Page 50 of Bedding the Baby Daddy

“What do you think?” she asked, grinning right back and scooting to the edge of the bed.

She stretched, let her hair fall over her back and couldn’t help but smile when she felt his fingers draw a picture on her back. It was like he couldn’t go more than a few seconds without touching her.

“Plus,” she said, looking over her shoulder at his sleepy face. “We’ve gotta make ourselves semi presentable for when Michelle gets back.”

“She won’t be back until this afternoon.” Dante frowned and swung his legs out of bed. “I hope she’s having fun. She said she’d call if she needed anything. But it’s her first sleepover in a long time and…”

He trailed off, thoughtful. Aurora scooped one of his t-shirts from the dresser and carefully chose her words.

“For someone who draws such careful lines in the sand, you sure worry about her the way a father might.”

Dante’s eyes snapped up to her as he tugged on some boxers. “You know, lately, some of those lines are starting to get a little blurry for me. The line between brother and father.”

“Oh?” Something tripped in Aurora’s chest like a stone skipping across a lake.

“She told me the other day that she thinks of me like a dad. It shook me up.”

“Why?” She followed him downstairs to the kitchen. He sat her up on the counter where he could look at her all he wanted and started to pull stuff out of the fridge to make them breakfast.

“Because I’ve always been so sure that I’ll never be a dad. Because of my dad.”

“He… is a bad guy?”

Dante seemed to weigh his words carefully. “Honestly, I don’t know much about him as a person. But as a father? Well, yeah. He was a bad father. Neglectful, bored, annoyed. He treated me and my mother like we were the highest degree of burden. I would say that he withheld love, but honestly, I don’t think he even had any love to withhold.”

“Dante,” Aurora whispered, horrified for what he must have gone through.

“I had no template for how to be loving or attentive.” He pulled out some pans and poured her a cup of coffee. “So when Michelle first came to live with me, I found myself doing things my dad might do or say. And it horrified me. I realized that I was trying to be her father. And unfortunately, the only kind of father I can be is like my own dad. But when I changed the way I was thinking about it, called myself her brother instead, well, it gave me a chance to start from scratch. Have a new roadmap.”

“That makes sense,” Aurora said slowly. “But now…”

“Yeah. Now things are kind of changing. She’s old enough that she understands what’s going on. I’ve started realizing that it matters less how I think about it and matters more how she thinks about it. If she’s thinking of me as her dad, then I guess in a lot of ways, I’m her dad.”

His voice was deep and calm, but Aurora could hear the gravity of his words, how much it shook him to say the words out loud.

She swallowed coffee down her dry throat. “Does it make you think about having children of your own?”

Dante opened his mouth to answer just as his cellphone chirped on the counter beside him. He picked it up and answered.

“Hey squirt.”

Aurora watched as Dante’s eyes rounded and then quickly narrowed. “Okay. Sit tight. I’ll be there in ten minutes. We’re going to have to go to the hospital. Don’t argue. And when you’re completely fine and on your way home and we’ve averted a heart attack for me, then we’re going to have a real long talk about what the hell you were doing jumping on a damn trampoline in the first place.”

Aurora winced and jumped up immediately from the counter. She hurried upstairs to grab his pants and shoes and shirt for him. The conversation they’d just had burned on the tip of her brain. She’d been so close then, so terribly close, to just telling him. But she swallowed the words back. He had Michelle to take care of now. And there was no way Aurora was getting in the way of that.

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