Hell, part of him already did.
But this—all of it—was for the sake of the restaurant, he reminded himself. Nothing was more important than having Red operating at maximum efficiency—not even his pride.
He’d earn back his pride—and then some—when he left Red in top condition to go on and open his own place, using everything he’d ever learned working here, he promised himself confidently.
Marcos could almost taste it and he could hardly wait for that day to come.
What else can you taste, Marcos? asked that same annoying little voice in his head.
If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn that his annoying little voice had acquired a Southern twang.
Walking into his office, Marcos closed the door behind him. He switched on the radio and turned it up louder than usual. He reasoned that if it was loud enough, it would drown out the sound of her voice, as well as the little voice in his head.
At least it was worth a try.
It failed.
She kept the phone within reach at all times.
Ever since William had disappeared and one of the happiest days of her life had instantly transformed into one of the saddest, Lily Fortune was never more than a few steps away from her cell phone. Even during her morning shower, the phone was placed on the counter next to the shower door and the ringer turned up high so there was no chance that she would miss a call.
And each time it rang, her heart would leap up into her throat and a prayer would spring to her lips. And each time, when it turned out not to be William, her heart would slowly sink and the prayer would fade.
Even so, Lily absolutely refused to give up hope, refused to remain anything but optimistic that somehow, some way, someday, William would walk back into her life as abruptly as he had walked out.
The questions that surrounded his disappearance would all be answered then, but they were of secondary importance to her. What was really important was William’s return—alive and well—to the family who loved him.
Worry had stolen her appetite. Nothing tasted right to her anymore. Nonetheless, Lily forced herself to have at least two meals a day because she was determined to keep up her strength. William, she sensed, was going to need her when he returned. And he would need her to be strong. She’d be no help to him if she wound up becoming a drain rather than an asset.
So, this morning after she’d allowed the cook to place before her a lone scrambled egg with a sprinkling of cheddar cheese and a single corner of wheat toast, Lily pushed the food around her plate, finally consumed it and tried to plan her day. She wanted to be at least a little productive.
William wouldn’t want her to become listless and moody in his absence. He’d told her once that he fell in love with her vitality first. She didn’t want him to find her a shell of the woman he loved when he finally returned.
Lily dropped her fork when her cell phone rang, nearly knocking over her orange juice in her hurry to answer.
Flipping the phone open, she pressed it to her ear.
“Hello?” she cried, suddenly breathless in her anticipation. Breathless even though she’d only stretched out her hand. “William?”
“No, Lily, it’s Drew.” There was a significant pause. For a dramatic effect? she wondered. And then she heard her future stepson say, “We found him.”
She felt like laughing and crying at the same time. “Oh, thank God,” she cried. “How is he, Drew? Is he all right? How soon can you get back?” The questions tumbled out, one after the other. She didn’t even stop to draw in a breath.
When there was no immediate response, an icy chill seized her heart. “Drew? Are you still there? Talk to me. Why aren’t you answering? What’s wrong?” And then it came to her. Drew was trying to brace her for bad news and at the last moment, was at a loss as to how to phrase it. “Oh, my God, Drew, is he— Is William—?”
She couldn’t bring herself to say the awful, damning word.
Death had taken her beloved husband Ryan from her six years ago—she’d barely survived the loss. If William was dead, it would kill her as surely as if someone had shot a bullet at point-blank range straight into her heart.
“No, he’s not dead, Lily,” Drew quickly reassured her. And then he stopped, obviously at a loss as to how to proceed. “But—”
The word hung there, an insurmountable mountain of steep ice between her and the man she loved. If William was alive, everything else could be dealt with. She encouraged Drew to continue, trying very hard not to be nervous.
“But what?”
She heard the man on the other end of the line take in a deep breath. “My father’s alive, Lily, but he’s lost his memory.” She could hear the frustration in Drew’s voice as he described his father’s condition. “He doesn’t know who he is or what happened to him. I took him to the local hospital and had a thorough workup done.”
“And?” Lily coaxed.
“And the upshot is that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a trauma to his head.” The news wasn’t quite as good as it sounded. “But on the other hand, those don’t always show up,” Drew qualified.
She wasn’t going to worry about that now. First things first.
“Just bring him home, Drew. We’ll handle it. We’ll handle any problem. The main thing is that William’s alive and that you found him. Whatever he’s been through, loving care and familiar surroundings can help him negate it,” she said with incredible confidence.
“Lily, I understand what you’re going through, what you have been through and what you’re hoping will happen, but you have to understand that amnesia is something that modern medicine still can’t treat effectively.”
She forced herself to be patient with William’s son. She needed him to be direct. “Drew, what is it that you’re trying to tell me?”
This was so hard for him to say. Not because he was talking to Lily, but because it was about his father. “That Dad may never remember any part of his life before that sheriff found him sleeping in the alley.”
