The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance (22 page)

I was so scared that the way she was feeling, her depression would have some sort of effect on the pregnancy. Even if I found out who was behind the murder today, and I went to Sophie with the report before dinner that night, it would not change the fact that her father was dead. It might put her mind at ease a little bit, but it wouldn’t fill the hole that had been ripped inside her.

“Just about a month or so,” I told him.

“Congratulations,” he said simply, as he stood and shook my hand. He gave me one of the rare smiles that he reserved for special occasions. I thanked him. The news wasn’t really supposed to slip out right then, but it had and he had taken it…
not badly
. Had he not taken it badly? It was hard to tell because he was inscrutable.

In the business, you aimed to produce heirs so that you could keep the shit going generationally. All the wealth remained in the same family, getting bigger and longer the further the line went into the future. He was probably happy for me, or maybe he was surprised that it had happened so fast.
I
had sure been surprised. Maybe he was shocked that Sophie and I were doing it at all. I had no idea what he thought, and the most likely scenario was he was not going to tell me.

Me… I barely knew what to think anymore. I left.

Did I owe him some sort of thank you? Did he expect one? I could see the way an interaction like that could feel awkward for both of us. He talked to me less like I was just another man first and then like I was his only and oldest son second. I am sure that it was not his intention to deliver the woman who I would fall in love with into my arms, but he had, and in a way, I had him to thank for that.

My father was telling the truth. He could lie and
had
lied, even to me when he had to, but he was telling the truth about this. I had no doubt. Something was wrong, but it went deeper than what I originally suspected—and that scared me.

Sophia

Marcelo would have let me stay home from the funeral if I had asked him to.

I had spent nearly the entire two months since I had received the phone call from my mom telling me dad was dead in bed, doing nothing. It was more accurate to say that I was trying to do nothing. What I was doing instead was ruminating on the darkest thoughts that I could surrounding what had happened and how. Of course, that was what I was doing. I was so good at it after all.

I had completely refused to see the body or to hear more about the event than I absolutely needed to. My imagination was colorful enough to fill in the blanks that I didn’t want filled and to apply the horror that such an event obviously needed.

It was absolutely gruesome to imagine your parent dead. It was more gruesome to imagine them being murdered. What had my dad been thinking right before it had happened? Had he felt pain? It pained me to think that it had been slow and painful for him. It pained me even more to think about who could possibly have done it.

Marcelo and his family crossed my mind because Marcelo and his family always crossed my mind. It didn’t make sense that the Orsinis would have anything to do with it, but who knew? What the hell made sense anymore anyway? Nothing—because my father was dead. His life had been taken from him—and now he was gone. It made no sense—and it was not fair.

Maybe if I stayed still long enough, I would become part of the furniture.

It mattered and didn’t matter who it was that murdered my dad because at the end of the day he was still dead and I still didn’t know what the hell was going to happen with my marriage. Was that it then? Dad was dead… did that mean the marriage was off? Our marriage was legal and binding in every way despite the fact that it had been arranged and that we hadn’t known each other when we got together. I hated to think of it, but I couldn’t help the fact that I did. I was in such low spirits that dark thoughts came to me with far more ease than bright ones. Marcelo was my husband, but one of the men for whose sake we had been married was dead. What did that mean for us? Were we
still
married? I wanted to still be married. My marriage had become a source of such gratification and happiness recently. The presence of Marcelo was one of the few things that was keeping me going, both literally and figuratively.

Everything had excited me. I was excited about the baby, and now, we had another wedding to plan,
our
wedding, the way that we wanted to do it. I had been thrilled, delirious with happiness, and just as fast as I had gotten it, it was gone.

The only real indication I had that time had been passing by was Marcelo’s comings and goings. I had turned our bed into a place of mourning, and it wasn’t fair to him. Every single night it surprised me when he would climb into bed with me. I felt like the grief and sorrow radiated off of me, and it was starting to get on the sheets and seep into the mattress. There was no lack of beds in the house, but he chose, night after night, to sleep at my side.

Every morning he would wake up earlier than usual and he would wrap his arms around me and ask how I was feeling. I was sleeping so much during the day that my nights were usually sleepless. He would ask me what I was going to do that day, and he would ask me to do something, too. It was always something really simple, like sending an email, or going to Central Park. Easy. The aim was literally just to get me out of bed and give me some sort of goal, however small, to work towards achieving that day.

Every night he would come home, and he would get me out of bed or wherever it was that I was vegetating to have a bath or shower with him. This was the part when I sometimes cried. He never told me to stop or became impatient and left me alone. He would just hold me and let me cry until I was done. When we were in bed, he would tell me everything that he had done that day. Everything. He would tell me whether he went to the store and saw a watch he wanted to purchase, or if a pigeon shit on his car that day,
everything
. He was taking it a lot better than I was. It was
my
father that had been murdered and not his, but still, it couldn’t have been easy being around me when I was like that. I was a complete sad-sack. He was being so sweet and kind to me, and all I could give him were tears and general sadness.

If he had used that time to seek out Alana or any other woman to satisfy him sexually, I wasn’t even in a position to be mad about it. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but there was a difference between cheating on your wife and having a need that she was at the time unable to meet for you. I couldn’t even imagine how unappealing I probably was to him at the moment. I likely looked like one of those stray, mangy dogs off the streets whose coat was dry and dull and who nobody wanted to adopt and take home.

If I had to choose, I would want him to use his hand and basically tough it out, but it wasn’t fair for me to expect his libido to have taken the same dip that mine had. A few times I had rolled into his back at night and asked him to wake up. I just needed to feel
something
and wanted to give
him
something to know that I still wanted him in that way. I felt empty and broken and his body and having him inside me could take that away, even if only for a little while.

