motherhood.

Guess what, Ma? Surprise!

“I saw Peter DeSarro the other day. He asked me to say hello to you both,” Sophia said, sliding her reading glasses onto the end of her nose. “He asked particularly after you, Rosetta. You broke his heart when you married Andrew, you know.”

“Oh yeah, I was a real man killer,” Rosie said dryly. “All those guys panting on my doorstep all the time.”

Sophia glanced at her elder daughter over the top of her glasses.

“You were too busy with your studies to notice, but you could have had any boy in the neighborhood.”

Rosie laughed outright at that.

“Ma, I was the size of a small country in high school. The only boys interested in me were the ones who figured I was good for a free feed at lunchtime.”

“Rosetta! That is not true!” Sophia said.

Lucy squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Any second now, the conversation was going to degenerate into a typical Rosie-Sophia debate about history as they both saw it, and Lucy would lose her courage. She took a deep breath.

“Mom, I’m pregnant,” she blurted, her voice sounding overloud in her own ears.

Was it just her, or did the world stop spinning for a second?

Her mother’s eyes widened, then the color drained out of her face.

“Lucia!” she said. Her hand found Lucy’s on the tabletop and clutched it.

“It’s Marcus’s. We think maybe a condom broke. I’m due in late October. Give or take,” Lucy said in a rush.

Her mother’s face got even paler. Lucy winced. She hadn’t meant to share the part about the condom breaking. She’d never discussed contraception with her mother in her life, and she wasn’t about to start now.

“You’re three months already?” her mother asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Lucy nodded. She could see the stricken look in her mother’s eyes, knew exactly what she was thinking.

“I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure,” she said. It was flimsy, and all three of them knew it. “I didn’t want you to worry about me,” she said more honestly.

Her mother exhaled loudly and sat back in her chair. Her hand slid from Lucy’s.

“Now Marcus will have to step up and take care of his responsibilities,” Sophia said. “You are angry with him, Lucia, I know, but for the sake of the baby you will take him back. You will buy a nice house, and he will get a real job to look after you and the baby.”

Lucy blinked. Fatten her mother up, give her a sex change and stuff her mouth with cotton wool, and she’d be a dead spit for Marlon Brando in The Godfather right now, the way she was organizing Lucy’s life like she was one of the capos in her army.

“Ma, he’s with someone else now. He loves her,” Lucy said flatly.

Sophia shook her head. “It doesn’t matter anymore. He has responsibilities.”

“Since when did that ever make a difference with Marcus?” Rosie said under her breath.

Lucy’s chin came up as the familiar urge to defend Marcus gripped her. She frowned.

He’s not yours to defend anymore, remember?

“This child needs a father,” Sophia said, her fist thumping the table.

Lucy knew that her mother’s words were fueled by all the years of scraping by, but they weren’t what she needed to hear. She couldn’t undo what had happened. She was stuck. She was going to have to do the best she could with what she had. And she was going to have to do it alone.

Rosie’s hand found her knee under the table and gave it a squeeze.

“It’s not like I planned any of this,” Lucy said. “It was an accident. And I can’t make Marcus love me again. I have to get on with things. I’ve got the business, and Rosie and I have been talking—”

“The business! I hadn’t even thought about that! How on earth will you cope with it all on your own?” Her mother threw her hands in the air dramatically. “All those fruit deliveries, lifting all those boxes. And it’s just you, Lucia, no one else. This is a disaster.”

“Ma, you’re not helping. You think Lucy hasn’t gone over and over all of this stuff?” Rosie said.

“She hasn’t gone over it with me,” Sophia said, and Lucy could hear the hurt in her voice.

“I know this is the last thing you want for me,” Lucy said. “I know you’re disappointed. But it’s happening. I’m going to have a baby. You’re going to be a grandmother. Can’t we concentrate on the good bits and worry about the bad bits when they happen?”

Suddenly she really needed to hear her mother say something reassuring. Something about how everything would be all right, how if she had managed, so would Lucy.

Tears filled Sophia Basso’s eyes and she shook her head slowly.

“You have no idea,” she said. “Everything becomes a battle. Just getting to the grocery store, or keeping the house clean. Every time one of you was sick, I used to pace the floor at night, worrying how I was going to pay for the medicine and who was going to look after you when I had to go into work the next day. All the times the utilities were cut off, and the times I couldn’t find the money for school excursions. I would never wish that life on either of you.”

“It won’t be the same, because Lucy has us,” Rosie said staunchly. “What Lucy was about to tell you is that she’s moving into the granny flat at the back of our house. When the baby comes, Andrew and I can help out. Between all of us, we’ll get by.”

Lucy saw that her mother’s hands were trembling. She hated upsetting her. Disappointing her. Deep down inside, in the part of her that was still a child, Lucy had hoped that her mother would react differently. That she’d be more pleased than concerned, that she’d wrap Lucy in her arms and tell her that no matter what happened she would be there for her.

The nervous nausea that had dogged her before her mother’s arrival returned with a vengeance.

She was already scared of what the future might hold. Of having a baby growing inside her—a crazy enough concept all on its own—and then taking that tiny baby home and having to cope with whatever might happen next without Marcus standing beside her. She’d told herself over and over that hundreds of thousands of women across Australia—probably millions of women around the world—coped with having babies on their own. She would cope, too. She would. But she knew it would be the biggest challenge she’d ever faced in her life. And it would be a challenge that would never stop, ever. At seventy, she would still be worrying about her child and wanting the best for him or her. She only had to look at her mother’s grief-stricken face to know that was true.

She stood, clutching her handbag.

“I can’t do this,” she said. “I’m sorry, Ma. But I can’t do this right now.”

It was too much, taking on her mother’s trepidation and doubts as well as her own.

Her mother gaped and Rosie half rose from her chair as Lucy strode for the entrance, fighting her way through the line of people waiting for service at the front counter.

Outside, Lucy stuffed her hands into the pockets of her coat and sucked in big lungfuls of air. She stared up at the pale blue winter sky, willing herself to calm down.

It’s going to be okay. I’m twenty-eight years old. Last year, I started my own business. I can do this. I’m a strong person.

She found her car keys in her bag and started to walk, chin up, jaw set.

After all, it wasn’t as though she had a choice.

A month later

DOMINIC BIANCO RAN his hands through his hair and stifled a yawn. If anyone asked, he was going to blame the jetlag for his tiredness, but the truth was that he’d gotten out of the habit of early starts while he’d been visiting with family back in the old country. Six months of touring Italy, hopping from one relative’s house to the next had made him lazy and soft. Just what he’d needed at the time, but now he was back and there was work to do. As always.

Around him, the Victoria Market buzzed with activity. Situated in the central business district, the markets were the heart of the fresh produce trade in Melbourne, supplying suburban retailers, restaurants and cafés across the city. Bianco Brothers had occupied the same corner for nearly thirty years, ever since new immigrants Tony and Vinnie Bianco started selling fruits and vegetables as eager young men. Today, the family stall sprawled down half the aisle and turned over millions of dollars annually.

Dom checked his watch. Five o’clock. One hour until customers started arriving.

He wondered if he would see her today. Then he shook his head. What was he, sixteen again?

“Grow up, idiot,” he told himself as he turned toward the pallet of boxed tomatoes waiting to be unloaded.

She might not even come. For all he knew, she might not even be buying her produce from his father anymore.

He flexed his knees and kept his back straight as he hoisted the first box of tomatoes and lugged them over to the display table. His uncle Vinnie was fussing with the bananas, ensuring the oldest stock was at the front so they could offload it before the fruit became too ripe.

“Be careful with your back, Dom. You know what happened with your father,” he said as Dom dumped the first box and went back for another.

Dom smiled to himself. For as long as he could remember, his uncle had said the same thing every time he saw anyone carrying a box. Dom figured the hernia his father had had while in his twenties must have really messed with his uncle’s head.

By the time Dom had unloaded all the tomatoes, he’d worked up a sweat beneath the layers of sweatshirts and T-shirts he’d piled on that morning. He peeled off a couple of layers, enjoying the feeling of using his muscles again.

It was good to be back. He’d felt a little uneasy as the plane took off from Rome two days ago, but it was nice to be home. Even returning to the old house hadn’t been that big a deal.

Danielle’s stuff was gone. The only sign that she’d ever lived there was the pile of mail addressed to them both that his sister had left on the kitchen counter.

Mr. and Mrs. Bianco. He wondered if Dani was planning on reverting to her maiden name now that their divorce was final. It wasn’t something they’d ever discussed. He frowned as he thought about it. It would be strange to learn she was calling herself Dani Bianco. As though the only part of him that she still wanted was his name.

“Dom, how many boxes iceburg lettuce we got?” his father called from the other end of the stand.

Dom shook his head when he saw that his father had his clipboard out and pencil at the ready. For thirty years Tony Bianco had kept track of his stock and sales in the same way—on paper in his illegible handwriting. Any notation he made would be indecipherable to anyone else.

Dom did a quick tally of the boxes stacked beneath the trestle tables.

“We got two-dozen boxes, Pa,” he called. Enough to see them through the day.

Before he’d left for Italy, he’d spoken to his father about bringing the business into the twenty-first century. There were a bunch of user-friendly, highly efficient software systems available for running businesses like theirs. Knowing what stock they had on hand, what it was costing them, how much they were selling and who their best customers were at the touch of a button would be of huge benefit to Bianco Brothers. Currently, all that information was stored in his father’s head and consequently Tony’s business decisions were often based more on gut-feel and instinct than hard figures.

Predictably, his father had been resistant to the idea of change.

“I do it this way for thirty years,” he’d said, then he’d gestured toward the long rows of produce and the customers lining up to make their purchases. “We do okay.”

His father was being modest. They did more than okay. They did really, really well. But, in Dom’s opinion, they could do better. He’d backed off last time because he’d been too messed up over Dani to concentrate on the business, but now that he was back it was time to start pushing harder. He was going to be running this business someday, since none of his cousins were even remotely interested. He didn’t want to have to deal with boxes full of his father’s scrawlings when he tried to work out where they stood.

He dusted his hands down the front of his jeans and glanced over the stand, checking to see that all was as it should be. Everything looked good, and he turned back to the stack of pallets piled behind their displays. Might as well get rid of those before the rush.

By the time he’d tracked down one of the market’s forklift drivers and arranged for him to shift the pallets to the holding area, half an hour had passed. The bitter cold was starting to burn off as the sun made its presence felt, and Dom shed another layer as he made his way back to the stand.

He’d just finished pulling his sweatshirt over his head when he saw her.

She was wearing a long, cherry-red coat, the furry collar pulled up high around her face as she talked to his father. Her long, straight dark hair hung down her back, glossy in the overhead lights. She turned her head slightly and he watched her smile, noting the quick flash of her teeth, the way her eyes widened as she laughed at something his father said.

As always when he saw her, his gut tightened and his shoulders squared.

Lucy Basso.

Man, but she was gorgeous. Her sleek hair. The exotic sweep of her cheekbones. Her ready smile. The elegant strength of her body.

Gorgeous—and now he didn’t have to feel guilty about noticing.

He stepped closer, automatically smoothing a hand over his hair to make sure he didn’t have any goofy spikes sticking up from dragging off his sweatshirt. Just to be safe, he checked his fly as well. Never could tell when a clothing malfunction was loitering in the wings, waiting to bring a guy down.

