by Virna DePaul
Apparently, she should have had her mother keeping a closer eye on her.
As if reading her thoughts, her mother cupped her chin and lifted her face so their eyes locked. “You have a job and money and a place to live, Aurora. That’s already so much more than you and I started out with. This child is lucky to have a mama like you.”
“But what about a papa for my baby?” Aurora cried.
“Eh,” Cedalie waved her many-ringed hand through the air. “Who needs that? A man will just complicate the energy in the household.”
Cedalie was old school Louisiana Creole. Not voodoo exactly, but she subscribed to a very different school of thought than the average American. Aurora had long ago accepted her mother’s view of the world. One filled with auras and energies and spirits. In some cases, her mother had proved to be damn close to psychic. Whatever that meant.
Aurora had inherited some “vision,” her razor sharp intuition a huge part of the reason she’d done so well in the business world. But for the most part, she kept the mystical side of herself confined to moments when she was with her mother.
“I’m not worried about raising the baby without a papa. I’m worried about raising it with one.”
“What’s that, child?”
“The father of the baby. He’s…” Aurora trailed off, totally unsure what she even meant to say. “Not the man I love.” Even as she said the words, however, she was surprised that when she tried to think of Gio, Dante’s visage remained strong. Almost as if it refused to be pushed aside to let another man inside her head.
Or her heart.
“Hmm.” Cedalie eyed Aurora shrewdly and stroked one finger over her daughter’s eyebrows. “Tell me about the father, then.”
“His name is Dante. He’s huge. Takes up every room he’s ever in.”
“He’s loud?”
“No. No, not at all. He’s just the kind of guy that people pay attention to. He’s always looking for the joke. But he’s smart. A good businessman. He’s not like us, Mama.”
“In what way?”
“He’s rich. Very rich. And he’s used to people doing everything and anything he tells them to. He’s very bossy.” Aurora blushed and turned away from her mother.
“Would he be a good father?”
“I have absolutely no idea. He has a million women in the bull pen at all times. He’s a total player. Been after me for years and one night I just…”
“You just needed to be loved.”
Aurora sat up then. “No. No, that’s not it at all. I just needed passion.”
“And you sure got it, child.” Cedalie stood and poured out a cup of the tea that was steeping in a kettle on the kitchen table. She brought it over to Aurora. “That much is clear just from the look on your face.”
Aurora blushed further. There was no use lying to her mother, who would know she was lying anyways. “Well. Yes. He’s very passionate. Oh god, Mama this is awful, what is in this tea?”
“It’s for good fortune. For you and for the baby. Drink up. Passion is a good quality in a partner.”
Aurora released a mirthless laugh. “He’s never in a million years going to be my partner.”
Cedalie sat back, her silver black hair settling over the large purple sweater she wore. She tucked her feet, clad in mismatched socks, underneath herself and looked out the window. “If you keep the baby, you have to tell the father. It’s bad energy to keep a man from his offspring.”
Aurora swallowed down the bitterness in her throat. “I know.”
She knew that her mother’s only regret over the way that Aurora was conceived was that Cedalie hadn’t been sure who the father was. It had happened during a wilder time. When she wasn’t sure of the names of the men she took to bed, and she damn sure wasn’t sure how to contact them again.
Cedalie turned back to her daughter. “But you damn well better be sure you have your ducks in a row before you do. You need to know that man inside and out before you tell him.”
“What? Why?”
“A man that rich? A man who gets what he wants? There’s no telling what he’ll do if he does or doesn’t want the baby. You need to be ready. Prepared. And you can’t prepare if you don’t know him.”
“You’re telling me to get closer to him?” Aurora heard a tinny ringing in her ears. Her heart was leaping, both from nerves and from something else she couldn’t quite identify.
“If you’re keeping the baby, you owe it to yourself to know this man. If he’s someone who will take the baby from you, then you need to have the legalities in order. If he’s someone who will try to convince you not to have the baby, then you need to have an escape plan. If he’s someone who will want to raise the baby with you, then you’ll have to know him well enough to know if you want it. Pregnancy is a vulnerable time. You need to be armed with information. And a good plan.”
Aurora’s head was spinning. “I thought you were going to tell me to come home and move in with you. Or convince me it was time to move back to New Orleans.”
“No, child. You have untied strings with this man. You tie them up. And then we decide where we live.”
Aurora tilted her head back on the couch. “And what about Gio?”
“What about him?”
Aurora lifted her head at the dismissive tone in her mother’s voice. “I just go on pretending I don’t love him?”
Cedalie reached forward, picked up the tea from the coffee table and shoved it back in her daughter’s hand. “Time tells, daughter. You feel your feelings and time tells the truth.”
* * *
Dante half-heartedly sank a spoon into his portion of ice cream and tried not to wince at the cotton candy flavor in his mouth. He was more of a chocolate chocolate chip sort of guy. But anything for Michelle. She was sitting next to him at the breakfast bar, swinging her socked feet and humming to herself as she worked her way through her half of the carton.
