Page 47 of The Italian's Pregnant Enemy (A Diamond in the Rough)

It would be easy to brush these things aside. It would be easy to dismiss her as a poor little rich girl. But her pain was very real, and he did not relish it. It was the kind of pain he thought he might’ve had if his life had continued on in the normal fashion. If it hadn’t been shattered so spectacularly. The kind of pain he might’ve experienced if his father had been human, rather than a monster who had abandoned his son. He and Lyssia were living in the fallout of things they could not control. They had both lost their mothers. They had both been left with fathers who had not been up to the task.

But her father had weathered it. He had stayed. His own had not.

Her pain was real. It didn’t have to be about safety and survival to be real.

“You are every inch yourself,” he said. “Whether you feel that or not. And I’m not certain that at twenty-three you’re meant to fully understand who you are. Life has a way of changing our expectations, does it not?”

He was a decade older than she was, and yet he too was on the cusp of a profound change. She was going to be a mother and he was going to be a father.

A father.

There was no relationship on earth he had a more complicated feeling about.

Lyssia’s father had been so good to him. His own so damaging.

He had vowed he would never be a father. Or a husband. Now he was to be both.

“I have gotten this far with great certainty of how everything would go. I never counted on you. On this. In that sense, perhaps neither of us know ourselves. Or at the very least we do not have great enough respect for how the world might intervene.”

“Is it fate, do you think?”

“I think it was lust,” he said. “Which has been undoing the greater plans of humanity for thousands of years.”

She laughed softly. “Well. That’s a good point. Though, not quite as romantic as fate.” There was something hopeful in her eyes, and it made him ache. Because if she was hoping for real romance, there was no chance of him giving it. He thought of his own home. Back in Italy. Small and simple and filled with warmth.

His father had never been a bad man.

His father had always loved him. That was the frightening thing.

It was the truly frightening thing.

“Life is not overly romantic,” he said. “And anyway, romance can be dangerous. I prefer to rest on careful planning.”

“Isn’t the topic of discussion about how plans fall apart?”

He smiled. “Then you make new plans.”

“What is the saying, Dario? Man plans, God laughs?”

“Good thing I’m relatively adjacent to the divine, isn’t it?”

“You have always been so arrogant. And I have always wanted to be more horrified by it than I am.”

“What a tragedy for you, then, that you find me irresistible.”

She looked at him and spread her hands. “Here I am, resisting.”

“And after dinner?”

“Are we talking to my father after dinner?”

“Indeed.”

“I’m going to guess that I won’t be in the mood after that.”

“We’ll see.” Because there was something about the bright burning between them that made him feel like this was something a little more familiar. Like it was something a bit more manageable.

The car pulled up to the restaurant then, the large picture windows lit up brilliantly, making the diners inside look as if they were part of a theatrical production.

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