All the while, he drank her in with his eyes. She looked even better than he remembered.

Lucy and her sister had grown up in Preston, just one suburb across from his own family’s stomping ground in Brunswick. They’d gone to different schools but the same church, and he’d been aware of her from the moment he’d first started noticing girls. There was something about the way she held herself—tall and proud, as though she knew exactly what she was worth.

He hadn’t been the only guy in the neighborhood who’d noticed. He’d never been put off by competition, but somehow the timing had never been right to make his move. Life kept intervening—other girlfriends for him, then, when he was free, she’d be with some other boy. Then they’d stopped running into each other altogether as they grew up and went out into the world. He’d only reconnected with her in the past year when she’d approached his father about the new door-to-door fresh produce delivery service she was starting up. After that, he’d seen her every day for six months before he bailed on his life for Italy. And he’d felt guilty every time he looked at her and felt the pull of desire. It wasn’t like he’d needed the added hassle as he and Dani battled through the ugly death throes of their marriage, and often he’d resented the attraction he’d felt.

Bad timing—again.

But things were different now. He was a single man. Divorced. Not exactly a shining badge of honor, not something he’d ever planned, but it was what it was.

And Lucy Basso was standing in front of him, looking amazing, daring him to reach out for something he’d always wanted.

She’d been one of the reasons for coming home. Not the main reason, not by a long shot. But he’d always wondered where she was concerned. What if.? And now there was nothing stopping him from finding out.

He was about to take the last step forward when a voice piped up in his head.

What are you doing, man? What happens if things get serious and she discovers you’re an empty promise?

He pushed the thought away. He refused to live half a life, no matter what had happened with Dani. Especially when Lucy was standing within reach.

“Lucy Basso. Good to see you,” he said.

She was already smiling as she turned to face him, her olive skin golden even under the harsh fluorescent lights.

“Dom! Hey, long time no see. I heard you’d taken off for Italy,” she said.

She had an amazing voice. Low and husky.

“Decided it was time to take a look around the old country, see what all the fuss was about,” he said. He tucked a hand into the front pocket of his jeans and rested his hip against the side of the stall.

“And?” She cocked an eyebrow at him, a small smile playing around her mouth.

“The Vatican is an okay little place. And they did some nice work at the Coliseum. But, to be honest, it would have been much more impressive if they’d finished building it.”

She laughed and pulled a face at him. “Bet you didn’t make that joke when you were in Rome.”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I didn’t.”

She laughed again.

He shot a glance toward his father, aware that Tony was watching their exchange with a big smile on his face.

Go away, he urged his father silently. There’s no way I’m asking her out with you standing there. I’ll never hear the end of it.

“I bet you’re glad to have him back, Mr. Bianco,” Lucy said.

“I save work especially for him,” Tony said, rubbing his apron-covered belly with his hands, his smile broadening. “To make up for long holiday.”

His father was looking at Lucy with admiring eyes and Dom realized he wasn’t going anywhere soon. He might be pushing sixty, but Tony knew a beautiful woman when he saw one and he wasn’t above a little harmless flirtation in his old age.

“Six months in Italy. I can only imagine,” Lucy said, closing her eyes for a beat. “Heaven. The way I’m going, I’ll get over there when I’m ready to retire,” she said.

“Make the time. It’s worth it,” Dom said. “Even if you only go for a few weeks.”

She shrugged, her hair spilling over her shoulder. “Nice idea, but it’s not going to happen,” she said ruefully.

Then she reached for her purse to pay for her order, and her coat fell open.

The words Dom had been about to say died in his throat as he registered the gentle bump that had been hidden by the long lines of her coat.

She was pregnant.

Lucy Basso was pregnant. Which meant she was married. Not free. Not available. And definitely not about to go out with him.

Bad timing again. The worst timing in the world, in fact.

Fifteen years of lust, blown away in a few seconds.

Damn.

CHAPTER TWO

SOMEHOW DOM MANAGED to make coherent conversation for the next few minutes, but his gaze kept dropping to the bump swelling Lucy’s sweater. After a while, she placed a hand there and blushed.

“Starting to show now, I guess,” she said.

“Uh, yeah. When are you due?” he asked.

“Just before Christmas.”

“Wow. I guess your husband must be over the moon,” he said, fishing unashamedly.

Who had she married? How come his mother hadn’t mentioned it in one of her letters to him? He’d gotten updates on every other birth, death or marriage in the neighborhood. Why would she miss Lucy Basso’s?

Lucy tugged her coat closed and slid a button home to keep it that way.

She shrugged casually, as if to say that her husband’s happiness was a given.

“You know, I’d better get going with all of this.” She gestured toward the trolley she’d filled with her supplies for the day.

Dom frowned as he noted several large boxes and bags of produce in her order.

“I’ll give you a hand,” he said, stepping forward.

“It’s okay. I’ve got a hydraulic tailgate in the back of the van,” she explained.

“Right.” He rocked back on his heels.

She was nothing to him, a neighborhood acquaintance and now a customer, but he hated the idea of her lugging groceries around all day when she was four months pregnant.

She laughed, obviously interpreting the look on his face.

“Italian men,” she said, shaking her head. “Honestly, I’m fine. I wouldn’t do anything to put my baby in danger.”

She curved her hand possessively over her bump, and he felt that tight feeling in his gut again.

Forget it, buddy. Forget her. It’s over.

“Okay. If you’re sure,” he said.

“I’m sure. I’ll see you tomorrow. You, too, Mr. Bianco.”

She smiled once more before pushing her trolley up the aisle.

He wasn’t aware that he was staring after her until his father came and stood next to him.

“Beautiful girl.”

Dom forced a casual shrug. Beautiful, married and pregnant. Not exactly a winning combination.

“Yeah, she’s nice,” he said.

He turned back toward the stand. Ridiculous to feel as though he’d just lost something valuable. For all he knew, she was a ball-breaking shrew with bad breath and a worse temper. There was nothing for him to mourn, no loss had occurred. They barely even knew each other.

He was so absorbed in trying to look busy that he almost missed his father’s next words.

“Such a shame. Her mother very worried, I hear.”

“Worried? Why?” Dom asked. Then his mind jumped to the obvious. “Is there something wrong with the baby?”

He knew what it was like to hope each month for good news, only to learn that once again all the wonders of modern medicine could not make up for the failures of nature. For four years he and Dani had tried in vain to have a baby. He could only imagine how wrenching it would be to have all the joy of finding out you were pregnant, only to learn there was something wrong with your child.

“Something wrong with the baby? How would I know?” his father asked, giving him a look.

Dom returned it in full measure.

“You’re the one who said her mother’s worried. What’s she worried about if it’s not the baby?”

Tony rolled his eyes, then held up his left hand, pointing to his own well-worn wedding ring.

“No husband. Lousy no-good left Lucy for other woman,” he said. He looked like he wanted to spit, the notion offended him so much. “Poor Lucy, she left with business and bambino all on her own.”

Dom stared at his father.

“She’s not married?” he asked, just in case his ears were deceiving him, feeding him what he wanted to hear.

“Didn’t I just say that?” his father asked. Muttering to himself in Italian, he strode off to serve the customer hovering nearby.

Dom stared blankly into space for a few long seconds.

Not married.

Single, in fact.

A smile curved his lips. He even turned on his heel, ready to race after her and ask her out.

He stopped before he’d taken a step.

She was pregnant.

Four months pregnant with another man’s child.

Not exactly your typical dating situation.

“Hey, Dom, those arms of yours painted on?” his uncle Vinnie called from the other end of the stall.

Dom blinked. A queue of customers had formed in front of him, waiting to be served.

Right. He was at work. There was stuff to do. He could think about Lucy Basso later.

It was a great theory, but he found it impossible to stop himself from thinking about her as the morning progressed. The flash of a red coat glimpsed briefly through the crowd. The sight of a woman pushing a baby stroller. A young couple walking hand in hand, both glowing with obvious contentment over her big, swollen belly. Everything seemed to remind him of her. She’d rocketed from being a vague incentive to come home to the most important thing on his agenda in the space of a few minutes.

Why was that? Because of the profound disappointment he’d felt when he’d thought she was married, lost to him for good?

Man, she’s pregnant, he reminded himself for the twentieth time that day.

But did that really matter? Really?

THAT NIGHT, Lucy sat with her laptop at her dining table and stared at the number at the bottom of her monthly spreadsheet. It wasn’t abysmal. It was almost respectable, considering her business, Market Fresh, had been in operation just over twelve months. But would it be enough to impress the man at the bank tomorrow?

Market Fresh had seemed like such a great idea when she came up with it two years ago. She’d been working as hostess in a busy suburban restaurant and listening to the chef’s constant complaints. He didn’t have time to get into the city markets every day to pick produce for himself, and he was perpetually disappointed in what he could source locally. Because she lived close to the city, Lucy had offered to stop by the markets on the way into work each day and fill his shopping list. The restaurant paid her for her time, and she selected the best produce at the best prices, going straight to the wholesaler rather than allowing a retailer to act as the middleman.

The chef had been so impressed with what she’d brought back and how much money she’d saved him, he’d bragged about it to his chef friends. Before long, Lucy had two, then three, then four shopping lists to fill each day. After a while, she realized that she’d accidentally discovered a niche in the market, and Market Fresh was born.

She did her homework for a whole year before jumping in. She took some small-business courses, and she went through the sums over and over with her sister. Finally, she leased the van and pitched herself to her former employer and his friends. After a few ups and downs, the business was now holding its own.

Except she’d reached a difficult stage in her company’s growth. She needed more clients, but she couldn’t afford to put on an extra driver to service them until she had more money coming in. Also, she needed to up her game to ensure she retained her existing clients. The answer to all her problems was obvious but expensive: the Internet. Ever since she’d found out she was pregnant, Lucy had been exploring the idea of taking Market Fresh online. With a Web site, she could deliver a real-time list of available produce to her clients each day and receive and collate their orders automatically. She already knew from discussions she’d had with several of her key clients that they were attracted to the convenience of the idea. She was confident that new clients would be equally drawn.

She just had to find the money to get online. Hence her appointment with the bank tomorrow.

Lucy rubbed her belly. She hated the thought of taking on more debt. She already made lease payments on the van, and while she was keeping her head above water, it would take the loss of only a few clients or a hike in fuel costs to put her in the red again. She didn’t want to risk that, not with the baby on the way.

But she also wanted to ensure her child’s future. Build something that would keep them both safe and warm for many years, without having to rely on the generosity of Rosie and Andrew, or handouts from her mother.

She closed her eyes at the very thought. Since the meeting a month ago when she’d told her mother she was pregnant, she’d been on the receiving end of all the fussing a pregnant woman could endure. Home-cooked meals appeared magically in her fridge, and every time her mother visited she brought something for the baby—stacks of disposable diapers, a baby bath, receiving blankets, tiny baby clothes. The study nook where she planned to put the baby’s cradle was already jammed to overflowing with her mother’s gifts.

It was incredibly generous, and it also took a huge burden off Lucy’s shoulders in terms of her baby budget. But every time her mother handed over an offering, Lucy remembered the nights her mother had stayed up late ironing business shirts for fifty cents apiece. And the weekends she’d spent sewing wedding and bridesmaid dresses, and confirmation dresses for the girls in the neighborhood. And all the times Lucy had watched her mother carefully count her change into the rainy-day jar. Her mother was retired now, living off a small pension and her savings, and Lucy knew that every gift to her came at her mother’s expense.

