The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance (9 page)

Sophia

On a scale of one to ten, how fucked up was it that the time during which Marcelo and I had bonded the most was when we thought there was someone out there trying to make an attempt on my life?

It was coming up on two weeks since we had been home, and I was torn. One part of me was sick of living in hotels, and the other loved the odd peace and bonding Marcelo and I had experienced since the whole fiasco at the restaurant a couple weeks ago. It was sort of weird that I
wanted
to be back home. That house had been my prison, where Marcelo kept me as he went about whatever he did all day. I couldn’t fucking
wait
to see the inside of that hell again.

After leaving the first place in the dead of night, we had made our way somewhere else, staying there for a few nights, and then finally ending up where we were now. We had crossed the bridge and were in Brooklyn. At the front desk of this place, we had checked in as Mr. and Mrs. Valentino, which I didn’t even know was something that people did in real life.

Marcelo had been extremely attentive. People should be trying to kill me all the time if this was what it did to him. He was on edge, jumping whenever there was a knock at the door and staying up way past the time that I fell asleep, continuously waking to check that the windows and door to the suite were locked.

It was tiresome to watch, but he wouldn’t stop it at my request.
I didn’t hate it
. In fact, it was sort of nice. I didn’t want him worrying himself sick about me, but I wasn’t going to turn away the additional attention and care. We had been getting along famously, which was strange. You would think that we would be our best selves in the home we shared, but really, the home was a biased space.

Technically, it was
his
home and I had just moved in. It was the place where he came to rest after work, and it was the place where all
my
work was. At the hotels, we were in various small rooms together, forced to share the space. We were also both completely out of our comfort zones. I couldn’t hide from him when I was here, and he could leave for work, but he had to come back and face me sooner or later.

We had been having sex nearly every other night. It was a revelation. I knew it shocked him, too. Most of the time we didn’t even need alcohol to suitably lubricate the situation and get us in the mood. More than once he had kissed me. Just kissed me, for no particular reason. He was sometimes leaving the room, or had just seen me after I had come out of the shower or something and kissed me. It was nice. In fact, it was kind of great.

There was no way it would last. I knew we would fall into our old patterns once the present danger was over and we went back home. Maybe—once we were there—he wouldn’t piss me off enough to make me sleep in another bed again. All his stressing and irregular sleep had meant that he was tired during the day. The first day he had come back to the room, tired, and he slumped into the bed, I had silently joined him and he hadn’t pushed me away. He had cuddled me to his side, and we had taken a nap together. It was very juvenile and disgustingly cute, but it felt amazing. Real or not…it was the two of us being peaceful and nice to each other—and that was all that mattered. He looked beautiful when he was asleep. Younger than his twenty-eight years and a lot less worldly and hard. Much more innocent and
soft
.

We were like that now. Asleep in the middle of the day together, because why not, except I was awake. I couldn’t sleep. Something was bothering me. We had had sex the night before. Amazing,
passionate
sex, and after, when I had gone to clean up in the bathroom, it had occurred to me that I had not gotten my period since before the wedding. I was due, in fact,
past
due by this point. I hadn’t had to run by a drugstore or use one of the emergency tampon I had in my purse.

It could have been a lot of things. Just because my period was late didn’t mean I was pregnant.
No
. That was, of course, a
possibility,
but it wasn’t the
only
thing that it could be. I wracked my brain for excuses. I had been regular since my late teens. I could track my period like clockwork. I was rarely late, and when I was, it was only ever about three days tops. Three days had come and gone and had turned into a full week.

Had I felt any other symptoms?

Nausea? Increased appetite? Decreased appetite? Fatigue? Weight gain?

No. None of them. Well… I had been feeling sort of bloated and heavy lately, but I attributed that to all the rich hotel food we had been eating since we hadn’t been home for a while. The other symptoms could easily be caused by something else, but the period loss was by far the most damning. Maybe it was the stress of all the moving around we had been doing lately. Maybe it was the stress of being targeted by some sort of mob hitman.

I took a few deep breaths. Trying to calm myself down. Marcelo was asleep on the bed beside me in all his clothes. If there was ever a time to do this, it was now. He was completely worn out. There had to be a drugstore somewhere. I’d be gone and back in under half an hour. I quietly left the hotel room and made my way out of the hotel. Marcelo would be so mad if he found out that I had left without telling him.

He would probably be madder if he found out where it was that I was going, though.

My mind was racing. This could not be the truth. I wasn’t going to take the test in order to
confirm
the pregnancy. I was going to take it in order to make sure what I believed was actually the case.
I was not pregnant
. I just wanted confirmation that that was true.

