Page 45 of Mafia King's Surprise Baby

I peer up at him, the question that’s been eating at me all these months since I met Bianca again at Mattia’s wedding no longer accepting to remain buried.

“Why didn’t you make an alliance with Roberto Bonucci? Power’s all he wants.”

He narrows his gaze slightly. “Who would I have offered in exchange? Myself?”

He’s a widower. Never mind that my mother left him when I was barely eight, my twin brothers Sergio and Emilio just three, Tristan hardly a year old—she subsequently died of an overdose in Mallorca two years later. That’s all that matters to us and the syndicate. It wouldn’t be seen as weird were he to take a newwife, even one younger than his own children.

“Me,” I state. “You could’ve offered me up.”

He sighs. “Leo, at Christmas, what did you tell yournonna?”

My jaw tightens when I recall my conversation with my grandmother. She’d been asking for great-grandkids. “That I’m twenty-eight, and there’s still another two years until I have to hit the marriage mart.”

He nods. “Two years you planned to enjoy to the fullest.”

Fuck. I’d shot myself in the foot without even knowing it at the time.

“And you never showed any interest in Mattia’s sister,” he adds.

Mattia and I met as little kids. At five, I punched someone for the first time—it was the bully picking on scrawny Mattia. I then slung my arm around Mattia’s shoulders and brought him home with me, telling my parents this is the brother I wanted and would never give up on—the twins had been a month old at the time; I had no use for wailing babies as siblings, fully thinking back then they’d never grow up.

So my father is very closely acquainted with Mattia’s and has thus known Bianca all her life.

I decide to be honest, even though I rarely, if ever, hide anything from my father. He doesn’t know I slept with her on Mattia’s wedding day, when she was clearly promised to another. Nor does he know I’m the one responsible for Ardian Abrashi’s tragic ‘fall.’ Some things, he needs to have plausible deniability about as a Don.

“I hadn’t yet seen the woman she’d become,” I told him.

“Hmm.” He takes a sip of Scotch. “And that’s not just your dick talking, is it?”

“No.”

Though it’s actually my dick that told me she’sThe One. I have no qualms about having fucked my way around in the past decade. My cock has been inside numerous pussies, many mouths, a few asses, too. It knows the feeling of sinking into a woman’s wet warmth and being welcomed there.

The day it plunged into Bianca’s body, it heard the welcome as well as the clarion call of coming home, of finding that elusive final destination it never wants to leave again. Her smile had already won my heart by this point. And seeing her with Abrashi at the bottom of the stairs, knowing she’d belong to him one day, my blood had lit up with the fire of jealousy, the one that clearly screamed at me she was mine, and mine alone.

“You really do love her,” my father says.

What’s the point in denying it?

“I do.”

“Then there’s no chance you’ll entertain the idea of marriage, I suppose.”

“To anyone but Bianca? No way in Hell.”

He swirls his glass. “I thought as much. I suggest you leave right this instant, then. Don Salvatore’s on his way over, wants to discuss an alliance between our two families.”

I frown, then put two and two together. If his daughter Paloma gets engaged asap, there’s no way she can be promised to an Albanian. Don Salvatore will want a Crown Prince for his only daughter.

I’m not going to be the sacrificial lamb in this deal.

I jump to my feet, already on my way out when my father adds,

“Oh, and Leo? You should get changed.”

Damn tissue’s still stuck to my front.

Chapter 13

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