Her mother had sacrificed so much to give her and Rosie a good home, and now she was sacrificing again to support Lucy’s unplanned pregnancy.

Lucy shoved her chair back so sharply it screeched across the timber floor.

She had to convince the people at the bank that she was a good risk. Somehow she had to push the business into the next phase, and she had to look after herself and her baby without leaning on her mother. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t the kind of daughter Lucy wanted to be. She remembered how proud she’d felt when she and Rosie had presented their mother with the lush, expensive Italian wool coat. Sophia’s eyes had lit up then filled with tears when she’d understood that the beautiful garment was hers, a token of her daughters’ esteem and affection.

That was the kind of daughter Lucy wanted to be—the kind of daughter who gave instead of took, the kind of daughter who could give her mother the retirement she deserved after all her hard years of work.

Lucy ran a hand through her hair and let her breath hiss out between her teeth, wishing she could release her tension as easily. She had her business papers in order and her best suit was hanging at the ready—even though she had to use a couple of safety pins and leave the zipper down to get the skirt on. As long as she didn’t take her jacket off, no one would ever know.

“They’ll listen,” Lucy said out loud, trying to convince herself. “They’ll see my vision. They have to.”

“First sign of madness, you know,” Rosie said from behind her, and Lucy started.

“For Pete’s sake!” she said, one hand pressed to her chest. “Have you been taking lessons from Ma or something?”

“I knocked,” Rosie said, gesturing toward the door that connected the flat to the kitchen of the main house. “You were too busy talking to yourself to hear me.”

Lucy punched her sister on the arm. “That’s for scaring the living daylights out of me.”

Rosie rubbed her arm. “If you weren’t knocked up, you’d be in so much trouble right now,” she said. “But even a lawyer has to draw the line at taking on a pregnant woman.”

“Very noble of you.”

“I’m good like that. You coming in to watch Desperate Housewives with us?” she asked.

Lucy shot a look toward her laptop. She had her accounts in order, but her nerves demanded she go over them one last time, just to be sure.

“I think I’ve got too much work to do,” she said.

Rosie’s face immediately creased with concern. “Everything okay? You’re all good for the bank?”

“Sure. No problems,” Lucy said, careful to keep her voice casual.

“I can still cancel my afternoon appointment and come with you,” Rosie said.

While a part of Lucy wanted her support more than anything, she knew she had to do this alone. The whole point of getting the loan and growing the business was to become more independent and self-sufficient. Lucy didn’t want to be a charity case for the rest of her life. She owed her baby a better start than that.

“It’s all good. Really. I’ve already ironed my shirt and everything,” she said.

Rosie looked like she wanted to argue some more, so Lucy said the first thing that popped into her head.

“Hey, guess who’s back in town? Dominic Bianco. Saw him at the market this morning.”

As she’d hoped, her sister stopped frowning and got a salacious, speculative look in her eye. Rosie had always had a thing for Dom Bianco.

“How long was he away? And is he as hot as ever?” Rosie asked.

“Six months. And he looks the same as always,” Lucy said.

“Ow. Must have been some divorce that he needed six months time-out to recover,” Rosie said with a wince. “Nice to know he hasn’t lost his looks, though. Tell me, does he still wear those tight little jeans?”

“At this point I feel honor-bound to remind you that you’re a married woman.”

“I can still admire from a distance. And Dominic Bianco is worth admiring. Those cheekbones. And those black eyes of his. And that body.” Rosie fanned herself theatrically.

“Careful or I’m going to have to hose you down.”

“How can you look at that man and not have sweaty, carnal thoughts?”

“Um, because I’m four months pregnant,” Lucy said, “and about to become a walking whale?”

“Irrelevant.”

“Maybe he’s not my type.”

“You have twenty-twenty vision and a pulse, and you’re pregnant so it proves you’re heterosexual. He’s your type. Next,” Rosie said, wiggling her fingers in a gimme-more gesture.

Lucy frowned. She’d never seriously given the matter much thought before. In fact, she’d never really paid much attention to Dominic, truth be told. He’d been married until recently, and she’d been living with Marcus, and Rosie had always had a thing for him—he’d been out of bounds for a bunch of reasons, really. And Lucy wasn’t the kind of person who got off on lusting after the forbidden.

“I don’t know. Maybe I never let myself notice,” she said finally.

“Ha!” Rosie said triumphantly. “I knew it!”

“You want to share what you know? ‘Cause I’m still in the dark here.”

“You have the hots for him. Only someone who really has the hots for someone would completely block out the other person’s attractiveness like that. And The Bianco definitely qualifies as attractive. The man is a god. Sex on legs. H-O-T.”

“Okay, I got it.” Lucy shook her head at both her sister’s convoluted logic and her use of her teen code name for Dom. “Is this the kind of argument you try on in court, by the way? Do judges buy this crap?”

“It’s the only explanation,” Rosie said, crossing her arms smugly over her chest.

“Really? How about this—you’ve been hot for Dom for so many years that you’re trying to live vicariously through me?”

Rosie cocked her head. “Hmmm. That’s not bad.”

They both laughed.

“You’re a dirty birdy,” Lucy said, reaching out and tugging on her sister’s shoulder-length hair.

“Thank you. I do try.” Rosie turned toward the door. “Sure you’re not up for ice cream and Housewives?”

Lucy bit her lip, tempted now that she’d let go of some of her anxiety. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t already gone over and over her application. “What flavor have you got?”

“New York cheesecake and macadamia toffee,” Rosie said.

Lucy slung an arm around her sister’s neck. “Have I told you lately that I love you?” she said, planting a kiss on her sister’s cheek.

“You, my dear, are an ice-cream hussy,” Rosie said. Then she slung her arm around Lucy’s fast-disappearing waist and kissed her back. “Love you, too.”

LATER THAT NIGHT, Rosie finished smoothing moisturizer into her face as she sat in bed. She dropped her hands into her lap, her thoughts on her sister. Lucy was so strong and bright and determined, but Rosie couldn’t help worrying about her. It was part of the job description of elder sister, but it also came down to simple empathy. Her sister was in a tough situation and Rosie would feel for any woman faced with the same challenges. The difference was, Lucy was her sister, and Rosie had a lifetime of feeling responsible for her to add to her natural sympathy. It made her want to move mountains for her, even though she knew her sister was determined to stand on her own two feet.

If only Marcus wasn’t such a loser. It wasn’t the first time Rosie had had the thought, and it wouldn’t be the last. From the moment she’d met him she’d spotted him for what he was—a moocher, content to pursue his “art” while someone else footed the bill for all the everyday things like food, water, shelter. That someone else had been Lucy for so many years that Rosie had almost gone crazy biting her tongue. And now Marcus had shown his true colors and bailed on her sister when she needed him the most.

What an asshole. Lucy deserved so much better.

“What time are the Johnsons coming in tomorrow?” Andrew asked as he exited the ensuite bathroom.

He had stripped down to his boxers, and as usual the sight of his solid, muscular body filled Rosie with a warm sense of comfort and proprietorial pride. He worked hard to stay fit, and she made a point of admiring the results as often as possible because she knew that, like her, he’d been an overweight teen and the ghosts of past shame still lurked in the corners of his mind.

“Looking fine, Mr. James. Looking fine,” she said, giving him her best leer.

Andrew struck a few muscleman poses, each more ridiculous than the last. She was laughing her head off by the time he slid into bed beside her.

“Come here,” he said, sliding an arm around her waist.

She went willingly, curling close to his big, warm body, her head resting on his shoulder. She wondered for perhaps the millionth time how she’d gotten so lucky. She’d had the hots for Andrew James since she walked into her first common-law lecture at Melbourne University. He’d been sitting in the third row, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He’d glanced up from his notebook, and her brown eyes had met his blue, and the deal had been sealed then and there. He hadn’t even needed to smile, but when he did, she’d literally gone weak at the knees.

Rosie smiled as she remembered. She hadn’t believed in love at first sight until that moment. Life sure showed her.

“What are you smiling about?” Andrew asked.

“Just thinking about the first time I saw you,” she said.

“That old thing,” he said. “What is it with women, always mythologizing the past?”

She dug an elbow into his ribs. “Don’t ruin my sentimentality with your man-logic.”

Her thoughts inevitably clicked to the subject she’d been worrying at before Andrew came through from the bathroom.

“I wish Lucy could have met someone like you instead of Marcus the moocher,” she said.

“She’ll be fine. Stop worrying.”

“I can’t help it. It’s in my genes.”

“It’s not like she’s in this alone. She’s got Sophia and she’s got us. We’ll all pitch in.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I know. But it’s close, and it’s more than a lot of people have. Lucy’s a lot tougher than you give her credit for, you know.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, it’ll be good practice for us, being Uncle Andrew and Aunty Rosie. By the time our own kids come along, I’ll have mastered the whole diaper thing, no problems.”

She tensed.

“Wow. I’ll have to tell Lucy you’re volunteering for pooper-scooper duty,” she said.

She felt his chest rise as though he’d taken a breath to say something, but he didn’t speak. For a moment there was a whole world of not-talked-about stuff hanging in the air between them.

“Oh, I forgot. The Johnsons. They rebooked for eleven,” she said.

“Right. Yeah, I’d forgotten,” he said.

He stretched to the side and clicked off the bedside lamp.

“Good night,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

She kissed his chest one last time and slid back to her side of the bed. As much as she’d love to fall asleep on him, she knew she’d just wake up in half an hour with a numb arm.

The sheets were cool on her side and she stared up at the ceiling, reliving that telltale little hitch in their conversation.

You have to pay the piper sometime.

There was a conversation coming, looming on the horizon. She knew that. And it filled her with fear. Because she knew how much Andrew wanted children—and she had no desire at all to be a mother.

CHAPTER THREE

ROSIE’S WORDS RETURNED to haunt Lucy as she approached the Bianco Brothers stall at the market the next morning. Dom was at the front of the stand and she was about to call out a greeting when he stooped to lift a box of potatoes. He was wearing a pair of well-worn Levi’s, and the soft denim molded his butt and thighs as he lifted the heavy load. His biceps bulged, visible against the tight cotton of a long-sleeved T-shirt, and Lucy found herself swallowing unexpectedly.

Then Dom turned and saw her, and his dark eyes lit up and his straight, white teeth flashed as he smiled. His black hair was curly and unruly around his face, and he was tanned from his months in Italy.

Okay. Maybe Rosie was on to something when she said he was a god, Lucy admitted to herself as she stared at him. Maybe he is attractive.

“Lucy. Be with you in a minute,” he said, dropping the potatoes onto another customer’s trolley.

Then he grabbed the hem of his long-sleeved T-shirt and tugged it over his head. Lucy’s eyes widened as she scored an eyeful of tanned, hard belly as whatever he was wearing underneath clung to the top he was removing.

Okay. Attractive is the wrong word. Sexy. Very, very sexy.

Lucy dragged her eyes away, frowning.

She was pregnant. Having a baby. With child. She had no business ogling hot guys at the market. She cursed her sister mentally. This was all Rosie’s doing, planting stupid suggestions in her head. If she hadn’t said all that stuff about Dom last night, there was no way Lucy would be standing here right now feeling like a pervert.

“How can we help you today?” Dom said, closing the distance between them.

