Page 34 of Savage Claim

My ears were still burning from the scolding Cristian gave me when he stomped out of my office. “I take it that you’re not staying for dinner?” I called after him.

“Succhiami il cazzo,” he yelled back.

“God looks down on that.” I was purposefully goading him, but he didn’t come running back to keep fighting. Instead, I heard the slam of what I assumed was the front door.

Moments later, Isabella was peeping into my office. “What did you two fight about?” she asked.

“We weren’t fighting.”

She gave me an unimpressed look that was so reminiscent of Amalia that it almost made me laugh. “He always stays for dinner unless you piss him off,” she pointed out. “Amalia even offered to make dinner for the first time since coming home from the hospital, and he still left.”

Goddamn it.Why did he have to forgive her so easily? Isabella had nearly cracked his skull open, but she said sorry, and all waswell. He could just move past it. Every time I looked at her, my gut burned with all the things she had kept from me.

“We can’t keep this up,” Isabella said. She was leaning against the doorjamb, arms crossed over her chest. “We have to talk about it.”

“I’ll get over it. You said it yourself that you’re fine. There’s nothing for me to be upset about.”

Isabella kept hovering in the door, like she was afraid to come in. She didn’t seem to like my office all that much…though considering the number of times she had seen someone bleeding in here, that made a sort of sense.

“Just come in,dolcezza,” I gritted out.

Cautiously, she stepped into the office and shut the door behind her. She crept over to the chair by the window and lowered herself into it. “We have to talk about this,” she repeated. “You’ve been avoiding me for two days, and I know you said you were busy, but I feel like I’m in a minefield, hopping around hoping that you aren’t going to explode on me.”

I made her feel unsafe, again. My hands ached: a trip to the gym to give the speed bag a working over would do me good. But I couldn’t leave when Isabella was looking at me with those sad, gloomy eyes. “You should have told me that you had been cramping and bleeding,” I said, putting voice to what had been nagging me for days.

“I know. I’m sorry that I kept it from you.”

“I’m not upset about that,” I insisted and went to the bar cart that I kept stocked. Grabbing the whiskey that was significantly less full than it was two days ago, I almost offered to pour herone. Instead of getting out a glass, I took the bottle back to my desk with me and pulled off the top.

Isabella watched all of this in silence. After I took a long drink from the bottle, grunting at the heat that sliced through my chest, she asked, “Then, what are you angry about?”

“You could have lost our child,dolcezza.”

Her expression grew cloudy. “If I’d had a miscarriage, it wouldn’t have been my fault. I didn’t do anything tomakeit happen.”

“I know that,” I snapped. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

She was getting angry now, and a part of me was glad for it. “Then, explain it to me.”

“You didn’t trust me enough to tell me that you were worried,” I said. “You were hurting in a way that I didn’t know about, and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

All of the anger seeped out of Isabella’s face. She stared at me, blank, for a moment before she got up from her chair. Before I could say or do anything, she climbed into my lap and wrapped her arms around my neck. “You are a stupid, stupid man,” she muttered against my neck.

I tapped her ass lightly. “Watch it.”

She sighed and shook her head. “I had no idea that you would care this much,” she confessed.

I pushed her back so that I could look at her. “Why wouldn’t I care,dolcezza?”

She shrugged. “You haven’t been the most…enthusiastic about the pregnancy,” she said. “I know that was the goal when westarted all of this, but like you said, you didn’t really have an interest in being a father.”

I still didn’t, and I wouldn’t lie to her about it. “You want this baby, right?”

She nodded. “Right.”

“I want to see you be a mother,” I told her. “That’s what I want.” I cupped her cheek. “If you’re worried about the baby, I want to know about it, all right? No more hiding things from me.”

“Okay.”

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