“Dante, I think you need to start doing yoga,” she said out of the clear blue.
He blinked at his little sister, his eyes instantly going wide with humor and surprise. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, in that authoritative way of hers. Her messy hair fell in front of her face and for a moment, her eyes, exactly like Dante’s, were blocked. She brushed it away. “It’s proven to help with stress.”
“I’m not stressed.”
“Pffft.” She rolled her eyes. “Then how come you’re always going running at the butt crack of dawn? You only do that when you’re stressed.”
He leaned over and brushed the hair out of her eyes himself, chuckling at her choice of words. “I’d say you need a haircut, but you’re already seeing too much as it is, kid.”
“So I’m right?”
“About the stress or the yoga?”
“The stress.”
Dante eyed his sister, her little frame in the too big shirt, her face so much like their father’s. It never failed to be like a dagger in the heart when he saw that man staring up at him out of Michelle’s face. When he’d taken her in, he’d promised himself that he’d never do anything the way their father would. And what would their father do right now? He’d lie. So Dante scrubbed his hands over his face and tried to think of a way to tell the truth to a way too intuitive ten-year-old.
“Yeah. I’m stressed. I’ve been messing things up at work lately.”
“Why?” She not-so-surreptitiously dug into his half of the ice cream.
“I’ve been distracted.”
“Because of the woman you’ve been sending flowers to?”
Dante drew his hand away from his eyes and stared at Michelle in complete astonishment. “How did you know about that?”
She shrugged. “The flower place calls the house number if they can’t get you on your cell. Sometimes they have to make substitutes for whatever you’ve ordered. I always tell them what changes to make.”
There were no words. “Is that right?”
She shrugged. “So, wh
o is she?”
He opened his mouth and clapped it closed again. “Her name’s Aurora.”
“The woman you work with sometimes?”
“Seriously. How do you know all of this?”
Michelle gave him quite the look. “Dante, we live together, I listen when you talk. It’s not rocket science. Plus, I met her at an office picnic. Don’t you remember?”
“I guess I forgot.” He chuckled, slapped her spoon away from his ice cream with his own spoon and took another bite. “So, yeah, I work with her and…” He trailed off. Nowhere to go from there. How to explain this to Michelle? It was too advanced for a ten-year-old.
“And you have a crush on her,” Michelle filled in where he couldn’t.
“No,” he started, and then reconsidered. He didn’t think Michelle needed to hear him talk about being obsessed with Aurora. That one night worshipping at the altar of her body had only served to whet his appetite. Yeah, not the kind of conversation a guy has with his ten-year-old sister. “Well. Sure. I’ve got feelings for her.”
“But she doesn’t have them for you?”
Dante shook his head. “Doesn’t seem like it. But she let me kiss her one time.”
That actually wasn’t true. She purposefully hadn’t let him kiss her. But he wasn’t about to explain that she’d let him fuck the lights out of her. Four times. So, kiss it was.
“And now you send her flowers.”
“Yep.” He eyed her out of the corner of his eye. She’d had a small health episode with her Von Willebrand’s earlier in the week. It had required a short hospital stay. But she was looking a lot better now. She had her color back. He glanced at the clock. It was going to be time for her medicine in a few minutes.
“Did you tell her how you feel?” Michelle asked, sneaking one last bite of his ice cream.
“She knows.”
“No,” Michelle shook her head again. “In school, they say that you have to make sure you actually explain your feelings, or else the other person might not understand. You might think she knows but maybe she doesn’t.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “I’ve been sending her flowers for six weeks. I think she gets the picture.”
Michelle shrugged and slid down from the bar stool. “Flowers mean a lot of things. ‘I’m sorry’, ‘Be my wife’, ‘Go on a date with me’, ‘Good luck.’ Who knows what she thinks you mean.”
Dante blinked at her. Michelle might have a point there. “Alright. Maybe you’re right.” He chucked his spoon in the tub and followed her from the room. “Time for your medicine.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled. But it didn’t stop her from reaching up and taking his hand. Just like she did when she’d first come to live with him four years ago.
Dante looked down at her head. The kid was growing up, that was for sure. But he was glad she hadn’t grown out of some things yet.
Chapter Five
A week went by and though Aurora was trying to be patient and follow her mother’s advice, time still hadn’t told Aurora shit. Except that being pregnant kind of sucked. She was irritable, her nipples had started hurting, and to add insult to injury, she was horny as hell.
Aurora couldn’t remember a time in her life when she’d been this turned on. All the time. She couldn’t stop thinking about her night with Dante. The hottest sex of her life. And that was really bothering her because she was trying desperately to figure out a way to reach out to Dante as a friend.
Her mother had encouraged her to get to know him better before she broke the news to him. And Aurora could definitely see the wisdom in the advice. However, she had no idea how to pull it off.
They had never been friends, even before they’d slept together. And any advance that Aurora made now was sure to be taken as an indicator that she wanted to sleep together again.
