The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance (5 page)

Sophia

Marcelo had a routine. He would get ready in the morning, putting his suit on and doing his hair before going downstairs to eat breakfast. He wasn’t fussy about what he ate, but he did demand—at the very least—to have coffee. Black. No cream and no sugar. He would be out the door after that—to a place he never bothered to tell me where it was—and be back at the house between four in the afternoon and seven at night. I knew that the Orsinis were a mob family. That little fact was true about my family, as well. It was part of the reason why Marcelo and I had had to get married. I didn’t know or particularly want to know what that entailed, and Marcelo wasn’t exactly forthcoming with any details, so I didn’t press him on anything.

I didn’t
want
to know. I had lived in blissful ignorance of the organized crime underground for a full twenty-seven years. I could have gone my whole life without the knowledge of what men like my father, Marcelo’s father, and apparently Marcelo, too, were up to, and unless he opened his mouth to tell me anything, I wasn’t going to ask.

He didn’t tell me what he did, and I wouldn’t tell him what I did, or at least what I planned to do that day. Being a housewife was fulfilling and enjoyable for many women, but I was not one of them. How on earth did Marcelo expect me to sit at home all day and not die of boredom? He probably expected me to join
societies
, or go shopping, take up aerial yoga, or what have you, but I couldn’t stand being unproductive. I had seen my mother spend years in the role of housewife and stay-at-home-mom but unfortunately for Marcelo, she and I were not cut from the same cloth.

I picked my phone up as soon as I was sure that he had left the house and called Elena. She was the one thing from my past life that had remained constant, and likely the one and only force stopping me from completely losing my mind.

“Hello?” she said down the line.

“Elena? Where are you?”

“I was just heading to work. Where are you?”

“Is everybody at the restaurant already?”

“Yeah, the chefs have been doing prep since earlier this morning for the lunch service, why?”

I smiled.

“I’m coming to work.”

“Work? You mean,
here
? At the
restaurant
?” Elena sounded worried.

“Yes, wait for me. Tell the guys I’m coming in today.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean, I thought your husband didn’t want you to go to work anymore,” she said carefully.

I sighed.

“Elena, if I spend one more day in this house I am going to lose my mind.”

“Won’t he be mad if he finds out you came back here? Won’t your
dad
be mad, too?”

“They’ll get over it,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. Sure, I was married, but I wasn’t a prisoner. I should be able to leave the house when I feel like it, and dammit, I should be able to earn my own money, too. It was the
twenty-first century
for Christ’s sake. Sure, wives were supposed to be submissive to their husbands, but I wasn’t about to give what I wasn’t getting back. He had maintained his entire life while gaining a roommate through the marriage, and I had had to abandon everything I knew, loved, and had grown accustomed to. No. It didn’t work like that. I wasn’t the one.

In under an hour, I was at the restaurant;
Puglia
, allegedly named from the region in Italy where our family had originated. The place had been in the family for decades. It had belonged to my grandfather before my father took it over. It had undergone a transformation after my father took over, going from a mom-and-pop, Italian comfort food place to a fine dining, modern Italian restaurant. I had been working there since I got back from culinary school and had until I got married been their executive chef.

They had lost a few business days getting the repairs to the interior done after the shootout with Agosto Orsini’s men, but as far as I could tell, they had bounced back beautifully. My old head chef, Maria, took up the mantle of executive chef when I left, but everything seemed to be going smoothly.

I always thought I looked my best in my chef whites. I tied an apron around my waist and joined the other chefs in the kitchen. They were surprised to see me, and I wasn’t sure what my father had ended up telling them to explain my sudden disappearance. They knew I was married, and from their questions, I guessed that that was all that they knew,
thankfully
.

There was lunch service that afternoon, and scallops were on the menu. I had never been so happy to see a pile of bivalves in my life. I started shucking them out of their shells, laughing with the others. I had never had any siblings growing up, and my extended family were close by in Jersey, but we didn’t all that much bonding when I was growing up. The staff at
Puglia
was mainly female, and the women had become like the sisters I never had. Prep and service was always alive with gossip and laughter. Being back, I realized just how much I had missed being with them every day. I could thank my two fathers for that loss. All the girls were
dying
to know about my new husband.

“Why weren’t we invited to the wedding, Sophie?” Giuliana asked. She was a line cook, one of the longest serving at the restaurant.

“It was sort of
fast
. We had a short engagement. A small ceremony with mostly family present. We kept it very intimate,” I said vaguely.

“Fast? Why? Are you pregnant? Did you and Orsini have a shotgun wedding?” she teased. I pulled a face at the thought.
Shotgun wedding
… it was something like that, but with literal shotguns because our families were both deeply involved in organized crime.

“Oh no. No babies. I’m not pregnant,” I said.

