Chapter Five #2
Something twisted in his gut, making him feel as if an invisible line had been crossed. No, he’d been dragged across it by fate, and now there was no going back. Only forward.
He was a husband and a father. Two things he’d never thought he’d be. Two things the men in his family were abysmal at being.
“Renzo?” Mimi whispered, though her tone rose in pitch.
He sat down on the bed next to her and handed her the glass. “He’s doing as well as possible,” he said.
She shook her head, stubborn to the last. “Tell me. Is the baby…” She swallowed audibly, and tears ran down her cheeks.
Out of the depths of numbness, fresh anger coursed through him, and he welcomed it. Anything was better than the black void of waiting he’d been drowning in for hours.
“Enough, bella. I will not have you sick again. Enough tears. Drink the water, and maybe I will tell you.”
She bristled, exhausted as she was. “You’re mean. Deep down, I always knew that.” But she took the glass from him and guzzled down nearly half of it.
It spilled around her mouth and down her neck. Which, in turn, made her gasp.
Renzo grabbed a napkin and wiped away the excess. Her pulse fluttered weakly under his fingers, the bones of her clavicle jutting painfully.
She grasped his wrist, her fingers ice-cold on his skin. He fought the urge to nuzzle deeper into her touch. “Please, tell me.”
“We have a son, Mimi,” he said, the words pushing past the chokehold in his throat.
“He’s healthy, although they tell me he cannot breathe by himself because he was early, like you said.
Everything else is pretty good. They have to keep him in the neonatal unit for the next few weeks.
Once his stats improve, we will take him home. You and I will take our son home.”
Fresh tears filled her eyes, but she blinked them back.
A small, precious smile fought through the tears, curving her lips.
“A son…” Her smile bloomed deeper, sending color to her cheeks.
Her chest rose and fell with her shallow breaths.
The same awe he had felt danced in her eyes. “What does he look like?”
“Right now? Like an oversized, wrinkled grape with a thin layer of fluff on his body.”
Just as he had intended, she gasped, burst out laughing and then smacked him. “Watch how you speak about my son.”
“Our son, bella,” he corrected her softly, though the emotion behind it was intense and overwhelming.
Possessiveness he had never known swamped him, fisting his insides. Without an outlet, it made him as angry as a bull.
Growing up, he’d watched his father dally and flirt and conduct scandalous affairs with one woman after the other, neglecting their mother, neglecting his children, neglecting the hotel chain his grandfather had handed him on a platter.
Making their family a target for tabloid press and fortune-hunting women. Not that he had any doubts about some of the women’s claims about their father.
Self-preservation then had been the only armor he had had left.
He hadn’t let anyone close—not Santo, not his sister, Chiara, and definitely not their mother, who had always been close to breaking. Hadn’t let anyone see how hurt and isolated he felt even surrounded by all of them.
Worse, as soon as he’d reached eighteen, he had to become their protector.
Including their father, to curtail his behavior, to save him from his own excesses.
Their mother, from completely shattering.
Because no one else was going to. He had worked hundred-hour weeks with his grandfather’s help, guiding the company back into profits, building it bigger and better in the last few years with new branding and acquisitions.
Power, he had realized, was the only way to control his father, the only way to exist outside of weaknesses, one’s own or others’.
He had tailored his life to never want anything from anyone, whether it be kindness or help or even affection. The women he’d dated had known that and had called him a ruthless, heartless monster. But he hadn’t felt anything more.
And yet now, this woman and their child seemed to have razed all his armor to dust. Making him feel all sorts of emotions that he didn’t know how to process, or how to exist with.
“Our son,” Mimi said clearly, her gaze holding his, conveying something he couldn’t put into words.
Renzo wondered if they would develop their own language now that they shared this magnificent tiny life. Like his grandparents did.
“Please tell me more about him,” she said, tugging fretfully at the IV tube.
Renzo leaned forward, letting some of his weight drop onto her legs. The small intimacy immediately filled her cheeks with a burst of color. “He has a full head of jet-black hair and the DiCarlo nose.”
Her lips turned down at the corners. “He looks nothing like me?”
“He has your ferocity and your strength, bella. They told me premature babies like him struggle with their sucking reflex, and he does too. But when they get him to clamp on the bottle, he’s fierce at drinking it up. They said it’s a great thing that he has such a good appetite.”
Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, and she swiped at them with the back of her hand. “More, please.”
He chuckled and took her hand in his, the naked hunger in her eyes calling to something in him.
He wanted her to look at him with such bare desire, wanted her to depend on him for everything. There was something extremely arousing, extremely motivating about winning the regard and respect of a strong woman like her. A woman whose strength of character shone like a diamond’s facet.
Merda, but only he could turn winning his wife over into a challenge for himself. But there it was, a sparkling new goal. One that set his entire being on fire.
“What else, Renzo?” she demanded, tugging at his fingers.