Lucy smoothed her hands down the sides of her skirt and shook her head slightly to clear it.

“All the usual staples. Plus I need eggplants and a whole lot of fresh herbs,” she said, consulting her list.

“May I?” Dom asked. He held out a hand for the list.

“Sure.”

She’d given her list to Mr. Bianco a hundred times. So why did it feel different giving it to Dom?

Damn you, Rosie, and your stupid teen crush.

“Sorry, did you say something?” Dom asked.

“No! At least, I don’t think I did,” Lucy said.

“The eggplants are down here. You want to come check them out?” he asked after a small silence.

“Sure.” She waited until his back was turned before she hit herself on the forehead with her open palm. Then, just in case her stupid brain hadn’t gotten the message, she slid a hand over the baby bump beneath her suit coat.

The smooth, taut curve of her belly grounded her in an instant. She was pregnant and scheduled for an important meeting with the bank. Her days of getting goofy over guys were over.

One hand on her tummy, she followed Dom.

“Nice and shiny,” Dom said as he showed her the eggplants. “Just the way we like them.”

“Definitely,” she said.

She kept her gaze focused on the dark purple vegetables in front of her.

“I’ll take three boxes,” she said.

“Not a problem.”

She stood back as Dom hefted a box from beneath the trestle table, lifting it easily onto her trolley. When all three boxes were stacked neatly, he turned to face her.

“What next?” There was a smile in his eyes and it quickly spread to his mouth. For the first time she noticed that he had a single dimple in his left cheek.

Rosie hadn’t mentioned that last night.

“Um, the herbs,” she said.

They were about to move to the other end of the stall when Mr. Bianco found them, a clipboard in hand and a frown on his face.

“Dom, you remember how much onions we order last week? Oh, hello, Lucy. You looking lovely today.”

For some reason, Dom’s father’s compliment made her blush. Which was stupid. Every morning he said something along the same lines to her. Why should today feel any different to any other time?

Because you were eyeing up his son like a side of beef five minutes ago? Because all of a sudden a part of you would like to really be looking lovely today?

She squashed the little voice with a mental boot heel. She really was going to have words with her sister for causing all this crazy, too-aware-of-Dom stuff.

“Hi, Mr. Bianco,” she said. “How are you today?”

“No complaints,” he said, patting his belly complacently. “But I interrupting. I wait.”

“It’s fine. No worries,” she said, gesturing with her hand that they should go ahead and have their conversation.

Dom shot her an appreciative look. “Two seconds,” he promised as he turned to talk with his father.

She moved away a few steps to inspect a pile of zucchini while they talked, but she was aware of lots of hand gesticulating and the frustrated tone of their conversation as father and son discussed something intently.

“Okay, sorry about that,” Dom said a few minutes later as he rejoined her.

He was frowning and the smile had gone from his eyes.

“If there’s a problem, I can wait for one of the other servers to be free,” she said.

Dom shook his head. “No problem. Just stubborn pig-headedness.”

“Right.”

He sighed, and his frown eased a little.

“You see that clipboard he’s holding? That’s the complete record of our stock on hand for the week,” he said.

Lucy’s gaze took in the many feet of frontage the Bianco Brothers occupied, all of it filled to overflowing with fresh produce.

“You’re kidding me.”

She carried a tiny fraction of the inventory the Biancos did, and she kept it all neatly organized via a simple computer program. She couldn’t even imagine how Mr. Bianco kept track of his stock with paper and pen.

“It gets worse. He’s the only one who can read his own handwriting. So whenever Vinnie or I or one of the others needs to check on something, we have to find him and get him to interpret for us.”

“Wow,” Lucy said.

“Yeah,” Dom said, a world of frustration in his voice.

“Driving you crazy?” she guessed.

“Just a little. There’s so much stuff we could be doing.Even having an up-to-date list of what’s available on a Web site would be a huge bonus. We get fifty phone calls a day from customers asking what we’ve got on hand. But Pa thinks that because his way has worked for thirty years, there’s no reason to change.”

He ran a hand through his hair, his gaze distant as he looked down the aisle. Then his eyes snapped back into focus and he gave her a rueful smile.

“Sorry. This isn’t getting your order filled, is it?” he said, pulling her list from his pocket again.

“It’s okay. I can barely have a conversation with my mother these days. I can’t even imagine working with her,” Lucy confessed.

Dom’s gaze instantly flicked to her stomach. She felt heat rise into her face. Yesterday when she’d seen him, she’d deliberately been vague when he’d asked about her husband. But she could tell by the awkward silence that had fallen that he knew the truth. There were precious few secrets in the close-knit Italian community they’d grown up in, and she should have known he’d soon find out she was single. Why she’d even bothered to cover yesterday she had no idea. At the time, it had seemed … messy to try to explain about Marcus and the fact that she was all alone.

At least be honest with yourself if you can’t be honest with anyone else, Lucia Basso.

The truth was that she’d been embarrassed. She stopped short of labeling the emotion she’d experienced shame. She wasn’t ashamed of her baby. She refused to be. But there was no getting around the fact that she was a good Catholic girl who was having a baby on her own because her boyfriend had abandoned her for another woman.

She opened her mouth to try to explain her omission, then swallowed her words without speaking them. Dom wouldn’t care. Her being pregnant or not or married or not meant nothing in his world. They had a business relationship, nothing more.

But still she felt uncomfortable. And the feeling seemed to be mutual. Dom shoved a hand into the back pocket of his jeans and shifted his feet.

“She’ll come around. Once she sees that little baby, she’ll be putty in your hands,” he said.

It was too complicated a situation to explain over a trestle table of zucchinis. Lucy smiled and waved a hand.

“It’s fine. We’re fine. It’s all good,” she said.

Dom hesitated a beat before nodding. “Okay, let’s get you those herbs.”

They were both careful to keep things surface-level for the rest of the transaction, and Lucy left the stall feeling oddly depressed. Which was as stupid as blushing over Mr. Bianco’s compliment. There was nothing in her relationship with Dominic Bianco that she had any reason to feel depressed about.

Still, she found herself going over their conversation again as she broke up her stock into separate orders in the back of the van prior to her first delivery of the day.

It was the fact that he’d confided about his father that had made her drop her guard, she decided. Dom had always been friendly, but in a professional way. Today was the first time that either of them had offered each other anything beyond polite small talk.

“Ow.” Lucy looked to where she’d caught her knee against the corner of one of her crates.

Great. She’d been so distracted thinking about Dominic that she’d put a run in her panty hose. Now she’d have to find the time to buy a new pair and wriggle into them before her bank appointment that afternoon.

A surge of nerves raced through her as she thought about the bank and the loan and what it meant for her future.

Get your head together, girl, because you will not get a second chance to get this right.

It was a scary thought—more than scary enough to sweep any other thoughts away. She didn’t have the luxury of being distracted right now.

Grimly determined, she finished breaking up her orders.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Dom stood in the refrigerated storeroom Bianco Brothers rented and broke the tape seal on the small box in front of him. Inside was a state-of-the-art handheld data unit, ideal for inputting stock information and orders for a wholesale company like his father’s.

Dom had picked up the unit yesterday after work, and today he was determined to start phase one of his plan to modernize the business. His father was going to be resistant to change, he knew that. But Dom would show him how much easier and more efficient life could be. In essence, that was what phase one was all about—massaging his father into letting progress do its thing.

It wasn’t like he was asking his father to take on the burden of learning the new software himself. Dom would do all that. At worst, Tony would have to learn how to pilot one of these handheld units, and the literature promised that they were as simple to use as a pocket calculator.

After studying the instructions for a few minutes, Dom powered up the unit and experimented with a couple of functions. Satisfied that he had the basics sorted, he turned to the stacks of crates towering around him. He’d catalog the stock in the storage space, then download the data into the new software program on his computer, then he’d show his father what they could do with the information. His father was stubborn, maybe even a little scared and intimidated by new technology, but Dom was confident that the old man would switch on to computerizing once he understood the benefits.

His thoughts drifted to Lucy as he began to punch in data. She’d looked good today, if a little pale. The bulge of her pregnancy was still in the burgeoning stage, cute and round rather than big and heavy. She’d always been beautiful, but being pregnant had added an extra dimension to her appeal.

He shook his head as he caught his own thoughts. He was not hitting on a pregnant woman. He’d already decided against it. She was vulnerable, for starters. Abandoned by her boyfriend, running a business on her own. She had too much at stake and inserting himself into the mix was only going to make things worse. Plus—pure selfishness here—he didn’t want to have any doubt about why Lucy was attracted to him. If that miracle ever happened. Not that he figured her for the type of woman who would seek out a man to provide security for herself and her unborn child, but he didn’t want there to be any confusion around the issue.

Once again they were the victims of bad timing. But maybe when she’d had the child, when her world was more settled. Maybe then he’d make his move, try his luck.

“Dom. We’re starting to close up. You ready in here?”

Dom turned to find his father standing in the doorway, his body a dark silhouette against the pale winter sunlight. There was a small pause as his father’s eyes adjusted to the difference in light, and Dom didn’t need to see his father’s face to know that he’d spotted the handheld unit.

“What you doing?” Tony asked. His voice was flat, absolutely expressionless.

Bad sign.

“I picked this up yesterday on the way home from work,” Dom said, facing his father. “I wanted to show you what it can do.”

“I told you, we not interested. Vinnie and me have discussed.”

“But, Pa, we can do so much more with this software in place. Project sales, pick up on trends. Cut down on spoilage.”

Dom hated that he sounded like a beseeching child trying to cajole a parent into taking him to an amusement park. This was a smart business decision and he should not have to cajole his father into anything. He was part of Bianco Brothers, too. It was time his father and uncle started respecting his opinion more.

“Take it back. I hope they give you money back,” Tony said dismissively.

“Why don’t you come over and take a look at what it can do? I’ve just entered this whole wall of stock in about five minutes,” Dom said. “It’s every bit as fast as writing it down on your clipboard, and everyone can have access to the data.”

“Don’t talk like I am little child,” Tony said. His voice was sharp. “I not idiot. Your uncle not idiot. We know how to run business. You bide time, be good boy, and one day you will run. Until then, you do things our way.”

Dom flinched from the tone and intent of his father’s words.

“Speaking of talking to people like children. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not a boy anymore,” he said. “Also, just so you know, Luigi Verde and his son have installed a computer system. And the Kerrimuirs have had one for two years. We’re going to be left behind if we don’t step up now and start offering our clients more services.”

He hadn’t meant for things to get this heated so quickly, but he also hadn’t expected his father to be so adamant on the issue. At the least, he’d expected his father to be curious, to explore the idea a little before rejecting it.

“It not matter. Our clients are loyal. They not forget us.”

Dom couldn’t help himself: he laughed.

“Pa, welcome to the twenty-first century. There’s no such thing as loyalty anymore. As soon as our customers know they can get a better deal or more value for money from one of our competitors, they’re gone. Don’t believe for a second that they come to you and Uncle Vinnie for any other reason except that it lines their pockets.”

His father waved a dismissive hand in the air and made a spitting noise.

“What you know? Your generation not understand. You not understand sticking to something, making work no matter what. You think if something hard, must be wrong. You walk away from commitments like mean nothing.”

Dom went very still.

“You’re talking about me and Dani, aren’t you?”

