Cisco made himself comfortable, sitting down first. “But this is the best restaurant in town, Mattie,” he teased, “and I’m hungry.”
Matteo had a solution for that. He struggled to hold on to his temper. He couldn’t have a meltdown in public. That would make him look unstable in Rachel’s eyes—and that was the last thing he wanted.
Looking at Rachel, he told her, “Whatever he orders—” he jerked a thumb in his brother’s direction “—make it to go.”
Cisco laughed drily. “Boy, you certainly don’t make a brother feel welcome.”
“There’s a reason for that—you’re not,” Matteo told him point-blank.
Yes, at bottom they were brothers, and if called upon, Matteo would come to Cisco’s aid and do a great deal for his brother, but right now all he wanted was to have his brother get up and go away.
“Lucky for you I’m not thin-skinned,” Cisco informed him.
“Right, lucky. Order,” Matteo instructed him, pointing at the lunch selections.
Cisco ordered, but he took his time about it, reading every description of every one of the different lunch entrees and specials the Cantina offered out loud. Only then did he make his choice: beef and bean enchiladas as well as a tostada salad.
“Is that your lunch,” Matteo asked Cisco, “or the meal you intend to consume before you go into hibernation?”
“Just lunch,” Cisco replied brightly. “I’m hungry—especially since my little brother’s paying for it.”
It was getting more and more difficult to hold on to his temper, Matteo thought. “What did I say about calling me that?”
Cisco’s eyes crinkled as he grinned in amusement. It really was too easy, he thought, getting his brother’s dander up. “Are you going to beat me up right here, in front of witnesses?”
Their eyes met and held for a long moment. Matteo did his best to get himself under control, refusing to allow Cisco to win the round. “Why do you do it?” Matteo wanted to know.
“Do what?” Cisco asked as if he really had no idea what his brother was talking about.
Matteo chose his words carefully, determined not to make himself look like a hothead—or an idiot. “Tear me down all the time.”
Cisco regarded him in silence for a moment, then said something that Matteo hadn’t been prepared for. “To get you to build yourself back up again. Every time you do, you’re a little bit stronger, a little bit feistier, a little bit more confident than the version that came just before.”
“You’re crazy,” Matteo accused him.
Cisco had just made that up on the spur of the moment, Matteo thought. His brother was a playboy. He always had been. To him, it had always been about winning the girl of the moment, the one he set his sights on. If Cisco thought Matteo was interested in her as well, all the better because the stakes went up. There was nothing noble about it.
“Like a fox,” Cisco countered.
It never ceased to amaze Matteo how his brother always manipulated things to make himself come out on top. “That’s not how I see it.”
“And you’re entitled to your opinion,” Cisco said. “Doesn’t make you right, but you’re still entitled to your opinion.”
And then Cisco easily slipped into his ultra-charming mode as he watched Rachel return to their table. The tray she was carrying had Matteo’s order on it as well as Cisco’s, which was bundled in a large, sturdy paper bag with the Cantina logo stamped on both sides.
“You have your breakfast,” Matteo said the moment Rachel had once again left their table. “Now leave.”
Cisco shook his head like a teacher whose lesson had fallen on deaf ears. “You really have to work on your social graces, Mattie.”
Matteo looked his brother in the eye. “You have no idea how hard I’m working on them right this minute.”
Cisco laughed, appearing genuinely to enjoy this exchange between them. “I get the message. Two’s company and all that.”
Matteo’s eyes darkened. “Get out of here now,” he ordered in a barely audible voice.
“Needs a little more work,” Cisco pronounced, obviously still pretending to assess the effects of his handiwork on his brother, “but pretty good.” With that, he took the supersize doggie bag and rose from the table. “See you around, Matteo.”
It seemed rather inevitable that they would see each other around at some point, given all the Mendozas in town, but Matteo for one was going to work as hard as he could to keep their paths from crossing with any sort of frequency.
Because his trust for Cisco had eroded to nearly nothing by now, Matteo made a point of watching his brother not just walk away from the table, but leave the restaurant entirely.
Only when his brother was truly good and gone did he turn his attention to the reason he had come here in the first place.
Rachel.
She was all the way across the room, seating another table. He watched patiently, waiting until she finally looked in his direction in an unguarded moment.
The second she did, he raised his hand, calling her over.
Reluctantly, concerned about what he might say now that his brother was gone, she made her way over to Matteo’s table.
“Is there something wrong with your meal, sir?” Rachel asked in the most detached, distant voice she could summon.
How did they get here after last night? The question nagged at him. Could there be this amount of animosity because he had left without a word? Apparently the answer to that was yes, he thought as he tried to surface above the guilt.
“No, there’s nothing wrong with the meal. It’s fine. What’s not fine is the problem between us,” he told her. “I came here to talk to you.”
Rachel glanced over her shoulder to see if either Wendy or Julia was anywhere in the vicinity, watching her. They weren’t.
