Page 45 of Bedding the Baby Daddy

Dante swung his attention back to Cedalie, finally taking a minute to look around her house. He opened his mouth to answer, but Cedalie was already talking.

“No, you don’t have to make up something about her having a busy schedule. The truth is completely understandable.”

“The truth?” Dante asked, a little bemused.

“Sure, bebe. You wanted to check me out first before you brought your little one here. You don’t bring her just anywhere. You’re a papa bear like that. But by the end of our visit, you’ll see that me and she would get along very nice.”

“Oh. I….” Dante’s eyes slid sideways toward Aurora, looking to her for a gauge on the situation.

“I’m not just guessing that we’d get along well. I know for fact. You might have left her at home, but you bring a little bit of her everywhere you go. I can feel her energy from where you hold it close.” Cedalie raised her hand to her lips in the gesture of a lifetime smoker, but dropped it and fished in her pocket for a toothpick. She pointedly ignored the annoyed look her daughter was shooting her way. “She’s curious, but realistic. Imaginative but very grounded. She takes care of you as much as you take care of her. She wishes she could play more sports, but you don’t let her.” Cedalie cocked her head to one side and surveyed Dante. “Why don’t you let her?”

“You don’t have to answer that, Dante,” Aurora said, setting a cup of iced tea in front of him and joining them at the table. “Mama, stop showing off.”

“No, that’s okay,” Dante cleared his throat, recrossed his legs and looked at Cedalie the way he might look at someone across a conference room table. “You can see so much but you can’t see the reason I don’t let her play sports?”

Cedalie sucked her lips in to keep her smile back, the same as Aurora often did. The familiar gesture immediately softened any prickliness Dante may have felt about being read so thoroughly and immediately by Cedalie. The two of them, equally confident, eyed one another across the table.

“I can see a great deal, although my daughter thinks it’s ‘rude’ and ‘totally stalls the conversation’ if I don’t let people tell me some things for themselves.” Cedalie made air quotes, exaggerated enough to have Dante chuckling.

Casually, Dante reached over and laced his fingers with Aurora’s. “My sister has a blood disorder that makes sports, especially contact ones, not possible for her. But if you’re telling me that she’s really pining after it, then maybe I’ll have to look into something she could play that doesn’t have too much risk.”

Cedalie nodded, a small look of chagrin on her face now. “Maybe I was trying to show off a little bit. But I wasn’t trying to tell you how to raise your child.”

“My sister,” Dante corrected automatically. Cedalie’s eyes zipped to Aurora’s and Aurora immediately looked away.

“Shall we go for a walk?” Aurora suggested.

A few hours later, Dante let out a deep, exaggerated breath in the front seat of Aurora’s car as they pulled out of Cedalie’s driveway. He slumped dramatically against Aurora’s shoulder and she lightly shoved him back, unable to do the same with her smile. “I’m driving! And it wasn’t that bad. She lightened up on all the occult stuff after the first twenty minutes or so.”

“Yeah, and the rest was just a walk in the park. I loved the part when she made me balance that rock on my head to balance my chakras.”

“It was a very small crystal and your chakras really needed cleansing. Trust me.”

“That wasn’t the craziest part though,” Dante insisted. “Your mom is HOT. I thought my eyes were going to bug out of my head when I first saw her. The woman could be your older sister.”

“Well, she was only twenty when she had me. She’s not much older than you are.”

“Oh god. Don’t go there. I’m closer to your age than I am to hers.”

“Mmhmm.”

“I don’t have to take this abuse. Drop me off at this bus stop! I’ll find my own way home.”

“No way, I could never live with myself for treating the elderly that way.”

Aurora yelped and laughed as he tugged her in for a kiss. Luckily they were safely stopped at a stoplight.

* * *

A half an hour later, Aurora was on her way home. She’d been so tempted to stay with Dante, and he’d wanted the same thing, but she’d needed some time on her own after the intensity of introducing Dante to Cedalie. And frankly, Aurora really needed to mull over what her mother had pulled her aside to say.

“You have to tell him, child. You have to.”

“I’m not ready, Manman. You’re the one who told me to wait, to gather information as long as I could.”

“That was before. That was before I saw the way he was about his sister. He doesn’t want children, child. I can see this plain as day. He’s not lying. To you or to himself.”

The words had cut through Aurora like a blade through a flower petal.

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