Surprise: Outback Proposal: Surprise: Outback Proposal. Sarah Mayberry
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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