Picking up the home pregnancy test, I paid for it and got back to the hotel. I stopped on my way up to our suite. If Marcelo found the home pregnancy test… how would he react? It would likely depend on what the result turned out to be. If it was negative, he would probably have nothing to say. If there was no baby, there was no problem.

We had never used condoms any of the times that we had had sex. Never. Part of me—whenever it happened—just thought
why bother
? We were married. How would Marcelo have reacted if we were in the heat of the moment and I stopped him to ask him to please put a rubber on? Was he one of those guys who didn’t believe in their use? Claimed he couldn’t feel anything when he had one on? Our backgrounds were similar, so did he also have a dogmatic list of Catholic
“don’ts”
that he lived by?
Thou shalt not use contraception?

I actually marveled at how irresponsible that was of me. I knew my own sexual history, but I had no idea about Marcelo’s. With the number of women he tended to have over at the house, I thought it was safe to go ahead and call him something of a playboy. The moment we slept together, was I exposing myself to every single one of the birds
he
had slept with? I shuddered at the thought. Did I have to get tested?

My thoughts were running away with me. The ladies’ restroom in the hotel lobby was the perfect place to administer the test. I could trash it once it was used and it would be untraceable to me. No matter what the result, Marcelo would never stumble upon it and see whatever the result was.

The three-minute wait dragged by with painful slowness. I knew it felt like it took eons because I just wanted to know what the result was, but my anxiety was building up in my head and tumbling down at a rate that was making my palms sweat. I picked the test up and looked at it after the alert on my phone sounded, indicating three minutes had passed. Squeezing my eyes shut, I counted to three and opened them.

Three black letters spelling the word “YES” and a tiny “+” sign next to it.

Yes.

Yes.

The answer to the question was that I was pregnant. The answer was
YES
.

I felt like a hole had opened up in the pit of my stomach. My hand went instinctively to my belly. My eyes filled with tears and my eyesight became blurry, but I didn’t know what or who I was crying for. Was it because I was scared? Was I happy? Was I overwhelmed? Was I all of those things? Regardless of whether I was or I wasn’t, I
was
pregnant. I was pregnant with my husband’s baby.

The tears spilled down my face, hot and fast. I quickly threw the positive test and the box the test came in into the trash—as if the result would stop being positive if I couldn’t see the test anymore. I washed my face in the sink and tried to compose myself. I still had to go back upstairs to the suite. I still had to face Marcelo as if nothing was the matter.

Since the beginning, as soon as I had accepted that I was going to be married to someone I didn’t know, there was one thing that had kept me going. As awful as it was to think, marriage was not permanent. It wasn’t. There was an out—and that was called divorce. That was always an option for me. Our parents had not stipulated that we had to be together for any minimum amount of time. That meant we could just call it quits when they had no more use for us anymore. Hell, maybe they would even do us the courtesy of informing us when they no longer needed our service and pay for the divorce proceedings the way they had paid for the wedding.

We had said “
‘til
death
do
us
part
” but how many other people had said that and still proceeded to dissolve their marriages. Marriages that had been built on foundations much stronger than ours was. That had been my saving grace. This was not my
forever
. It was my
right
now,
but it was not my forever. I could leave. If I really wanted to, I could leave. If I really had to, that was an option for me. That was true up until that little test in the trash had told me that the decisions I was going to make from now on were not only going to affect me.

I had to tell Marcelo.

Could I do that?
Should
I do that? I mean, I
had
to tell him. It was his. I had been single for years before our marriage, so there was no way in hell the baby was someone else’s. The tears came back, angrier and more urgent when I thought about telling my husband the news. What would he
do
? Did he want kids? What if he thought I was lying to him and was just trying to trap him in a loveless marriage to punish him for what our fathers had made us do? What if he… oh my god, what if he demanded I get rid of it? What if he demanded I give it up when it was born so we couldn’t raise it?

Every thought was even more horrible than the last. I couldn’t take it. Everything was ruined.
Ruined
. The past two weeks had been so great, almost blissful, and they were about to come to a crashing halt because there was no way he would be happy to hear about this. We had been making each other so happy for the past two weeks…and this was going to undo it completely.

He was a powerful and connected man in the mob circles. Was a newborn baby going to be an asset to him? How the hell would I be able to go back to work now?
When
would I be able to? I shuddered when I thought about his reaction. No matter what it would be, happy or sad, it didn’t matter because no matter what he felt, the inescapable truth was he and I were stuck together now. For the long haul.

