The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance (12 page)

“I’m glad,” I said.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked.

“No occasion,” I shrugged.

“You’re all dressed up, you cooked, and you sent Daniella home early. What is it? Tell me.”

“It’s
nothing
. Honest. I just wanted to have a nice sit-down dinner with you. Maybe wear some of those gorgeous dresses you keep getting me.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said playfully.

“If you don’t like it, I guess I could just not do it again. I’m sure there’s a
Little
Caesar’s
menu in this place somewhere.”

He laughed.

“No, I like it. It’s nice. Like a date.”

Everything was going great. He had asked for seconds of the cake and was eating it with a cup of espresso. I peered over at him. His eyes were down. The line of his profile was flawless. Smooth. No weird bumps or crags. Perfect. If our baby was a boy, I wanted him to grow up to look like Marcelo. Even if he ended up taking after me, I hoped he at least got Marcelo’s eyes. They were so deep. Every emotion was intensified through them. Was it shallow to sit there and be happy that my husband was so attractive? If I was going to focus on the positive, then I had to start somewhere. At the very least, unless something went wrong, our baby would be
beautiful
. Marcelo was strong and solidly built, so maybe our baby would be robust too. Nice and fat with golden skin and dark eyes.

They would absolutely have all the best. The one thing that was certain was that we could definitely support a child financially. I smiled thinking about Marcelo taking our child to the park, or letting them sit up on his shoulders. What was wrong with the fantasy of a perfect life? The fact that I could even
see
it had to mean something. There was no way we could be together,
really
be
together if we didn’t even think it was a possibility.

What if it was? Stranger things had happened. We—at the very least—liked each other. We were both adults, and we were married. If our life could look anything like the two weeks we had spent away hiding out, then maybe this could work. If he could hold me the way he had in that tub every night then maybe we could call each other husband and wife and actually mean it. Maybe a real relationship was possible. Till then, neither of us had really been trying our hardest. The attraction was there. If we put the work in, it could be fantastic.

I smiled, looking at the father of my future child.
Our
future child. He suddenly looked up at me. He looked shocked for a second before he smiled back.

Marcelo

If Sophia had any physical imperfections, it was the fact that when she smiled, a dimple appeared on her left cheek but not her right. I had first noticed it when were away from home, at the first hotel at least a few weeks into being married to her. Getting a smile out of her was like playing the slots, you just kept trying and were actually shocked when you finally got the jackpot. I could look past the facial asymmetry, of course. It was like her freckles. It was charming and didn’t take away from her overall beauty. When she smiled, she looked cute. It softened her face and was infectious.

Dinner had been amazing. She had done all this for
me
. I was expecting to get to the house and find her in the shower or bed, or laid out on the couch or something. She had been like that ever since getting back home. She insisted it was nothing, and some days she was just fine, but there was no good reason for her to be as worn out as she seemed to be all the time that was not medical. She hadn’t really eaten much either. If it went on, I was going to get the doctor in.

I had been waiting since we sat down for her to tell me what it was that we were celebrating. It wasn’t her birthday, I knew that, and it wasn’t any sort of holiday or anniversary. She just wouldn’t budge. She didn’t need a
reason
to do all this for me. I wasn’t going to stop her if she wanted to do it though. Maybe that was it, she just wanted to do it. Maybe she was feeling domestic and wanted to impress me.

Whatever it was, I
liked
it. I liked that she was thinking of me, and I liked eating her food. It was delicious. The wine and the ambiance were nice, too. I hadn’t been on a real date in a long time, and I had definitely not been on one with her before. I hadn’t had to do anything to try and woo her, she had just been dropped in my lap. She was definitely a prize, but I wanted to be able to feel like I had
earned
her. I wanted it to be more than the agreement between our fathers that was keeping her with me.

