Read The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance Online
Authors: Sophia Hampton
The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons--living or dead--is entirely coincidental.
The Don’s Baby copyright @ 2016 by Sophia Hampton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sophia
“Ack!” I cried, shoving my finger into my mouth. The taste of blood and dish soap made me cringe. I looked at my finger and watched the small cut bloom red again as the blood resumed seeping out. It was small, but it stung.
I looked into the soapy water, afraid to stick my hand back inside to locate the offending knife. From the other room, vibrating through the walls, was the joyful sound of my husband and his dinner guests enjoying a dinner party.
I sighed. This was ridiculous.
My life was like the terrible version of ‘
Cinderella
’, set in New York City, where instead of an evil stepmother and stepsisters, I was under the tyrannical thumb of my new husband and his laundry list of household duties he demands I fulfill.
The ways in which this situation was pathetic and painful were nearly too many to count. Not only was I washing dishes in the kitchen, I was
handwashing
them. This wouldn’t have been so bad if there wasn’t a fully functional dishwasher in the kitchen, directly to my right. I could have put it to use for all the money it cost, but Marcelo forbade it.
Forbade
it, as if I was a child.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I was in the kitchen washing dishes while he was at the dinner table entertaining guests. We both lived here, but for some reason, Marcelo didn’t want his wife present as a co-host for the guests. He wanted me to take care of the dishes. He wanted me to prepare the table and cook the food, but beyond that, he claimed he
needed
me in the kitchen. He said he didn’t like it when the kitchen was messy, the dishes could not remain dirty all night. He and his guests laughed over alcohol and food…as my blood dripped red into the soapy water.
I ran it under the faucet and left to find a Band-Aid. We kept them in the pantry, and frankly, we were running out. I had been having accidents in the kitchen more often than I was proud to admit.
I had grown up in the kitchen. I worked in one professionally, but not as the
dishwasher
.
I had done my time in the trenches and worked my way up to executive chef in my kitchen. That meant it had been
years
since I had had to wash dishes by hand. It had been years since that…and it had been two weeks since it had become my new normal. Marcelo wouldn’t even wash his own coffee cup in the morning when he was on his way out to work, just leaving it by the sink for me to take care of. It had been two weeks of this shit, and somehow I still hadn’t managed to get any better at it. I looked sadly at my hands; they felt dry and tight.
How did you end up like this, Sophia?
How did you become a depressed housewife with an awful husband?
My wedding band glinted on my ring finger. A delicate, simple rose gold band that Marcelo didn’t like me to take off, even when I was doing the dishes.
Completing the awfulness trifecta was the fact that Daniella, our housekeeper, would be coming in the next day.
Yes
. There was a woman, a
professional
who Marcelo paid to do this sort of shit, but he still insisted that I do it. He said that I was the woman of the house and I should be able to keep it. Some ridiculous excuse about girls these days being wild and crazy. He wanted a simple, honest girl. That meant
humble
. That meant handwashing dishes when there were several reasons not to have to do it. Daniella had been working for Marcelo for years, and when I showed up, introduced as his wife, she had actually
laughed
.
Not a polite laugh either.
A real, full-bellied laugh, holding her midsection and wiping tears from her eyes. The worst part was Marcelo had joined her. There needed to be a name for the feeling of the hybrid of embarrassment and mortification you feel when your husband treats your marriage like a joke in front of other people while you are present.
“Can you believe it?” he had asked her. I had stayed quiet, but the truth was no,
I couldn’t believe it either
.
I had thought it was a joke. If not a joke, then something I would be able to get out of if I just talked to him or screamed loud enough. If I was Cinderella, then my loving father, like hers had unwittingly turned my life into a living hell. There were things you just
didn’t
do to your children, and marrying them off should be one of them.
I was his only daughter, why would he do this to me? Then again, if you thought about it. I was his only daughter, why
wouldn’t
he do this to me. Dad had told me to come over to his house because he had something important to tell me. I had sat for twenty minutes in a room with him and two men I had never met while they spoke among themselves. We were in his office, the room where, when I was young, he used to let me spin around in his chair and sit at the massive desk where I could barely see over the top, my feet dangling over the front of the chair, not touching the floor. When I was little, the room and the man who used it had been larger than life. I always had to knock on the door when I wanted to come in, and sometimes there would be people in there with him, guys who he wouldn’t bother introducing and who wouldn’t bother addressing me.
The situation felt surreal, replaying itself just like when I was little. I had knocked on the door and waited to be let in. I had seen him with two tall, darkly dressed men who he didn’t bother to introduce and who virtually ignored me right back. Finally, my dad pointed at the younger of the two and said the words that should have been a lie: “Sophie. This is Marcelo Orsini. Marcelo, this is Sophia, my daughter. Your new wife.”
The man who had later been revealed to be Marcelo Orsini’s father had smiled and said that he had always wanted a daughter, before coming up to me and kissing me on both cheeks. Marcelo himself had just smiled.
