A Natural Father

by Sarah Mayberry

  “I need advice. He’s cooking for me,” Lucy whispered into the phone.

  “What? Why are you whispering? Of course he’s cooking for you—he invited you to lunch,” Rosie said.

  “I’m whispering because I’m in the bathroom, and I’m in here because he’s set the table with flowers and linen napkins and he’s made gnocchi from scratch and there’s wine and he just fed me sauce and looked at me as though maybe he really does want to take a bite out of me,” Lucy explained in a rush.

  “Oh boy. I need to sit down.”

  “Me, too,” Lucy said. She put down the lid on the toilet and sat.

  “I’m freaking out here, Rosie. I have no idea if I’m reading things into the situation that aren’t there or I don’t know what,” she whispered, glancing toward the door.

  “Calm down. Let’s assess the situation logically. You said there were flowers. What kind?”

  “Roses.”

  “And linen napkins. And he’s making pasta for you?”

  “Yep. And there’s wine. And I think I saw some kind of cake sitting on the counter for later.”

  “He baked for you? Maybe I need to lie down,” Rosie said. “I can’t believe The Bianco is making a move on you.”

  Lucy sucked in an outraged breath. “What do you mean you can’t believe it? You’re the one who told me he wanted me. You’re the one who told me to wear the red shirt and that this was a date, not a business lunch.”

  “Yeah, but this is really happening!” Rosie said excitedly.

  Lucy closed her eyes. She felt dizzy, scared, even a little sweaty. She couldn’t handle this. She didn’t want Dom to look at her with bedroom eyes. She didn’t want to be aware of him as a woman. She was pregnant. A tiny little person was growing inside her body. Soon, she’d be looking after that little person night and day.

  “I think I should leave,” she told her sister. “I’ll tell him I don’t feel well and come home.”

  “Are you kidding me? Stay. Stay and see what happens.”

  Lucy clutched the phone.

  “Rosie. Be serious. This is not a game. This is my life. Isn’t it complicated enough already? I just signed a contract to share my business with Dom. If anything happened between us—” She broke off, shaking her head. She couldn’t even allow herself to go there. It was so absurd, so crazy. She still couldn’t believe that she’d seen what she’d thought she’d seen in his eyes.

  “But he likes you,” Rosie said, as though that resolved everything.

  “I don’t like him,” Lucy fired back.

  “Liar. If you didn’t like him, you wouldn’t be hiding out in the bathroom calling me because he looked at you.”

  “Rosie. Be serious. I just gave half my business to this man.”

  Rosie sighed. “Fine, be sensible then. Tell him you’re not interested. Get it out of the way now, off the agenda. That way you both know where you stand.”

  Lucy realized that every muscle in her body was tense and made a conscious effort to relax.

  “Okay, good. That’s what I’ll do, nip it in the bud,” she said, nodding her agreement. “Thanks, Rosie. I needed to hear that.”

  “Did you?”

  “Stop trying to be Dr. Freud. You don’t have the beard for it.”

  She ended the phone call after promising to call Rosie the moment the meeting was over. Then she flushed the toilet and washed her hands and eyed herself sternly in the mirror.

  The very next time Dom smiled at her in that special way or looked at her as though she were chocolate-coated, she’d call him on it. They’d lay their cards on the table, establish some ground rules and move on. Problem solved.

  Dom was dressing a salad when she returned to the living room.

  “We’re about two minutes away. Would you mind taking our wineglasses over to the table?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  She placed the wine on the coasters he’d provided and hovered awkwardly beside one of the chairs.

  “Does it matter where I sit?” she asked.

  “Help yourself.”

  He brought the salad to the table, then served the pasta. Aromatic flavors wafted up from her meal as he placed it in front of her.

  “This looks wonderful,” she said.

  “I take no credit. My ma perfected this recipe over twenty years. All I did was follow instructions,” he said.

  He smiled and she searched his face for any of the heated intent she’d registered earlier. But for the life of her she could find nothing apart from friendly warmth and welcome.

  “You want Parmesan?” he asked, offering her a small bowl of freshly grated cheese.

  She sprinkled Parmesan on her gnocchi and took her first mouthful. It really was fantastic—the tomatoes tangy, the chili providing the exact right amount of background burn. The gnocchi was light and fluffy, with the hint of something elusive in the mix.

  “This is great,” she said, gesturing toward her plate with her fork.

  “Yeah? Glad you like it. I made so much, you can take some home with you, save you cooking dinner.”

  There was a solicitous note in his voice. She darted a look at him, ready to deliver her clear-the-air speech at the first sign of anything remotely unbusinesslike. But again he simply looked friendly and interested. The perfect business partner, in fact: cooperative, personable, intelligent.

  She was on tenterhooks throughout the entire meal, waiting for a repeat of the moment by the stove. It never happened. After they cleared the table, he brought out his paperwork and notepad and got down to business in earnest. Not once over the subsequent hours did he so much as hint that he saw her as anything other than his business partner.

  No hot looks. No lingering glances. No intimate smiles. Nothing except sensible, incisive business discussion.

  After two hours of intense strategizing, Lucy retreated to the bathroom again.

