Fielder's Choice (32 page)

Still she didn’t answer, only watched him with a look he couldn’t read.

“Alana, talk to me.”

“I’m waiting,” she said with a grin. She came within a few steps of him and crossed her arms. Tapped her foot for emphasis. “Waiting for the good part.”

“I want...” How could he say what he wanted? Why should she care what he wanted?

“I love you,” he blurted out. His declaration in no way resembled the careful scripting he’d perfected on the drive from the city. “I love you and I don’t want to live without you.”

A cloud came into her eyes, and all signs of humor disappeared from her face.

“I’ve decided I want to stay here, to make the ranch work,” she said softly. “I want to help make it into the place my grandmother dreamed it could be.”

She backed a couple of steps away.

“I make mistakes, Matt.
Lots
of mistakes. I am sometimes out of control and hard to handle. Ask anyone in my family—I’m trouble.”

“If I can’t love you at your worst, I don’t deserve you at your best,” he said. “I’m up for trouble.” He moved close again, erasing the distance she’d put between them.

“Fielder’s choice,” she said as she traced her fingertips down his chest.

“What?”

“Jackie told me that when the game is on the line and you go for the hard out, for the riskier but more important move—for the game changer—that it’s called a fielder’s choice.”

“
You’re
the game changer,” he said, pulling her to him and dipping his lips to hers.

She pushed him away.

“There’s Sophie to consider,” she said, suddenly very serious. “I’m not sure I’m up for being a stepmother, not sure I’d know how to do it.”

“Hell, I’m not sure I know how to be a dad. We can’t do any worse than our parents, and look at us.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Not exactly a recommendation.”

“Sophie’s well-being is my responsibility, and I can tell you honestly that you’re the best thing that ever happened to either of us. She knows you have a good heart. The bumps in the road won’t be any worse than in any other blended family. “

Family
. He’d said it. He wanted her to be part of his family.

“I want to marry you, Alana.” He tucked a tendril of her hair behind her ear. “Marry me.”

She smiled then, but rubbed her hands against her belly. “I really do have to eat. I was so nervous about telling Marcel that it was over that I couldn’t eat breakfast.”

Matt wasn’t sure he heard her right.

She leveled her gaze at him.

“That means yes, Matt, I’ll marry you. I’ve loved you from the minute you caught me falling from that ladder, maybe from the first minute I saw you. And definitely since the night we first made love. I tried to pretend that night meant nothing to me, but it meant everything. It changed everything. ” He opened his mouth to whoop, to cheer, but she held a finger against his lips as a wry smile curved into hers. “When we met I thought meeting you was a trick of fate. Now I
know
it is. But I warn you—hiring a full-time nanny and cook would be worlds easier than life dealing with me.”

She traced her fingers around his chest and lit a fire in his groin.

“Fielder’s choice, remember?” he said as he took hold of her hand and pulled her close and lowered his mouth to taste her lips. She gave him a teasing nip that nearly drove him wild. “I’ll take my chances.”

She grinned as he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed. He laid her on the comforter and followed her down.

“Um,” she murmured. “Perhaps I can postpone breakfast. But I warn you, last chance at the nanny and the cook.” She delivered the warning between kisses.

When the phone rang, she pushed away from him, snapping to attention.

“The windmill! You made me forget my
duties
,” she said in a teasing tone.

She ran to the window, and he followed. The blades were turning slowly, flashing white in the late morning sun.

“Oh my God! Zav will be furious! I told him I’d be there to greet the people whose arms he twisted.” She scrambled furiously for her clothes. “I have to go, or he’ll have my head for being late.”

Matt tugged her back and closed his lips over hers. She pushed him away and wrinkled her nose in protest.

“Don’t you have a game?”

“Night game,” he said, drawing her back to him and circling her wrists with his fingers.

“Then we’ll just have to continue this after the party,” she said with an official-looking smile. “I have a
job
to do, Mr. Darrington.”

He kissed her again, and the reality of a future with her lit through him. Her kind of trouble was exactly what his life had been missing. She wiggled in his grip, but he held fast and deepened his kiss, smiling against her lips as her body melted against his. Then he slowly released first one wrist and then the other.