“I’m sorry,” she told him crisply. “I can’t have any long conversations with the customers while I’m working,” she lied. “It’s against restaurant policy.”
That seemed simple enough to circumvent. “Then go on your break.”
As if she could just snap her fingers and have it happen. “I—”
“Please?” he added with such sincerity, it got through all the protective layers of indifference she’d been busy wrapping around herself ever since she’d woken that morning.
Rachel suppressed a deep sigh. She had every right to be angry at this man and just cut him dead every time their paths crossed from here on in.
So why did all her fine resolutions, all the promises that she had made to herself, just dissolve like so many soap bubbles dancing in the wind when he looked at her with those big, brown, contrite eyes of his?
Why couldn’t she stand firm instead of melting like a scoop of ice cream that had fallen onto the concrete in the dead of summer?
“Wait here. I’ll see what I can do,” she told him, her voice strained. With that, she left his table and disappeared behind the rear of the reception desk. She was looking for Julia, who made up their weekly and daily schedules.
Rachel was gone for several minutes.
Long enough for him to think that perhaps she had said whatever she needed to in order to make an exit, and once she had, she had chosen to give him the slip. For all he knew, she might have told her boss that she felt sick and was, even now, on her way home, leaving him here with his food getting cold.
So now what?
Was he just going to sit here until doomsday, waiting for a woman who wasn’t about to return? Just how many times did he have to be hit by a two-by-four before he moved out of range?
Taking out his wallet, he removed several bills and was about to leave them on the table to pay for both Cisco’s meal and his own when he heard her voice. Rachel was talking to someone close by, a redhead who looked vaguely fam
iliar. He’d probably met her at some family function or other, Matteo thought.
The next moment, he realized that Rachel was getting permission to take her break earlier than scheduled.
And she had done it because he’d asked her to.
It was a promising start, he thought.
Now, as she sat down and joined him, it was up to him to keep the promising start going so that it turned into something that bore fruit.
He crossed his fingers.
Chapter Thirteen
“All right, I don’t have that much time,” Rachel said.
She folded her hands in front of her on the table like someone who had resigned herself to getting something distasteful but inevitable over with, ideally as quickly as possible.
“You wanted to talk,” she told him coldly, “so talk.”
He had just the one chance to have this come out right, Matteo thought. One chance to try to make her understand why he had left her bed so abruptly last night. At the same time, he needed to word his reason in a way that wouldn’t place him in too negative a light.
Some negativity was inevitable. He knew that. But he also knew that a balance had to be struck. If it wasn’t, how could he expect her to consider having a relationship with someone who behaved more like an adolescent than a man?
No matter what was said to the contrary, most women wanted to be with bad boys and heroes. Wishy-washy and indecisive were not part of the description when women went looking for the man they would regard as their other half.
All he could be, Matteo thought, was honest with her and hope for the best.
“Last night,” he began, his eyes meeting hers, “was without a doubt the singularly most fantastic night of my life.”
Rachel wanted so badly to believe him. “If that’s true,” she said skeptically, “what happened to you? Were you kidnapped by aliens who refused to give you any time to leave a note, some kind of an explanation as to why you suddenly had to dash off into the night?
“Who does that kind of thing?” she demanded. “I’ll tell you who. Men who don’t give a damn about anyone’s feelings but their own. Who are only interested in their own satisfaction—and don’t care who they hurt as long as they get what they want.”
Her eyes were blazing as she spoke, but there was still a tiny glimmer within her, maybe even less than tiny, that hoped he’d come up with something she could believe. Something that would make her want to forgive him.
She didn’t want to feel this way about him—but what choice did she have?
“Are you finished?” Matteo asked quietly after a beat had gone by.
“Very,” she retorted. She was a fool for thinking he could explain his actions away to her satisfaction, she thought in disgust.
She began to rise from her chair, but Matteo put his hand on hers, silently pleading with her to remain where she was.
“Would it help to say I was very, very sorry?” he asked.
“No,” she responded firmly. But then, because last night had turned her entire world upside down, Rachel willed herself to give him just a little more time to plead his case. “But it’s a start,” she said more magnanimously. “Go on.”
He gave it to her straight. “I’ve told you I’m not very confident when it comes to women, Rachel. I wish I were, but I’m not. I’m not Cisco,” he emphasized.
Why would he think that she wanted him to be more like his brother? “I didn’t pick Cisco. I picked you,” she reminded him.
Maybe he’d just won by default, Matteo thought. “But you did go out with him.”
Was he going to hold that against her? Seriously? “Only one time, Matteo. Because he asked, and at the time, I had no reason to turn him down.”
She had a point, and if the subject wasn’t such a sensitive one for him, he would have backed her sentiments all the way.
Still, he needed to have something settled in his own mind before he put all this to rest. “So there’s nothing between you and Cisco?” he asked.
