The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance (4 page)

He released my hands and fell back onto the bed. Reaching under the covers he adjusted his erection.

“Look what you did, Sophie,” he said. He had taken to calling me Sophie when he was trying to seduce me or was drunk enough. He pushed the covers down and revealed his sizeable bulge. “I can’t go to sleep until you do something about it.”

“
Do something
?”

He grinned lasciviously, eyes trained right at my cleavage.

“I would ask you to hop on and take a ride, but I want you to use your mouth.”

That
was it.

I threw the covers off and pulled my nightgown on.

“Fuck you, Marcelo,” I said. I heard him call to me, asking what he had done wrong as I left, slamming the door behind me. A petulant action, but it made me feel a little better. I gripped the sides of the gown and pulled them securely over my chest like I wanted to keep myself hidden.

How dare he?

How
dare
he?

Sandpaper
? He wants it to feel like a woman when I touch him? Fuck him and fuck his handwashing rule that got me to this point in the first place. I chose the guest room furthest from the master bedroom. It was finished in ivory, cream, and dark brown tones. Extremely masculine. I hated it, but it would do. The important thing was he wasn’t anywhere near me that night. I self-consciously wrung my hands together.

Shit. He was sort of right. They weren’t soft like the women he probably knew who didn’t have jobs or didn’t have to wash their own dishes by hand. I rifled through the guest bathroom for some lotion, the guest rooms were stocked like hotel rooms. It was ridiculous. Marcelo probably thought it made him look generous, but it just made him look wasteful.

I resented everything about him when he wound me up. I flopped onto the bed and got under the covers. I cried. Like a baby. I was upset about Marcelo’s treatment that night, but it was the stress, too. It had been two weeks and nothing,
nothing
from my life was the same. Nothing. I didn’t live in the same place. I wasn’t working. I was married, and I had made the soul-crushing discovery of my father’s hidden life. I had gone from single and independent to married and stuck under my husband’s thumb.

I was still coming to terms with the fact that I was effectively a mob wife. Before that, I was a mob boss’s daughter and I hadn’t had a clue. The man who sat at dinner with me every night growing up was the head of some of the city’s most illicit crimes. Our home, everything in it, my tuition, hell, even the restaurant where I worked…had been bought with money he had gotten through...

God
. I was innocent. Why did I have to have this as part of my family history?

How many girls in New York got to nearly their thirtieth birthday without knowing that their fathers were involved in organized crime?

It was a couple days before my father had told me that I was getting married. I didn’t know the events were related, but it made sense when it was spelled out for me. I never knew the true nature of my father’s business. All I knew was that it spared us the fear of having to live in a neighborhood where we heard gunshots at night.

I had been supervising dinner service at the restaurant. There were a few VIP guests who had booked the chef’s table, and I had to come up with something special for them that was not included on the menu. I remember that day as if the events were taking place in real time. I was trying to come up with a flavor profile that would complement the duck I wanted to serve as the main course. Orange was the obvious choice, but I didn’t do
obvious
. I had my friend Elena in the kitchen with me, helping me come up with the special dishes. She worked as a hostess there, but I trusted her palate.

I heard some men walk into the restaurant. There were about four in their party. I heard the maître d’, David, tell them that we were not yet open but would be opening for dinner service if they could come back in a few hours.

“You’re not open for dinner tonight,” one of the men said.

David was about to say something, but the loud bang of a gunshot cut him off. The sound was deafening, like nothing I had ever heard before. People sometimes compared the bang of a gunshot to the sound of a car backfiring or of fireworks exploding on the Fourth of July, but this was no firework show.

I had been knocked to the floor and had plugged my ears, screaming. What was happening? I was paralyzed. Was everyone okay? The loud bangs cut my thoughts off as they began to form. For the first time in years, just force of habit, I began reciting the ‘Hail Mary.’ I could feel tears on my face, and my heart felt like it was in my throat.

It came to an end as fast as it had begun. I stayed down, waiting to hear the wail of police sirens, of the fire department, a SWAT team,
someone
.
Anybody
who could tell me what was happening, why it was happening, and make sure it never happened again.

It never came. Nobody came.

Sebastian, one of my chefs had come to get me, helping me up from the floor. Not five minutes later, my mom had come by and picked me up, taking us to her and my dad’s place, the house where I grew up. The man I had known all my life as my father had hugged me, glad that I was okay. He then, as calmly as if he was telling me about what had happened on a re-run of ‘
Empty Nest,’
told me that the people who had come to his restaurant and shot the place up were sent by one of his rivals.

Rivals.

His rivals in what? Did they support the Mets instead of the Yankees?

If only it were that trivial.

