51. Isabella
CHAPTER 51
Isabella
I had never been so…gobsmacked in all of my life. The idea of staying and raising our baby made my chest throb, but could I really do that? “You want me to marry you?” I asked. “Really?” Why? What about Sienna? What about never getting married again?
Lorenzo nodded, and I felt his lips on my forehead. “And I get what I want, don’t I, dolcezza ?”
My heart squeezed again. I felt like I had whiplash, and as badly as I wanted to be in my baby’s life, as much as the thought of leaving them behind was choking me, I couldn’t simply say yes. “Can I think about it?” I asked, squeezing my eyes shut. I wasn’t sure what would come out of my mouth if I kept looking at him. “Just for a little while?”
Lorenzo was quiet for a moment, and then he hummed in agreement. “I know it’s a lot to take in,” he said. “You can tell me your answer in the morning.”
I nodded, and we finished up our shower.
“I’ve got some things that I need to finish up in my office,” he said after we had dried off and gotten dressed again.
I figured that would happen. “Sure.”
He left me alone, and I sat heavily on the side of the bed. “What the fuck was that?” There was no way that Lorenzo Vitali asked me to marry him. There was no way that counted as a real proposal.
For months, I had been insisting that there was nothing but sex between us, and once I held up my end of our agreement, it would all stop. That’s all that it was, right?
Except that he had shown me parts of myself that I didn’t even know existed.
Except that he had brought me a sense of peace that I would have never felt if he hadn’t dragged me here.
If you stay, you can protect the baby . It was a tempting thought. There would be little I could do to shield the baby from the Cosa Nostra, but maybe if I was here, I could temper it. I could make things as soft as I could for as long as I could.
But would that make me and Lorenzo like Amalia and Elio? Could I handle being married to a man who didn’t love me? I didn’t know…especially when my own feelings were so complicated. Lorenzo scared me in so many ways, and that fear had become an exciting, delicious, awful thing that made me feel more alive than I ever had before.
Was that love? And if it wasn’t, was it enough for a marriage?
“What do you think?” I asked, touching my belly. “Should I stay?”
The tiniest flutter was my reply, and my breath hitched in my throat. There really was a baby in there; it wasn’t just in my head. It was such a weird concept that I was growing what would become another human being. Someone with a whole personality who would lead a life entirely separate from me.
My eyes stung, and I wiped them furiously. That would be one thing I wouldn’t miss when all of this was done: crying at every little thing.
I would go and talk things out with Amalia, but I imagined that she was busy with Elio, from the way she’d dragged him out of the kitchen earlier. Why couldn’t that have been the end of my night? I was never confused in Lorenzo’s arms. It was the one time that I felt safe, and I knew the way things were.
I couldn’t lie here with my own thoughts anymore. Getting up, I got my phone from the bedside table. There were now three numbers saved in the contact list: Lorenzo, Amalia, and Gemma.
It probably wasn’t fair to drag my sister into any of this mess, but I needed to hear from the outside world. A little bit of normalcy to anchor me to reality.
I clicked on Gemma’s name and held my breath as the call connected. It would be my luck if she was out for the night or already in bed or?—
“Isabella.” The voice on the other end of the line made every hair on my body stand on end. I had hoped to never hear it ever again. “It’s so nice of you to call,” my father said, and I could hear his smile. I could picture it: spread across his face so wide that it must hurt. It was the smile he wore whenever he was getting exactly what he wanted. “A little late, though, don’t you think?”