If his father wanted to throw accusations around, Dom was going to be damn sure they both knew what they were talking about.

Tony shifted his bulk, then tucked his thumbs into the waistband of his apron and just stared back at Dom. His stillness was his answer: yes, he thought his son had given up on his marriage rather than do the hard yards to fix it.

Hot anger stiffened Dom’s neck and squared his shoulders. He’d known that his father was unhappy about the divorce, but not this unhappy.

“I guess I should thank you for the honesty. At least we both know where we stand.”

“You think your mother and I not have hard times? You think I never look at other women and wonder if they wouldn’t be easier to love?”

Dom held his hand up. “Wait a minute. You think I cheated on Dani? Is that what you’re saying?” he asked. His voice had slipped up an octave.

His parents had known he and Dani were trying for children, that there had been problems, but Dom had never discussed the finer points of the issue with them. He’d never quite known how to explain to his father that thanks to the case of mumps he’d had when he was twenty years old, he was sterile and would never be able to father children of his own. He’d figured he’d get around to it, eventually.

And now his father was suggesting that the reason his marriage had fallen apart was because he’d strayed. So. Not only was Dom a man who couldn’t go the distance and honor his commitments, he was a cheat, too.

“Why else marriage break up? Dani was nice girl. She would never cheat,” his father said.

Dom rocked back on his heels. “This is unbelievable. How long have you felt this way, Pa? How long have you thought your son was a no-good sleaze?”

It was his father’s turn to rock back on his heels. “That not what I said. You never talk, you never say anything. You come to me and your mother and say marriage over. What we supposed to think?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Maybe the best of me? Maybe that there was a bloody good reason for my divorce and that I’d tell you once I could handle talking about it?”

“Talk now. Tell me now,” Tony demanded, thumping his chest.

“Why would I bother?” Dom said. “You have your own ideas about me, and you obviously like them a lot more than the truth.”

He grabbed his jacket and strode toward the doorway. He couldn’t remember ever being more furious with his father—and they’d had some rip-roaring fights over the years.

His father held his ground until the last possible moment, then stepped to one side.

Dom thrust the handheld unit at him as he passed.

“Do what you like with it. You won’t hear another word from me on the subject,” he said.

Then he marched back toward the stand. There was work to do, after all. He’d hate for his father to think his no-good son was adding shirking to his list of crimes.

“I CAN’T BELIEVE they said no.”

Lucy forced a small smile. “Well, they did. Apparently I’m a bad risk. No assets, no security.”

“But you’re making a profit. And you’ll make a bigger one once you get the site up and running and you attract more business,” Rosie said.

“Said all that. They didn’t care.”

“Crap,” Rosie said. Then she sat straighter. “We’ll try another bank. There’s got to be someone out there with a bit of vision.”

“Rosie, I have my van lease with them, do all my banking through them. If they don’t want to do business with me, no one else is going to step up to the plate.”

“You don’t know that. We have to try.” Rosie pulled her cell phone from her bag. “What’s the name of that new bank, the one advertising all the time?”

“I’ve already called the other three major banks, and two of the building societies,” Lucy said.

“And?”

“Like I said. No one wants to take a risk on me. And that’s before they’ve gotten an eyeful of this.” She indicated her belly.

Rosie stared at her, clearly at a loss as the facts sank in. “Crap,” she said again.

“Oh yeah,” Lucy said.

A waiter appeared at their table and Rosie waved him away.

“No, wait. I need chocolate,” Lucy said.

“Good idea,” Rosie said.

They both ordered hot chocolates and cake before returning to the crisis at hand.

“There has to be some way around this,” Rosie said.

Lucy pushed her hair behind her ear. She was tired, exhausted really, but she was hoping the chocolate would give her a much needed kick. Crawling into bed and sleeping for a day was not an option open to her right now.

“I’ve been doing some sums. If I save my ass off between now and when the baby is due, I can put aside enough to cover my bills for three months. Ma mentioned the other day that Cousin Mario is looking for work. I thought I could offer him the driver’s job for three months. He can take my wage, I’ll live off my savings. It might work.”

Rosie was staring at her. “What if you need more than three months? What if Mario won’t do it for what you pay yourself? Which, let’s face it, is a joke.”

Lucy felt the heat of threatening tears, and she clenched her jaw. “I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“No. It’s a make-do, Band-Aid plan, and it’s not going to cut it. You need that twenty thousand.”

“Really? Do you think?” Lucy said. She so didn’t need her sister pointing out the obvious to her, not when she was trying to be stoic.

“We’ll lend it to you,” Rosie suddenly announced, slapping her hands onto the table so hard she made the sugar dispenser jump.

“What?”

“Andrew and I have got some money put aside for renovations at the office. We can put them off and lend it to you instead,” Rosie said.

Lucy stared at her sister. “God, I love you, you idiot, but there’s no way I’m taking money from you and Andrew. Forget about it. I’ll talk to Cousin Mario tonight, get something else sorted. It’ll be fine.”

“Listen to me,” Rosie said, leaning across the table until she was right in Lucy’s face. “That money is just sitting there. We’ve been talking about hiring an architect for years and it hasn’t happened. We’ll draw it up like a loan, if that makes you feel any better. You can pay us interest, make regular payments. We’ll be just like the bank, only nicer.”

Lucy shook her head. “No. You’ve already taken me into your home. You won’t let me pay more than a token rent. I can’t keep taking your charity forever, Rosie. What kind of a mother am I going to be if I can’t stand on my own two feet?”

“Exactly. And the fastest way for you to get there is to get that Internet site happening and grow your business. I know it hurts your pride, but taking a loan from your family is the best thing for you and the baby. And that’s the truth.” Rosie sat back in her chair, her case made.

Lucy stared at her, her mind whirling.

It was so tempting. Rosie and Andrew had the money. Lucy could stick to her original game plan. She’d already spoken to a Web site design company in anticipation of today’s bank appointment. She could go full steam ahead with her schedule and be online within a month.

“Say yes. Be smart. For the baby,” Rosie said.

“It’s so much money,” Lucy said. “And you guys have got plans for it.”

“They’ll wait.”

“What about Andrew? It’s his money, too.”

“He loves you almost as much as I do, and he’ll understand.”

Lucy closed her eyes. So many big decisions lately. If only she had a crystal ball. She opened her eyes again.

“Yes. Okay. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but thank you. Thank you so much. Where would I be without you?”

“Good girl!”

“I won’t let you down,” Lucy said. “I promise I’ll pay back every cent.”

“I know you will. I know where you live, remember?”

They were both blinking rapidly. Lucy shook her head.

“I feel like I just got off a roller-coaster. Talk about up and down.”

“Welcome to parenthood, I guess,” Rosie said. “From what I hear, this is just the beginning.”

They both smiled, and Lucy reached across to grab her sister’s hand, overwhelmed with gratitude and relief.

“Hey there. Long time no see,” a familiar male voice said.

Lucy looked up to see Dominic Bianco standing next to the table. She felt her sister’s fingers convulse around hers in reaction and had to fight the urge to giggle. Truly, Rosie’s crush on The Bianco was a hoot.

“Dom. You’re not just finishing work for the day, are you?” Lucy asked, noting he was still wearing his Bianco Brothers shirt.

“Something like that. Hey, Rosetta, how are things?”

Rosie was smiling at Dom with slightly glazed eyes. “G-good. Things are good. I’m married now, you know,” she said.

Dom’s eyebrows rose a bit at her sister’s odd segue.

“Congratulations. When was the wedding?” he asked politely.

“Eight years ago,” Lucy said.

“Right,” Dom said. He looked confused, as well he might.

“Lucy tells me you’ve come back from six months in Italy,” Rosie said.

Now it was Lucy’s turn to be embarrassed. She didn’t want Dom to think she spent her spare time talking about him.

“Yeah. Had a few months in Rome, Florence and Venice, checked out the countryside.”

“Andrew and I were going to go for our honeymoon, but we wound up in Thailand instead,” Rosie said. “I guess you got a bit of sun while you were there, huh? You’re really tanned.”

Rosie’s eyes were on Dom’s forearms as she spoke, and she looked as though she was about to lunge across the table and sink her teeth into him. Lucy drew back her knee in case she had to kick her sister.

“It was summer over there. What can I say?” he said.

He turned his attention to Lucy. “Your client happy with the herbs for his wedding dinner?”

“As happy as he can let himself be. He’s French. He makes it a point to never smile too much.”

Dom laughed, and Lucy felt a surge of satisfaction that she’d amused him.

“We’ve got a few French chefs as clients. They like to keep us on our toes, that’s for sure.”

“Pretty amazing, Lucy winding up as one of your customers after all these years,” Rosie said. “It’s a small world.”

“Even smaller when you’re Italian,” Dom said. “Lucy is one of our favorite clients. My father and I fight over who gets to serve her.”

Even though she knew he was only joking, Lucy shifted in her chair.

“That’s rubbish. You almost always serve me,” she said, aware of her sister’s speculative glance bouncing back and forth between them.

“That’s because I cheat,” Dom said with an unrepentant grin.

The waiter arrived with their hot chocolates and cake, and Dom checked his watch.

“I’ll leave you to it—looks as though you’ve got your work cut out for you,” he said, indicating the generous slices of cake.

“See you tomorrow,” Lucy said.

Dom smiled and gave a small, casual wave before moving to the other side of the café, out of sight behind the central counter.

“Oh. My. God. Pass me the chocolate. I need emergency therapy,” Rosie said, slumping in her chair and fanning herself. “He’s better-looking than ever. What a hunk. I mean, wow.”

“Oh, look, there’s Andrew,” Lucy fibbed.

Rosie immediately sat up straight. Then she realized her sister was yanking her chain.

“Good one. Very funny.”

“Just a timely reminder.”

“Hey, I love Andrew with everything I’ve got, don’t you worry. I’m not going anywhere, with anyone. But I can still admire The Bianco. It’s a sentimental thing.”

“It’s sad. And, can I say, just a little embarrassing. You almost got drool on your good shirt.”

“Pshaw,” Rosie said, flicking her fingers in the air. “I was in total control the whole time.”

Lucy rolled her eyes and spoke to the ceiling. “Delusional. The woman’s delusional.”

“Anyway, he never even noticed me. He was too busy looking at you like he wanted to lick you all over.”

Lucy stared at her sister.

“He was not!”

“Uh-huh. He was, and he was flirting with you, too.”

“Get out of here. I look like I’ve got a beach ball stuck up my top. He was not flirting with me.”

“Lucy is one of our most favorite clients ever. My father and I wrestle to the death over who gets to serve her. What do you call that?”

“Being polite. Or being funny. Maybe both. But not flirting.”

Rosie gave her a get-real look. “Seriously? You seriously didn’t think he was flirting with you?”

“Of course not. Duh,” Lucy said, pointing to her belly.

“Man. We are going to have to do something about your dating skills, because if you’re not picking up signals that strong, you are never going to find another man,” Rosie said.

Lucy knew her sister was only joking, but her words still caught her on the raw.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Rosie asked as Lucy reached for her hot chocolate and concentrated on stirring it.

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”

“Bad at flirting and bad at lying. What am I going to do with you?”

Lucy stopped stirring her drink and met her sister’s eyes.

“I don’t want another man. I want Marcus. I want the father of my baby,” she said in a small voice.

Her sister stared at her, her face full of sympathy.