She had on one of the dresses that I had gotten her. It fit like a glove. It was black, and the heels she had on made her legs go on for miles. I knew she liked the things that I got her, but she obviously wasn’t easily swayed by them. Was she one of those girls who liked talking by wood burning fires, walks on the beach… shit like that? I would go
geocaching
with her if that was the kind of girl she was. I wanted to see that smile again. I wanted it to be because of me. This side of her was new, and I wanted to know more.

“What are you doing Friday night?” I asked her.

She looked up from the cake slice she was picking at. No wonder she kept her figure as a chef. She hardly touched the food she prepared.

“I don’t have anything planned. Why? Are you having people over?”

“No, I want to take you out.”

“Where?”

“The Met. There should be a show there Friday night. We can go see it.”

“Are you asking me out on a date?”

“Are you about to turn me down?”

“No, I mean,
yes
. I’d love to go.” She did it again; she smiled at me.

***

She was still in the bathroom putting her makeup on while I was picking out a tux when Friday evening rolled around. The bathroom and the closet had an adjoining door, so I could see her and she would be able to see me if she looked away from the mirror.

“Babe?” I called.

“Hm?” she answered.

“What did you decide to wear?”

“The red dress without the straps,” she said.

Elie
Saab
Fall
2010
. She would look great in it. I knew because I had gotten it for her for the exact reason that she would look great in it. It amused me a little that she didn’t know who the designer was and likely didn’t care. Dresses like those were made for women who looked like her. She could name every known edible mushroom variety, but for all she cared, Donatella Versace could be one of my aunts or something. She had had to concern herself with real world issues, so it was understandable that things like fashion weren’t terribly interesting to her. Lucky for her, she was married to me. She finally walked into the closet. She already had on everything but the dress and her shoes, which meant she was wearing a strapless bra and panty lingerie set,
La
Perla
. She smiled shyly as I checked her out. The panties were practically scraps of fabric held together with string. My cock stirred but we
couldn’t
. We’d be late. She put the dress on, and I helped her with the zipper. She turned to face me.

“Is this good?”

“It’s great. Wear the gold earrings,” I told her. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”

I went downstairs for a drink before we headed out. The slit in Sophia’s dress came all the way up to the top of her thigh. Everyone would be staring. Between her beautiful tits in the front of the dress and her legs, they wouldn’t know where to look. I’d been looking forward to this date all week and now that it was here. Fuck, I was
nervous
.

Sure, we could chat during dinner, but what if she didn’t have a good time? She had agreed to go, but what if she had said yes because she thought I wanted her to. I mean, I had asked her out, of course, I
wanted
her to say yes, but what if she had agreed because she thought I liked the opera. I did, but did she? What if she was bored out of her skull this entire time? What if she just ended up taking her phone out and not watching anything? Had she seen ‘
Tristan
und
Isolde’
before?

I knew she liked me. She definitely didn’t
hate
me. That was good, but what if that was as far as it went between us. What if she only ever
liked
me? It never happened like that. Women, even the ones that I had no intention of seeing beyond a one-night stand, fell head over heels in love with me. With Sophie… it was as if our wedding had cut me off at the pass. She was too mad to be attracted to me, and I was too mad to give her a reason to be attracted to me. We had definitely made progress, but what if—in the end—we just weren’t satisfied with one another. We’d definitely be satisfied in
one
way. I had nothing to complain about when it came to sex with her, and with the way she screamed when I fucked her, I felt safe making the same conclusion on her behalf when it came to me. There was that, but there was never any relationship that survived on purely the strength of the sex the couple was having, and I doubted that Sophie and I would be the first.

If it really came to that, there was always divorce. I felt a little bad thinking about it, but it was true. There was no way she hadn’t thought the same thing, especially when I had been giving her every reason to. Maybe she hadn’t, and I just needed to make myself feel better by making myself believe that she had. Things had changed since the guy who was after her had been taken down. We were both a lot more comfortable around each other. We had been having sex more often. A couple times, she had leaned over and kissed me before she went to sleep. There was
something
there, and no one could say we weren’t both trying. It was still a tiny spark, but we were both fanning it with what we could.