Marcelo

The suite was empty when I woke up. I must have dozed off. She had been right there. She had fallen asleep beside me. I didn’t feel her weight on me. I ran my hands over the bed to my left and right hoping to come into contact with her sleeping form. I shot upright. The bed was empty.

I panicked.

Where was Sophia?

As if she had heard me, she came out of the bathroom with her purse. She must have been in there putting her makeup on or something. I didn’t ask her. I greeted her instead.

“Hi,” I said to her.

“Hey, did you sleep well?” she asked.

“Yeah. Great,” I said distractedly as I heard my phone buzz. I took the call on the balcony, leaving her in the room. I waited until I had slid the balcony door shut before I started talking.

“What do you have for me?” I asked shortly.

“Where are you?” one of my guys asked.

“We moved hotels a couple times. What happened? Did you get the guy?”

“We don’t have an ID on him, but we do know that he won’t be bothering you guys anymore.”

“
What
happened
?”

“He’s dead.”

I blinked a couple times.

“He’s what?”

“Dead. You guys can go back home.”

“Who killed him? Who was it?” I demanded.

“No one of importance. He was probably working solo. He’s dead now, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

I sighed. Most of the men weren’t attached. If they had families, they would care a
little
more
about things like this. They might be able to have some empathy and understand that there was nearly nothing more painful to think of than my wife being murdered because I had failed to protect her.

“I’m not going home until there’s a patrol around the house. You set that up. Every hour of the day I want at least one person patrolling the house. If my wife gets hurt, I’m coming after you personally. Do you understand?” I snarled, surprised at my own insistence.

“Consider it done. You two can go home. I’m sending someone to your house right now.”

I ended the call and paced up and down the balcony a couple times.

It was done. Just like that. We were in the clear. We could go back home. I wanted to be happier about the news than I was, but I couldn’t help feel iffy about it. Who was the guy? Why didn’t the guys get an ID on him? What conceivable reason was there for him to be after Sophia, besides to get my attention? Hitmen were taken out all the time, but this one was special. This one had made the crucial mistake of fucking with the wrong man’s woman.

I reentered the room. Sophia was just sitting on the bed. She looked up when she heard me.

“Any news?” she asked casually.

“Yeah. We’re clear. We can go back home.”

Her brow furrowed, as her clear, green eyes looked at me.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

I shrugged and tried to sound flippant.

“You know. This underground mob stuff seems a lot higher stakes in the movies,” she quipped.

“Does it? What? Almost getting murdered not do it for you?” I teased her. She shrugged and came off the bed.

“Nope. Honestly, I’m a little disappointed.”

“I’m sorry your first brush with death didn’t measure up.”

It was cute. She wasn’t scared and I was impressed. I didn’t like that she could be so cavalier about her own life, but maybe she was making jokes to play off how she really felt. I wished she would tell me because she seemed to be feeling nothing.

Sophia was silent the entire ride home. I kept looking over at her, trying to figure out what she was thinking. She had her sunglasses on and was absently looking out the window, running her fingers through her hair. We had both bought new clothes to wear because of how impromptu our trip had ended up being. Neither of us had been back to the house for the last two weeks. We had ended up buying a duffel bag so we could carry them home. I agreed to Sophie’s request because she thought it was wasteful to have gotten the clothes and then just ditch them at the hotel when we left.

Was she unhappy that we were finally going home? Was she dreading going back? I thought about the things she had said to me. The dishes, staying home all day while I was at work. Was it really that bad? The last couple weeks between us had been amazing. She had been so sweet, and we had had sex more times during the two-week hotel stay than we had had since we got married. She had been, dare I say, happier than she seemed to be when we were at home. Shit. Maybe she really didn’t want to be back at the house. As we neared the house I decided to ask her something.

“Sophie, are you okay?” I asked.

She looked over at me. Her glasses obscured her eyes, but her face otherwise looked completely calm.

“Mm-hmm,” she said shortly. I raised my eyebrows. I knew I had underestimated her in the beginning, thinking she was powerless to protect herself but what was she? Completely desensitized to everything already?
How
? She had only known about this part of her life, our life, since a couple days before the wedding.

“How are you feeling?”

“I just want to get back to the house, sleep in my own bed…have a home-cooked meal.” She looked over at me. “The hotels were great, but you can understand wanting to be somewhere where they aren’t charging you by the night, can’t you?”

I smiled. So she
was
looking forward to going back home.

“I’m sorry again about this whole mess. I am going to have security posted around the house all hours of the day. You don’t have to worry about anything.”

“Okay,” she said shortly, looking down at her hands.

