“No,” he mumbled. “I don’t really want you to leave and not come back. It’s just that—”
“You’re so damn frustrated,” Marcos filled in for his brother. He nodded. “Yeah, I know where you’re coming from. It’s hard being patient with things we have no control over. But the doctor said that the swelling is beginning to go down, so that means that you are getting better.”
“Ha!” Javier jeered. So far, he didn’t feel any different. “Not anywhere nearly as fast as I’d like.”
Marcos laughed. He knew Javier. His brother would have wanted to be completely healed—yesterday. “I don’t think that would be humanly possible, unless you had healing properties like Wolverine,” he amended, thinking of the comic series he and his siblings used to read when they were children.
The mutant he was referring to was a favorite of his and Javier’s. He’d never admitted that he had gravitated toward Wolverine because Javier liked the character as much as he did. Back then, he’d wanted to be exactly like his brother. Looking back now, he realized that what he’d had was a pronounced case of hero worship.
Childhood heroes shouldn’t have to be talked out of making dumb mistakes, he thought, looking at Javier now. His brother should have better instincts than that.
“Just try to take it easy,” Marcos advised. “Listen to the doctors and try to make gains during the physical therapy session—no matter how small,” he urged. “Before you know it, this’ll be behind you. I promise,” he added, crossing his heart the way they used to as kids.
Javier looked totally unconvinced. He looked like a man who was struggling to make peace with a life sentence. “Yeah, right.”
“Unless you’ve found a way to make time stand still.” The phrase, which he’d just plucked out of the air, made him smile. Wendy had done that for him, he realized. She’d made time stand still.
Not at first, of course. At first she’d made time sizzle because she’d been so maddeningly infuriating and he’d been saddled with her. He’d perceived her as a so-called poor little rich girl—slumming in the working world until she grew bored. Her parents had sent her off to Red Rock, and then to their friends, his uncle and aunt, in hopes that somewhere along the line their youngest born would develop a work ethic.
They’d had no idea that they were sending her out to meet her destiny.
And seal his.
Still frowning, but appearing just the slightest bit contrite now, Javier looked at him. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”
“Happens every once in a while,” Marcos told him good-naturedly, with a laugh. He glanced at his watch. It was getting late and he was falling behind schedule. Again. “Look, I’ve got to get going.” He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Promise me you’re not going to do anything stupid.”
“You mean like disguise myself as an orderly and sneak out of here?” Javier asked innocently. He saw Marcos’s eyes grow wide. “Take it easy!” Javier laughed for the first time since before the tornado had hit. “I was only kidding. If I tried to sneak out as an orderly, I’d have to do it snaking my way out on my hands and knees, like a soldier trying to crawl through an open field under the enemy’s radar. Remember? I’m the guy whose legs won’t listen to him.”
Marcos still wanted assurances. “So you’ll be here when I come back tomorrow?”
Javier preferred to leave it open-ended. “Unless the doctors change their minds about sending me home.”
Well, there was absolutely no way that was going to happen in the next twenty-four hours, Marcos thought, but for the sake of his brother’s abysmally low spirits, he merely nodded and repeated, “Unless they change their minds, right. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promised, crossing to the door.
“Tell Wendy I was asking after her,” Javier called to his brother.
Marcos turned in the doorway and smiled as he looked back at Javier. “I will,” he told his brother. “She’ll like that.”
His wife, family rebel though she’d once been, was exceedingly family oriented these days, especially now that they were beginning a family of their own.
Once he was out of his brother’s room, Marcos quickly made his way down the hall to the bank of elevators. He was a man in need of a miracle, he thought. Preferably one that caused all traffic to either disappear or conveniently part for him, so that he could get back to Red Rock and the restaurant at something akin to a reasonable hour.
He supposed that made him an unrealistic dreamer.
“It’s a thirty-day plan,” Blake told Wendy proudly the next morning. She’d arrived a few minutes before and he had brought her into the makeshift office he had put together in Scott’s house.
He was still having some difficulty in thinking of his brother as a rancher and not a forward-moving business dynamo. After all, he’d spent all those years watching Scott and Michael, his oldest brother, constantly competing with one another over absolutely everything they laid eyes on, each always betting against the other that he would be the winner.
How did someone go from that to a laid-back man of the earth? It didn’t seem possible to him without involving stiff doses of tranquilizers.
Yet this was Scott’s new life, one that he was happily embracing—and all because of a woman. The very woman he had been trapped with when the tornado had all but buried them alive in debris.
Well, if Scott could do an about-face and turn his life completely around, Blake thought, he certainly could launch a thirty-day campaign to win back the woman of his dreams. The woman he knew in his bones destiny had chosen for him, to remain at his side until death parted them—and maybe even beyond.