“Go on, say it. Tell me I’m pathetic for wanting someone who doesn’t want me,” Lucy said.

“I don’t think that’s pathetic. Marcus is the pathetic one. I just feel sad that I can’t give you what you want.”

Lucy sighed heavily and picked up a fork.

“I guess all this chocolate is still very necessary, after all,” she said.

“Chocolate is always necessary, whether it be for celebration or commiseration,” Rosie said.

Her sister waited until Lucy was swallowing a chunk of sinfully rich frosting before speaking again.

“And he was flirting with you. The Bianco was fully, blatantly, balls-out flirting with you.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“DID YOU EVEN consider discussing this with me first?” Andrew asked.

Rosie put down her knife and fork and gave her husband her full attention.

“I should have waited to talk to you, I know—”

“You think?”

Rosie blinked. Andrew didn’t often lose his temper but when he did it was usually well-earned. Like tonight. As soon as she’d given it some thought, she’d known she should have spoken to him before offering the money to Lucy. But she couldn’t undo what had already been done.

“I’m sorry. I got carried away. All I was thinking about was Lucy and how I could help. I hate that she’s in such a difficult position.”

“I hate it, too. But we’ve already given her a home. We can’t afford to give her our savings, too.”

“I hear what you’re saying, but that money’s just sitting in the bank, collecting interest. Why not use it to help Lucy? She’ll pay us interest like the bank. It’s a win-win situation.”

Andrew pushed his chair back from the table and stood.

“What about our plans to renovate the practice? What about getting a junior partner? All that just goes by the wayside, does it?”

“No, of course not. But it’s not like we were actually ready to do any of that. We haven’t even decided on an architect yet.”

“Because you keep putting it off.”

Rosie stood, hating being at a disadvantage. “I haven’t put anything off. Neither of us has pushed for the renovation. We’ve been too busy building the practice.”

Andrew looked at her, his face tense.

“Rosie, every time I suggest we start talking to architects you come up with a reason for why we can’t. First it was the Larson trial, then it was the Bigalows’ divorce. The time after that you strained your Achilles’ at the gym and you didn’t want me doing all the legwork on my own.” He stared at her, his jaw set. “If you’re not ready to have children, tell me and stop stringing me along.”

Rosie took a step backward. She hadn’t been expecting such a direct confrontation, not after the way they’d both been sidestepping the issue for so long. It had become a game of sorts, the way they skirted around the all-consuming subject of when to start a family.

“I’m not not ready,” Rosie said quickly, even though her stomach tensed with anxiety. “I’m not stringing you along. The time simply hasn’t been right before.”

Andrew sighed heavily. His blue eyes were intent as he looked into her face. “So when will the time be right if we give all our savings to Lucy? Five years? Ten years? You’re thirty-one. How old do you plan on being when our kids are in college? You’re the one who insisted we needed to add a junior partner to the firm before we even considered starting a family. And we both agreed we couldn’t do that until we’d renovated the practice to create an extra office.”

Again the tightness in her belly.

“Lucy probably only needs the money for a year or two,” she said. “As soon as she’s paid us back, we’ll renovate and start trying.”

“Rosie. Be serious. It will take longer than two years for Lucy to pay out a loan. She’ll be working part-time, she’ll have expenses for the baby. It could take her years to get on top of things. We’ve dealt with enough bankruptcies to know that most small businesses don’t survive the first few years.”

“Lucy is not going to go bankrupt!”

“I didn’t say she was. But she’s also not going to suddenly become Martha Stewart, either.”

He watched her, waiting for her to acknowledge that he was speaking the truth.

Finally she nodded. “Okay. You’re right. It probably won’t be two years.”

He returned to the dining table and sat. His meal was only half-eaten, but he pushed it away.

“So we need to make a decision. Do we invest in our dream or your sister’s?” he asked quietly.

She sat, too. Suddenly she felt very heavy.

“We could remortgage,” she suggested.

“We’re already leveraged because of buying the office. And once you have a baby and we put a partner on, our income will be reduced. That was the whole point of socking away extra money to pay for the renovations rather than taking on more debt. You know I would have been happy if we were pregnant years ago. But I know financial security is important to you, so we did things your way. Now you’re telling me you want to put things off again while we lend our renovation fund to your sister?”

Rosie picked up her fork and pushed it into the pile of cold peas on her plate.

“Do we put off having a family or not, Rosie?” he asked.

She raised her gaze to him. She knew exactly how much he wanted children. It was one of the first things they’d discussed when they got together all those years ago. He wanted at least three children, wanted to build a family that would make up for the lack in his own shitty childhood. Even though the thought had scared her even back then, she’d invested in his dream, built castles in the air with him. And for the past eight years she’d been burying her head in the sand, pretending this day would never come.

“I shouldn’t have offered the money to Lucy,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Andrew waited patiently for her to answer properly.

“We’re not putting off starting a family,” she confirmed. “I’ll tell Lucy that we can’t lend her the money after all.”

Andrew’s shoulders relaxed. She saw for the first time that there was a sheen of tears in his eyes. This meant so much to him.

“I’ll come with you. We’ll explain together,” he said.

Rosie shook her head.

“No. It was my mistake. I’ll do it.”

She stood. She hated to think of how disappointed Lucy would be. Her sister had been so excited this afternoon.

If only she hadn’t acted so impetuously. If only she’d stopped to think, waited to talk to Andrew tonight. But she hadn’t, and now she had to go break her sister’s heart to avoid breaking her husband’s. And then, somehow, she had to overcome this terror that struck her every time she thought about becoming a mother.

LUCY DRAGGED HERSELF to the market the next morning. Never had she wanted to stay in bed so badly, not even the morning after Marcus left.

She felt defeated, and it scared her that she couldn’t see a way out. She had no choice but to keep on working for as long as she could and hope that her cousin was prepared to drive for her at minimum wage and that she had a problem-free pregnancy before giving birth to the world’s most perfect baby.

She didn’t blame her sister for reneging on the loan. Rosie’s offer had been generous and impulsive, and Lucy totally understood why she and Andrew had decided they had to retract it once cooler heads had prevailed.

She just wished she had an Option C to fall back on now that Option B had gone up in flames.

“Lucy. Managed to brave the cold, I see,” Dom said as she stopped her trolley in front of the Bianco Brothers stall.

“Yeah,” she said. Today even Dom’s smile and charm couldn’t nudge her out of her funk. All she wanted to do was to go home, curl into a ball and sleep until the world had righted itself. She fished in her bag for her shopping list, growing increasingly frustrated when she couldn’t put her hand on it.

“Sorry. Give me a minute,” she said. She pulled hand-fuls of paper from her bag, angrily riffling through them for the one she needed. She was such a train wreck—couldn’t even get one little thing right today.

She could feel Dom watching her as she went back and forth through the papers. The list had to be in here somewhere. And if it wasn’t, it meant a trip home to collect it from her flat. She felt dangerously close to bursting into tears and she blinked rapidly.

“Here.”

She looked up to find a takeout coffee cup under her nose. She automatically shook her head.

“I can’t drink coffee.”

“It’s hot chocolate. And you look like you need it more than I do.”

As he spoke, the smell of warm chocolate hit her nose and her mouth watered.

“Come on, take it,” he said, waving the cup invitingly.

“Thanks.” She took the cup with a small smile. The first mouthful was hot and full of sugar. Just what she needed.

“Better?” Dom asked.

“Thanks.”

He smiled, the dimple in his cheek popping. She glanced down at her papers and realized her shopping list was right on top of the pile.

“Typical,” she muttered as she handed it over.

Dom scanned it quickly. “No problems here. Why don’t you kick back and I’ll get this sorted?”

He was already moving off. She knew she should object, at least pretend to inspect the produce on offer. But she trusted him. And today—just today—she needed a break. Tomorrow she would take on all comers again.

She rested her elbows on the push bar of her trolley, watching Dom sort through produce for her as she sipped his hot chocolate.

He was a nice man. Sexy, too. Although she still wasn’t sure that she was grateful to her sister for pointing that fact out. She wondered what had gone wrong with his marriage. Then she realized what she was doing and dragged her attention away from his broad shoulders and flat belly.

“Okay. I think that’s everything. I threw in some extra leeks for you. We overordered, and I’m sure you can find a customer to give them to,” Dom said when he’d finished loading her trolley.

Lucy looked at him steadily for a moment before speaking.

“Thank you,” she said. She hoped he understood that she meant for everything—the produce, the hot chocolate, giving her a helping hand when she was bottoming out on self-pity.

He shrugged. “It’s nothing. You look after yourself.”

She opened her mouth to say more, but he was already greeting another customer. She’d taken up far too much of his time. Her stomach warm, she headed to her van and a full day of deliveries.

DOM FOUND THE PAPERWORK sitting among the boxes of broccoli in front of the stall. Four pages, stapled together with a brochure for a Web site design company. They looked important, and he put them aside in case a customer came looking for them. It was only when they were packing up the stall for the day that he noticed the papers again.

The sheets obviously couldn’t have been too vital, since no one had claimed them. He was on the verge of throwing them out when something about the loopy handwriting on the front page jogged his memory. He flicked through, and Lucy Basso’s signature jumped out at him from the last page. He remembered her agitation this morning, the way she’d fumbled in her bag. She had to have lost this when she was looking for her shopping list.

Dom stared at her signature for a long beat. He could wait till tomorrow and hand them back to her.

Or he could take them to her.

He folded the papers in two, sliding them into his back pocket. Lucy Basso was not in the market for romance. He knew that, absolutely. And yet he was still going to take advantage of the opportunity these papers represented.

Later that night, he balanced a takeout pastry box in one hand while knocking on Lucy’s front door with the other.Music filtered out into the night, Coldplay’s “Everything’s Not Lost.” He glanced over his shoulder at the backyard of the house her flat was piggybacked onto. He’d had to decipher his father’s handwriting on the much-thumbed index cards that constituted the Bianco Brothers’ customer database to find her address. He eyed the flattened moving boxes stacked against the house and wondered how long she’d been living here.

Footsteps sounded on the other side of the door, and he blinked as it opened and light suddenly flooded him.

“Dom! Hi,” Lucy said. She sounded utterly thrown, and her hands moved to tighten the sash on her pale-blue dressing gown.

She was ready for bed. He gave himself a mental slap on the head. Of course she was ready for bed—she was pregnant, and like himself she had to be up at the crack of dawn.

“Hi. Sorry to barge in like this. You left some papers at the stall today and I thought they might be important,” he said.

“Oh. Wow. Thanks.”

She smiled uncertainly and pushed a strand of thick dark hair off her face. For the first time he noticed her eyes were puffy and a little red.

She’d been crying.

That quickly his self-consciousness went out the window. The thought of Lucy crying on her own made him want to hurt something.

He lifted the pastry box.

“And I brought dessert, in case you hadn’t had any yet.”

She frowned as though she didn’t quite understand what he was saying.

“Dessert?” she repeated.

“You know, the stuff everyone tells us is bad for us but that we keep eating anyway.”

She laughed. “Right. Sorry. I wasn’t expecting. Come in,” she said.

She stood aside and he stepped past her into the flat. He took in her small combined living and dining room, noting her rustic dining table and her earthy brown couch with beige and grass-green cushions. A number of black-and-white photographs graced the walls—the desert at sunset, an empty beach, an extreme close-up of a glistening spiderweb.

