Mendoza's Secret Fortune (The Fortunes of Texas: Cowboy Country)

by Marie Ferrarella

  Almost automatically, Rachel rose to her feet and found herself slowly moving closer to the front door and the two men who had entered.

  If she was surprised to see Matteo, he looked twice as surprised to see her.

  Perhaps, Rachel thought, he looked a little too surprised.

  Had he somehow known she’d be here today?

  She tried to remember if she had said anything to Cisco last night about having to work here at the Foundation’s office today.

  But even if she had, the little voice in her head that came equipped with a large dose of common sense maintained, why would Cisco have shared that information with his younger brother? From the interaction she had witnessed yesterday, the two had an ongoing rivalry, competing with one another over just about everything.

  But if that was the case, then what was Matteo doing here?

  It didn’t make any sense to her.

  “What can I do for you?” Christopher was asking the two men as he crossed the office to get to them.

  “It’s what we’re here to do for you,” Orlando corrected him. The older man nodded his head toward Matteo. “My stubborn mule of a son and I are here to deliver a shipment of supplies for your office from your Red Rock headquarters.”

  Not willing to be mischaracterized, Matteo chimed in, “My more stubborn father suffered a bad injury last year and really should still be taking it easy instead of making these cargo flights,” Matteo explained. “I came along in order to ensure that he wasn’t taking on too much too soon. I’m also a pilot,” he added, wanting Rachel to know that he wasn’t just ineptly tagging along after his father but had a true purpose as well as a true vocation.

  Orlando snorted like a parent who was trying patiently to endure the know-it-all attitude of his well-meaning children. “This one thinks I’ll have a heart attack and he’ll have to grab the controls and heroically land the plane.” Orlando puffed up his chest ever so slightly and added, “Apparently he doesn’t realize his father is as strong as an ox.”

  “Yeah and just as stubborn as one,” Matteo interjected. He turned toward Christopher. “If you just tell me where you keep your dolly, I’ll load it up and bring the supplies up for you.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” he said to Matteo. Turning toward Rachel, he recruited her help. “Rachel, would you show Orlando where we keep the dolly? Then bring him back to the storeroom when he’s ready so he can stack the supplies there.” He glanced at Orlando. He had forgotten just how much he had ordered. “Is it a large shipment?”

  Orlando nodded. “I would say so, yes.”

  The smile on Christopher’s lips was spontaneous as well as wide.

  “It’s all coming together,” he announced, partly to the people in the office, partly to himself.

  While ranching had initially been a way of life for him, running a branch of his newly discovered family’s charitable foundation seemed like a very noble endeavor to him. And the more involved he became, the more committed to the cause he felt.

  “We keep the dolly in the storeroom,” Rachel told Matteo. “Come on, follow me. I’ll show you where it is.”

  Matteo fell into step with her as she walked quickly to the end of the floor and the storeroom.

  “So, you work here, too?” he asked her, sounding somewhat puzzled.

  That Matteo asked the question disappointed her a little. It meant that this meeting really was just an accident rather than something he had deliberately orchestrated.

  What was she thinking, assuming that Matteo had gone through complex machinations just to get a glimpse of her again? Sometimes a chance meeting was a chance meeting and nothing more, she told herself.

  But the fact that it was obviously true in this case stung her a little. The scenario she had put together in her head had been far more romantic.

  Grow up, she chided herself.

  Looking at Matteo, she realized that he was waiting for some sort of an answer.

  “I just started working here,” she replied. “The Foundation doesn’t officially open to the public until next month.”

  Matteo was still trying to piece things together. He knew so little about the woman who had captivated him with no effort whatsoever. He had deliberately been avoiding Cisco this morning because he didn’t want to take a chance on hearing his brother brag about what had gone on last night.

  “So, yesterday was your last day at the Cantina?” he asked.

  That was a shame, he thought. He’d given serious consideration to dropping in there tomorrow, supposedly for lunch but actually just to see her again. Now it looked as if that plan wasn’t destined to make it off the ground.

  Opening the door to the storeroom, Rachel gestured toward the dolly—located right in front—and stepped out of Matteo’s way.

  “No, actually, it wasn’t. My job at the Cantina is really part-time, and I’m keeping both jobs, at least for a while,” she told him. Just saying it made her feel tired. But this wasn’t about getting her beauty rest. It was about her future and getting ahead. “I want to see where this is going before I make any major decisions about my life.”

  Pushing the dolly out of the room, he followed Rachel toward the elevator. “Have you always been this ambitious?” he asked her.

  She had to admit that this was an entirely new direction for her. When she’d moved out here, she hadn’t a clue on how to start rebuilding herself—or even how to earn a living. All she knew was that she wasn’t running toward something—at least, not at first—but from something.

  “No, I wasn’t,” she told him, pressing the down arrow beside the elevator. “You should have seen me five years ago.” She recalled all the empty partying, the meaningless kisses and even more meaningless words that had been exchanged. “I was a slug,” she confessed with a self-deprecating laugh.

