Page 5 of The Scandal Behind The Italian’s Wedding

Because she felt like she was staring down the very devil.

“We have a lot to discuss, don’t you think?”

Dante took hold of her hand, and lifted her from the limo, depositing her gently onto her feet. She looked past his shoulder, at Maximus and her father.

“And when you’re done speaking to her,” Maximus said, “I think you and I need to have a talk.”

“I’m sure this will give you time to rally the firing squad,” Dante said, his tone dry.

He was still holding her hand.

She could recall, with perfect ease, another time Dante had touched her hand. Not the dance, but earlier.

She had been a girl. All of twelve, and she had fallen out of a tree in the backyard.

Dante had found her lying pitifully on the ground, pondering her fate, and he had been afraid that she had broken her neck. He had yelled as much at her as he had lifted her up. His touch, hot and strong, had started to quiver low in her body.

She hadn’t liked it. She had pulled away from him, then bent down to wipe the blood from her knee. “I’m fine.”

“You are a menace,” he’d said back.

She could imagine the exchange happening just that way now.

“I have to get Isabella,” she protested.

“Go,” he said.

She did, stumbling as she went. With shaking fingers, she undid the seat belt and lifted her baby girl up from the seat.

The thing was, it didn’t matter who’d given birth to Isabella.

Minerva was her mother.

She’d cared for her from the time she was born while Katie shrank away in increasing fear, self-medicating away the terror of the possibility of Carlo finding them.

Min was not brave by nature. But she’d known someone had to be brave for Isabella. And since Katie couldn’t, it had to be her.

They walked past her brother, who was looking at Dante as though he wanted to flay him alive, and her father, who looked stoic. Into the house. Up the stairs.

Totally silent.

Minerva clung to Isabella, thinking of her in some ways as a shield. Surely not even Dante would yell at her while she was holding a baby.

He opened up the door to her father’s study, and ushered her inside, slamming it behind them. “Explain this, Minerva, because you and I both know that I am not the father of your baby.”

Well, she was disappointed on that score. Dante was clearly fine yelling around an infant.

She cupped the back of Isabella’s downy little head. “Did you tell them?”

“No, I didn’t tell them. You’re going to have to tell them, because if I tell them they’re not going to believe me. In the hour it took you to get home from the press conference, I had to tell your brother about ten reasons he shouldn’t kill me where I sat. And the leading one was that I might be the father of your child, and that you might need me in some capacity.”

“I do need you,” she said.

Silence settled between them as he waited for her to explain.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I panicked.”

“Why did you panic? What is happening?”

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