Made for Him: A Mafia Baby Romance (5 page)

I twist to face him. “You’ve been reading baby books?” I ask incredulously.

“Well, we’re having a baby, aren’t we?” he counters, one eyebrow raised slightly.

I’m not sure what to say to that.

“How are you feeling?” he asks. “Ready to go back to bed?”

Just the thought of moving my limbs makes me want to barf again. I shake my head, knowing how pitiful I must look. I don’t care. “I think I should stay in here for a little while longer. Just to be on the safe side.”

He nods.

I sip some more ginger ale and try to stare at him without being obvious. With his long legs stretched out on the floor and his broad shoulders resting against the wall, he’s so decadently male. All his muscle and willpower directed towards sitting quietly with me, like a lion at rest.

And that bare chest and those ridged abs…well, it’s impossible not to stare.

Despite the view, however, the late night and early morning catch up with me, and I yawn, too queasy to leave the bathroom but too drained to sit up any longer.

“You’re tired,” Matteo observes.

“Mmm,” I reply, my eyes fluttering shut of their own accord. I feel the ginger ale can being lifted from my fingers, and then Matteo is helping me lie down right there on the floor, my body between his legs and my head resting on his firm thigh. He starts stroking my hair and my shoulders, and I don’t know when I’ve ever felt this cared for, even before my parents died.

“Matteo?” I murmur.

“Yes?”

“Are you really a criminal?”

A beat. Then: “Yes.”

I try to summon up the feelings of dread from earlier, but his hands feel so nice in my hair, his body so comforting around me. “I know you’re Italian…are you, like, the Mafia?”

I feel a slight jerking of his body around me and I realize he’s chuckling. “I never thought you guilty of stereotyping, Jessica.”

I try to open my eyes and defend myself, but I’m too tired. The best I can manage is a sort of shrug.

He sighs then, the laughter fading away. “I guess you could call what I do ‘organized.’ And my organization is run through a network of Italian and Italian-American friends and family. I suppose some people would call that the Mafia.”

“Why?” I murmur. “You could have made money any other way.”

He doesn’t respond right away, but his fingers keep stroking my hair, so I know he’s not angry with me. “It’s not just about the money,” he says after a minute. “The people who controlled this city before I came in—who still control parts of it—they’re bad people, Jessica. I’ve build my empire primarily with—ah—let’s call them
unconventional
loans, but we also dabble in gambling and the occasional drug-running, mostly weed and coke. But these other people, the things they do make even a man like me sick to my stomach. They ship meth in and out of the city. They sell guns to very bad men. And,” I feel his body tighten, “they sell
people
. Girls mostly. Sometimes boys. Almost all of them under eighteen.”

I shudder, and his hand chafes my shoulder reassuringly.

“I’m going to stop them,” he promises. “I’m not a good man, Jessica. I do bad things. But my grandfather raised me to believe that even bad men had to have a code, a line that they wouldn’t cross. Even bad men have to have honor.”

“And do you have honor?”

I can almost hear the dimple in his voice. “I like to think so.”

“So you do all this for honor and not money?”

He sighs. “No. I do it for the money too. And I do it because I want to make my family’s name known again, I want to make my grandfather proud. I do it because deep down, in my bones, I’m a businessman and I see a market ripe for takeover. But underneath all that, I believe these men have to be stopped. Chased away from our city.”

“So there will still be criminals left, but they’ll be your criminals…civilized criminals?”

“That’s the idea, doll.”

“Do you think it will be easy to make these other men leave?”

“No,” he answers honestly. “The man who leads them is as smart as he is ruthless. He won’t give up without a fight. But I’ve sworn to myself that I’ll stop him, no matter what. And I don’t break my promises—especially promises to myself.”

I roll so I can look him in the face. “Why are you telling me all this? Aren’t you afraid I’ll go to the police?”

“You won’t,” he says simply.

Our gazes meet, his vivid eyes searing into mine.

“I can’t figure out if you trust me, or if you’re just bossy and arrogant,” I mumble, closing my eyes again. I’m too tired to process any of this right now, and I can’t deny how safe and spoiled I feel with Matteo right now.

He laughs quietly. “It’s both, Jessica. It’s both.”

W
hen I startle awake
, I’m on a cold bathroom floor, my head still on Matteo’s thigh. His hand still plays idly with my hair, but I realize it’s been at least an hour by the way the sunlight is now streaming in through the water closet’s window.

“Oh God,” I groan, sitting up. “I’m so sorry.”

Matteo is covered in goose bumps from sitting on the marble-tiled floor in nothing but his boxer briefs, but he doesn’t seem bothered at all. “I like watching you sleep,” he says, as if it’s an obvious fact that I should already know.

“Yes, but you must have been so bored and uncomfortable…and oh my God, did I drool on you?”

He smiles, the dimple flashing in his cheek. “Not this time. You did snore a little though.”

I groan again, burying my face in my hands. “I can’t believe I snored in a mobster’s lap.”

“This mobster is glad you did. It was kind of cute, actually.”

I peek at him through my fingers. He doesn’t seem to be lying. He does, however, tug down on my hands to see my face and search my eyes.

“Jessica, I can’t change the man I am or the things I do. But I need to know how you feel about them. I don’t want it to change what we have.”

Fuck, those eyes are blue. “What do we have, Matteo?”

His voice is a low whisper when he answers. “Something special.”

My body remembers every
something special
that he’s done to it. I’m so dazzled by his eyes, his expanse of toned skin, and that square, handsome face, that the words come out without me thinking about them. “I’m okay with it, Matteo. I think. As long as I feel safe.”

