Santa Fe Fortune & How to Marry a Matador

regrets.”
    Jess’s heart sank because she knew Evie was right. As much as she believed herself to have fallen in love with Fernando, maybe she needed some distance between them so she could assure herself her feelings were real. She’d be taking a risk, and she knew it. If she walked away now, she stood the chance that Fernando might tell her to never come back. But if he loved her as much as he said, wouldn’t he do her that one small courtesy and wait?

    “How long, Jessica?” Fernando asked. “How long are you asking me to do this? Two weeks? Three months? A year?” He stood in the room of their lovely hotel, his face wrought with pain.
    Jess wrung her hands together, her stomach clenched. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. If she said two weeks, what if she needed one week more? It didn’t seem right for him to place her under a strict deadline.
    “So it could be as much as a year?”
    He studied her with disappointment, his disapproval agonizing. “Beautiful, Jessica. Just perfect. You’re willing to make me wait past my thirty-second birthday.”
    “I thought you loved me.”
    “And I thought the feeling was mutual,” he said, a cold burn in his green gaze. “Forgive me for being a fool.”
    Fernando turned away and began shoving clothes in his backpack.
    Fear sliced through her at the thought that she was pushing him away. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
    “Like what?” he asked, scorching her with his glare. “Like you’re asking me to risk everything? Lose my inheritance—the ranch—on the off chance you might come around?”
    Jess’s cheeks flamed as she spoke past the tightness in her throat. “I never said it was an off chance. ”
    “No?” he asked combatively. “Then give me some odds, why don’t you? Fifty percent? Seventy-five?”
    “Please,” she moaned, tears now streaming down her cheeks. “Fernando, stop!”
    He blew a hard breath, then gathered himself, nabbing his wallet off the nightstand.
    “Where are you going?” she asked, her head and heart crazed with emotion. She was leaving, and he was about to tell her to never return.
    “To settle our bill,” he said, halfway to the door.
    When he stepped into the hall, she called after him, her voice trembling. “I thought it wasn’t about the money.”
    He stopped in his tracks and stared her down. “Honestly,” he said, “I don’t know what it was about.”
    He pulled the door shut with a bang that sent her heart racing and the tears more furiously flowing down her face.
    She’d lost him now.
    It was done.

    Fernando watched Jessica climb into the cab where Eve was waiting, the shadows from Casa Garcia de la Vega looming large ahead. If he wanted an easy way out, he could blame the best friend. But Fernando knew in his heart that had Jessica truly wanted to stay, no amount of congenial history could have convinced her otherwise. Gustavo appeared at his side, Fernando’s best stallion at the ready.
    “You can always go after her,” Gustavo said.
    “I already did,” Fernando replied, stone-faced. He mounted his horse as the taxi started down the drive, Eve turning slightly to give him a guilty glance over her shoulder.
    “Yah!” he commanded, driving his steed forward and alongside the road that carried Jessica’s cab toward the airport. She pursed her lips and peered at him through the glass as he galloped faster. Stop the car , he wanted her to say. Anything to indicate they still stood a chance.
    He followed them past the grove of olive trees, then slowed his horse in the setting sun.
    Jessica turned away, her head dropping on Eve’s shoulder.
    Fernando swallowed past the burn in his throat and beat back the fire in his eyes.
    Then he urged his horse into a run and took off over the desert landscape. He would ride until neither he nor his steed could take any more. But Fernando knew he would never outrace the ache in his soul. It was a scar he’d be forced to wear, just like the one on his thigh. Some battles were worth fighting, and Fernando had never found a contest in which he hadn’t given it his all. Yet sometimes your opponent was tougher than you were, and—no matter how many skirmishes you won—you still wound up losing the war.
    Fernando rode faster, leaning into the Andalusian winds. Tomorrow was his thirty-first birthday, but apparently, nobody remembered but him.

    Eve pulled a tissue from her purse and handed it to Jess, who was weeping on her shoulder. It was