But then again, why were we together in the first place? Our dads had been fighting, and now they were amicable because of our union. The fight was between
them
. It had to be because they saw no problem in marrying their two children. They wouldn’t have done that if the beef between them extended to anyone else in the families. They didn’t
actually
think they were making a union that would last when they pulled us arbitrarily out of our respective lives, did they? It was as if they were too arrogant to come to some sort of agreement between them, so they had to make some sort of equal exchange…both of their only children. That was it then, wasn’t it? We were doomed. There was nothing underneath what we were. It was an arrangement in every sense of the word. Christ. I was an
asshole
. This whole arrangement hurt her more than it did me. Hell. Maybe divorcing her would be doing her a favor.

I heard the sound of her heels coming down the stairs. I turned and waited for her to come to the kitchen. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her. It was a much more violent response I felt in my crotch when I saw her fully dressed than any when I had seen her in anything else. She had put the gold earrings on that I had asked her to and a sapphire studded bracelet, as well. When I saw her in her wedding gown, I felt nervous. I was excited. Proud because I was claiming her as mine that day, pretty much. I mean, we
did
have the same last name now. We were announced as Mr. and Mrs. Marcelo Orsini.

Tonight she just looked…
incredibly
sexy. She was breathtaking. Divorce? What’s that? Sophia was
mine
, every last perfect inch of her. What the hell was I thinking? The girl was worth it. What kind of fool lets go of someone like her? Not me.

“Do you like it?” she asked, smoothing the dress down her hips. I had probably stared too hard.

“You look beautiful. Let’s go.”

***

I had paid for the entire box. We were alone if you disregarded the entire rest of the auditorium. It was the closest thing to privacy that we could get. The goal was to watch the show, but I wanted to treat her. We were out on the town.

The lights would be down; we’d be close together. It was romantic. This was a great idea. The central parterre level where we were sitting was amazing acoustically, but the opera glasses helped see the finer details on the stage, makeup and things like that. I kept sneaking glances at Sophia. She was rapt the entire time. Guess she
did
really want to see the show. Her eyes even became glassy with tears at some parts.

She hadn’t cried once since we had gotten together. Well, that probably wasn’t true. She had cried at the wedding, and if that was any indication about the way she felt about me in particular and us in general,
yeah
, she had probably done some crying.

She had said that she liked the opera, but I wasn’t expecting
this
. I had had to deal with crying women before, but they weren’t usually crying because they were overcome by the beauty of ‘
Tristan
und
Isolde.’
She had to have been dragged to the opera when she was a kid. At least once if Frank Dandolo was her dad. Women tended to cry around me when they wanted something, when they realized they weren’t going to make it to the second date, or when they learned that I didn’t actually
want
to introduce them to my parents. They would act like they knew what the score was going into it, but would lose their shit sometimes when they realized I had been serious when I told them they had to leave in the morning and I would not be calling them back.

They used tears as a weapon, and they worked, when they were
real
that was. Crocodile tears just annoyed me. Sophie wasn’t sad. She was moved, but I couldn’t help but reach out for her. I took her hand, which caught her attention. She looked at me. Her green eyes were shiny like the tears would drop at any moment. I rubbed the back of her hand with my thumb.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She swallowed and sniffed a little, looking down.

“I’m fine. It’s just, the performance… it’s beautiful,” she said smiling. I felt this sudden urge to kiss her right then. I leaned forward and did it before I had time to think twice about it. Just a small kiss, on her cheek. She looked surprised. Her eyes became wide as she looked at me as if it was the most unlikely gesture ever.

Her hand was soft and warm, as she gently touched my face. She leaned in and kissed me lightly on the lips.

“Thank you for bringing me,” she whispered. She pulled her thumb along my lower lip a couple of times, getting rid of any of her lipstick that had transferred. I opened my mouth so my tongue made contact with her thumb. She gasped as I sucked the tip of her digit into my mouth. The air between us felt like it was buzzing with electricity. The show she had been so absorbed in a second ago had suddenly become a drone in the background.