“You really didn’t have to do this,” Lucy said as she moved past him to the kitchenette that filled one corner of the small flat.

“It was no big deal. It’s on my way home,” he said.

Technically, it was kind of true. If he was taking the really, really scenic route.

Lucy placed two plates on the counter.

“Would you like coffee or something else with. I don’t even know what you brought,” she said. She sounded bemused again but he refused to feel bad about ambushing her.

“Tiramisu. Like a good Italian boy,” he said.

“I love tiramisu.”

“It’s in the blood. We’ve been trained from birth to love it.”

He handed over the pastry box and she peeled away the paper.

“Good lord, this thing is monstrous. There’s no way we can eat all of this,” she said.

He made a show of peering into the box.

“Speak for yourself.”

She smiled and gave him a challenging look as she divided the huge portion into two uneven servings, sliding the much larger piece onto a plate and pushing it toward him.

“I dare you.”

“You should know I never back out on a dare,” he warned her.

She handed him a fork, a smile playing about her lips. He followed her to the dining table where she sat at the end and he took the chair to her left. She’d barely sat before she was standing again.

“Coffee! I forgot your coffee. These bloody pregnancy hormones have turned my brain into Swiss cheese,” she said.

He grabbed her arm before she could move back to the kitchen.

“Relax. I don’t need coffee,” he said.

Her arm felt slim but strong beneath his hand. He forced himself to let her go, and she sank into the chair.

For a moment there was nothing but the sound of forks clinking against plates as they each took a mouthful.

“Before I forget,” Dom said.

He leaned forward to pull her papers from his back pocket, then slid them across the table.

Lucy’s face clouded as she looked at them.

“Thanks.”

“Why do I feel like I just handed you an execution order?”

Her gaze flicked to his face, then away again.

“It’s nothing. Less than nothing. I’m sorry you wasted your time on them.”

She pushed the papers away as though she never wanted to see them again.

He took a mouthful of his dessert and studied her. She looked tired. Maybe even a little beaten. The same vibe he’d sensed from her this morning.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.

She looked surprised. Then she shook her head. “You don’t want to hear all my problems,” she said after a long moment.

“Come on, you have to talk to me. You made me come all this way for papers that mean nothing, you’re eating my tiramisu. What’s in this for me?” he said.

She huffed out a laugh at his outrageous twisting of the truth. “When you put it that way.” She gave him a searching look then shrugged. “Just yawn or fall face-first into your food when you’ve heard enough.”

“Don’t worry. I have plenty of cunning strategies to escape boring conversations. I have three aunts and four uncles.”

Briefly she outlined her plans for Market Fresh—her goal to go online to grow the business, her plans to lease a second delivery van. She sat a little straighter as she talked and color came into her cheeks. She loved what she was doing, what she was building. And he was quietly impressed with her strategy. Apart from the all-too-apparent hiccup curving the front of her dressing gown, she sounded perfectly situated to take the next step.

“Absolutely,” she agreed with him. “Except for one tiny little thing—the bank doesn’t agree with me. They won’t lend me the money I need to get my Web site built. Without the site, I can’t generate more business, and without more business I can’t afford to put on a second van.”

Lucy looked down and seemed surprised that she’d polished off her dessert.

“So, basically, I’m screwed,” she said.

“Lucia Basso. If your mother could hear you now,” he said, mostly because he hated the despairing look that had crept into her eyes.

“It’s okay. She already thinks I’m screwed. It won’t be news to her.”

She met his gaze across the table, and they both burst into laughter. She laughed so hard she had to lean back in her chair and hold her stomach. By the time she’d gained a modicum of control, tears were rolling down her face.

“God, I needed that,” she said. Then her eyes went wide and she straightened in her chair as though someone had goosed her. “Oh!”

Both hands clutched her belly and she stared at Dom.

“What? Is something wrong?” he asked, already half out of his chair.

“The baby just moved!”

“Right.” He felt like an idiot for being on the verge of calling the paramedics.

“It’s the first time,” she explained excitedly. “All the pregnancy books say I should start feeling something about now, and I’ve been waiting and waiting but there’s been nothing—”

Her eyes went wide again and she smiled.

“There he goes again!” she said. “This is incredible! Dom, you have to feel this.”

Before he knew what she was doing she’d pushed aside her dressing gown to reveal the thin T-shirt she was wearing underneath, grabbed his hand and pressed his palm to her belly. He could feel the warmth of her skin through the fabric, the rise and fall of her body as she breathed.

“Can you feel it?” she asked, her voice hushed as though the baby might overhear her and stop performing.

He shook his head, acutely self-conscious. He didn’t know what to do with his fingers, whether to relax them into her body or keep his hand stiff. He could smell her perfume and feel the swell of her breast pressing against his forearm.

“Relax your hand more,” she instructed, frowning in concentration. He let his hand soften and she slid it over her belly, pressing it against herself with both hands.

Still he could feel nothing. She bit her lip.

“Maybe he’s tired,” she said.

Beneath his palm, he felt a faint surge, the smallest of disturbances beneath her skin.

He laughed and she grinned at him.

“Tell me you felt that?”

“I felt it.”

They smiled at each other like idiots, his hand curved against her belly. He knew the exact moment the wonder of the moment wore off and she became self-aware again. He pulled his hand free at the same time that she released her grip on him. They both sat back in their chairs, an awkwardness between them that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago.

“I should go,” he said. “You’ve got an early start tomorrow.”

“Yours is earlier,” she said.

They both stood.

“About the business … something will come up,” he said.

She shrugged. “Or it won’t. I’ll muddle through, I’m sure.”

Her hand found her stomach, holding it protectively. He followed her to the door.

“Thanks for the tiramisu,” she said with a small smile. “And for bringing my Web site stuff back.”

“Like I said, it was on the way home. And I would have eaten all the tiramisu on my own if I’d had the chance. You saved me from myself.”

He patted his stomach and she laughed, as he’d known she would. He hovered on the doorstep, unwilling to leave her just yet.

“What does it feel like?” he asked suddenly. “When the baby moves inside you?”

Her expression grew distant, and she cocked her head to one side. He had to resist the urge to reach out and touch her cheek to see if her skin really was as soft and smooth as it appeared.

“The books say it’s like butterflies fluttering,” she said after a moment. “Some women say it’s like gas.”

“Butterflies or gas. Right.”

She smiled. “The closest thing I can come up with is that it’s like when a goldfish brushes up against your hand. Only on the inside, if that makes sense.”

She was so beautiful, standing there with her uncertain eyes and her smiling mouth and her rounded stomach. He wanted to kiss her. He took a step backward.

“Good night, Lucy Basso,” he said.

“Good night, Dom.”

He told himself he was being smart and fair as he walked down the darkened driveway to the street. She was pregnant. He had no business chasing her.

And yet he felt like he was letting yet another opportunity slip through his fingers.

He flexed his hand as he remembered the flutter of movement he’d felt beneath his palm. A smile curved his mouth as he started his car. She’d been so delighted, so amazed. He was stupidly happy that he’d been there to share the moment with her.

He sobered as he registered where his thoughts were going. This wasn’t his baby. Lucy wasn’t his wife or partner. He wouldn’t be sharing any more moments of discovery with her—or with any other woman, for that matter.

There was a message from his father on his answering machine when he arrived home, asking him to call back. His father sounded sleepy when he answered the phone.

“You are late. Where have you been?”

Dom raised his eyebrows at his father’s nosiness. “Out. What’s up?”

“Out where? Out with girl?”

The joys of working with his family—they felt they owned his life.

“Pa.”

He heard his father sigh.

“I need you to make run to Lilydale tomorrow to collect more zucchini from Giametti’s. We short and I promise dozen boxes to Vue De Monde,” his father explained.

Dom rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn. What his father was suggesting would mean he had to get up an extra two hours early in order to have the stock on hand for their customers.

“You know, if you’d let me manage the stock on the computer, we wouldn’t have these kinds of problems,” he said lightly.

To his surprise, his father blew up, sending a string of expletives and curses down the phone.

“I sick of hearing about computers. You said you not talk about them again. I expect you to honor this even if you honor nothing else!”

Dom let his breath out between his teeth. He loved his father, but he wasn’t a little boy anymore, and he certainly didn’t have to take crap from him—especially when it was out-of-line, unearned crap.

“Am I part of Bianco Brothers or not?” he asked.

“You are my son. This is stupid question.”

“Answer the question, Pa.”

“You are part of business. You there every day. You can’t work out for yourself?”

“So I’m an employee. Like Steve and Michael and Anna?”

“You are my son.”

Dom didn’t say a word, waiting for his father to stop hedging. The silence stretched tensely for long seconds before his father spoke again.

“What you want from me? You my right-arm man,” his father said, messing up his Anglo phrasing the way he often did. “I not manage without you. There. Happy now?”

“If that’s true, if I’m your second in command, I want a say. I want a vote. And I want a bit of respect while you’re at it,” Dom said.

“Respect! You talk respect when you speak to your own father like he is idiot who doesn’t know anything about anything. You have place in my business, good job. You should be grateful, counting your lucky stars, instead of whining and complaining.”

Dom held the phone away from his ear and swore long and loud. Why did he bother? Hadn’t he banged his head against this brick wall just the other day? His father didn’t want to change. He was old. And the truth was, Bianco Brothers was so successful that his father wouldn’t notice the business they would lose over the coming years as their competitors got leaner and meaner and more efficient. By the time his father was ready to retire—or he dropped dead on the job, which was just as likely—Dom would be left with the task of picking up the pieces and trying to claw back market share.

If he chose to take it.

“Good night, Pa,” he said. Then he ended the call.

“My business,” his father had said. Not “our business.”

Dom leaned against the kitchen counter. He had some decisions to make. If his father wasn’t going to allow him to grow, to have a say. Well, maybe Dom needed to forge his own way.

LUCY FELT RIDICULOUSLY shy as she arrived at the market the following morning. Last night she’d pressed Dom’s hand against her belly, practically strong-arming him into sharing her baby’s first movements.

What had she been thinking? As if he cared what was going on in her belly. He was her wholesale supplier, for Pete’s sake. The guy who used to sit two pews forward of her own family in church when they were kids. He didn’t want to know what her baby felt like when it kicked. Every time she remembered how she’d pressed his hand against herself her toes curled in her shoes.

It wasn’t until after he’d gone that she’d looked in the mirror and seen how puffy and red her eyes were. There was no way he wouldn’t have guessed she’d been crying. She could only imagine what he thought of her: poor, lonely Lucy, desperate for company.

She was relieved when she approached the stall and saw Dom was busy with another customer and his father was free. Mr. Bianco could help her with her order, and she wouldn’t have to talk to Dom today. One small thing going her way for a change.

“Lucy. You look beautiful,” Mr. Bianco greeted her, his chubby arms spread wide.

Dom glanced up from where he was standing nearby. His dark gaze was unreadable as he noted her.

“I’ll look after Lucy, Pa,” he said.

“You are busy,” Mr. Bianco said dismissively.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Dom said, addressing Lucy and not his father.

There was a definite tension between the two men, and Lucy shrugged uncomfortably.

“Sure. Whatever suits you guys,” she said.

Mr. Bianco opened his mouth to protest, but Dom nailed him with a look that had Mr. Bianco muttering under his breath as he moved off to serve someone else.