I was stumped. Was she really this unbothered about the whole thing? There was no way. We got to the house, and we took the bag inside. She went directly to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of water out of the fridge, drinking it. I tossed the bag in the laundry room and went back through into the kitchen where I saw her rifling through the cabinets for pots and pans.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“I want to cook dinner,” she said. Opening the fridge and frowning at its contents. She started pulling vegetables and fruits out, they were probably toxic to eat for as long as we had been gone. She started chucking them in the garbage, doing the same for the leftovers that happened to be in there, too. Daniella hadn’t been by the house over the entire two-week period.

“There isn’t much that’s edible in here anymore,” she remarked.

“Don’t cook. Just relax. I can order something in. What do you feel like having?”

She bit her lip thinking.

“I wouldn’t mind beef and broccoli,” she suggested. I didn’t mind that either. I made the call and turned to find she had been looking at me. Really looking at me…as if she was trying to take an x-ray. I couldn’t deal with this. What the fuck was going on?

“Sophie, if something’s the matter, I want you to tell me,” I said, firmly.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she lied. I didn’t call her on it. I sighed. What sort of relationship was built on lies? Maybe our relationship was a little unorthodox, but I at least wanted her to tell me when something was up with her. Was she just moody? Was this a mood swing? Christ,
was it that time of the month
? I had never shared a home with a woman besides my mother, and she didn’t count because I
had
to live with her. For most of my life, I had had no choice. I had never lived with a girlfriend because I didn’t keep women as girlfriends. Sophie was not my girlfriend; she was my wife, and the hidden world of women’s issues was suddenly front and center. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

Our food came, and she picked at hers, managing to order the food into three neat piles of rice, beef, and broccoli on her plate. Perfect. Now she wasn’t eating. I caught her looking at me again—as if she was trying to blow my head up with her mind. I volunteered to clean up. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but I didn’t want to make it worse by making her move and what not. She hardly looked present. She looked spaced out and tired at the same time. Was she sick? She stood and waited for me to come back from the kitchen, which she never did. We
never
went up to the room at the same time. Was it because she was scared? Had the whole experience spooked her? I tried again.

“Sophie?”

She looked at me. Her face was completely flat. Inscrutable. I looked down into her eyes and cupped her face.

“I’m sorry about what happened. Nothing like this will ever take place again,” I said to her, making a promise I really could not keep. I could only ask my guys to make sure there was a twenty-four-hour patrol on the house. That didn’t mean there would be. I couldn’t assure her that they would do their job to the level I expected it to be done. I couldn’t tell her with absolute certainty that nobody was ever going to try something like this again. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It would have been a lie. A bold-faced lie. She would never be safe again, not the way she had been before we had gotten married.

That was the truth of the Orsini name. The name I had given her. I wished she would say something.
Anything
. Even if she just wanted to tell me how much she regretted becoming my wife.

She inhaled deeply.

“You don’t have to apologize, Marcelo. It isn’t your fault.”

I leaned in and kissed her. Her lips were soft and yielding when I met them. I took hold of one of her hands.

“Come,” I said quietly. She followed me up the stairs. We went up to our bedroom. I told her to wait on the bed while I ran the tub for her. That calmed people down, didn’t it? Released your knots or whatever? Helped you relax? She must have stood and followed me into the bathroom because I heard her voice from behind me.

“Marcelo… really, you don’t have to do all this. Nothing happened.”

“And nothing will ever happen. I want you to know that, Sophie. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Her face was still flat and unreadable. I kissed her on the forehead and made for the door so she could have a bath.

“Marcelo, wait,” she said. I turned.

“Could you sit with me?” she asked carefully, like she wasn’t sure that was something she thought she could ask for.

“Where?
Here
?”

“In the tub?”

“Uh…. Sure,” I said, not fully understanding what it was that she wanted. She turned around so I could help her unzip her dress. It fell and pooled at her feet. I unhooked her bra and it fell, joining her dress on the floor. She turned and pulled my sweater up my body. I helped her, removing it completely along with the t-shirt I wore underneath. Her hair fell down over her breasts, obscuring them in a way that was even more erotic than seeing them on full display. I finished disrobing and turned the faucets off. She removed her panties, being the last item of clothing she had on, and climbed into the tub. She looked at me expectantly, her knees pulled to her chest.

For the first time in my life I didn’t know what to do. Did I just go in? Did she want me to do anything specific? Did she want me touching her at all? The bathtub was huge. More than big enough for two. I saw her cast her gaze down into the water.

“You don’t have to join me if you don’t want to,” she said quietly.