Lily refused to be brought down. William was alive and they’d found him. That was enough for her right now. “But you just said he has amnesia, right?”
“Yes, but it’s not like in the movies,” he warned. “Amnesia can go away in a few hours, in a few days, in a few weeks—or it doesn’t have to ever go away at all.” He took a breath. When he spoke, the words were intended as much for him as they were for her. “You have to be prepared for that.”
She wasn’t going to think about that now, she couldn’t. It would bring her down too far and she needed to remain positive.
“Just bring William home to me, Drew,” she requested again. “Bring him home and we’ll handle it one step at a time from there.” For the moment, it was the only plan she had.
There appeared to be nothing else that Drew could do at the moment. “I can do that,” he told her with a resigned sigh.
Sensing he was about to hang up, Lily spoke quickly. “And, Drew—”
“Yes?”
“Thank you,” she said with feeling, trying her best not to break down and cry over the phone. “Thank you and Jeremy for finding him for me.”
“You don’t have to thank me, Lily. I didn’t find him just for you. I—we,” he amended, “found him for all of us.”
“Yes, of course. I didn’t mean to imply anything else,” she told Drew.
Lily began praying the moment the phone went silent. The nature of the prayer had changed now that William had been found. What hadn’t changed—and wouldn’t—was its intensity.
And, as she prayed, her thoughts turned to her late husband, the way they often did.
There were times that she could literally feel Ryan’s strength here. Feel his presence. Not always, but sometimes.
Like now.
She wouldn’t tell anyone, not even her children, because they’d think she was crazy or had been pushed over the edge by this latest twist involving William, but there were times that she could s
wear Ryan was in the room with her. Supporting her. Bolstering her.
“It is all right with you, isn’t it, my darling?” she whispered softly. “You do want me to marry William, I can feel it. But I need your help, Ryan. I can’t do this alone. How do I bring him around? How do I make William remember us? Remember me?” she asked.
Lily could feel tears gathering in her eyes as she spoke to the man who she could no longer see.
At that moment, she thought she felt something pass over her. A feeling.
A calming presence?
She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t put it into words, but she was no longer agitated or worried. And suddenly, she thought she had an answer to the question she had put to her late husband.
Very slowly, a smile began to spread over Lily’s generous mouth.
Chapter Eight
The best laid schemes of mice and men…
The classic saying went through Marcos’s brain as he walked into Red’s kitchen two days later and saw that there was already someone there.
The wrong someone.
He’d come in early, hoping to find an empty kitchen. With Wendy’s foray into the world of creative pastries, he recalled his own roots as a cook and had become inspired to try his hand at it again.
When he’d first targeted working in the restaurant field, he’d started out in the kitchen. It seemed only natural. Growing up, he’d been the one to do most, if not all, of the cooking at his house while his parents were busy earning a living.
Cooking had been a source of comfort to him then. The tiny kitchen in his home had been the first place that he had ever felt as if he was in control of things. He’d nurtured that feeling and eventually it became the foundation he’d used to build his life. The confidence that arose from being able to cook not just passably but well had slowly spread out to all the other facets of his life.
Cooking had been the beginning of it all, the beginning of the man he had grown up to be.
He missed being in the kitchen, missed mixing things together and coming up with an unexpected taste or texture. Missed the serenity of cooking.
Wendy’s success was urging him to go back and revisit his roots.
But if his intentions had been to putter around by himself and fall back on his own devices, the moment Marcos walked into the kitchen, he was sorely disappointed.
The kitchen was empty. Except for Wendy.
It was only eight-thirty. What the hell was she doing here?
Suppressing an exasperated sigh, he tried his best not to sound as irritated as he felt when he put the question to her. “What are you doing here?”
Though she was just as surprised to see him as he had been to see her, Wendy hid her reaction well.
“I could ask you the same thing,” she countered, then answered his question by glibly saying, “I work here, remember?”
She turned toward the walk-in refrigerator. Marcos followed her. “Not at eight-thirty in the morning you don’t. Why did you come in so early?”
Reaching the refrigerator door, she stopped and looked over her shoulder, waiting. “Actually, I came in earlier,” she confessed, then opened the door and went inside.
“How much earlier?” he wanted to know.
Finding what she wanted, a large container of heavy whipping cream and what appeared to be a helping of butterscotch pudding, she took her prizes and walked out again, kicking the door shut behind her.
“Seven-thirty,” she answered as she passed him.
“How did you get in?” he asked. His eyes narrowed beneath eyebrows that were drawn together in a dark, uncompromising line. “Who gave you a key?” There was no reason for her to have one. The fact that she did meant that someone’s head was going to roll.
She placed her bounty on the stainless steel work table and headed to the pantry next. “Enrique,” she replied.
“Why?” Marcos wanted to know.
She turned from the pantry so abruptly, she just narrowly avoided colliding with him. He stepped aside at the last moment, trying not to notice that his pulse rate had gone up.