Sometimes it worked.

Sometimes I had it in me to please him. The hard part wasn’t being there physically, I loved to feel his hands on me and his cock inside of me. It felt incredible, physically. He filled me so tight; it felt amazing, and he knew exactly what to do with his mouth and hands to make me go wild. It was being there emotionally and psychologically that was difficult. It killed me that I couldn’t be there for him all the times that he needed me to be because, dammit, I wanted to be. I wanted to be there for him so badly; he deserved so much more than a woman who was practically dead inside with him in his bed when he was doing his best every day to carry both of us.

Marcelo had hired a nurse to watch me during the day and make sure I was getting enough food, and she also made me stand up and walk up and down the street a couple times for exercise if nothing else. I
was
still pregnant. I had to make sure the baby didn’t suffer, no matter how much I was. There was no way I would be able to come back from my father’s death
and
losing the baby all in one jump. No way. That would kill me.

The first trimester was over and that was generally the danger zone. We had made it through unscathed, and the pregnancy seemed to be progressing as planned. I had started showing as well, which was sort of exciting. There was nothing there one minute, and it was suddenly there when I had woken up the next day, physical proof that the little life inside of me hadn’t been poisoned by my grief and that—even though my father was dead—there was something, someone, who I needed to keep my chin up for. I was just thirteen or fourteen weeks along, but my lower abdomen curved gently outwards whereas my stomach previously had been flat.

The change was fairly new, so it wasn’t one of the factors that got in the way of dressing for my dad’s funeral. My mother and I were expected to stand together as family, but I wouldn’t do it without Marcelo there with me, too. He was my rock. If he wasn’t there, they would have had to take me away on a gurney because I would not have been able to hold myself up.

One good thing about being pregnant was that nobody made you stand up when you were tired. I held Marcelo’s hand in both of mine, definitely hard enough to hurt him, but he didn’t complain. Not once.

How could one of the brightest, happiest points of my life be followed by this?

Thoughts about what this would change plagued me and made me feel even worse about the whole situation than I already did. Our initial marriage hadn’t been our own, but we had established our own partnership, and we were in love. I prayed that that was what Marcelo felt as well. I didn’t want us to break up,
especially
not then. I wanted him to continue being my husband, and I wanted to believe that the intense and beautiful happiness that I had felt, however fleeting, was real, and that it was possible that we could find it again.

Time was supposed to heal all wounds, and I was counting on that adage proving true now more than ever. If that was the case, then that meant the pain was going to subside and that I was going to start to feel like a whole person again at some point.

***

It was a Sunday.

The only reason I remember it was a Sunday was because Daniella wasn’t home and I had to crawl out of bed and come down the stairs to answer the door when someone rang the bell. It was not Marcelo because it was his house, he had a key. If he had forgotten it or something, he would have rang me on the phone to tell me that he had done that. This was someone else. Whoever it was, I hoped they liked my no-makeup face because that was what they were getting.

I unlocked the door and opened it, squinting at the outdoor light that streamed through the door. Whoever it was pushed past me into the house before I saw who they were. Her high-heeled shoes clicked on the floor, and she looked flawless and polished in a short dress; her hair was perfectly styled like she was going out; and her makeup looked like it had been professionally applied. I was—on the other hand—in a tank top and a pair of comfortable shorts.

Alana Bianchi.

Not even my general state of reduced arousal was enough to kill the resentment and hatred I felt for her when she looked at me like I was wasting her time.

“Alana? Are you lost?” I asked.

She scowled at me.

“Why did you take so long to open the door?” she snapped. “Where is Marcelo?”

I wanted to scream at her, or at least call her every kind of bitch that I thought she was, but strangely, I felt a calm come over me that stopped me in my tracks. This was the woman, the pathetic, desperate woman who tried to break my marriage up by sending me three or four-year-old nudes of herself and Marcelo. This was the woman who had been throwing herself at my husband, long before he became my husband and still was now that we were together. This was the woman who had stormed into my home on a Sunday afternoon like she really had some business here. Alana Bianchi had nothing on me. She was nothing to Marcelo, and she was upset about it. She was behaving like a toddler who had had her favorite toy taken from her, and she was having a tantrum.

“He’s not in. You couldn’t call him?”

The frown on her face told me that she had tried calling him, but he had just ignored her, forcing her to take more drastic measures.

“I know he’s here, why is he avoiding me?” she demanded. She walked towards the stairs and started calling for him like the house was burning down. I pressed a few fingers softly to my temples. She was shrieking.

“Alana, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this is a private property, and if you refuse to remove yourself from the premises, I am going to get the NYPD to remove you for me,” I said. She swung around and looked at me with pure venom. She was vexed, and I wasn’t going to lie. I sort of liked it. She smiled sardonically.

“Oh, little Sophia. I’m surprised that you’re still here. Really, a lot of us thought Marcelo would have gotten rid of you by now and started competing in his own weight class,” she said. She made a show of looking me up and down, but her face dropped when she got about halfway. I looked down and saw what she did. My stomach. She blanched, and I realized she didn’t know that we were expecting. Her eyes slowly traveled back up to mine.

“
My, my
Sophie. Letting yourself go in your married bliss?” she chirped. I smiled and placed a hand on my stomach.

“No, Alana, this is called fourteen weeks of pregnancy. You’ve never had this happen to you, have you? You usually have them terminated before six weeks? Am I right?”

She was speechless. How fucked up was it that I derived so much pleasure goading her.

“No… no. You
aren’t
pregnant. It can't be.”

“Yes, Alana. It can be and it is. That’s what happens when two people are married; they usually have kids after.”

“Marcelo didn’t tell me!” she yelled.

“That’s because it was none of your business, Alana. You aren’t the pregnant one,
I
am.”