Page 34 of Her Impossible Boss's Baby

“If you wish, you could stay there.”

“I will live under the same roof as my child.”

“As you wish.” She looked at him, her gaze hard. “If you make this miserable, believe me when I tell you I know how to make it hard for you too. Because I grew up with parents who were extremely accomplished making each other’s lives hell.”

“And how will that be for the child?”

She looked as if he had struck her. “I know enough to know how to keep it away from the child, because that is something my parents declined to do.”

“Do you think they also thought they were not including you in their games?”

“Don’t speak to me of games. Not when you’re playing them just the same.”

He shook his head. “This is not a game to me. You will be my wife. There will be no argument.”

“I’m not sleeping with you.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

They never made it to lunch. Instead, she was bundled back on his plane, she quit her job over the phone, and they were back in Rome before dinner.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have this imaginary house you imagine we will be sharing different wings of,” he said. “We’ll have to make do with another room in the penthouse tonight.”

He gestured to the door, and then went off to his own room.

He closed himself inside, and let the silence bear down on him. Everything in his life had changed in a single day. He preferred change to take place over a very long period of time, slowly and surely, if it had to occur at all.

But he would marry Polly as soon as he could obtain a license. He would change.

For his child, he would change everything.

Because everything he was, everything he had done until this point had been a tribute to his mother. And what would any of it matter if he could not pay tribute to the flesh and blood he had created?

It would not matter at all.

And neither would he.

Polly didn’t think that he would be a good father. But it didn’t matter what she thought.

What mattered was what he would do.

CHAPTER EIGHT

POLLY SAT ON the edge of the bed, shell-shocked.

She had said things to Luca that she deeply regretted. Because they had been unnecessarily hurtful. She had been lashing out because she was upset. Because she was afraid. But then he had reacted... He had reacted the way that she had been certain he would. Inflexible, cruel in kind, when he didn’t even mean to be.

She hadn’t told him the honest truth. She hadn’t thought that caring about him would be hell.

But that loving him would be.

She cared about him already. That was the problem. She had cared about him for quite some time, in spite of herself.

And now she had let him drag her back here, had quit her job...

If she had loved her job then perhaps she would have fought harder on that point.

The truth was, it was difficult to care as much about marketing for the fashion house when...she really did believe that Luca was changing the world. And she really had felt in some small part that when she was working with him, she was working in tandem to do so as well.

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