“Because I told him that I wanted to get an early start on making today’s desserts.”
She gestured at the ingredients she was slowly gathering on the table, then went to secure a bottle of brandy from the bar in the main dining area. “So I could concentrate on making something new for the menu today.” And then she moved those warm chocolate eyes toward him and turned the tables. “I told you mine, now you tell me yours,” she said cheerfully.
What the hell was she talking about now? “What?” Marcos asked, utterly and frustratingly confused.
So she articulated her question slowly. “What are you doing here so early, Marcos?”
He resented her putting him on the defensive—and the effect she seemed to have on him.
“I thought I’d see what I could come up with in the kitchen,” he finally told her.
Wendy’s stare only became more pronounced. “You cook?”
“Why does that surprise you so much?”
She shrugged in a carefree movement that made her soft peasant blouse—she’d worn her waitress uniform just in case he wanted to put her back on the floor, he noticed—slide off her slim shoulders.
Why couldn’t the woman keep her clothes where they belonged, he silently demanded.
For a second, she left her blouse the way it was, though whether by choice or because she was oblivious to it wasn’t clear at first. What was becoming progressively clearer to him was that he found the image before him exceedingly sexy. The front of her blouse continued to move teasingly in and out with each breath she took, playing hide-and-seek with cleavage he wasn’t supposed to be noticing—but did.
“I didn’t know I could cook,” she told him honestly. “You seem to know you can, but I can’t figure out why a man with your kind of looks would even begin to know the first thing about cooking.”
He didn’t follow her at all. “What does the way I look have to do with anything?” It was only after a beat that he realized she’d complimented him. He forced himself not to dwell on that. She probably didn’t mean it the way it sounded.
“I would have thought that’d be obvious.” When he said nothing, she explained her logic further. “Just that you’d have more than your share of women wanting to cook for you, that’s all.”
He studied her for a moment, trying to decide whether she was just laying it on thick, trying to snow him, or if she was actually serious.
The scale tipped just the slightest bit toward serious.
He concluded that she wasn’t trying to flatter him, exactly, she was just saying the words out loud as they occurred to her.
“Well, I used to cook for my brothers and parents,” he told her. “It was either that or live on a diet of fast food. And having me cook was cheaper—also healthier,” he threw in, although back then, neither his thoughts or his brothers’ had run along those lines. Marcos had just been trying to create a dinner out of whatever he found in the pantry—and doing his best to make it taste good.
If he’d failed in his attempts to make it taste at least decent, his brothers would tease him mercilessly and he’d really hated that. He’d learned to be a good cook because, very simply, he had to.
Slanting a glance in her direction, he caught Wendy grinning broadly.
“What’s so funny?” he wanted to know.
Wendy pressed her lips together and began to whip the cream, drizzling powdered sugar into it at regular intervals. “Nothing.”
“You’re grinning from ear to ear,” he pointed out impatiently.
After a beat, she gave in. No point in making him think that she was having terrible thoughts about him. “I was just picturing you, standing on a stool next to the stove, your mama’s apron covering you from your neck down to your feet, frowning over something you were cooking up in a big old pot.”
“For the record,” he began, deciding to set her straight, “my mother’s apron was folded
in half and tied around my waist. And I didn’t need a stool. I was this height by the time I was twelve.”
“Wow,” she said as her eyes skimmed over his frame quickly.
That wasn’t exactly the way the kids in his class had reacted the September after his summer growth spurt. They’d called him beanpole and other, far less flattering names. It was because of their jeering that he’d made a concentrated effort to put some meat on his bones, working out like crazy every morning and night, using a set of secondhand weights he’d gotten at the pawnshop.
Eventually the weight he’d packed on was sculpted and no one called him beanpole anymore. But they did call him. Especially the girls. Mostly they were girls in his class, but sprinkled in between them were a few “older women,” sophomores from the local high school. That was when he’d discovered that he could readily get by on his good looks.
It had also been possibly the most shallow time in his life, he judged now.
“You said you cooked for your brothers,” Wendy said, redirecting his attention back to the present.
He raised an eyebrow. Where was she going with this? “Yeah?”
Opening the industrial-size bottle of vanilla, she measured out an amount simply by looking and making a judgment call.
“I was just wondering how many you had. Brothers,” she prompted when Marcos just continued to look at her, apparently confused.
He was still having trouble tearing his eyes away from the front of her blouse—or lack thereof. “Three,” he finally answered, then filled in their names before she could ask. “Javier, Rafe and Miguel.”
She liked the way the names sounded. Manly and sexy. She set aside the vanilla after capping it. “Are you the baby?”
“Miguel is. Why?” Why was she asking all these questions? What was her angle?
“No reason,” she replied innocently. Picking up the whisk, she began to whip the concoction in earnest this time. “I’m the baby in my family. The baby and the black sheep,” she added with just a touch of ruefulness she hadn’t managed to cover.
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