“I bet you wouldn’t mind becoming pregnant with his
kid
, though. I can’t believe you’re married to Marcelo Orsini,” quipped Sebastian, the sous chef and one of the few men we had on our team. Most of the girly banter went over his head, but he was one of us, and we didn’t hold his gender against him.

Maybe I sort of did after that question he had just asked me.

I shuddered to think about it. I hadn’t even fully adjusted to the thought and reality of myself as Marcelo’s wife. A baby this soon would be a disaster. Besides, I didn’t want kids. Not
his
kids at least. I wanted a few years to establish myself as an executive chef, maybe even expand the restaurant into a franchise around the city. I couldn’t do that while bouncing Marcelo Orsini, Junior on my knee. That dream would probably never come true anyway anymore, but that didn’t mean I was going to pack it in and become the Orsini family heir production factory.

“Yeah, he’s
hot
. I bet your honeymoon was amazing,” Giuliana added. Elena was quiet at my side, thankfully. She already knew all about how I felt about being Mrs. Marcelo Orsini.

“The hotel was incredible,” I said truthfully. “Have you guys made any changes to the menu while I was gone?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“Come on, you can give us more than
that,
Sophie. What is he
like
?” Giuliana goaded. I smiled uncomfortably, not wanting to get into the details of my sham marriage with my co-workers. If the circumstances were different I would be gushing about the wedding night. They obviously had expectations of what being married to Marcelo was like which were far from the truth. They didn’t need me spoiling their good impression of my husband. They were clearly far fonder of him than I was. I wouldn’t shake their pretty fantasies of him. At least he had admirers in those close to me, even if I couldn’t stand him.

“What kind of wife would I be if I told you what went on behind closed doors?” I asked coyly, hoping to throw her off. She shrugged.

“I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be able to shut up about him if he was
my
husband. Do you know how many hearts broke the day you two got married? That man is a prize stallion you have in your possession, Sophie.”

I tried to laugh, but it came out flat. The way she was talking about him,
she
should have been his wife. What sort of man did she think he was anyway? I was just about to ask her what she knew about him when I heard yelling from the front of the house. I closed my eyes and dropped the scallop and knife I was holding. Two men were arguing, their voices mounting into shouts. One was David, the maître d’. The other one of them belonged unmistakably to Marcelo.

He had come for me.

I heard him calling my name, his voice getting closer and closer as he neared the kitchen.
Shit
. How did he know I was here? Could he not
yell
like that in public? It sounded like the kind of yelling that would prompt neighbors to call the police if it was coming from the apartment below yours. I wiped my hands down the front of my apron and turned to face where the voice was coming from. He appeared seconds later. We argued all the time, but the look on his face was something I had never seen before. His fists were balled and his hair was messed up as if he had been running his hands through it. He stared me down for a few seconds before he said anything.

“Did you lose your phone?” he asked.

“My phone?”

“I’ve been trying to call you. I went to the house and you weren’t there. I was
worried
.” The last word had sounded strained as he said it. Was he looking for me? For
what
? Did he have another dinner party he wanted me to cook for and then not attend? Everyone had sort of retreated from the kitchen, falling away somewhere unseen. Giuliana had ended up outside the kitchen in the front of the house. She and the other chefs were all watching us, as if they were waiting for one of us to strike. More accurately they were watching Marcelo.

I wasn’t even mad. He looked a treat. I hadn’t seen what he had worn that morning, but it was a really nice suit, not black but a deep slate gray. His shirt underneath was crisp white, and the vest between the two pieces was navy. He looked amazing, and he was
mine
. An odd sense of pride came over me as I thought about the fact that the attention he got from other women didn’t mean anything. They could look all they wanted, but only I could touch. He was married to
me
.

He was married to me, and he had come to whisk me back home. If this was any other day, I might have agreed to take my apron off and leave silently—but not today. Not after the night we had had, and not when I was finally feeling normal and happy for the first time after the wedding. I painted a smile on my face and addressed him

“Worried about what, honey?” I asked sweetly. His brow furrowed, hearing me call him anything other than his name. “I just get so
bored
in the house all day after you leave. I thought it’d be a good day to see my old friends. Help them out with the lunch service.”

He looked at me like I had grown another head.

“You don’t work here anymore, Sophia. Come. We need to go home.”

A tiny spark of defiance glowed inside me. Why did we need to go home? What did he want that he couldn’t take care of himself? He wanted me to go home? What if I didn’t
care
what he wanted?

“Actually, darling, I wanted to see when a good day for me to come back to work would be,” I said. I turned my back to him and walked to the sink to wash my hands. He hadn’t said anything back to me. Had I done it? Had I rendered Marcelo Orsini speechless? I turned the faucet off and turned to face him, drying my hands on my apron. His eyes were dark, and he was heading towards me.

I thought for a second that he wouldn’t dare cause a scene somewhere so public, in full view of my coworkers, but the set in his jaw and look in his eyes told me otherwise.

He was
furious
.