Page 60 of Mafia Christmas Vows

“What?”

“You like him. A lot.”

“I…”

She waves a hand. “I gave birth to you, Magdalena. I know that face. You really like him. I think you probably love him. But you, for some reason, are keeping yourself from admitting it.”

“I am not.”

Laughing, she walks around the island and pulls me into a hug. “You, my love, have the same look on your face as you did whenever you picked me up a cake from the bakery. You absolutely want to eat all of it, but you know that you shouldn’t.”

I sigh. “Mom. It’s just not logical. I mean, do I feel a lot for him right now? Yes, but it can’t be what I think it is because?—”

“You love him, sweetheart. You don’t have to hide it from me.”

I think I know what I’m going to do for my master’s thesis. Because someone needs to study the phenomenon of what happens to a person when their mom says, out loud, the thing that they’ve been trying to hide from themselves.

Bursting into tears, I bury my head in her shoulder. “I can’t love him,” I say, gasping around the tears that are pouring out of me. “I haven’t been around him enough to love him.”

“Sweetheart. Love isn’t logical. It doesn’t always mean you’ve been with someone for their whole life,” my mom gently pats my back. “I mean, I fell in love with your dad that night.”

“And he left you!”

Wow.

That brings on a whole new wave of tears.

Eventually, I calm down a little. I wipe my eyes and pull back, bringing in deep, shuddering breaths.

My mom’s eyes are wet too.

“He did leave us, baby. But he also didn’t. He tried to stay, but he couldn’t. They would have found us a lot earlier and tried to kill us, and I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving them with a baby on my hip. He did what he did to keep us alive, and now…”

“You forgive him?” I ask.

It comes out as more of an accusation than I meant, and my mom’s face pales.

I sigh. “Mom…”

“I don’t know if I fully forgive him. I think that there’s been a lot of time, and a lot of space, that he could have probably figured out a better solution. Twenty-three years is a long time, and I wish he had stepped in sooner,” she whispers.

“Amen,” I snort.

My mom’s lips curl up. “But, the past few weeks, I’ve remembered a lot about your dad. Including the fact that I like him. A lot. And I loved him the second I laid eyes on him a little over twenty-three years ago.”

“How?” I whisper.

She shrugs. “I’m not sure, baby. But all of that came roaring back as soon as we started talking again, and I’m not going to deny those feelings.”

I look to the side, refusing to acknowledge her slight jab.

“Alexei is a good man. He asked me to come here for you. He wants you to be happy, baby. His reputation is practically made of platinum. I get feelings about people, you know this, and I have a good feeling about this one.”

I nibble my lip. “But what if he has to… leave. Like dad?”

She shrugs. “Then you’ll come live with me. But I have a feeling that your life with Alexei Orlov is going to be just a little different than your dad’s life, my love.”

“Why?”

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