The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance (3 page)

Sophia

Maybe it was petty of me to think so, but I believed Marcelo held business dinners at home just to annoy me. The meal was over, and the house was finally silent. I was relieved at the peace, but more than that I was happy that I no longer had to listen to my husband laughing and flirting with other women while I tore my hands to ribbons trying to get the dishes clean.

One of the women around the table with him that night had been Alana. Alana Bianchi. I had had to hear from my mother-in-law, Marcelo’s mom who she was. She had been one of the few friends on his side who had been invited for the wedding. I wondered what the connection between that beautiful, statuesque woman and Marcelo could possibly be, but I had pretty much known it instinctively when I had seen her. They were exes. They used to date, and who knows what else. Maybe I had beaten her to the finish line she was trying to cross with Marcelo by becoming his wife and effectively blocking her prospects.

There was always a
second wife
. Or third. Maybe
that
marriage would actually be real. Maybe she’d get an engagement ring and everything. Marcelo’s mom, Camilla had basically warned me that that one had never really gotten over her son.
Tough
shit
, I thought. Her feelings were none of my business. Whatever unresolved issues she had with Marcelo, she could have brought up at the ceremony when the pastor asked whether anybody had any objection to our being married. Seeing as she hadn’t brought up anything then, she had made the choice to forever hold her peace. I didn’t have to be in the room to know that she had been all over him. I didn’t have to be in the room to know that he had let her flirt with him, knowing I was in the house, as they feasted on a meal
I
had slaved over a hot stove to make.

It wasn’t that I was jealous. There was nothing to be jealous about. I had done it. I was the one with the Orsini last name and she wasn’t. I was the one he went to bed with every night and she wasn’t. I had won the race. It wasn’t a race I had been trying to win, and sure, I didn’t particularly like being in my position, but I was in it…meaning Marcelo had to respect it.

I didn’t care what caliber of trollop he had had in his past life. All I wanted was not to be
exposed
to anything by way of his infidelity or disrespect. It didn’t matter that we weren’t in love, we were
committed,
and he wasn’t going to do that to me.

What the hell was she playing at, continuing to come to the house? An ex was an ex, what did she still want from him? His friendship? Surely he could see the way that she looked at him and put her hands all over him, as if she was checking him for weapons? The disgust I felt was simply because it wasn’t proper. It wasn’t right. I didn’t like her. She seemed like she was the type who would ransack your whole house when you broke up with her and release a sex tape. Honestly, if he was going to cheat on me with anyone, I just didn’t want it to be with her.

I heard him make his way upstairs. I took longer to go up because he didn’t bother clearing any of the dishes from the table. It was late, would I...?

No.

Fuck it.

I loaded the dishes into the dishwasher and started it up. It
wasn’t
cheating. What the hell was the machine there for if not to wash the dishes? I would be awake before him at any rate, and I would be able to unload them before he saw and pretend I did them all by hand. It wasn’t a lie if your husband was being irrational in the first place.

I walked upstairs after him, giving him time to finish in the shower. He didn’t tend to take that long, but I did it out of respect. We were more roommates than a married couple. I didn’t want to be more put upon by him than I already was. In addition to that was the fact that he would be naked. I’d seen him completely disrobed before; I
mean
, we had had sex our wedding night and we slept in the same bed, but it was always easier to withstand his advances when I didn’t have to see him like that.

The body on this guy was the kind built from heavy lifting in a gym, not the leaner, more sinewy look that guys who built their bulk on construction sites or doing other manual labor had. He was proportioned like a perfect GI Joe toy, wide in the shoulders and back and tapering into a narrow waist and hips. Every part of him was swollen with muscle, and I was painfully aware of it. Black hair grew on his chest, arms, and legs. I liked that he didn’t get rid of it.

He was
something else
. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, and he was mine to jump on every night. Why was he such a pain in the ass? Why did he make it so difficult for me to want him? It wasn’t the
wanting
him that was difficult. I wanted him, and I wanted him
bad
. It was acting on that want. Let’s face it. We were married, who the hell else was I going to go to when I wanted to get off? I hadn’t looked left or right since we had gotten together, and I trusted… or at least I hoped that he hadn’t either.

It didn’t matter that the vows were fake; we had still made them. Did I want to have and hold this guy until the day that one of us died? No. I barely knew him. All I wanted was to get through every day as it came, being married to his ornery, chauvinistic, macho, annoying ass.

I walked into the master bedroom and saw him lying on the bed. He was on his back, shirtless. He only slept in his underwear. I silently stole into the bathroom to shower and get ready to sleep. The bathroom adjoined to the massive walk in closet so I didn’t have to go into the bedroom when I wanted to get changed. I found it hard to believe that this was the sort of closet he had in his house when he was a bachelor. It was massive. It was like an entire room in its own right. It was like the closet that Big built for Carrie on ‘
Sex and the City’
but on steroids.

My clothes went on one side and his went on the other. I didn’t have that many clothes, but I knew he would have let me convert one of the guest rooms we had around the house into a dressing room if I wanted it. All I had to do was ask. Marcelo lacked many things. In the time that I had known him, he had not been particularly charming, nor had he been very pleasant. He was tetchy with a short fuse, and he was very busy, always in and out of the house or on the phone with someone.

