Page 47 of Bedding the Baby Daddy

Chapter Thirteen

Dante reached over the back of Michelle’s seat in the movie theater to play with a silky strand of Aurora’s hair. Aurora turned and gave him a soft little smile. He didn’t think she was paying attention to this movie any more than he was.

But Michelle had wanted to come and she’d wanted popcorn and she’d wanted to sit in the middle. None of which she’d demanded but all of which she’d engineered with alarming alacrity. Dante was really going to have trouble on his hands when she was a teenager. Besides the seating arrangements, Dante really had nothing to complain about. Nothing like a movie on a stormy Saturday afternoon with his girls.

His stomach bottomed out for a second before quickly rebounding. It had shocked him the first time he’d realized he was thinking of Michelle and Aurora that way. His girls. But he was slowly getting used to the thought now.

Somehow, over the last two months, Aurora had worked her way into being a part of his family.

He knew that Michelle was feeling the same way too. She was always disappointed when Aurora didn’t sleep over. And she’d started asking Dante questions about marriage, about mothers, and most alarmingly, about whether he’d ever have any kids.

“It’d be cool,” she’d said. “I would be an aunt and a sister all at once.”

“Why’s that?” he’d asked, handing her half of the peanut butter sandwich he’d just made.

“Because you’re like my brother and dad all at once, so your kid would be like my sister and niece or brother and nephew all at once. It would be cool.”

Michelle had shrugged and hopped down from the counter, ready to get back into whatever she was reading, but Dante had sat, dumbfounded, for another twenty minutes.

He’d always been so careful with Michelle, reminding her over and over that he was her brother, not her dad. He’d kept their father fresh in both their minds. Not in order to honor the man, but as a cautionary tale for both of them. Positions in their family had to be earned, not given without discretion. And their father sure as hell hadn’t earned a place in their lives.

Dante had no idea that Michelle was starting to think of him as a dad. It both thrilled and scared the shit out of him at the same time. He could be a brother. He was a hell of a brother. But father? He had no idea how to do that. None at all. He supposed that it probably wasn’t all that different, he was just going to have to keep doing what he’d been doing. But for some reason it was filed under a very different drawer in his mind.

When the credits rolled and the three of them headed out of the movie theater, Aurora quickened her step to fall in beside Michelle.

“Hey, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Michelle looked up expectantly, slipping her hand into Aurora’s in the automatic way that she always did Dante’s.

“I already talked to Dante about it,” Aurora continued. “And he said I should ask you about it.”

“Okay.” Michelle looked back and forth between them. “You guys are getting married?”

“What? NO!”

Dante’s ego took a healthy punch to the gut at Aurora’s utterly horrified look. She turned and looked Dante straight in the face, practically begging for his help out of that particular conversation.

He raised his hands and his eyebrows at the same time. If she was so horrified at the prospect of marrying him then she could get herself out of this one.

“I… no. We’re not getting married. That’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

“Okay,” Michelle said, taking it on the chin. “Then what?”

“My company, Esposito Group, we throw fundraisers a few times a year for good causes. And this year I was thinking that we should do a fundraiser for research toward Von Willebrand’s.”

“Oh!” Michelle looked surprised as she pulled open the back door of Dante’s car. “Really?”

“Yeah. I was thinking a lot about what you said about wishing that you knew more about the disorder. And we’re always on the lookout for good causes.”

“That’s really cool, Aurora.”

“So…” Aurora’s gaze flicked to Dante for a half second as they slid into the front seats. “Will you make a speech?”

“What?!” Michelle screeched, her messy hair falling into her eyes. “Me?”

“I think everyone would really want to hear from someone who lives with the disorder. They’d want to know a little about what it is like to have it and what it would mean to you to know more about it.”

“I—I’ve never given a speech before.”

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