Which she totally did. She couldn’t deny that. She’d replayed their passionate night together more times than she could count. But she was certain that it was a bad idea to sleep with Dante again. He scrambled her brains when what she needed to be was clearheaded and deliberate. Now more than ever. As her mother had advised, she needed to figure out what kind of man he was.
Besides, it wasn’t like her love for her boss had disappeared overnight, simply because Dante had helped ease her pain for one night. Granted, she’d woken up the next day confused over two men instead of one, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t have either of them. Not as a lover or a husband.
But whether she liked it or not, Dante might just play another part in her life. The role of father to her child, if he was so inclined.
As she prepared a file to bring into Gio’s office, she pondered how to get to know Dante better without winding up in his bed again. Maybe she could find some work-related project to team up with him on. That way she could be in his sphere, observe him, get to know him, but not run the risk of blurring any lines.
Intrigued by the idea, Aurora straightened her emerald green silk blouse and brushed off her charcoal pencil pants. She smoothed her hair back before she left her office. She was no longer trying to attract Gio, but it didn’t hurt to look her best.
She strode into his office, holding the file triumphantly in the air. “Found it!”
“Thank God,” Gio said, pushing back from his desk and coming around to stand next to her. “I really didn’t want to have to do all that work over again.”
“I’m sorry, are you under the impression that you did it the first time?”
Gio grinned. “Ah. My mistake. I wouldn’t have wanted you to have to do all that work over again.”
She laughed. It was just one of the many things she loved about him. He’d never been intimidated by her competence. Even when she’d started here as his executive assistant, he’d recognized her talent immediately. In many ways, he was her mentor. She stared at the side of his face as he surveyed the file. He was just so dang handsome. All black hair and five o’clock shadow and milk chocolate eyes.
“Am I interrupting?”
Dante’s voice came from the doorway. His hair was tousled from the wind and he had a messenger bag slung across his chest.
And he was looking at Aurora like he could see right to the heart of her.
* * *
Suddenly everything made sense. Painfully clear sense.
She was in love with Gio.
Dante had daydreamed about seeing that look on her face. Soft and sweet and hopeful. He’d wanted Aurora to look that way at him, and instead she was doing it for Giovanni Esposito.
Damn. He’d been having such a good day too. Michelle’s words had inspired him to come clean to Aurora. He was going to lay his cards on the table. And if she didn’t pick those cards up? Well, then he was just going to have to be a big boy and move the hell on.
But now, this. What the hell was he supposed to do with this?
“Ah, Dante,” Gio said as he looked up, taking a file from Aurora’s hand. “Glad you’re here. I have a few things I want to go over with you.”
“I’ll leave you to it.” Aurora ducked out of the room, leaving nothing more than a whiff of her scent. It was subtle, light, but it went straight to Dante’s head like a shot of whiskey.
Dante sat down and went over the file that Gio had wanted to show him. He surveyed him, taking stock of Giovanni the way a gladiator might take stock of his opponent in the ring.
Sure, Gio was dating a woman named Rose now, but had Dante missed something? Had Gio and Aurora ever slept together? The thought curdled in his stomach like spoiled milk. He swallowed against the insane rage that rose up through his throat.
“Dante, are you even listening?” Gio was looking at him like he was a crazy man right now. What had he just said?
Dante tried to focus on the business at hand, but he found his mind was still spinning. All he could think about was the fact Aurora was in love with a man who didn’t want her. And somehow, that had ended up with her being in his bed.
His brain just sort of shor
ted out at that one. Because who in their right fucking mind didn’t want Aurora LeMonde? The woman was pure, walking sin. Sex in the body of Aphrodite.
A small knock on the door of their office interrupted their meeting, and not a moment too soon. Dante was about ten seconds away from leaning across the table and smacking the handsome right off Gio’s face. Just for being whatever the hell it was that attracted Aurora.
The men turned to see Rose standing shyly in the doorway of the office.
Gio stood up so fast that the papers they’d been studying fluttered to the ground. “Rose!”
Dante raised an eyebrow and watched Gio fumble for the papers and then hurry around the desk to Rose. Was this what he was like with Aurora? Yikes.
“I’ll get out of your hair,” Dante said. “Nice to see you again, Rose.”
“You too,” she replied, but she obviously only had eyes for Gio.
Apparently every woman in the world only had eyes for Gio.
Dante left Gio’s office and closed the door behind him. He eyed Aurora’s closed office door. So that was it. She was in love with someone else.
But then a thought started uncurling in his head. He assumed that she’d been in love with Gio when they’d slept together before, so apparently it wasn’t too much of a problem for her. It made his blood pump and his fists clench to think about her longing after Gio, but in a way, it also relieved him.
Finally, Dante had the missing piece of the puzzle. He had all the information. He could finally make a good game plan here. He’d been flying blind before. He considered his options, and as the extremely shrewd businessman he was, a plan started to form.