Surprise: Outback Proposal: Surprise: Outback Proposal. Sarah Mayberry
stood back as Dom hefted a box from beneath the trestle table, lifting it easily onto her trolley. When all three boxes were stacked neatly, he turned to face her.
“What next?” There was a smile in his eyes and it quickly spread to his mouth. For the first time she noticed that he had a single dimple in his left cheek.
Rosie hadn’t mentioned that last night.
“Um, the herbs,” she said.
They were about to move to the other end of the stall when Mr. Bianco found them, a clipboard in hand and a frown on his face.
“Dom, you remember how much onions we order last week? Oh, hello, Lucy. You looking lovely today.”
For some reason, Dom’s father’s compliment made her blush. Which was stupid. Every morning he said something along the same lines to her. Why should today feel any different to any other time?
Because you were eyeing up his son like a side of beef five minutes ago? Because all of a sudden a part of you would like to really be looking lovely today?
She squashed the little voice with a mental boot heel. She really was going to have words with her sister for causing all this crazy, too-aware-of-Dom stuff.
“Hi, Mr. Bianco,” she said. “How are you today?”
“No complaints,” he said, patting his belly complacently. “But I interrupting. I wait.”
“It’s fine. No worries,” she said, gesturing with her hand that they should go ahead and have their conversation.
Dom shot her an appreciative look. “Two seconds,” he promised as he turned to talk with his father.
She moved away a few steps to inspect a pile of zucchini while they talked, but she was aware of lots of hand gesticulating and the frustrated tone of their conversation as father and son discussed something intently.
“Okay, sorry about that,” Dom said a few minutes later as he rejoined her.
He was frowning and the smile had gone from his eyes.
“If there’s a problem, I can wait for one of the other servers to be free,” she said.
Dom shook his head. “No problem. Just stubborn pig-headedness.”
“Right.”
He sighed, and his frown eased a little.
“You see that clipboard he’s holding? That’s the complete record of our stock on hand for the week,” he said.
Lucy’s gaze took in the many feet of frontage the Bianco Brothers occupied, all of it filled to overflowing with fresh produce.
“You’re kidding me.”
She carried a tiny fraction of the inventory the Biancos did, and she kept it all neatly organized via a simple computer program. She couldn’t even imagine how Mr. Bianco kept track of his stock with paper and pen.
“It gets worse. He’s the only one who can read his own handwriting. So whenever Vinnie or I or one of the others needs to check on something, we have to find him and get him to interpret for us.”
“Wow,” Lucy said.
“Yeah,” Dom said, a world of frustration in his voice.
“Driving you crazy?” she guessed.
“Just a little. There’s so much stuff we could be doing.Even having an up-to-date list of what’s available on a Web site would be a huge bonus. We get fifty phone calls a day from customers asking what we’ve got on hand. But Pa thinks that because his way has worked for thirty years, there’s no reason to change.”
He ran a hand through his hair, his gaze distant as he looked down the aisle. Then his eyes snapped back into focus and he gave her a rueful smile.
“Sorry. This isn’t getting your order filled, is it?” he said, pulling her list from his pocket again.
“It’s okay. I can barely have a conversation with my mother these days. I can’t even imagine working with her,” Lucy confessed.
Dom’s gaze instantly flicked to her stomach. She felt heat rise into her face. Yesterday when she’d seen him, she’d deliberately been vague when he’d asked about her husband. But she could tell by the awkward silence that had fallen that he knew the truth. There were precious few secrets in the close-knit Italian community they’d grown up in, and she should have known he’d soon find out she was single. Why she’d even bothered to cover yesterday she had no idea. At the time, it had seemed … messy to try to explain about Marcus and the fact that she was all alone.
At least be honest with yourself if you can’t be honest with anyone else, Lucia Basso.
The truth was that she’d been embarrassed. She stopped short of labeling the emotion she’d experienced shame. She wasn’t ashamed of her baby. She refused to be. But there was no getting around the fact that she was a good Catholic girl who was having a baby on her own because her boyfriend had abandoned her for another woman.
She opened her mouth to try to explain her omission, then swallowed her words without speaking them. Dom wouldn’t care. Her being pregnant or not or married or not meant nothing in his world. They had a business relationship, nothing more.
But still she felt uncomfortable. And the feeling seemed to be mutual. Dom shoved a hand into the back pocket of his jeans and shifted his feet.
“She’ll come around. Once she sees that little baby, she’ll be putty in your hands,” he said.
It was too complicated a situation to explain over a trestle table of zucchinis. Lucy smiled and waved a hand.
“It’s fine. We’re fine. It’s all good,” she said.
Dom hesitated a beat before nodding. “Okay, let’s get you those herbs.”
They were both careful to keep things surface-level for the rest of the transaction, and Lucy left the stall feeling oddly depressed. Which was as stupid as blushing over Mr. Bianco’s compliment. There was nothing in her relationship with Dominic Bianco that she had any reason to feel depressed about.
Still, she found herself going over their conversation again as she broke up her stock into separate orders in the back of the van prior to her first delivery of the day.
It was the fact that he’d confided about his father that had made her drop her guard, she decided. Dom had always been friendly, but in a professional way. Today was the first time that either of them had offered each other anything beyond polite small talk.
“Ow.” Lucy looked to where she’d caught her knee against the corner of one of her crates.
Great. She’d been so distracted thinking about Dominic that she’d put a run in her panty hose. Now she’d have to find the time to buy a new pair and wriggle into them before her bank appointment that afternoon.
A surge of nerves raced through her as she thought about the bank and the loan and what it meant for her future.
Get your head together, girl, because you will not get a second chance to get this right.
It was a scary thought—more than scary enough to sweep any other thoughts away. She didn’t have the luxury of being distracted right now.
Grimly determined, she finished breaking up her orders.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Dom stood in the refrigerated storeroom Bianco Brothers rented and broke the tape seal on the small box in front of him. Inside was a state-of-the-art handheld data unit, ideal for inputting stock information and orders for a wholesale company like his father’s.
Dom had picked up the unit yesterday after work, and today he was determined to start phase one of his plan to modernize the business. His father was going to be resistant to change, he knew that. But