I would give him one thing though. The man was generous.

I hadn’t been married before, but I knew that it wasn’t custom for the people getting married to give wedding gifts to one another. Marcelo had given, no, he had
showered
me with gifts. Beautiful boxes from exclusive Fifth Avenue boutiques with dresses, lingerie, jewelry, accessories, all sorts of things in them. The man himself was always dressed to the nines, even if he was just leaving the house to go to work.

His cufflinks alone cost more than some people’s rent. The Orsini family was a moneyed bunch, and as their newest daughter, I was benefitting handsomely, with gifts I didn’t ask for or particularly need. Maybe he thought that if he kept giving me things, I would forget that I could divorce him. Maybe he had a truly generous spirit and liked to give the woman whom he was falsely telling the world that he loved, the finest in garments, jewelry, and adornments. If he couldn’t love me with his heart,
at least he could love me with his bank account
.

The one thing he had insisted on was that we share a bed—from the absolute start. He wasn’t going to have his wife sleep in a different room than he did. That wasn’t a
real
marriage
according to him. I understood, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t uncomfortable for me. We had consummated our marriage the night of our wedding and had kept sharing a bed, but that didn’t mean it was getting all that much easier.

Maybe I wasn’t who he wanted as a wife. We didn’t choose each other. Nobody could say I didn’t make an effort. Since the wedding, I had made an effort with my nightwear. He had bought me tons of nightwear sets, everything from La Perla to Stella McCartney. The least I could do was wear them. There were so few concessions that I was willing to make for him, but this one wasn’t hard. It showed I was grateful for the gifts and that I was above going to bed in a ratty t-shirt that used to belong to my father. If I couldn’t please him in any other way, I was going to at least do that much.

He noticed me and propped himself up on his elbows to look at me. His face spread into a smile.

“Sophia, honey, what are you doing standing there? Come here, give your husband a kiss.” He laughed then, as if he had made a fantastic joke. The laughter, the jovial mood…he was drunk. Too much whiskey.

I sighed and walked over to him, slipping off the nightgown I wore over my shoulders. His eyes were watching my movements.  He seemed to like the slinky black nightie I had on. It was fitted over my breasts and skimmed my curves, stopping just before my knees. He made a lewd show of adjusting his growing erection with his hand as he watched me approach.

“Come here,” he growled. It wasn’t the first time he had made a pass at me when he was drunk. He made passes at me all the time, drunk or sober. I was the one who couldn’t stand to have him on top of me. Of course, he had been, but most of the time I was too mad at him to stand his hands on me like that.

He was
drunk
. The usual routine would be he would try to grope me, and I would tell him I didn’t want it. He would complain, and I would tell him I wasn’t in the mood. He would get a little steam in him and declare—like a king—that I had to have sex with him because he was my husband.

I would roll over with my back to him and tell him I was tired. He would change tack, trying to turn me on, kissing my neck and feeling me up, but I wouldn’t budge. He would give up eventually and fall asleep. If he annoyed me too much, I would just leave. There was no lack of beds in the house. Sure, this
particular
one was my marital bed, but some nights, most nights, I had a lousy partner. I climbed into my side of the bed and turned my bedside lamp on in order to check my phone and get a few pages read of the book on my nightstand.

“Sophia... Sophia
Orsini
,” he mumbled, kissing the back of my neck. He moved my hair out of the way nipping and sucking the skin there. I sighed. Sophia Orsini. His
wife
.
Me
.

“I’m tired, Marcelo,” I told him. I felt him inhale deeply and bury his face in my nape. His body was pressed into my back. He was long and powerful. His body was hard and lean; not a spare ounce of fat anywhere. His hard penis pressed into my ass, I knew he wanted me to feel it.

I sighed and closed my eyes. It felt
good
. It felt good to be desired by my husband, especially given the circumstances. At the basest level, I was just a woman and he was just a man. Legally we weren’t allowed to seek our release with anyone but each other. If I was the type who could divorce the feelings I had for a person from their genitals and the act of sex, then this marriage would be a match made in heaven.

He moved from directly behind me and pushed my shoulder down into the bed so I was flat on my back and he was above me. Just a hint of whiskey, its sweet edge was on his breath, and I could taste it when he lowered his mouth to mine, kissing me deeply. I put my hands on his face, feeling his rough stubble, and ran them down his neck and chest.

He grasped both my hands and broke the kiss.

“Your hands,” he said.

“What?”

“These hands,” he said, running his thumbs offer my palms. “These aren’t a woman’s hands. Why does it feel like
sandpaper
when my wife touches me?”

I felt my face heat and anger bubble up inside me.

“
Sandpaper
?”

“When was your last manicure?”

He looked at my hands, inspecting them. I tried to snatch them back, embarrassed, but he held them fast.

“Marcelo, you’ve had me handwashing dishes since we got married. You can’t expect them to feel like a baby’s bottom when I’m washing dishes all the time.”

“That’s no excuse. Get some gloves or something. I want you to feel like a woman when you touch me.”