“Then you really were serious about wanting to go after Brittany and wear her down, like any of our marketing customers,” Katie said as she sat down at her side of the desk. She’d really hoped that once he’d slept on it—really slept on it—Blake would realize how nonsensical that sounded and just move on. After all, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have any real work to do.
But obviously he didn’t see it as nonsensical and he wasn’t about to move on. Which in turn made it a problem she was going to have to deal with.
There were times when she fervently wished she didn’t love the man as much as she did. But then, she might as well have wished that the sun wasn’t going to rise the next morning. It really wasn’t something that was going to happen anytime soon.
Or ever.
Blake caught the incredulous note in Katie’s voice when she asked her question and, while he was convinced he was finally going about winning Brittany in the right way, he did value Katie’s input. Over the past two years he had discovered that their onetime neighbor and his sister’s childhood friend had an uncanny gift for putting things together and homing in on what needed fine-tuning.
He looked at her for a moment, trying to gauge what Katie had really meant. “You make it sound like I’m not playing with a full deck.”
Katie shook her head. There was no way she was going to ever say something disparaging about him, especially to his face. There were times, when she looked around at other would-be applicants for her job, that she saw nothing but nubile, eager young women willing to do whatever it took to land a position. There was no way she could begin to compete against them on any level—other than demonstrating extreme competence. She was not about to do or say anything that would make Blake look for another assistant to take her place.
“Oh, no, the deck’s full, all right—it’s just a little different,” she allowed, her voice trailing off as she frantically cast about for just the tiniest drop of the courage that she lacked.
His sister had insisted this morning that Katie go through with the idea that Wendy had come up with last night. She wanted Katie to strongly suggest that Blake try out each “step” of the plan on her first.
K
atie sincerely doubted that he’d agree to that.
Here goes nothin’.
“You know,” Katie began, feeling her way slowly around the words, trying her best to find the right ones, “since this plan of yours is such an unusual approach, maybe you should try it out first, you know, like a rehearsal or a dry run.”
“Try it out?” Blake echoed. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
Okay, she’d backtrack. “You want everything letter perfect, right?”
“Well, sure, that’s the whole idea behind putting this down on paper and going over it,” he told her, tapping what he had written on the eight-by-ten sheet of paper in the center of his desk.
“Having it down on paper doesn’t give you a real feel for it,” she told him, wondering at the same time where these words were coming from.
Was she somehow managing to channel Wendy? Because that would seem to be the only answer. She knew that, even under fire, she wasn’t capable of coming up with these words on her own, not when she had so very much at stake here.
Blake leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms before him as he studied her face closely. “And what would?”
“If you practice all this on someone else first,” Katie said a tad too quickly. “If you took that person—that other person—to this play—” she tapped the name of the play that Blake had selected “—before you took Brittany.” She could see he wasn’t on board with this yet. Katie pitched harder. “That way, you could see if it—the play—was the kind that she enjoyed seeing. It would be just awful if the show turned out to be something that she’d feel uncomfortable about seeing. You never know, Brittany might think you had intentionally dragged her to see it for some reason.” Katie pressed her lips together, not knowing if she was getting through to him. Only one way to find out. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
He smiled broadly and she felt her heart do a backflip. Seeing that smile on his face always had the same results.
“Yes, I do. You want to make sure this is all perfect for Brittany. You want me to succeed as much as I want to succeed.” He took hold of her shoulders and pulled her to him, giving her what amounted to a fierce bear hug. “You really are something else, you know that, Katie? You’re absolutely one of a kind,” he pronounced.
When he released her, Katie had to concentrate in order to make the room stop spinning and settle back down on its foundation.
“Okay,” Blake, won over, declared, “we’ll do it your way, Katie. We’ll put every piece of this plan to the acid test. Together. And we’ll start at the beginning and work our way down.”
She tried to keep her excitement from surfacing in her voice. He was going to be taking her out and they were going to be doing things together. Fun things. Never mind that she was acting as a stand-in. She was going to be with Blake all this time. And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in all that time, he’d realize that she was the girl for him.
“That way,” she said matter-of-factly, while cheering on the inside, “if something doesn’t work, you can substitute something else in its place and she’ll never know.”
He nodded, pleased as the plan began to gel and come together in his head. “Like I said, you really are one of a kind, Katie Wallace.”
Yes, I am, and you’re just too damn thickheaded to realize that on your own, she thought, even as she kept her easygoing smile pasted on her lips. But you will, Blake Fortune, God willing, before it’s all too late, you will.
Chapter Five
“Dancing?” Blake repeated.
His tone was less than happy as he looked at Katie uncertainly. In an attempt to snag a little of his father’s attention, he’d forged his way into his father’s business world at an early age. Some things, per force, had been sacrificed and certain rites of passage never even approached. Consequently, learning to dance was one of those things that just had never happened for him. If he was completely honest with himself, he’d never felt that he’d missed anything by neglecting this tiny portion of his social education.