Part of Rachel wanted to just get up and walk away without saying a word, making Matteo stew about the situation the way he had made her agonize over finding herself alone this morning, causing a stampede of self-doubt to come storming through her as she tried to figure out what she could possibly have done to cause him to leave like that.
But it was specifically because she had gone through all that herself that she couldn’t make another human being go through the haunting uncertainty that she’d been dealing with these past few hours. So she didn’t just get up and walk away.
Revenge was not part of her makeup. It never had been. She was better than that.
“No,” she answered Matteo, “not in the way you mean.” She saw the question in his eyes. So there would be no further misunderstanding, she elaborated. “Cisco is a charming acquaintance. Maybe someday he’ll even become a friend, but that’s it. Nothing more,” she emphasized. With that, she glanced at her watch, as if she was running out of her allotted minutes. “Anything else?”
He had a feeling that he still hadn’t managed to make her understand what it was like, living in his brother’s shadow.
He tried again. “All my life, I’ve felt...well, outshined, I guess, by Cisco.” The shrug was partially hapless. “I think I might even have unconsciously used that as an excuse.” He could see that she still didn’t understand, not that he blamed her. He was having trouble coming to terms with this self-analysis himself. “Whenever I didn’t get what I had set out to get, I blamed it on him rather than myself for not trying hard enough. It was easier that way, I guess, having a built-in excuse. Saying that Cisco was faster, better, smarter, handsomer.” He blew out a breath, forcing himself to continue, “I used that as an excuse to avoid moving forward.”
Rachel’s eyes never left his. “You know that’s not right, don’t you?”
“What’s not right?” he asked, confused. “Moving forward?”
“No, the part where you said Cisco was smarter, better, handsomer.” Someone else might have said those things fishing for a compliment, but not Matteo. That much she knew about him. He was not full of himself in any sense of the word. And he obviously didn’t realize his own self-worth. “None of that’s true. You’re all those things when you want to be.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to discount her words, saying something to the effect that she probably felt obligated to compliment him for the sake of being polite.
But there was something about the way Rachel said it, the way she sounded, that made him pause. “You mean that?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.” A small, private smile curved the corners of her mouth and filtered into her eyes as she thought of the way they’d been last night. The way he’d been last night. Gentle, caring and then wildly passionate, bringing every fiber of her being to life. “I was there, remember?”
“I remember,” he replied in a low voice that was overflowing with emotion. “I remember every single magical moment of it.”
Reaching across the small table, Matteo took her hands in his. Looking into her eyes, he did something he wouldn’t normally do. He went out on that very shaky limb, leaving himself totally exposed. He knew there might be a chance she would begin to have doubts the moment she walked away—unless he did this. “I need to tell you something.”
“Talk quickly,” she urged him, looking at her watch again. “My break’s almost over.”
Matteo shook his head. “This isn’t something that I can say quickly.” Granted, it was only one sentence, but he needed time to work up to it. What he had to tell her demanded that it have time before as well as after so the words, the sentiment, could be given the respect they both deserved and commanded. “Could I pick you up after your shift?” he asked.
Rachel had driven her car here, and th
ere were logistics to take into consideration, but the bottom line was that he was asking her out, she thought. Asking her out so that he could get this—whatever this was—off his chest. She’d already made up her mind to give him another chance.
“Sure,” Rachel replied. “I get off at six today.”
“Six it is,” he told her.
And then she hurried away.
Matteo whistled as he paid his tab and left the restaurant, a smile on his face.
“Judging by your smile,” Wendy commented as Rachel passed the co-owner on her way to wait on a new table, “I see that my cousin has managed to redeem himself.”
“He’s working on it,” Rachel replied.
The smile on her lips told her boss that she strongly suspected Matteo would manage to accomplish exactly what he set out to do.
* * *
“What’s that?” Matteo asked, nodding at the very large paper bag Rachel was carrying when he met her in front of the Cantina six hours later.
“Your cousin’s wife insisted I take this for you,” Rachel told him, keeping a very straight face. “She said she thought you’d be hungry after having nothing but humble pie to eat this morning.”
“Humble pie?” he repeated, not quite certain what the other woman had meant. Assuming that it was heavy, he took the bag with its carefully packed collection of small containers from her. He was right. The bag was heavier than it looked.
Rachel nodded. “It’s a figure of speech, referring to—”
Matteo held up his hand. “I know what it is,” he told her, cutting her explanation short. “What I’m wondering about is how she would even know anything about our situation.”
He personally had less than a nodding acquaintance with the pretty brunette his cousin had married. For that matter, he knew only Marcos by sight. He doubted if he and the other man had ever exchanged more than a couple of words at any one time.
Had Rachel been talking to the woman, unloading—and perhaps even complaining—as some women were prone to doing?
“That’s easy enough,” Rachel told him. “Wendy saw you—and Cisco—at the Cantina this morning, remember?”
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