She had long fingers with chewed-up nails and chipped nail polish. The strangeness of her hand in his gave Renzo whiplash for a second. They had been through a life-altering event together, but she was still pretty much a stranger who didn’t believe in his commitment.
The uncertainty of it prickled against his skin, demanding action.
Demanding he arrange his future, their future, to his satisfaction.
He never doubted his decisions, but everything they had gone through in the past few days had only hardened his resolve that Mimi and their son belonged with him.
Permanently. His little family would operate on mutual respect and fidelity and their love for their precious son.
No, it was just a case of figuring out what she wanted and giving it to her.
He patted her hand and let go. The very vivid visual of this strong, beautiful woman surrendering everything to him was enough to keep him going.
“Renzo? What’s wrong?”
“I’m wondering if I should tell you a little truth. It doesn’t paint me in a good light.”
“Are you having second thoughts about being a father?” Alarm danced in her eyes, but she rallied fast enough.
As if she were used to dealing with disappointments from others.
The very thought stoked his ire. “Doesn’t matter.
A child’s birth is such a big event in one’s life that it’s normal to doubt yourself.
I’m okay if you want to annul the whole thing… ”
“Merda, cara! You really think very little of me, don’t you?”
The vehemence of his curse made her blanch, but she didn’t back away from him. “Commitments like these are hard for certain people. I don’t want to trap you.”
“Noted,” he said, half growling the word at her.
She leaned forward and rested her forehead on his shoulder. “I… I would be crushed if you walked away now. And not just because you’re a powerful, arrogant billionaire who can arrange the world just so for me right now.”
He laughed, his breath hitching at the soft graze of her body against his. How could this fragile woman be so strong? “Flattery will get you everything.”
“Tell me, please. I don’t want secrets between us when it comes to…him. Or how we feel about this whole parenthood thing. Like you said, we’re doing the best we can, and there’s no script for this. No right or wrong way to feel.”
“I haven’t seen him yet,” he admitted, a hundred emotions coursing through him. But none that he could hold on to. He felt like he was constantly caught up in a river current, barely staying afloat. “Everything I told you, I was simply repeating what Massimo told me.”
“Why didn’t you see him, Renzo?”
He kept his eyes averted from her, not wanting to telegraph something he didn’t have under control.
“You were unconscious, and it felt unfair that I see him first when you were the one who carried him all these months and cared for him. So I asked Massimo to tell me. He seems excited that he’s not the baby of the family anymore. ”
She tugged his chin up, and the smile blooming on her face was…so brilliant that it should have blinded him. “Shall we go now and see our son?”
He laughed and drew her closer. As if they had gone through the same ritual a thousand times, she tucked her head under his chin and wrapped her arms around his waist.
Renzo felt the desperate need to kiss her again. To taste her sweetness and her desire and her…just one more time.
He beat back the urge. Their relationship was supposed to be built on trust and mutual respect, not his hunger for her.
Yes, he was attracted to her, and that would only make their marriage pleasant.
Maybe become part of their foundation too.
But he couldn’t become a slave to his own needs and mess this all up.
He couldn’t let anything but rationality rule his head.
“Sì, we should. But the nurses will have to check you first. They worried that your blood pressure was too low earlier. You fainted when they tried to get you to sit up to go to the bathroom.”
She turned her face up to him and scrunched her nose. “Please tell me I didn’t embarrass myself.”
He sifted his fingers through her tangled hair. A soft groan escaped her chapped lips, sinking deep into his flesh. “Even if you had, it’s okay.” Tenderness engulfed him. “Did you have a name for him in mind?”
She tensed immediately, and he stroked his palm down her back. The need to soothe away every ache from her—whether it was of body or mind or heart—engulfed him.
He had always been the one to take charge of his family affairs, even though Santo had been older.
From ordering their father to control his unending flings to making sure their sister married the man she loved, to taking charge of their dying hotel conglomerate and growing it to the billion-dollar luxury resort empire it was today… he had taken control of all of it.
Not once had he bemoaned the duties that fell to him.
Then why should this overwhelming need to relieve his new wife’s burden be anything different? Especially since he’d already decided that this marriage would be as real as he could make it between them. She was under his protection, and his patterns were far too deep-rooted to deny them now.
“It’s your call, Mimi. Whatever you decide, I’m okay with it.”
He felt her shuddering exhale, her slender body swaying in his arms. Her words were a muffled whisper against his chest. “They wanted to call him Luca if it was a boy. It was one of the few things they immediately agreed on.”
He tightened his arms around her, grief twisting his stomach. This day would have been so different if Santo and Pia had been alive. And yet he couldn’t imagine a different reality.
Did it make him a selfish bastard that he didn’t want to?
“You like it?” he said, clearing his throat. There was no point in letting the ghosts of the past dictate their lives now.
“I do,” she said simply.
“Luca it is then,” he said.
She burrowed deeper into him, chanting their son’s name over and over again.