Page 40 of The Scandal Behind The Italian’s Wedding

She would’ve bounced around and...

And Minerva would never have seen her again.

So Minerva had told the police that Isabella was her daughter.

And that was how it had continued.

Dante thought that she was at least interesting enough to have engaged in an affair with a mobster.

But she wasn’t.

She had just been a witness to it, and that made her all the more bland.

She suddenly felt small and weak and trembling, and she hated herself for it.

“What’s the matter?” He lifted his hand and dragged his thumb along her lower lip.

“Nothing,” she said.

She lied because there was nothing else to do. She lied because all of this was a lie, so she might as well be one too.

“I think we had quite enough of the beach, don’t you?”

“Have we?”

“Yes. You’re my wife. And it’s time to make that real.”

“Oh... Well, it is real, in that it’s legal.”

“You know,” he said, his voice lowering to a growl. “There were days when a marriage wasn’t considered a marriage until it had been consummated.”

“Right,” she said. “Wasn’t there some barbarous practice of hanging bloody sheets out the window to alert the nation of the purity of the bride?”

He chuckled. “Luckily,” he said, “neither of us have to worry about your purity.”

Her stomach fell.

“Luckily.”

He bent down and picked up Isabella. With shaking hands, Minerva began to gather her things.

“Leave it,” he said. “It will be dealt with later.”

Min was half out of her mind by the time they tromped back up to the house, by the time Dante laid Isabella down in her crib and closed the door to the nursery behind him.

“Will she sleep?”

“She doesn’t run on a schedule. She does what she does.”

“But she is...due to sleep?” he asked.

If there was one thing that made Dante seem a little bit flummoxed, it was Isabella. Babies in general. And truly, she had managed to destroy some of his composure with her impromptu announcement about his being the father of her baby. She supposed that on some level she should be triumphant in that.

She might be relatively boring, but she had caused Dante Fiori a moment’s concern. Had made that patrician brow crease for but a few seconds before he had taken control of the entire endeavor.

So she was several steps ahead of the rest of the world.

Maybe that made her not so boring.

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