  She was confused. She’d been so sure…. The butterflies in her stomach, the pounding of her heart, the steamy intent in his eyes—was it really possible that she was so out of practice with all things male-female that she’d misread his signals? Could she have simply imagined that moment of connection? Was that really possible?

  She checked her reflection in the bathroom mirror and groaned as she realized she’d spilled sauce on herself, her baby bump having obligingly caught it. She stared at the red splodge, bright against the dark of her turtleneck, like a beacon drawing attention to her belly.

  “You’re an idiot,” she told her reflection.

  The tension she’d been carrying with her all afternoon dissipated as she sponged her top clean, shaking her head all the while.

  Call it hormones, call it nerves, call it whatever—she’d clearly misinterpreted Dom’s behavior. Of course she had. She was pregnant. Hardly an object of desire. She had to have been temporarily deranged to even entertain the idea in the first place.

  Feeling calm and centered for the first time all afternoon, she returned to their meeting.

  Thank God she hadn’t delivered her little speech.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DOM COULDN’T STOP thinking about Lucy. While he cleaned up after their lunch, he thought about how she didn’t take herself too seriously, how she liked to laugh. How smart she was in a school-of-hard-knocks kind of way.

  During his run afterward, he thought about how gutsy and brave she was.

  He liked her. He liked her a lot. The admiration and curiosity and attraction he’d felt for her previously had been based on what little he knew of her via their brief daily encounters at his father’s stall. Now, however, he’d seen Lucy at home, watched her interact with her sister, had numerous meetings with her, and he was beginning to understand just how special she was.

  As he paused at a traffic light, he registered that he’d spent the past hour thinking about Lucy Basso. And not in a business kind of way.

  Sweat ran down his back and the smile faded from his lips as he remembered the moment by the stove. He�
�d almost kissed her. She’d been standing so close and he’d been staring into her face and the need to taste her lips, to touch her to see if she was as smooth and warm and soft as he imagined had almost overwhelmed him.

  He was a bastard. The light changed and he took off across the intersection.

  The moment he’d decided to offer her a partnership, he’d known it meant the end of his chances with her. Lucy did not need her new business partner lusting after her. She needed help, support, money. Anything beyond that was simply not on the agenda. And he was a selfish prick for even letting himself go there. He lengthened his stride, angry with himself. He needed to get a grip on his attraction to her.

  Ten minutes later, he slowed his pace, switched off his iPod and opened the gate to his parents’ house. His mother looked up from the kitchen table when he entered via the back door.

  “Dominic! At last you come. I was beginning to forget what my boy looks like,” she said, pushing herself to her feet with an effort.

  Like his father, his mother had turned into a round little barrel as she aged, her love of pasta and rich meats catching up with her. Her long gray hair was pinned on the back of her head, and she wore a voluminous apron over her dress. Her hands were dusted with flour, and she held them out from her sides as he kissed her.

  “You all sweaty,” his mother said, eyeing him with concern. “You should get out of those damp clothes. Have a shower. Put on something of your father’s.”

  “I’m fine. I just dropped in for a quick hello,” he said.

  His mother’s lips immediately thinned.

  “I never see you anymore. First you go away for six months, then you come home and still you are stranger.”

  Guilt stabbed him. He had been avoiding home—or, more accurately, he’d been avoiding his father. At the market, work acted as a buffer between them, but at home there was no place to hide the fact that he and his father were barely on speaking terms.

  “I’ve been busy. Work and some other things.”

  His mother sat back at the table and resumed rolling out the mixture for her biscotti.

  “Your father is in the front room. You should go say hello to him,” she said.

  He hesitated a fraction of a second before nodding.

  “Sure.”

  He could feel her watching him as he walked up the hallway.

  His father was in his favorite chair, the seat reclined as far as it could go, the Italian-language newspaper, Il Globo, spread across his belly. Dom watched him sleep for a moment, noting how old his father looked without his larger-than-life personality to distract from the new wrinkles in his face and the sag of his jaw. Age spots had appeared on his hands in the past few years and the gray in his hair was turning white. He was fifty-nine and still he woke every day at 5:00 a.m. to tend the stall at the market, despite the fact that they could easily afford to hire staff to cover the early shift.

  Stubborn bastard.

  “Pa,” he said quietly.

  Tony started, the newspaper rustling. He frowned, jerking the chair into the upright position.

  “Was reading newspaper,” he said.

  Dom gestured back toward the kitchen.

  “I dropped in to see Mama for a bit,” he said.

  Tony nodded. “Good, good. She worries when she not see you.”

  Conversation dried up between them. Dom felt the silence acutely. He and his father had had their moments over the years, but he’d never felt as distant as he had recently.

  He cleared his throat. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Lucy Basso was looking for an investor in Market Fresh, so I’ve bought in. We’re partners.”

  “What is this? Partners? How can you be partners with another business when you have Bianco Brothers?”

  “It’s not a full-time gig. At the moment, at least. When things pick up, I might have to rethink. But in the meantime nothing has to change.”

  His father’s face reddened. “You work for me! You always work for me.”

  “I’m not resigning, Pa. I’m just exploring other opportunities.”

  His father glared at him for a long moment.

