As Antonio McDyess dragged her onto the dance floor, Liara Williams told him for the second time: "I'm not dancing with you." His gentlemanly response, "May I walk you back over to your friends?" disarmed her. Antonio picked her up every day after work that summer in Houston. Liara remembers: "He would always ask, 'When do you want to see me again?' I would always say, 'Tomorrow.'"

Five years later, while celebrating Antonio's birthday in Vancouver, the couple embarked on a Whistler day trip. When their driver encouraged them to hike to a waterfall, Antonio saw an opening. "He had a whole speech planned. I was just giddy and laughing; I messed up his flow," says Liara, who was caught off guard by the proposal.

For a year, she researched wedding destinations. "I didn't see anything that inspired me," Liara says. Then, she stumbled upon Cuixmala, an exclusive estate "in the middle of Mexican jungle." She visited alone and found it to be magical. "You could tell they've built the property with a reverence for the natural beauty that was there," she says.

"I trusted her," says Antonio of his decision to allow Liara to surprise him, but as they traveled overland for hours, he did begin to wonder: "Where are we going?" When he first saw Cuixmala, with its roaming zebras and antelope, Antonio says, "It was like a different world." Still, the vision of his bride descending the dramatic staircase at Casa La Loma on their wedding day is the one that evoked maximum emotion. "That one moment felt sacred to me," he says. "I felt lucky; I felt privileged just to have her in my life."

The couple's weekend-long celebration for sixty guests began Friday night with a lively, Mexican-themed welcome at the open-air Casa Alborada. The two had legally married in Santa Barbara before traveling to Mexico. Although their California officiant couldn't make the trip, her husband, screenwriter David Michael Wieger, offered to perform Saturday evening's ceremony. It was his first wedding. "He was so nervous," Liara says, "but he did a lovely job."

A dinner featuring fresh, estate-raised ingredients was served outdoors on a patio overlooking the sea. After fireworks, it was "time to party," Liara says. Even when DJ Goldfinger departed in the wee hours to catch a plane, "we were trying to keep it going; everyone was on the microphone," she says.

A private beach was the setting for a relaxing day of play on Sunday. After bidding farewell at Monday's breakfast, the newlyweds drove north to Puerto Vallarta for a week-long stay. They'll celebrate their first anniversary with a longer honeymoon.

First, however, Liara hopes a month-long volunteer trip to Tanzania will inspire her fiction writing and personal growth. "She likes to explore new things. I try not to hold her down," says Antonio, who told her, "Go do it," when she first broached the subject. Now, he admits, "I want to say, 'Stay—don't go.'"

"I'm sad, too," says Liara, but she knows from welcoming the Detroit Pistons forward home from road trips that even if it's not tomorrow, whenever they're reunited, "It's all good."

>Written by Kim Knox Beckius