  Matteo didn’t believe it for a moment. He considered himself a fair to middling judge of character, and Rachel Robinson was a woman with a purpose. He would lay odds that she always had been.

  “I sincerely doubt that,” he told her, dismissing her words. “But I would have liked to have seen you five years ago,” he admitted.

  Rachel couldn’t think of a reason why he would have wanted to do that. “To compare then and now?” she guessed.

  “No. If I had seen you five years ago, that means I would have known you for five years.” And he would have been able to get her attention before Cisco had a chance to move in on her. “But I guess since you live here and I grew up in Miami, that wouldn’t have exactly been possible,” he concluded.

  “No,” she agreed, “it wouldn’t have.” But that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t have wanted it to be possible, she added silently.

  As Matteo stepped into the elevator, pushing the dolly before him, he was surprised to see Rachel get on with him. He’d just assumed that she would wait for him to return to the storeroom with the supplies. “You’re coming with me?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  His smile was very wide as he told her, “No, I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.”

  Chapter Five

  “What happened?” Rachel asked Matteo as they stepped out of the elevator with the dolly on the ground floor.

  Since the question seemed to come out of the blue, Matteo looked at her, puzzled. He wasn’t sure what Rachel was asking him. In all honesty, he might have been so captivated by her proximity that he’d completely zoned out for a moment, thereby missing a possibly vital part of the conversation.

  He would have attempted to bluff his way out of it, but that could have been successful only if he’d had an iota of a clue what she was referring to. And he really didn’t.

  When in doubt, his father had taught all of them, honesty was the best policy.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” he tol
d Rachel, feeling more than a little awkward about the admission and hoping that she didn’t think he was a complete idiot.

  She flashed a smile that corkscrewed its way directly into his gut, tightening it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a tendency to start questions in my head, leaving vital parts out when I engage my mouth. You told my boss that you came along with your father because you were afraid he hadn’t sufficiently recovered from his injury. I was just curious about what kind of an injury it was.”

  Before I engage my mouth. The words she’d used echoed in his brain as he looked at that very same mouth now. He would have liked to engage that mouth in his own way, he couldn’t help thinking.

  With effort, he made himself focus on the question she had asked and not on the woman herself.

  “It’s a long story,” he told her as they got off the elevator and headed past the reception area, toward the front doors. “The short version is that his plane malfunctioned and he crashed. The doctors thought his recovery was amazing. I just didn’t want him to overdo things. He doesn’t like owning up to a weakness, especially a physical one. But he is human, so things can happen that are beyond his control.”

  They approached a silver midsize van parked several feet from the building’s entrance.

  “I’m stunned that your father actually got into a plane and flew again after that,” Rachel said.

  Matteo smiled to himself. She caught herself thinking that he had a really gorgeous smile. It was the kind that lit up the immediate area around him—and her.

  “My father is probably the most bullheaded man who ever walked the earth,” Matteo told her. “He does not like backing away from any sort of a challenge—and he’s been a pilot for most of his life. Flying is second nature to him, like breathing.”

  Rachel nodded intently, as if absorbing every word. “I see. Well, good for him,” she declared with feeling. “Sometimes being stubborn like that is all we have to see us through.”

  Matteo wondered if she was talking about herself rather than his father. Something in her voice made him think she at least related to the experience.

  Rachel paused on the sidewalk while he unlocked the back of his father’s van.

  Climbing inside, he moved the supplies his father had flown in, dragging them closer to the bumper. Then he jumped down again. Box by box, he loaded a third of the supplies onto the dolly. A third was all that it would hold at one time.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he told her.

  Rachel looked at the back of the van as he pushed the doors closed. “What about the rest of it?” she wanted to know.

  Positioning himself behind it, he began to push the loaded dolly toward the front entrance. “I’m going to have to come back. There’s no way I can get the supplies into the storeroom all in one trip.”

  “Oh,” she murmured. Rachel saw it as an opportunity to spend a little more time with Matteo than she’d initially anticipated. Not that he actually needed her help, but since Christopher hadn’t specifically told her to show Matteo the storeroom and then come right back, she gave herself a little leeway in the matter. After all, Matteo might have a question for her regarding the supplies.

  Orlando, still talking with Christopher, glanced in their direction as they got off the elevator and made their way toward the storeroom.

  “If you have an extra dolly,” Orlando said, speaking up and addressing the words to Christopher, “we can get the supplies up here twice as fast.”

  But Christopher shook his head. “Sorry, we’ve got only the one. But there’s no reason to hurry,” he assured Orlando. “I figure once we’re open, things are really going to start hopping. Until then, we can take life at a bit of a slower pace.”

  Orlando nodded, as if in agreement, but he didn’t fool his son. Matteo knew his father was just going along with what Christopher Fortune Jones had said to come across as agreeable. In reality, his father didn’t know how to take life at a slower pace.