Lucy fiddled with the strap on her bag, nervous all over again now that she was going to have to face Dom after all. Maybe she should apologize for last night, for thrusting her baby bump at him. Just get the awkwardness out of the way and move on.

“Okay. Sorry about that,” Dom said.

She looked up, words of apology on the tip of her tongue.

“Listen, have you got time for a coffee? Sorry, a hot chocolate? Twenty minutes?” Dom asked.

She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Why did this man keep taking her by surprise?

“Sure,” she finally managed to croak.

Dom called out to his father that he was taking a break. Lucy left her trolley next to the stall and followed him to a café in the group of permanent shops that ran along Victoria Street beside the market. The woman behind the counter greeted him with a smile.

“We’ll have two hot chocolates, Polly,” he called as they sat.

Lucy clasped her hands nervously in front of her as Dom gave her his full attention. She had no idea what he was going to say to her, and she found his intense gaze unnerving. Suddenly all she could think about was how hot and heavy his hand had felt against her body last night.

Talk about inappropriate.

“I’ve been giving some thought to what we talked about last night,” he said. “About your business and your plans for the future.”

Lucy nodded. Right. He was going to offer her some advice, probably suggest she talk to one of the second-tier banks like everyone else had. She schooled herself to be patient. He was being kind, after all. And she’d shown herself to be in need of kindness last night.

“How would you feel about taking on a business partner?” Dom asked.

She blinked. “Excuse me?” she asked stupidly.

He smiled. “Bit out of the blue, huh? I think you’ve got some great ideas for your business, and I think you’ve tapped into a strong niche market. Market Fresh has a lot of potential. There’s no reason why you couldn’t be operating across the city, even expanding into other states.”

He smoothed some papers out on the table between them.

“What I’m proposing is a fifty-fifty business partnership. I’ll put up the capital to expand the business and build the Web site. You’ll bring the existing business and your expertise to the table.” He paused to look at her, his eyebrows raised in question.

She was too busy grappling for a mental foothold to say anything. Dom wanted to buy into her business? Become her partner? Give her the money she needed to make her business a success?

“But you already have a business,” she said, blurting out the first thought that popped into her mind.

“No. My father has a business. I just work for him,” he said. There was a tightness around his mouth that hadn’t been there yesterday. A determination.

“You don’t know anything about my business. You haven’t seen the books. You have no idea what my turnover is,” she said, frowning.

“Of course I’d want my accountant to take a look at things before we signed anything. I guess what I’m asking at this stage is if this sounds like something you might consider?” Dom asked.

Their hot chocolates arrived, and Lucy bought some time by fiddling with her cup and saucer.

Did she want a business partner? Being her own boss had been part of the appeal of starting Market Fresh, but taking on a partner wouldn’t necessarily mean she wouldn’t still have her independence. It would mean compromises though, having to listen to other ideas and incorporate them into her plans.

She eyed Dom assessingly. She hardly knew him really. Didn’t know if he was hot tempered or easygoing, impulsive or rational. All she knew was what she’d observed of him over the year she’d been a customer at Bianco Brothers. He was good with customers. He was smart. He knew his product. He knew the industry.

“I’ve never thought about taking on a partner. Mostly because it’s never come up before.” She studied his face. She didn’t quite know how to ask her next question, so she decided to just go for it.

“Why me? Why Market Fresh?”

He took a sip of his hot chocolate before answering.

“I’m thirty-one and I’ve been working for my father all my adult life. I’ve always thought I’d take over when he retired. But I’m beginning to realize that that might be a long way off. And that maybe I don’t want to be Tony Bianco’s boy anymore. I have ideas, things I want to try, and he’s not open to them.”

“Okay. I get that part. But you could do anything.”

“Sure. I could start my own business. Go through all the pain of establishing myself, learn a new industry. Or I could find someone like you who has done all that hard stuff already.”

He eyed her over the rim of his cup.

“And you need help,” he added. “Which, speaking from a purely selfish point of view, means I’ve got a certain amount of leverage.”

Lucy dipped her head in acknowledgment of his brutal honesty. “Well. I asked,” she said ruefully.

“Yep.”

He sat back in his chair, his hands toying with his cup, spinning it on the saucer. His eyes never left hers as he waited for her to think things over some more.

What did she have to lose, after all? Her business, was the answer. And she was very afraid that she would do just that if she didn’t take him up on his offer. She needed capital to grow. That was the bottom line.

“Okay. I’m interested,” she said.

He smiled slowly. Suddenly she wished that her sister had never made her take a second look at him. Two weeks ago, he was a man, a human being like any other. Today, thanks to Rosie’s teen obsession, Lucy felt a distinct frisson race up her spine as she registered how very, very good-looking he was.

Again, so not appropriate. Especially given her situation and the offer he’d just put on the table.

“Great. Why don’t we meet on Sunday? That will give me time to get a preliminary offer drawn up. Rosetta will probably want to take a look at it, right?”

“Oh yeah. She’ll probably want to pat you down and ransack your house and run an FBI check on you,” Lucy said.

He smiled again. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

He leaned across the table and held out his hand. She hesitated a second before taking it. His hand was warm and firm.

“To new beginnings,” he said.

She nodded, unable to speak for some reason while he held her with his dark gaze.

“We’d better get you on the road,” he said.

She followed him to the stall, feeling more than a little dazed. After what had happened with her sister’s offer of a loan, she knew it would be stupid to get too excited. So many things could go wrong. Dom could change his mind after he’d looked at the books. His lawyer or accountant might have objections. Anything could go wrong.

And yet a slow excitement was bubbling through her blood. If this came off, her problems were solved. She’d have the capital she needed to grow. She’d have a fighting chance to secure her and her baby’s future.

She closed her eyes for a minute.

Please, please, please let this happen.

She wasn’t quite sure who she talking to, but she hoped like hell they were listening. It was about time she scored a break.

CHAPTER FIVE

“YOU’RE NOT WEARING that,” Rosie said as Lucy loaded paperwork into her tote bag.

After two weeks of negotiations and discussions, she and Dom had signed a partnership contract the previous day. Lucy still couldn’t quite believe that her money problems were over. Well, not over, but at least in a holding pattern for a while. She had a chance now to do what she needed to grow her business. Which was what today’s lunch meeting with Dom was all about—planning for the future.

“Lovely. Thank you for the confidence boost,” Lucy said.

“I didn’t mean you look bad. You just look … ordinary,” Rosie said.

Lucy looked down at the plain black pants, black turleneck and black boots she was wearing. The pants were new, the first of her true pregnancy wardrobe. The turtleneck was old and would probably never look the same again after being stretched over her belly.

“I am ordinary,” she said dismissively.

“Why don’t you wear that red stretchy shirt? That always looks great with black.”

“It makes my boobs look huge.”

“Exactly,” Rosie said with a grin.

Lucy rolled her eyes. “You are seriously turning into a pimp. You need help.” She was only half joking—her sister’s continual comments about Dom were starting to wear her down.

“He asked you to lunch,” Rosie said.

“It’s a work meeting, not a date.”

“He likes you, Lucy. He flirts with you every time we see him. Yesterday, when we signed the contract, he even ordered you food from the bar without asking because he knows you get hungry all the time. How many more signs do you want that this man has the hots for you?”

“None. I just signed a partnership contract with him. I don’t want him to have the hots for me.” Lucy shook her head. “Why are we even having this conversation? He does not have the hots for me. He’s a nice guy. He’s considerate. He’s like that with all his customers. He’s like that with you.”

“He doesn’t look at me the way he looks at you,” Rosie said.

“And how does he look at me?” Lucy asked, hands on hips.

“Like he wants to take a bite out of you,” Rosie said. “Like a starving man looks at a feast.”

Lucy hooted with laughter.

“You are so deluded. Starving man, my ass. He’s newly divorced, he’s just spent six months traveling through Italy. He’s probably got women lined up around the block to throw themselves at him. There’s no way he’s interested in a five months pregnant woman. No. Way.”

“You’re nineteen weeks,” Rosie said a little sulkily. “Not quite five months.”

“Which means I’m only cow-like instead of elephant-like. You need to stop trying to live out your teen obsession through me.”

“It wasn’t an obsession,” Rosie said.

Lucy gave her a look.

“Okay, it was slightly obsessive. But that’s not why I want you to wear the red shirt. He’s a nice guy. I think he’d make a great father.”

Lucy stilled, the smile fading from her lips.

“I’m not looking for a father for my baby,” she said.

“Marcus isn’t going to help you carry the load, Lucy,” Rosie said.

Lucy eyed her sister steadily. She needed Rosie to understand that she couldn’t buy into the romantic fantasy she was spinning. She didn’t have the luxury to indulge those kinds of dreams anymore.

“I know you’re trying to help, but please can we stop it with the whole Dom-likes-me thing? He’s my business partner. All I want from him is hard graft and a cash injection. I don’t want him to like me. And I don’t want to like him. We’re business partners, and I need one of those much more than I need a man in my life. Even if that was an option that was on the table. Which it isn’t.”

For a moment Rosie looked as though she was going to object, then she sighed and shrugged a shoulder.

“Fine. Bury your head in the sand.”

Lucy palmed her car keys. “Thank you. You know how much I like it there.”

Dom had given her directions to his house in Carlton and she found it easily. A double-fronted terrace house, it was a pale cream color, the trim painted heritage green and red. Someone had placed terra-cotta planter boxes along the front edge of the front porch, but they were full of dirt and nothing else. She wondered if Dom’s ex-wife had been the gardener and felt sad for him. No one got married expecting it to end in divorce.

Warm air rushed out at her when he opened the door to her knock.

“Lucy. Come on in. I’m just finishing up the gnocchi dough,” he said.

She managed a greeting of some description, but she had no idea what she’d actually said. She was too busy reeling from the impact of Dominic Bianco in bare feet, well-worn jeans and a tight, dark gray T-shirt. His hair was ruffled and casual, his eyes warm.

He was so earthily, rawly sexy it took her breath away.

She barely noticed the polished hardwood floor beneath her feet or the ornate plasterwork on the cornices and ceiling as she followed him down the hall.

She gave herself a mental slap. She had no business being so aware of Dom as a man. It was ridiculous and counter-productive and she needed to get a serious grip. Right now. Dom was her business partner. End of story.

“I’m making my mama’s secret gnocchi,” Dom said over his shoulder. “If you notice any of the ingredients, you have to take the information to your grave with you.”

They entered a wide, spacious living area with a vaulted ceiling. Immediately in front of them was a sleek, dark stained table. To the left was a modern white kitchen with dark marble countertops. Beyond she could see comfortable-looking brown leather couches and French windows that opened onto a deck.

“I promise not to look,” Lucy said.

She noted the two place settings at the table. Everything looked perfect, from the red roses in a sleek vase to the snowy white linen napkins folded neatly across each side plate. She frowned.

Dom moved behind the island counter and reached for a handful of flour. She watched as he dusted the counter prior to rolling out the dough.

She smiled uncertainly when he glanced up at her.

“You want to take your coat off? I should have asked before I got flour on my hands again. Just throw it on the couch.”

She took advantage of his suggestion to try to pull herself together, but nothing could stop the way her brain was suddenly whirring away.

He’d gone to a lot of trouble for a simple business meeting. The flowers, the beautifully set table. Unless she was hugely mistaken, he’d even ironed the napkins. And he was making pasta by hand for her.

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.

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