He yanks me into the fiercest hug I’ve received. I think it’s the first time we’ve actually ever hugged. It feels amazing, glorious even, to be pressed against the length of him, his bare skin hot against mine.

“You’ll be the safest woman in the city,” he vows. “You’re under my protection, and I’d die before I let anything hurt you or my baby. I’ll keep you safe and sound.”

“Okay,” I whisper against his chest.

I think I almost believe him.

* * *

T
he weekend passes
in a blur of sex. When we’re not fucking, Matteo coddles me like a baby, searching out any and all of the food that sounds good to me, showering with me after I’m sick, and letting me sleep whenever the pregnancy exhaustion tugs my eyes shut. Being with him is intense, surreal, almost hypnotic, and when he drops me off at my apartment Sunday night, I walk into the loft like a person waking up from a dream. How is this small space my life? My real life?

How long have I lived this so-called
real life
without Matteo in it?

I think it will be the next weekend before I hear from Matteo again, but he texts me the next morning.

You’re in my head. I need to see you again tonight.

I can’t help the way my toes curl in my high heels and the little whimper of anticipation I make. I look around my corporate law office, at the people sitting quietly at their computers and at the closed conference doors where the partners are having their Monday meeting. I sigh relief when I realize that no one heard me. I’ve always been the most serious one here, the most driven, the one least likely to talk when there’s work to be done. I’ve never been one of the people to chatter or gossip or…
whimper
…in front of others.

What is Matteo doing to me?

That night at his house, we’re alone. No Pauly or Gina, no guns, and after he lays me on his dining room table and fucks the shit out of me, he cleans me up and goes to find some of the peppermint tea he bought because he read about it in the baby book.

The idea of Matteo reading a baby book of his own free will is so fucking hot to me.

While I wait, I get up and wander out of the dining room to his office, which is lined with built-in bookshelves. I gravitate towards the shelf by his desk; rather than lines of thick, leather tomes like the other shelves boast, these are all peeling and worn paperbacks, an eclectic mix of non-fiction, fantasy science fiction, and classics. A tingle dances down my spine when I recognize most of the books as the books I keep in a low shelf by my bed:

The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair

Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Illustrated Man
by Ray Bradbury

Dracula
by Bram Stoker

Matteo even has the Seamus Heaney translation of
Beowulf
which surprises me. What would an investment banker/Mafioso in Kansas City see in a Dark Ages Scandinavian swords-and-monsters story? Although there is something in Matteo that reminds me of a warrior…that hard, strong body and quiet presence and the way he talked about honor on his bathroom floor…

“That was the moment I realized I had to fuck you again,” Matteo says, and I jump, not hearing him come in.

I turn to see him with a steaming mug of tea and a dimpled smile. As always, that smile makes my heart flip over.

“I got out of your bed when you finally fell asleep and went to get a glass of water,” he says, setting the mug down on his desk, “and then I noticed your books. Almost the same as my favorites.” He comes closer, bracing his hands on the shelf on either side of me. “They all looked like mine, all bent and dog-eared and torn up, like they’d been carried around everywhere. That’s when I realized that you weren’t the girl I thought you were. That there was more that met the eye.” He tilts my chin up to force me to meet his gaze.

“And that’s when you decided to come wake me up and fuck me again.”

The dimple gets deeper. “Well, I still got my drink of water. And then I stared at your tits while you slept. Then I woke you up.”

“I’m not complaining.”

His hand drops from the shelf to my belly, spreading into a protective, long-fingered sprawl below my navel. For a moment, excitement spikes in my chest as I wonder would it would be like to have him touch my stomach months from now, when we can both feel our baby squirming around.

“Even with this?” he asks, his eyebrows drawn together in two dark, worried slashes. “You’re not complaining, knowing the outcome?”

I think about it for a moment. “It’s all too new,” I admit. “Sometimes, I think I feel nothing but regret, but then other times, I think…” I trail off, because the words are too stupid, too premature, too soon.

I think I might be falling in love with you.

He doesn’t press me, but I sense he knows what I was going to say because he captures my mouth in a fierce, stormy kiss, his tongue pushing in deep and taking the unsaid words for himself. His mouth plunders mine as he pushes me harder against the shelf, rocking his erection into me, and then I’m being scooped up and carried back to the dining room table, where he fucks me for so long that my tea gets cold and the sky gets dark, and I don’t care. Not one bit.

* * *

A
fter two weeks of this
—seeing Matteo every night, fucking until I can’t see straight and having him coddle me with massages and Preggy Pops after—it’s time for my first prenatal appointment, and Matteo comes with. He looked at me like I was an escaped asylum inmate when I asked him if he’d like to join me.

He’d rolled up on his elbow in bed and looked down at me, half incredulous and half amused. “How many times do I have to prove it to you, princess? This is my baby too. And I care. A goddamned lot.”

And his face at the appointment when the doctor let us listen to the heartbeat…if I’d thought his smiles made my heart flip over, it was nothing compared to that look of fierce, all-consuming protectiveness and awe. After filling my prenatal vitamin prescription at the drugstore, he took me back to his place and spent hours kissing my belly, which turned into him kissing me farther down, which turned into another sleepless, glorious, orgasm-filled night.

It was ridiculous and insane and maybe so very very wrong…but I was falling in love with the father of my child, head over heels. Guns, crime, and all.

This lasted until my tenth week. And then it all came tumbling down.