Fortune's Valentine Bride

by Marie Ferrarella

  “That’s entirely up to Katie,” Wendy told him, raising her hands as if she had nothing to do with that sort of decision.

  It took Katie a second to realize that the ball was now in her court and Blake was waiting for an answer from her. “Fine,” she told him with feeling, coming to. “Two hours will be fine. Sooner if you’d like,” she added as an afterthought.

  “You heard the lady,” Wendy said, taking charge again. For emphasis, she waved her brother away from the bed and toward the doorway. She was dying for some alone time with her friend. There were things she just had to find out. “Come back in two hours.”

  Blake almost reminded her that Katie had said “or sooner,” then changed his mind. He wasn’t about to argue with Wendy, not about anything if he could help it. Not in her present condition. Heaven only knew what might send her into premature labor again.

  “Two hours it is,” he agreed. And with that, he left the room.

  “Wendy, I—” Katie began, only to be abruptly stopped by the mother-to-be before she had a chance to say anything more.

  Wendy was holding her finger up to halt any further flow of words. At the same time she cocked her head, listening to something other than the sound of Katie’s voice.

  Her eyes shifted back to Katie. “Is he gone yet?” she wanted to know.

  “Blake?”

  Wendy seemed to indicate that she wanted her question answered before another word was said between them. Katie stepped into the hallway to make sure that the man who could raise her body temperature with just a single look in her direction was nowhere in the immediate vicinity.

  “Yes,” she said, reporting back, “he’s gone.” Curious, she crossed back to Wendy’s bed and asked her, “Why?”

  Because she planned to talk about her big brother and she didn’t want him knowing that, Wendy thought. Out loud, though, she merely said, “I just don’t want him eavesdropping on girl talk, that’s all.” She made a request. “You’re going to be doing me a huge favor, making sure Blake keeps busy while he’s here. Otherwise, he’ll find some excuse to be over here night and day, watching me as if he expects me to suddenly explode or something,” she complained. Being pregnant made her feel hugely vulnerable, not to mention grumpy. She just couldn’t wait to be mistress of her own fate again.

  “Sure thing,” Katie readily agreed. That was what she’d initially thought was going to happen, anyway. It was just the car ride from the airport that had thrown a monkey wrench into everything. “I just wish that the campaign he wants me to help him with actually had something to do with work.”

  Wendy looked at her, momentarily speechless. Blake hadn’t— He couldn’t have— Her brother could not have laid out his half-baked plan before Katie. Not seriously.

  Could he have?

  “Don’t tell me that Blake actually asked you to—” Wendy couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence, but the look on Katie’s face made that unnecessary. Wendy covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God, not even Blake could be that dense.” But even as she said it, she mentally crossed her fingers.

  The smile on Katie’s lips was small and, when Wendy looked closer she saw that it was also rather sad.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be putting any bets on that if I were you,” Katie advised. “At least, not unless you’re bent on losing.”

  Wendy just couldn’t believe it. It was one thing to talk about the idea to her, but she would have thought that someone as savvy as Blake would have come to his senses shortly after he had hatched this stupid, half-baked plan of his.

  Closing her eyes for a moment as she searched for strength, Wendy sighed. “Oh, God, Katie, he actually asked you to help him win over that dreadful woman?”

  “Well, I don’t know about dreadful,” she allowed loyally, although for the life of her, she was beginning to wonder how she could harbor these feelings for a man who seemed to so easily disregard the fact that she had any feelings at all. “But he did say he wanted me to help him with his ‘campaign’ to win back Brittany Everett.”

  Wendy rolled her eyes in frustrated exasperation. “To win her back, my idiot brother would have had to have her in the first place.”

  “Wait, I’m confused,” Katie protested. “Didn’t he and Brittany go together just before they graduated college?”

  She remembered how upset she’d been when she’d found out that Blake was seeing the beautiful young socialite. Katie had felt as if her entire world was crumbling right beneath her feet. It had taken her a while to get over it and get her mind back on her studies.

  “Blake may have been ‘going together,’” Wendy corrected. At least she remembered things clearly, even if Blake didn’t. “Brittany apparently forgot. Besides, there’s absolutely no comparison between the two of you. You have a heart. I think Brittany has a mirror where her heart is supposed to be. While my idiot brother was recruiting you for this impossibly ridiculous mission, did he happen to tell you how he and the Magnolia Queen came to ‘break up’?” Wendy wanted to know.

  Katie shook her head. “He didn’t go into any details, no.”

  “Then allow me to fill you in,” Wendy offered, warming up to her subject. “They were at a graduation party and became separated. At some point in the evening, he started looking for her. He walked around, searching the immediate party area, and found her making out with another guy.”

  Oh, poor Blake, was all Katie could think. “He found Brittany actually kissing some other guy?” she asked incredulously. How could she have even looked at another guy if she knew that Blake was committed to her?

  Wendy shook her head, completely disgusted with her brother’s choice in women. “Personally, I don’t understand why Blake would even want to be in the same room with her, much less take her back.”

  Wendy was missing one very obvious point, Katie thought. “Maybe because Brittany’s pretty much drop-dead gorgeous.”

  Wendy raised her chin. “So are you,” she insisted loyally.

  It was Katie’s turn to roll her eyes. “Oh, come on, Wendy. I do own a mirror, you know. I know exactly what I look like.”

  Wendy shook her head. Katie was missing the obvious. She’d been such a dedicated soul and hard worker for so long, she didn’t even remember how to use her feminine wiles, but that was all right. Wendy was devious enough for both of them.

  “The only difference between you and that woman my brother thinks he wants is that she knows how to apply makeup to her best advantage.” Wendy’s eyes narrowed as she looked at Katie. “Nothing you can’t learn,” she told her emphatically.

  Maybe, Katie thought, but not easily. And not quickly enough. “And while I’m busy learning how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Blake and Brittany will be exchanging wedding vows,” she concluded unhappily.

  Wendy waved away the very notion. “Not in a million years, I guarantee it,” she promised with deadly certainty. She knew the Brittanys of the world. They took up space and looked attractive—as long as no one was looking closely. Because what they had was superficial. What Katie had ran deep. Clear down to the bone.

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

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

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

  The woman was up to something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Even if it wasn’t going to work.

  Chapter Four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Like what?” he wanted to know.

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

  “This is just temporary,” Marcos insisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was also the place where he had first met Wendy. Although he and the youngest member of the Atlanta Fortune family hadn’t exactly hit it off at first—and that, he now had to admit, had been entirely his fault—the restaurant still held a very special place in his heart. He wouldn’t have felt right about neglecting his duties there and having the other members of the staff pick up the slack for him, even if this was an unusual crisis.

  Javier continued to stare out the window. “Well, you don’t have to feel obligated to come back here and give me annoying pep talks.”

  Marcos moved around the bed and directly into Javier’s line of vision, getting between him and the window. He looked at him for a long moment. “You really want me to leave and not come back?”

  Javier opened his mouth, about to say yes. But in all honesty, it wouldn’t have been the truth. And he wasn’t angry at Marcos and his “pep talk,” he was angry at the circumstances that had put him here. So he sighed and looked down at his motionless limbs.