He nodded now at the list on his desk. At the time he’d printed it, he’d thought it was a final copy of his campaign strategy. Apparently, he’d thought wrong.
“Dancing never made my list,” he pointed out. What with the play and other things, he felt that he had other ways to court the “Brittany Market” without having to resort to something that made him feel inadequate.
“I know,” Katie replied simply. “But it should have.”
She sounded pretty adamant, but Blake dug in his heels. He shrugged carelessly at the mere suggestion of being forced to move to a given beat. “It just seems so old-fashioned.”
“Old-fashioned is good,” Katie countered with conviction. The only way she was going to get through this, she thought, would be to focus on the concept that she was helping her friend reach his goal. If she allowed herself to dwell on her actual “motivation,” then all bets were off. “Romance is old-fashioned, yet this is what you’re really setting out to do, isn’t it?” she pressed. “Romance Brittany? Sweep her off her feet?”
It was a rhetorical question and she hated the taste of every single word she was uttering. How she managed to talk and keep a forced smile on her lips, rather than hit him upside his head, was a credit to her strength of will.
“Yeah, but…” Blake’s voice trailed off and he looked at her, one friend putting his trust in another. “You’re sure about this?” he asked uneasily.
“I’m sure,” she answered with conviction. “Take her dancing.”
Blake took in a breath. “But I can’t,” he finally admitted.
Katie looked at him innocently over the desk that was between them. “Can’t take her?”
He shook his head. He hated admitting to any shortcoming, even something as trivial as dancing. “Can’t dance.”
She knew that. Just as she made it a point to know everything else about him—except why in heaven’s name a man as intelligent as Blake Fortune seemed to be so obsessed with winning back an airhead like Brittany Everett. Everything about the woman was so shallow—were these the qualities he really wanted in a wife? Did he really only want eye candy to hang off his arm?
Katie refused to believe that. She knew Blake, and the Blake Fortune she knew liked having intelligent conversations on a broad spectrum of subjects. Brittany Everett could conduct an in-depth analysis on why the color mauve brought out the hint of violet in her eyes. Moreover, she could go on for hours about which of the newest Paris fashions were the most flattering to her figure and her porcelain complexion.
But neither were subjects she, Katie, could stretch out for more than thirty seconds—if that long—nor did she have any desire to do so.
Brittany just couldn’t be the kind of woman he was interested in.
And yet…
And yet here they were, laying out plans that rivaled the complexity of Allied maneuvers for the D-day invasion on Omaha Beach.
Make the most of this opportunity, remember? If you teach him how to dance, he’ll have to hold you in his arms in order to practice.
For a second, she could almost swear she heard Wendy’s voice in her head, urging her on. She had to stop thinking about Brittany and just concentrate on the positive aspect here—she was spending a great deal of time with Blake, strategizing.
“No problem,” she responded to his negative input with a wide smile. “I can dance and I’ll be more than happy to teach you.”
Blake continued to look at her with a doubtful expression. She obviously gave him too much credit, he thought. While he was a fairly decent athlete, he was convinced that he was in possession of two left feet when it came to being coordinated on the dance floor. There had been one attempt to teach him—he vaguely remembered one of his sisters trying to get him to master the tango whe
n he was in middle school—and that had been quickly aborted.
“Why don’t we put dancing on the bottom of the list?” he suggested. Picking up a pen, he was about to do just that.
But Katie pulled the paper away from him and shook her head. “No. It’s always a good idea to tackle the hardest project first. Isn’t that what you always say?” she reminded him.
Blake nodded, none too happy about having his words used against him. “Yes, but I didn’t expect it to come back and bite me. You really do listen to everything I have to say, don’t you?” he marveled, impressed despite the situation.
She hung on his every word, but that wasn’t something she wanted him to be aware of. So instead, she used work as an excuse. “You’re the boss.”
That he could use to his advantage, he thought. “Well, if I’m the boss—”
“Except for here,” she quickly interjected before he could get rolling. Then, because she could see how frustrated he looked, she pointed out the obvious. “You did tell me you wanted my help, right?”
Part of him was beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of his having approached Katie with Project Brittany. “Right,” he muttered.
“Well,” she concluded brightly, “this is how I’m helping.”
“By making me feel like an idiot?” he challenged, because that was how he was going to feel, tripping over his own feet and pretending it was called dancing.
She wasn’t even going to try to argue that point. Instead, she just forged ahead. “By making you see that you really can be light on your feet.” She looked at him and said softly, but with certainty, “You can do anything you set your mind to.” She could see that he was weakening. “When your father put you in charge of marketing, didn’t you tell me that you overheard him saying that he thought maybe you were in over your head?”
“Yes, he did,” he recalled. He also recalled how good it had felt to prove the old man wrong—not that his father would ever admit it, of course. But it was enough that his father now knew Blake could handle it.
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