  “This is because of computers.”

  “I want to make my own business successes,” Dom said, sidestepping the issue.

  “After everything I give you, everything I do for you. You tell me this, no discussion, nothing.”

  Dom refused to feel guilty. He had a life to live, too.

  “I’m not a kid, I don’t need to ask your permission.” He felt like he’d been saying that a lot lately. “I just thought you’d like to know what was going on.”

  He headed for the kitchen. His mother looked up from spooning biscotti mixture onto a tray when he entered.

  “Listen, I have to go. But maybe I could come around for dinner during the week?”

  His mother frowned, then her gaze slid over his shoulder.

  “Bianco Brothers is for you. For all my children. And you throw back in my face,” Tony said from the doorway.

  Dom saw his father’s hands were shaking and his eyes were shiny with tears. Dom rubbed the bridge of his nose and reached for patience.

  “What am I supposed to do, Pa? I have a business degree, I have ideas, but you won’t listen to any of them. So either I sit around and suck it up and stew in my own juices, or I do something for myself. I chose Option B. You still have Vinnie and the rest of the staff. There’s nothing I do that they can’t.”

  “What is going on? What is happening here?” his mother asked.

  “Dominic is leaving business,” Tony said, his chin stuck out half a mile.

  Dom raised his eyebrows. “That’s not what I said.”

  “What do you call when you buy another business?”

  “I’m a partner. Lucy will still run it. I’m just helping out. I promise this won’t be a problem, okay?” he said. “Look, we can talk about this more tomorrow at work.”

  When you’ve had a chance to cool down and think instead of react.

  He turned to his mother.

  “Save some biscotti for me,” he said. She nodded absently and kissed him good-bye.

  Out in the street, Dom took a deep breath, then let it out again. He’d done it. It hadn’t been pleasant, but it was over.

  The look on his father’s face flashed across his mind. He’d looked betrayed. Hurt. Baffled.

  Dom started to run, lengthening his stride with each step. Soon he was breathing heavily, sweat running down his chest and spine.

  He refused to look back, and he couldn’t stand still forever. His father was going to have to come to terms with his decision. And if he didn’t…well, they would cross that bridge when they came to it.

  * * *

  LATER THAT EVENING, Rosie stood in the kitchen making spaghetti with meatballs with her husband. As usual, he was cutting the onions because they made her howl like a baby and she was mashing the canned tomatoes in the saucepan.

  “Do you think it would be wrong for me to invite Dominic Bianco to the Women’s Institute fund-raiser next week without telling Lucy first?” she asked during a lull in their conversation.

  “Why would you do that?” Andrew asked.

  “Because if I tell Lucy, she’ll tell me not to invite him.”

  “Okaaaay,” Andrew said, frowning. “Why do I feel like I’m missing a vital part of this conversation?”

  “I think Dom likes Lucy.”

  His eyebrows rose toward his hairline.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said.

  “So?”

  He clanked a frypan onto the stove.

  “You’re serious? You need me to explain?”

  “It’s happened before in the history of the world.” Rosie was aware she sounded defensive. Was she the only one who saw the potential here? “Lucy is still gorgeous and fantastic. Would it be any different if she was a single mom and she met a guy?”

  Andrew looked confused for a minute as he thought it over.

&
nbsp; “Yes. And I don’t know why, it just is. Pregnant women are for protecting and admiring, not lusting after,” he said unequivocally.

  She grunted.

  “Hey, I can’t help the way the male mind works. This stuff is hardwired in, along with the ability to kill spiders and take out the garbage.”

  She rolled her eyes but couldn’t help smiling.

  “I’m still going to invite him,” she said.

  “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”

  She threw the tea towel at him.

  “I almost forgot. I picked up that new George Clooney movie for you on the way home,” Andrew said as he measured olive oil into the frypan and added the onions.

  “Have I told you lately that you’re the man of my dreams?” she said.

  “Yeah? Prove it,” he said. He pulled her close for a kiss, and only the hiss of the olive oil forced them to call a halt.

  “Phew. Someone’s looking for some action tonight,” she said, fanning herself with a hand.

  “You know it, babe.”

  She smiled at him, anticipating the night ahead. A couple of hours with George on the TV and her husband beside her on the couch—the perfect man sandwich. Then bed, with sleep not on the immediate agenda. Sounded pretty damn fine to her.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said as she began to form the meatballs. “This whole thing with Lucy—the baby, the renovation fund.”

  She tensed, forewarned by the odd stiffness to his speech. Almost as though he’d rehearsed what he wanted to say.

  “I’m thinking we should start the office renovation now,” he said.

  She let out a silent sigh of relief.

  “Okay. Good. That sounds good,” she said.

  “And that maybe we should start trying for a baby at the same time.”

  She suddenly had trouble swallowing.

  This is it, the moment of truth. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

  “I thought we were going to wait until we had a junior partner on board,” she said slowly.

  “Sure. But the odds are good we won’t get pregnant straight away. Even if we do, there’s a whole nine months to find someone and train them. I was talking to Lincoln Sturt during the week, and he thinks the renovation would only take a month or two to finish. He even suggested his draftsman for the design work.”