They had been sent by Agosto Orsini. This man was his rival in that he controlled one of the most powerful and influential mob families in New York, and my father controlled another. They were apparently at odds, the two men. The rivalry ran deep, deep enough that Orsini felt he had to send people to my dad’s restaurant to send a message. Orsini. The same Orsini family into which I had just been married.

Agosto was Marcelo’s dad. My father-in-law.

Marcelo and I had been pawns used by our fathers to broker a peace treaty. As long as they were family, they couldn’t fight, or at least, they wouldn’t fight. The restaurant had bounced back, having had repairs done, and thankfully, none of my crew had been injured or killed in the shootout. I ached to get back to work. It was the one thing I truly wanted because nothing at all was normal anymore. This marriage had stolen away everything that was stable in my life and I was flailing. Where did I belong?

The position of Marcelo Orsini’s housewife was not going to do it. I needed more to live for than pleasing him and cleaning his house. I resolved to go back. Next week. No, that was too far away.
Tomorrow
. I’d be back in the kitchen tomorrow. If he didn’t like it, he could kiss my ass.

Marcelo

She had ended up sleeping in a different room. It was one thing to be mad…but
come
on
. Not only was my wife frigid, she also couldn’t take a joke? She must have been doing it to punish me. It was a miracle and a crying shame that I slept in a bed with a gorgeous brunette who was legally obligated to have sex with me and we had only gotten physical twice since the wedding.

Two times.

Both unforgettable. Both fucking incredible, but still only two.

Why wasn’t she attracted to me?

I shook my head. No, she had to be attracted to me. She
was
. I saw the way she would look at me sometimes, the way her body would press into mine when I kissed her. On our wedding night, we had been riding the wave of the ceremony. She looked breathtaking in that dress. That very
expensive
dress my family paid for. The least she could have done was let me take it off of her. It had been easy that time.

We had both wanted it, and after I had kissed her at the ceremony earlier, I couldn’t wait to get another taste. It was in the hotel before we left the next day for the honeymoon, and both of us had been drinking at the reception. For the sham of a wedding that it was, our parents really outdid themselves trying to make it look real. That fucking corset back had taken ages to get off, but her body inside the dress when I finally peeled her out of it was so,
so
worth the effort.

She was not a virgin, at least, at age twenty-seven she shouldn’t have been. If she had been, she certainly wasn’t one now. I had nearly torn the lacy, delicate bridal lingerie to shreds, trying to get at her. Her soft, fragrant skin and her championship figure… I had no problem
whatsoever
taking her down.

The second time was our first night back in the city after the honeymoon. I had gotten home before her, and she wasn’t picking up when I called her. Irritated, and yeah, maybe a
little
worried, I sat up waiting for her. She got back to the house just after midnight. She was smiling and happy when she walked through the door. I was fucking livid. She was my
wife
. She was an Orsini. That meant there were places she couldn’t afford to go strolling through any more like it was no big deal. That meant that there were more than a few people who wanted to get to me and were not above using her to do it.

She claimed she had been at her friend’s house, Elena…or Ilyana…or something like that, and they had just been catching up since the wedding. I had no reason not to believe her, but I was still mad that she hadn’t told me anything or called me to tell me that she would be late. When I told her she couldn’t do that anymore since she was married she had told me playfully to stop being such a grouch. She had put her arms around my neck and purred sweetly that she was sorry she made her husband so upset. It was kind of cute, I won’t deny it.

I didn’t fuck around when she would get like that. We weren’t on bad terms; we just weren’t the warmest of couples if you know what I mean. She was likely still upset about the arrangement, and I was just trying to make her into the wife I wanted her to be for me, which she was strongly pushing against. When she got like that, flirty and sweet, I relished it. I got in as many touches and kisses as I could because it would only be a matter of time before she was mad at me again.

She was clearly drunk, and I had lost count of the whiskeys I had had since I had been waiting for her. She ran her hands up and down my chest, and I had groped handfuls of her perfect ass. Call it getting carried away, but right then, she wasn’t mad at me, and I wasn’t going to throw the opportunity away. We had fucked, right there on the living room floor.

We had never managed to get that balance of alcohol and willingness right again. She would always push back when I wanted to have sex. The night before she had practically run away from me. I mean, I know I can be a little much, but she was going to have to get used to it if we were going to continue being married to each other.

Sometimes I actually forgot that that was the new state of my life.
Married
. I mean, it wasn’t like Sophia was making me excited to go home to her every day. She had been upset the night before, but not upset enough not to make coffee in the morning. She was nowhere in sight by the time I was leaving. Why couldn’t my dad have picked someone else to hate, someone with a nice, domestic daughter who would cut the crusts off the sandwiches she made me and suck my dick every night without complaint. Someone who was actually happy to see me and didn’t try to run away from me every chance she got.
Someone who could wash the fucking dishes without smashing half of them into smithereens every night
.