“She’s beautiful,” he had said. It must have been meant as a compliment, but ice ran up and down my spine, and I balled my hands into fists, trying to figure out something to say. Something to do. The way he looked at me didn’t help the situation either. His eyes were so dark they looked black. His hair was inky black, thick and slightly wavy. His skin had that natural Mediterranean, golden glow that he didn’t need to spray or rub on. His eyes had a look I could only describe as hungry, and
not
for food. It made me feel small. Small and something else.
Hot
.
As simply as my father had asked for me, he had sent me away, just like how he would when I was a kid and had come up to his office when he had work to do. The exchange had been so casual, I halfway wondered why he hadn’t just texted me. He had taken the time to call me to the house and tell me to my face in the presence of the other people who were apparently involved but that didn’t make it better. I still felt as insulted, as I would have if he
had
actually sent me a text message informing me that I was to be married to a stranger.
That was the part that got me. He was
informing
me of plans that had already been set. He was just letting me know that an entire discussion about my life had been had in my absence, and he was just making sure that I had the memo, too—before they proceeded.
It took a second to catch up to what was happening, but the moment I did, I was seeing red. I had never raised my voice to my father in my life, but in my defense, he had never married me off to a man I didn’t know before.
“
Wife
?” I had asked.
“Mrs. Marcelo Orsini,” Marcelo had said to me, answering the question I had directed at my father. He was smiling, a real smile, as if this was the funniest joke he had ever heard. I didn’t know who the guy was, but I was sure of one thing. I
didn’t
like him. Had he been in on that whole arrangement, too? He obviously was told about it before I was because he wasn’t reacting to the news like this was the first time he had heard it. Was I, apparently the bride, the
last person
to know about my own wedding?
“No. I don’t know this man. You can’t make me,” I had said bluntly before leaving the room. It was the petulant move of an angry teenager, but I wasn’t going to just stand there and let my father continue to update me on the plans he had been making with other people about my life. Did he even realize the amount of disrespect that they were showing? Did they care? I didn’t even know the other two guys. My alleged husband and father-in-law. My head spun as I fled the room and left the house.
I had taken off of work to come listen to what my father had had to tell me because he had given me the impression that it was important. I suppose that was one thing to call it but I had a load of other things I would call it before I used the word ‘
important
.’
I had taken the fact that none of the men had tried to follow me out or convince me to stay as a sign that they agreed with me. There was
no way
I was supposed to marry that guy. Who even was he? Marcelo
who
? People didn’t get married to people they didn’t know. Or if they still did,
I
wouldn’t be.
They had let me run off, and it wasn’t because my father and the men were respecting my wishes. It was because it wasn’t even worth going after me because the deal had been set in stone. It didn’t matter what I wanted, or what I thought. His answer, though I had left before he said it, was basically,
“Yes
,
it doesn’t matter that you don’t know this man because I do, and yes Sophia, I can and will make you marry him.”
I had had to swallow my defiantly uttered words barely a week later as Mrs. Orsini, my future mother-in-law stood behind me in my hotel room, fastening the corset back of my wedding gown.
Barely a week
. The shocking shortness of the duration between when I had heard I was getting married and when I had actually gotten married only occurred to me after the fact. How long had this plan been in the works?
When I was little, I had always sought support and a shoulder—or a lap—to cry into from my mother. She fell in line with what my father and what the Orsini’s had declared. She let me cry and rant as much as I wanted to, but at the end of the day, she broke it down for me like this. We weren’t who I thought we were. I had grown up thinking the Dandolo family was nothing but my father, my mother and I, a loving Italian-American family who lived in Lower Manhattan. However, our family—along with the Orsinis and a couple others—had the city cut up like a pizza and ran everything that happened there. Marriage was the oldest and best way to settle disputes between warring communities apparently, and that’s what we were, families at war. I didn’t know what that had to do with me and why that meant I had to marry a total stranger, but I got the picture that there was no getting out of this one.
The ceremony had been… honestly, and to the credit of our parents for planning it behind our backs, beautiful. It was no slap-up affair, definitely. We got married in a cathedral—Catholic, of course—and had the reception in the Astoria ballroom. I wouldn’t have gone with the pink roses if given the choice, and the centerpieces weren’t the tall, modern style that I favored, but what did it matter? The wedding wasn’t for me. I was just getting married at it.
That day I had stood in front of the man who was introduced to me as my future husband. Marcelo Orsini. Those words from my father should have been the worst possible thing he could have said to his only daughter, but they weren’t. As if it were even possible, things continued to go downhill from there.
At least I was a beautiful bride
. Everyone said so. The dress was something covered in crystals and lace. It was obscenely expensive, apparently flown in from Milan. It went down to the floor in the front and in the back had a long train. When I saw it for the first time, the day of the wedding, it was difficult to be angry that I had been excluded from the wedding preparations. It was
gorgeous
. Even Marcelo had had a visible reaction to seeing me in the dress. I know I had one when I saw him in his tux.
If the man looked good in a suit, he looked even better in a tuxedo. In the room with my father and him, I had attributed the fact that he was so intimidating to the fact that he was so tall. He towered over me, even though I wore heels, both that day and the day of the wedding. Though his height played a part, it was also the air he had about him. He was confident—
palpably
confident—and sure of himself.
