10. Isabella
CHAPTER 10
Isabella
T here was a dress laid out on the bed, deep blue and very pretty, and when I reached out to touch it, the fabric was the softest thing I’d ever felt. When I picked it up, I noticed that the price tag was still attached.
This wasn’t one of Sienna’s dresses. Lorenzo had bought it specifically for me.
My eyes began to burn slightly, and I wiped at them gruffly. I would not get choked up over him buying me a dress instead of dressing me in his dead wife’s clothes. That wasn’t sweet. It was the bare minimum.
I put on the dress; the bodice flared out and gently covered my baby bump, and I twirled this way and that in the mirror before I styled my hair so that it lay across my shoulders in a heavy curtain. I went minimal on the makeup. Looking in the mirror, I frowned at the spider webbing of scars across my cheek, but I had learned that the more I tried to cover it up, the more prominent it looked.
I expected Lorenzo to be waiting for me in the foyer, but instead, I saw Damian standing by the door, twirling a set of keys on his finger. He caught them in his palm when he saw me coming down the stairs. “Lorenzo’s not here.” It wasn’t a question.
Something about seeing Damian waiting for me just pissed me off. It was something about the way that he was the first to see me wearing this dress. Lorenzo should have been here, but instead, he foisted this moment off on someone else.
“I’m driving you to him,” Damian said.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “What if I said no?”
Damian gave me a tired look. “Please don’t,” he said. “He’ll only get pissed at the both of us.”
I was being childish, and I knew it. It didn’t make my mood any brighter. “Fine. I’ll go.”
He let out a breath. “Thank you.”
I followed Damian out to the waiting SUV, and I tried not to be huffy when he held the door open for me…but I wasn’t going on a date with Damian. He didn’t buy me a dress and laid it out for me to wear. So, why was it suddenly so important that Lorenzo rushed ahead to wherever we were going?
Damian drove into the city as I watched out the window. When we turned into the parking garage for the Palazzo, I glanced at him. “Is this another work thing that I’m being included in?” I asked, thinking back to the singular time Lorenzo had brought me to the casino before Artem blew it sky high.
Damian shook his head. “No, and that’s all I’m going to tell you, so don’t ask.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “Spoilsport.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Lorenzo wants to surprise you, so just let him.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “For my sake?”
Damnit . “Fine.”
Damian parked and rushed around to the passenger side to open my door. It was all very showy, very formal, as if he was afraid that Lorenzo was watching. Hell, he probably is . Damian escorted me to the elevator, and after I stepped inside, he reached in and pressed the button for the penthouse. He saluted me as the doors slid closed.
The elevator carried me up to the top floor of the building. It stopped with a little ding! and the doors opened to Lorenzo waiting for me, bouquet of roses in hand. He was wearing a suit that had been tailored to fit his broad body perfectly. He smiled, and my knees quivered. Fuck , but the man had such a deadly smile.
“Are you planning to step off the elevator, dolcezza ?”
With legs shakier than a baby deer, I stepped into the landing of the penthouse. Lorenzo handed me the bouquet; it was a weighty thing in my arms. “I was mad that you weren’t at the house to pick me up.”
Lorenzo nodded. “I know,” he said. “Damian texted me.”
Of course, he did . “I almost didn’t come.”
His smile didn’t slip an inch. If anything, he looked even more annoyingly smug. “Well, I’m grateful that you made the right choice.”
I shook the bouquet at him. “I will smack you with this.”
His laughter bounced off the walls around us. “Come on,” he said and offered me his arm. I thought about walking around it, but I didn’t really know where we were going, so I slipped my arm into the crook of his elbow.
Lorenzo keyed us into the penthouse, and I had to bite back a gasp. White fairy lights had been strung up around the penthouse, and every flat surface seemed to be filled with more vases of the same flowers that I was holding.
“What is all this?” I asked.
“A date that will not be ruined.”
I glanced up at him. “You’re sure of that?”
He hummed in reply, and we put my bouquet in the only empty vase available. I had never been given flowers before. I had half-convinced myself that it was because I didn’t like them but they were so pretty. I reached out and touched one velvet-soft petal and smiled.
Lorenzo reached out and took my hand. “Are you ready for dinner, dolcezza ?” he asked. I nodded and followed him out to the balcony where a table was beautifully set and waiting for us.
“When did you find the time to do this?”
He looked positively smug. “When I want something, I get it, remember?”
“How could I forget?” I asked with a little harrumph and sat when he pulled out my chair.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to the crown of my head. “Fucking brat,” he murmured fondly into my hair.
Lorenzo sat across from me, and from somewhere within the suite, a waiter appeared with a tray bearing our dinner. Once everything was placed on the table, the person seemed to disappear into thin air.
I looked out at the view and back into the suite and, finally, at Lorenzo. “I don’t know what to say to any of this.” Everything was hitting me like whiplash; so much had happened in the last seventy-two hours, and I wasn’t sure that I was processing any of it.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “Just share a meal with me.”
So, that was what we did. We ate and made small talk as best we could, and it all felt so wonderfully…normal. For the first time, it felt like Lorenzo was just the man that I fell in love with without all of the other things that had gotten in the way.
“I like when you smile like that at me,” Lorenzo said when the conversation had settled into a lull.
I blinked. “What?”
“You were smiling at me just now,” he said. “You looked beautiful.”
Heat rushed to my face. I knew that he wanted me, and he’d said that he loved me, but I didn’t think I would ever get used to anyone telling me that I was beautiful, let alone someone as gorgeous as him.
“I like that blush even more.”
I covered my face with my hands. “Stop.”
He reached across the table and pulled them away. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I’ll keep saying it until you believe me.”
“I don’t think that will ever happen.” It didn’t matter how Lorenzo saw me. He was an anomaly. The rest of the world wasn’t like him.
But he wouldn’t hear of it. “Then, I’ll keep saying it.”
A part of me wanted to dive under the table and hide; another part of me wanted to argue, to say something sarcastic to distract him. “How long do you plan to do that?” I asked in all sincerity.
“How about I tell you for the rest of our lives?” he asked. Lorenzo pushed out of his chair and dropped to one knee.
My heart began to pound in my ears. “What are you doing?”
He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and brought out a ring box. “I know I asked you this before, but it wasn’t right how I did it.” He opened the box to reveal a beautiful ring: a blue diamond haloed with smaller white diamonds set in a platinum band. “Will you marry me, Isabella?”
There were too many reasons why marrying Lorenzo was a bad idea. Even if I never planned on leaving him, could I really legally tie myself to him? Though it felt like my heart was going to wrench out of my chest, I said, “I can’t.”
Staring into his disappointed face, I burst into tears.