“Wouldn’t want to get in the way of a woman with a game plan.”

When she smiled demurely, as demurely as a naked and love-flushed woman could smile, he grinned back, both at peace and excited, primed for a lifetime of adventure with Alana.

“Besides,” he said, dangling her lace bra from his fingers, “we’ve got plenty of time to fit everything in. I’m trained up for extra innings.”

Epilogue

You look
ridiculously
beautiful,” Alana’s cousin Sabrina said as she tucked the last tuberose blossom into Alana’s hair.

Alana turned and surveyed the women surrounding her. Sabrina was radiant in a dress of the softest sea-foam blue. She’d flown in from her film shoot in LA to be Alana’s maid of honor. Jackie, Alex’s wife and Sabrina’s sister-in-law, stood next to her in a simple column of pale green silk. Gossamer gold made her good friend Chloe, with her honey-blond hair and wide eyes, seem like an angel. The group of them gave the impression that they’d walked out of the fairy village. But even though they were lovely, Alana knew each stood strong in her own passions and gifts and determination to love. Alana was proud to be in their company.

Alana lifted Lauradore from her lap and stood. The cat had taken to sleeping curled up with Piers the bear, but on her day rounds she preferred Alana’s lap. “Lucky me to have my cousins and friends as bridesmaids,” she said. “You’ll keep me from fleeing out the door.”

“If word got out that you even considered bolting, there’d be a line of women waiting for Matt at the exit to the ranch,” Sabrina said.

Alana elbowed her. “You’re supposed to say what a catch
I
am.”

“Catch extraordinaire. Definitely,” Chloe chimed in.

There’d been a day when Chloe had been jealous of Alana. Not anymore. Since Chloe married Alex’s dear friend Scotty Donovan, she and Alana often got together to compare notes on being women working in a field dominated by men. Ranchers could be just as prejudiced and stubborn as baseball owners.

“We’d better get down there,” Jackie urged.

“Where’s your something old?” Chloe asked. “I’m superstitious—goes with the game.”

“Which game—marriage or baseball?” Sabrina asked.

Sabrina was the only one among them without a man. Not that she didn’t have suitors; a man would have to be brain-dead and blind for Sabrina not to catch his attention. She just hadn’t met a man who’d caught hers. And no one in the group liked the well-known actor who’d been on a campaign to win her. He was handsome and outwardly charming, but there was something about the man that Alana just did not trust. She wanted Sabrina as happy and carefree as she was, but Derrick Ainsley wasn’t the kind of man who could cherish Sabrina the way she deserved to be cherished.

“Both,” Chloe said. “They’ll both kick your butt if proper rituals are not followed. Superstition’s just a form of respect, a way of showing you’re taking life seriously.”

Alana drew the charmstone from a tiny pocket she’d had sewn into the flowing skirt of her wedding gown and held it out for Chloe to inspect. “Does two thousand years or more suit your standards for old?”

She told them about the stone and then tucked it back into her secret pocket.

Isobel knocked at the door. “Best get going—the guests are getting restless,” she said as she shooed the bridesmaids out of the room.

Before Alana left her bedroom, she glanced out the window. The graceful blades of the windmill rotated lazily in the afternoon sky. To her, it was more than a green power source—it was a symbol of her willingness to take on a variety of risks. Not partying risks or thrilling adventures in exotic places, but risks that paid off in the long run and laid fertile ground for heart and community.

Her bridesmaids preceded Alana and her father down the flower-bordered path that led to the butterfly garden at the edge of the pond. Sophie walked in front of them, her basket full of blossoms.

Alana smiled.

Sophie was supposed to throw the blossoms as she walked, but she’d said she couldn’t bear to part with a single one. She intended to press them and make a wreath for Alana and her dad. Alana was so touched she didn’t have the heart to dissuade her, although they’d both be hearing from Parker—any deviation from his design plans turned him into a madman. He’d transformed into the wedding Gestapo and had nearly driven Isobel and Peg nuts. Alana suspected he was still trying to make up for his late arrival at the Boys and Girls Club gala. Fat chance. Alana liked having him owing her one, even if it was all good family sport.