  That wasn’t his father’s style. The man had worked from the time he had been a nine-year-old boy, growing up on the streets of Juarez in Mexico, looking for a way to help support his family. When his parents had moved the family to Miami the year he turned ten, things hadn’t changed for Orlando. The locale might have been different, but his work ethic had stayed the same: work as hard and as much as you could today because tomorrow was an uncertainty.

  As they approached the storeroom, Rachel moved slightly ahead of Matteo in order to open the door for him. She quickly ducked inside to give him room to come in with the dolly.

  Following her into the storeroom, Matteo righted the dolly and parked it in order move the supplies off and place them on the shelves, which were only half-stocked at this point.

  He had a feeling that this trip to the Foundation might just be the first of many. Suddenly the future was beginning to show promise. Thoughts of returning to Miami took a backseat for the time being.

  When he finished taking the first load off the dolly, stacking each container on top of others with the same dimensions, he started to leave. Rachel, he noted, was right behind him.

  Was she coming with him? Had he said something to make her feel obligated to do that? Matteo felt bad, as if he was putting her out. Guilt began to nibble away at him like a determined chipmunk.

  “You know,” he told her, “you don’t have to come back to the van with me.”

  “Sure I do,” she contradicted him innocently. Then, with a smile that seemed to seal itself immediately to the inside of his heart, she added, “If I stay behind, who’s going to press the elevator button for you?”

  He laughed at the absurdity of the question, a little of the tension leaving his shoulders. They no longer felt as if they resembled a landing pad.

  It almost felt intimate, sharing the moment—and a joke—with her.

  “You’re right,” Matteo responded. “What was I thinking?”

  Had she asked him that, he would have had to have answered, I was thinking about you.

  * * *

  By the time they made the third and final round trip to the sidewalk and back, the van had been completely emptied and this particular storeroom—Matteo learned there were others—filled to capacity.

  So much so that there was precious little room in which to maneuver.

  Rachel found that out the hard way.

  Moving back to get out of Matteo’s way, she found that her back was blocked by a huge floor-to-ceiling stack of boxed printer paper. A wall of ink cartridges were right next to the boxes of paper.

  Matteo, unaware that she had nowhere to go, attempted to move past her and wound up brushing up against her.

  The moment of contact did not go unnoticed.

  By either of them.

  He was acutely aware of brushing against the sweetly supple, heart-melting brunette as every part of him—not just the parts that had made actual contact, but all of him—felt as if it was experiencing an electrical surge that seemed to fill every single space in his body.

  Had he looked down instead of directly into her beautiful blue eyes, Matteo was certain that he would have seen sparks flying between their bodies.

  As it was, she took his very breath away so completely he felt he was in danger of asphyxiating right then and there.

  Breathe, idiot, breathe! Matteo silently ordered himself.

  He felt his head spinning around for a moment. This tall, willowy young woman had that sort of an effect on him.

  Kiss me, Matteo, Rachel silently begged as her body came alive, tingling intensely from the fleeting and all-too-real contact between their two bodies. Please kiss me.

  Rachel held her breath, hoping.

  Praying.

  Refusing to budge a fraction of an inch, hoping that would encourage Matteo to make a move.r />
  Her eyes held his. If mental telepathy was an actual thing rather than a myth, Rachel couldn’t help thinking, Matteo Mendoza would have already swept her into his arms, held on to her tightly and kissed her soundly. If nothing else, the way she was looking at him would have hypnotized him into making that first move. She could definitely take it from there.

  What was wrong with him? Matteo silently upbraided himself.

  If he were more like Cisco, this would already have been a done deal. He would have pulled this woman whose mere glance set him on fire into his arms like some soap-opera hero, said a few well-articulated words that would have swept her off her feet and then kissed her the way she had never been kissed before.

  Matteo continued to berate himself. If he were more like Cisco, he wouldn’t be thinking about it. He would be acting on it. It would have already been done.

  Or perhaps even be ongoing.

  So what was to stop him from doing just that? From acting instead of just thinking? Matteo silently demanded of himself.

  Come on, Matteo, do it. Go with your instincts and kiss her already.

  Making up his mind, Matteo squared his shoulders and then he began to lean into her.

  The very air stood still around her.

  It’s going to happen. He’s going to kiss me. Finally! The thought telegraphed itself through her brain as the rest of her grew excited in anticipation.

  Every nerve in her body felt like applauding and cheering wildly. She was afraid to move or even breathe.

  His mouth was almost on hers, his breath tantalizing her as she felt it on her face.

  Do it, Matteo. Do it, Rachel prayed.

  Contact seemed totally inevitable.

  And then it wasn’t.

  “So there you are. I was beginning to think you and that dolly had disappeared.”

  Orlando’s voice seemed to almost boom as it rang out through the storeroom. The elder Mendoza was right there, standing in the entrance, larger-than-life and twice as loud.