Page 114 of Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King

I nod.

“So then…” his jaw clenches and unclenches, his laugh bitter, “God, it’s so stupid to even bring this up now. Why did you cut me off?” he finally asks. “If there wasn’t anyone else in your life, and you couldn’t have known about any plan? Why else would you do that unless you were done with us?”

I don’t blush easily, but my neck makes an honest effort of it.

“Oh.”

The stupid reason feels so juvenile now.

“It’s not a good reason, Ren. It was just stupid teenager stuff, that’s all—”

But I know that’s not a good enough reason. That won’t make the way it all happened make sense to him, not without the truth. I bow my head, hiding behind a few loose strands of hair as I force myself to tell him.

“Do you remember the charity gala you went to here in Manhattan?”

“…Not specifically.”

“Well, you wouldn’t,” I admit. For Ren, I’m sure it’s just another night, blending in with the countless other events and dances and auctions that we used to frequent at our parents’ urging. “I was going to surprise you. I’d picked out this dress and—” I wave away the old details, because they aren’t important now. “Instead, I overheard you talking to Elijah. I only caught bits and pieces—something about who you were going to dance with that evening. Elijah said your wife might disapprove. And you said…that I was fun, but I wasn’t wife material.”

I glance down at my hand, where the wedding band still hugs my finger. “I guess the joke’s on you, isn’t it?” I say, self-deprecatingly, forcing a smile. “So, I did what any stupid teenager would do. I blocked your number and locked myself in my bedroom for a week to cry it out.” I shrug, “It probably didn’t help that I was pregnant at the time. I just didn’t know it then.”

It still hurts to talk about it, to realize that we are still two people in a bed, both of us thinking that we settled for the other.

“Nadia, I…”

“Don’t apologize,” I wince, jumping on that grenade before he can set it off on both of us. “I shouldn’t—it doesn’t matter now. It’s been years, and…clearly it didn’t matter anyway with how it all turned out…”

“Nadia,” he interrupts, his stern tone causing me to falter and shut my mouth, “I told Elijah I didn’t want to marry you because I didn’t want him to know how serious I was about you. I toldeveryonethat. I couldn’t let them know that you were different.”

I stare at him, a numb disbelief spreading through my chest.

His hand curls around mine, tight and grounding, making sure I am dialed in to every earnest word. And I can always tell when Ren is being earnest. It makes him look younger. “My family had their own ideas about who I’d end up with. You know how they were—but my father said it would be good for me to enjoy dating while I was young and before I settled into the business and the family life. I knew if they found out, they’d try to interfere. And Elijah was always an insufferable little snitch when we were younger.”

My eyes feel too wide; the hinge of my jaw has come loose.

I feel like an animal that’s had a plastic ring around its neck for most of its life, cutting into the skin so deep that the pain had become a part of it. An inescapable truth of existing. And then someone comes along suddenly and rips the garbage off and you remember what it was to live without that awful pain that had been with you in every breath.

“I wanted to marry you, Nadia—for the right reasons, at first, and then for the wrong ones. But Ialways, alwayswanted to.”

“That’s what I wanted, too,” I confess, the words ripped out of me. “Even after everything. And I hated myself for it for so long—”

I hide my face in my hand and push down the stupid, soft feeling hammering in my chest. I tell myself again that crying doesn’t do anything. There’s just so much relief, and so much regret for how long I let those words haunt me, and everything they caused. Ren pulls me in against him, and my near-crying bubbles into a wet, miserable laugh,

“This was supposed to be sexy,” I complain dramatically, and Ren laughs into my hair. I wipe my face, grinning, his emotions holding mine back.

“Hey. Who says it can’t still be?” he says, putting me down onto my back again.

A sliver of moonlight falls over him from the window. I know, out there, the water is dark, the city lights dancing in tremble of their reflection. Ren comes into focus over me. I trace his cheekbones with my hands, cup his gorgeous face and feel him here with me.

I close my eyes as Ren lies over me, not fucking or teasing, just kissing and nuzzling in the dark. When he finally spreads my legs, and takes me slowly and gently under him, it feels like a first time of its very own.

***

Before the weather can turn for the season, I am brushing off my wedding gown again. A lot of women don’t get to wear their wedding gown twice in their lifetime; I get to wear mine twice in a single year.

I told Ren we didn’t have to have another wedding—a formal one, with plans and guests and a budget that could buy the moon—but when he asked if I wanted one, I couldn’t lie well enough to convince him I didn’t. Of course Iwanta real wedding, but even with all of Ren’s wealth and security at my disposal, a part of me still functions in terms ofwantversusneed. I’m trying to get back into the pampered life, like a house cat that lived outdoors for a little too long.

“I have something I want you to look at,” Ren says one evening as I watch for the hundredth time as Harper practices her skipping walk as the flower girl. Despite the reputation of most brides, I’m not the one making her perfect it. Harper just likes jumping around, throwing flower petals around the hallway and wearing a “fairy” dress.

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