Besides, it was a good thing Parker had been stuck in traffic that evening and had shown up an hour late. If she hadn’t stood beside Matt greeting her guests, if she hadn’t come to know the deep-hearted side of him, well... who knew the workings of fate?

Her dad squeezed her arm when they reached the end of the path, but her eyes were on Matt. He stood under the arbor of green ferns and flowers that he’d helped the ranch staff build just for the wedding. Who knew the man could wield a hammer even better than he did a bat? He was so unbelievably handsome it hurt to look at him. But Alana planned to never stop looking.

And he was hers. Every heart-melting smile, every inch of world-rocking muscle, every moment of thoughtful, considerate, funny, inspiring Matt was hers. She’d never imagined that love could be a territory she’d adore inhabiting, but it was wonderful.
He
was wonderful. And just as much as he was hers, she was his.

That she could be held so tightly to him, by him, and yet be free at the same time was a miracle she couldn’t have hoped for. Wouldn’t have believed to be possible.

Her dad brushed a kiss to her cheek, and Alana watched as he sat down next to her smiling stepmother. As the soloist began to sing the first of the songs she and Matt had chosen, Alana smiled at her mom sitting a few seats over with her husband, Tom. Her mother and Tom had started a bookstore together, and her mom seemed so much happier in her quieter life with him. Maybe she’d become enlightened and bury the hatchet with Patrice.

Sure she would. Alana bit back a snort of laughter. When pigs fly.

In an unguarded moment earlier that morning, when her mom had helped her slip into her wedding dress, Alana had told her that she should’ve married Tom in the first place.

But if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have had you
, her mother had countered.

There was no argument against truth.

In that moment, Alana had let go of the guilt she’d felt for so many years, guilt for liking her stepmother more than her mother. She might like Patrice, even love her, but there was no substitute for the love she felt for her mother; it didn’t matter that she didn’t like her some of the time. Maybe those sorts of conflicted feelings just came with the territory. Talking to her mother, Alana had felt a knot in her heart dissolve.
Making room for the new
. It was something Matt had said to her as he’d watched Rafael trimming away spiny branches on a honeysuckle vine the day she’d met him. Making room for the new—she was beginning to trust her newly gained sense of life’s possibilities with a strength that surprised her.

She reached for Matt’s hand, and a melting sizzle of happiness ran though her as he tugged her close to his side. She breathed in the scent of honeysuckle and roses wafting down from the arbor above. She imagined that from this day forward, the scent of the mingled flowers would carry happiness in its wake.

“Pinch me or I’ll think I’ve died,” Matt said, sharing one of his special smiles.

She leaned close and put her lips against the cusp of his ear. “This is your very last chance for the nanny and the cook,” she whispered with a laugh.

“Maybe I should rethink the part about the cook.” He grinned.

She nudged him with her bouquet. Everyone knew what a rotten cook she was. “Too late now.”

“Ahem.” The minister cleared her throat, smiled at them and began the ceremony.

Alana fingered the charmstone and sent a silent word to Nana. Because of the challenges she’d had to face since Nana had left her the ranch, she’d discovered inner resources she’d never known she possessed.

She suspected that Nana had even hoped she’d find love in the process, likely would’ve planned it in if she could have. But Alana’s toughest lesson had been admitting to herself that she could be loved, even though she wasn’t perfect.

Nana probably knew that too.

Alana squeezed Matt’s hand and lost herself in the infinite love she saw in his eyes. The feelings she had for him were more than real, they were the pulse of her soul
.
To be able to both love and like a man had been a revelation. A revelation that kept on stunning her every day she woke up in Matt’s arms.

The reception and dinner were set up in and around the butterfly garden and the pond. Sophie had decked out the fairy village with blossoms and miniature garlands and was giving guided tours. The stone Iris had given her sat proudly in the center.

Alana’s brother Damien had come from Patagonia to serve as a groomsman. He’d landed a fellowship at the regional bird observatory, so she’d see more of him soon. She made a mental note to ask him where birds slept. Not knowing still bugged her.