Chapter One #3
Mimi swallowed, both the alarm and her doubts. She wasn’t going to let him wind her up with vague threats.
Pain danced freely in his gaze. His throat bobbed up and down. “I recognize the guilt in your face as well as if I were watching myself in the mirror. You’re not responsible for their accident any more than I am.”
Mimi nodded. Suddenly, he didn’t seem like an enemy so much as another grief-stricken bystander. “Do you start to believe it at some point?”
A hollow smile curved his lips. “I’m still waiting for that day. But you…”
“Yes, I know. I have to think of the baby.”
“I was going to say you were not even there that day. But I was present. I saw them leave.” He rubbed a long finger over his temple. “They had been at it again, arguing like dogs. It was raining in dense sheets. I cherished the silence after they left. Until I got the call.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, hearing the anguish in his tone.
“Me too.” Then Renzo DiCarlo reached for her hands, and it took every ounce of willpower Mimi had to not jerk away like a frightened kitten in front of the big, bad wolf. “I’d like to understand why you hid the pregnancy from everyone.”
“I… Pia wasn’t the easiest to deal with.”
“That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one.”
Shockingly enough, the dryness of his tone made Mimi giggle.
“The last few months before the accident, it snowballed. Like you said, she and Santo were fighting regularly. But she desperately believed that the baby would miraculously fix everything. Only they were building more and more lies between them.” Her breath came in a shallow gasp as she herself had skated over a dangerous lie.
“At the funeral, it became too much. John and Mom and your family and you… I realized I needed to think of myself. I’d spent months being her emotional support even as I was the one going through the invasive fertility shots.
” The words rushed out of her. “I needed calm. Not John’s heartbreaking grief.
Or your arrogant commands. I…needed respite from everyone and everything, and time. ”
“That sounds fair.”
“So glad you think so,” Mimi said archly, responding to that condescending tone again.
“Ahhh…this is going to get so much harder for both of us if you react like that to everything I say.”
She fought the urge to roll her eyes at him. “Then maybe don’t speak in that tone to me.”
“I don’t know—”
“Like you’re validating my choices with your agreement.”
“You’re a little porcupine under all that sensible softness, aren’t you?”
Mimi flushed, hoping he wouldn’t realize how much she liked his compliment. How much she liked that he saw her strength beneath her easy compliance. How desperate she had been all her life to be seen, especially next to her sister’s brilliant beauty. That it was this man was more than alarming.
“Only one more question remaining.”
Mr. DiCarlo uncoiled to his full height, one hand on his waist. He looked so deep in thought that the question came at Mimi like an arrow heading straight to her weakest point. “Why did you decide to keep the baby?”
“What?” she said inanely.
“Is it because it was Santo’s?”
Hot color suffused her cheeks. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I know you nurtured a little affection for Santo. That you were the first one to meet him, the one who became his friend over that long-ago summer in Milan. Then Pia came along and stole him from you.”
“And you think I kept the baby because I was in love with him?” Outrage colored her words. “So I not only was in love with my stepsister’s husband but eagerly agreed to give over my body and my freedom for nine long months just to have his baby? That’s a little twisted, don’t you think?”
He shrugged. And even that movement was somehow elegant. “You agreed to be surrogate for a woman I know firsthand was incapable of thinking about anyone but herself, Ms. Shah. Although, it was only in the last year that I realized Pia’s emotional vampirism extended to you too.”
“She was my sister, and I loved her,” Mimi declared, enraged.
But beneath the anger was that flicker of warmth that he had seen how exhausting Pia could be with her incessant competitiveness and petty jealousies and complex mind games. “I’m not hung up over Santo, for God’s sake. Honestly, it didn’t take me long to discover he wasn’t my type.”
“What ‘type’ was Santo?”
“You want me to list my dead brother-in-law’s faults?”
“I just listed your sister’s.” His throat bobbed up and down again. “My family has already turned him into a saint, Ms. Shah. I’d rather remember the real man, flaws and all.”
“Santo was irresponsible. No, that’s not right.
He didn’t take responsibility for anything, but rather had this romantic view of life that had nothing to do with reality, and he didn’t stand up for what was right.
It became clear to me over the years that he and Pia lived far beyond their meager incomes, and that’s all because of you.
In hindsight, I think it was a miracle that their marriage lasted as long as it did. ”
When she looked up, Renzo DiCarlo’s firm mouth was slack with shock. Mimi sighed. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It seems you’re a good study of character. Everything you said about Santo is completely true.”
Mimi was as shocked by his honest admission as he seemed to be by hers.
“Then you should acknowledge that I needed to nurture something for the man who adored my stepsister like I needed a hole in my head.” She took a breath to even out her tone.
“Whatever else they fought over, Pia and Santo desperately wanted this baby. They went through so much to have it. I went through a lot. So, no, I didn’t think of not having it. ”
“I want to believe you.”
Mimi shot to her feet. God, the man was infuriating. “If you’re done insulting me, I’d like you to leave.”
“We’re not done.”
“Fine. You’re here to hash out some kind of custody arrangement, right? So can we please get to it? I’ve had a long day and would like a shower and dinner and my bed, in that order.”
“Do you want me to order takeout for you?”
“No, I couldn’t eat a morsel with you hovering over me like some…rabid raptor, waiting to pick off leftover pieces.”
He laughed, a husky sound that swathed Mimi in silky waves. “You have quite the tongue on you, sì?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. DiCarlo, for not being as mousy and accommodating as you expected me to be.”
He sighed then, and that too was distracting. Because it seemed to come wrenching out of the depths of him. It pulled her out of her own head for just a second. He had lost his brother and now had the unwanted news of that brother’s child.
God, what a mess…
“I have something to tell you,” he said after a long pause, “and I think you should sit down. I’d hate for you to be upset in your current condition.”
“Again, it’s very simple,” she said through gritted teeth. “Don’t tell me upsetting things.”
“Remember the mountain of lies that you said Pia and Santo built between them?” Bitterness twisted his mouth. “I’d rather we don’t begin this relationship buried under those ourselves.”
“We don’t have a relationship, Mr. DiCarlo. Neither are we going to build one.” She took a deep breath. “We can arrange for visitation rights for you, if you want that. One of my housemates is a lawyer, and she assured me that I don’t owe you even that. But since it’s your brother’s child, I—”
“It’s not Santo’s child. It’s mine.” His gray eyes held steady like flinty stones that had seen millennia pass. “Just as it’s not Pia’s. But yours. Wholly yours.”