Page 69 of Forced Arrangement

I giggle, imagining the scene. “The French are quite eccentric. You never know.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t want to share you with everyone else at the restaurant. You are my dessert for after dinner.”

“Oh, I see,” I say with a sage nod. Then, I grow more serious. “Thank you,” I tell him.

He blinks at me. “For what?”

I smile. “For giving me a family. For loving me.”

His smile is blissful as he looks at me. “Oh, for that? Well,Tesoro mio,that comes as easily as breathing for me.”

“See that it stays that way,” I say, stretching up to kiss his mouth.

He makes a noise of appreciation low in his throat and then sets me away from him.

“Dress. Now. For dinner,” he says, pointing at the bedroom. “Or else we will miss our reservation and I will enjoy my dessert first.”

Extended Epilogue

Sophia

I have suffered through a lot of pain in my life, but nothing else prepared me for this. I have never been in so much pain, or been so tired in my life. Not even when I was fighting for my life on Guiseppe’s ship.

“You can do this,” Angelo says to me, holding my hand as I bear down again, trying to push as hard as I can despite my exhaustion.

I glare at him. “Your overeager spawn couldn’t bother to wait until I got my epidural. Don’t tell me I can do this!”

He grins at me, unrepentant in the face of my frustration with him. “Are you too weak to give birth?” he taunts me, trying to will me into being angry enough to get through this labor. I know what he’s doing, but my patience is so frayed that it actually works.

“Fuck you,” I whisper at him. The nurse closest to me blinks in surprise, then smiles.

She pats my leg. “Atta girl,” she says before withdrawing to enter some notes in the computer nearby.

“You’re crowning,” my OBGYN says excitedly.

I glare at her bowed head. I resent her excitement when all I feel is pain, nausea, and bone-deep exhaustion.

“Another couple of pushes and you will be done,” Angelo tells me. He presses a kiss to my sweaty brow and I soften a little toward him just before the next painful contraction tears through me.

I’ve been practicing my Italian, and I switch away from English to roundly curse everything about existence, my body, and my husband as I bear down again. I add a little flourish about Angelo’s giant head and the fact that he clearly has gifted our child with this unfortunate trait.

“That sounded so beautiful,” my doctor says, looking up at me with a grin. “I’m sure it was all cuss words, but it sounded really pretty.”

“Romance languages,” Angelo says with a shrug. “The best way to curse the heavens and sound polite while you do it.” He turns toward me again. “Break every bone in my hand,Tesoro mio,”he goads me. “Show me that you can hurt me.”

“I wish I had the strength to deck you right now,” I grumble, allowing my body to tell me to push again. I give a little gasp of relief as I realize that it’s over…I’ve done it. I fall back against the bed, gasping, listening to everyone else in the room cheering and celebrating my good work.

“Ready to hold your son?” my doctor asks with a grin before placing the slimy, slippery body of my child, wrapped in a towel, on my chest.

My arms come up automatically to catch my child and I expect to be revolted at the mess, but I’m not. I’m not at all. I instantly feel the most overwhelming rush of affection for the messy little bundle in my arms. I reach up and stroke back thedamp mop of curly black hair on his head. Just as I thought, his head is huge.

“Are all of our children going to have bowling balls for heads?” I ask thoughtfully as I stroke the hair on my child’s head.

My doctor laughs. “Probably,” she says. “I’d love to lie to you, but that tends to be a consistent feature if even one of them has a huge head.”

“It’s all the brains in there,” Angelo says proudly, and I snort. “What?” he says to me with an unrepentant smile. “You know you’re the smart one around here. That means it’s your fault that he has a big head, not my fault.”

I giggle in spite of my exhaustion. Angelo and I have settled into a routine that includes lots of verbal sparring, which is often quite fun for me. I love ribbing him and he loves ribbing me back. It’s gotten us through a lot of really tough times over the past six months.

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