Surprise: Outback Proposal: Surprise: Outback Proposal

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.