I had never been able to keep girls around long, but fuck it, Sophia was no walk in the park either. I couldn’t speak on her dating history, but women always served very specific purposes for me. They were there to admire, meaning they had to look pretty and they were there for my pleasure, meaning they had to be willing and available for me to fuck whenever the urge arose.

Marriage had been the furthest thing from my mind when my dad brought it up.
I
didn’t have to get married. Why would I want to do something like that? You got married when you had no other choices, and I had
plenty
of choices. Money was never an issue, and when you had money, the other things in life tended to sort of fall into place on their own.

Money got you power. Power got you access, access to whatever you wanted, even women.
Especially
women. There was never any lack of those. Maybe it was better that my dad had gone ahead and picked Sophia because there was definitely no chance that the women who ran in my circles would be any kind of decent wife material. Shit, they’d be even worse at the dishes than my darling wife was. They would run the charge on my black card up sky high before becoming bored and—maybe—develop a drug habit or pester me to let them go off to Europe or somewhere like that.

I sighed. At least with girls like that, girls like Alana, they wouldn’t be as disappointed with the man they ended up getting married to. They would have lower expectations. At least they would know the kind of person they were becoming involved with and they wouldn’t try to change me. They wouldn’t have a prestigious job they were giving up, and they wouldn’t be so bull-headed about submitting to me.

I took my time getting to the meeting that day. It was at one of my father’s restaurants, and besides the fact that I really wasn’t that keen on going, there couldn’t have been much that needed my attention anyway. Sophia and I were married. That was the greatest of my father’s issues—and it had been solved. Our territories had been merged, and our force strengthened against outsiders.

It was a win-win for everyone involved… except—of course—Sophia and I.

I made my appearance at the meeting and let the men mostly talk amongst themselves. The more my mind wandered, the more I thought about Sophia. The fact that we were at a restaurant also made me think about her. She had been so mad at me last night. Was that going to become a pattern with her? Sleeping in another bedroom when she was upset with me? Because if it was, we would never be in the same bed again. I would never be able to touch her again. The thought pissed me off, but mixed in with the feeling was
some
guilt. Maybe I had hit a sore spot for her. Maybe she was tired and just not in the mood to deal with my teasing, even if I didn’t mean it maliciously.

Did she think I did? Was that why she was so angry? Did I have to make it up to her? I sighed. She was so hard to read. She wouldn’t tell me like a normal woman what she liked and what she wanted me to get for her. She reacted with the same wooden polite gratefulness to all the gifts I bought for her. Diamonds didn’t seem to make her any more excited than new dresses.

The conversation the men were having had mostly turned into a dull drone, as I thought about salvaging my marriage. Then, Louis, a big guy and one of my favorites called my name.

“Marcelo, we have some bad news. It’s about your wife,” he said. I raised an eyebrow, bored. What the hell could it possibly be? I almost laughed to think that the next words out of his mouth would be a message from Sophia that she had told my mother or her father, believing that through my men was the most effective way to get to me because we apparently weren’t speaking at the moment.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s been a hit put on her.”

The silence following the statement was deafening. I asked him to repeat himself, just so I was sure that I had heard him right.

“Sophia Dandolo? Your wife. There’s been a hitman hired to ice her,” he said again.

“
Orsini
,” I corrected him. “Her name is Sophia
Orsini
. How do you know this? Who is it?”

“We couldn’t tell you, boss; we don’t know. We don’t have a name for the guy.”

“Then why are you coming to me with half the story? What am I supposed to do with that?”

Louis looked flustered.

“Can you even tell me who he might be connected to? Hm?”

“No, boss. Besides the usual suspects, we don’t have a lead.”

I rolled my eyes. What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?

I stood up. “Find out who the guy is. Don’t contact me again until you do.”

My jaw ticked in annoyance as I made my way back to the car. This was so stupid. The annoyance I felt with the men at their shoddy intel was eclipsed by the anger—no, the rage—I felt for this sucker who was after Sophia. This was so dumb that it was laughable. Who would
dare
? Who was the idiot who would even try it? Who had the nerve? I wanted to meet this guy. Shake his hand before I broke his neck.
How dare he
?

I had only been married for a couple weeks, but as soon as I put that ring on Sophia’s finger, she became my family. Who wanted to box? Because they had their fucking fight. The hit might have been on Sophia, but I knew whoever it was, they were looking for me. They were trying to get my attention. Sophia had been completely off the radar until we had become involved, and now, she had her first contract killer after her. They were obviously a coward because they hadn’t just come after me like a man. They had gone after a woman. Little did they know, that might just prove to be worse for them. They wanted my attention—and they had it.

I sped home to check on Sophia. She wasn’t safe there anymore. We would move out temporarily and find somewhere to hide out until this had blown over. Until I had had the pleasure of putting the guy in the ground myself.