She put one hand on the railing and looked over at Derek. He was her good friend but there were so many things about her he didn’t know. The embarrassing stuff that she shared with no one. And this was something that she never needed to tell him. This bit of humiliation had died with Jose.
She looked into Derek’s eyes and started to tell him what she always did when she was asked about the baby. But in her heart, she remembered Jose saying that a baby and a family would stop him from looking outside of their marriage bed for company. That a family would ground him in a way nothing else could.
Derek thought she’d have some sort of easy answer. Her modeling career hadn’t been conducive to children, but she came from a big family as he did. It might be a bit old-fashioned but he had assumed she would end up wanting kids after she married. But her hesitance told him there was something more to it. He’d struck a nerve that he hadn’t meant to and he should have just let it go.
But this was Bianca, and there was that look of sadness in her eyes that he didn’t glimpse very often. He put his hand on her shoulder, felt that spark of awareness and shoved it down. She needed a friend not a guy who was turned on by her. That damned perfume of hers wasn’t helping. It was subtle and floral and when the wind blew, he couldn’t help inhaling a little more deeply.
“Bia?” he asked. “It’s okay if you don’t want to answer me.”
She just glanced over at him with those big brown eyes of hers and he was lost. He realized this was exactly how he’d let himself get friend-zoned by her. She had very emotive eyes and he had always been suckered into wanting to comfort her, to be there for. To slay dragons for her. But Jose was dead so if he was the dragon there wasn’t anyone to slay.
Besides she’d had the fairy tale: first-love marriage with Jose. That wasn’t the problem.
“Hey, forget I asked. I was just making small talk,” Derek said even though that was the farthest thing from the truth.
He heard his old man’s voice in his head: start out as you mean to go on. Well, lying didn’t seem like a really good place to start. But he’d asked her to be his pretend fiancée, not his real one. So maybe that meant they both were entitled to their secrets.
“It’s okay. It’s just that once I got married my life changed... I mean my priorities changed and then I got pregnant and once I held Beni in my arms, everything just sort of...” She paused, glancing over at him and arching one eyebrow. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“Why would I?”
“Well, when I had my son it was like a veil was lifted from my life and I realized how shallow I had been. When I considered that little face I wanted to be more. To be better. To give him the world—not material things—but experiences. It changed me.”
He could see that. She pretty much glowed whenever she talked about her son. And Derek had seen her in town with the little boy and she seemed to be in her element when she was with him. He couldn’t reconcile it but she almost seemed prettier when she talked about her son.
He remembered something his brother Hunter had said once...that women in love were more beautiful. And he finally saw that. He saw it on Bianca’s face when she talked about her son. He had to be very sure that he was careful when she moved in with him. She might be his secret crush from adolescence but she was a woman now, a mother, and he couldn’t afford to explore a “crush” unless she was looking for the same thing.
He took a deep breath, put his hands on the wooden railing and looked out over the lake. He’d grown up on the Rockin’ C but he’d spent a lot of time with his dad on the golf course and hanging out at the club after school.
And as he looked at the moonlight reflecting on the water he thought about how much his town had changed. There was now a NASA training facility on the Bar T. Bianca was a famous supermodel, his brother a former NFL wide receiver. It was crazy.
“I don’t think anything has lifted a veil from my life,” Derek said out loud. He was still the same inside as he’d always been: determined to do whatever he had to in order to keep on track with his medical career. He’d left the ranch at fifteen and Cole’s Hill to go to college, finished undergrad in three years and then gone on to medical school. There had been no stopping him.
“Maybe that’s why this setback with being named cardiology chief has been such a shock. I just have always been focused on becoming a surgeon and then on making sure I was the best.”
“You are the best,” Bianca said. “You’re lucky, Derek. You’ve always known exactly what your purpose is. Some of us stumble around until we find it.”
“You? You never seemed to be stumbling.”
She threw her head back and laughed, and he listened to the sound of it, smiling. She had a great laugh.
“That’s just because I only let people see what I want them to.”
“Like the Wizard of Oz?” he asked. They’d both been in the play in middle school. He’d been the Tin Man and she’d been Dorothy.
“Just like that. ‘Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain’ should be the motto for my life.”
“But not now, right? You have Beni,” Derek said.
She shrugged. “I’m still faking it sometimes. I mean, he has given me purpose, but being a mom is tough. Every day as I reflect on what has gone on, I wonder if I’ve screwed him up...that’s why I want to think this engagement over. I don’t want to say yes and then realize that this decision is the one that ruined him.”
Derek nodded. He was pretty confident in his personal life and in the operating theater but there were times when something went wrong and he had to keep going over the surgery to see what had happened. Had he missed something? Had the error been his? How could he keep it from happening again? He’d never thought that Bianca would be like that.
She seemed confident and able to conquer anything. Seeing that she wasn’t perfect made him want her even more. It made her real. Not the image of the girl he’d had a crush on, but the real woman.
* * *
This night had taken a turn and she wasn’t sure she was that upset by it. She had been saying that she wanted something different to happen. That she was tired of the Wednesday night blind dates set up by her mom that coincided with her dad taking Beni and her brothers out to dinner at the Western Two Step. Her father had missed out on bonding with Beni after his birth as they had been living in Spain. So her father was determined to make up for lost time. And the Wednesday nights with the boys were a long-established tradition in their family. It was a sports bar of sorts that had a huge gaming area in the back; they served what her father called “man food.” Pretty much just burgers, steaks and fried everything. It was a tradition in their family for as long as Bianca could remember.
When she’d been in her teens every Wednesday she and her mom would have a spa night and go and get pedicures and manicures or facials or massages. And have a “girl’s night out.” Somehow her mom’s desire to see her with a new man had taken over girl’s night. Bianca knew that saying she was engaged to Derek would probably make her mom happier than just about anything
