Page 9 of Mafia Doctor's Secret Baby

Not that it has come to that, as it turns out. Because he’s turned up right in front of me, and there isn’t a damn thing that I’m going to be able to do about it.

“Hey, let me get you some water,” she tells me as she rubs my arm lightly. “And something to eat. Wait, you can have sushi now, can’t you?”

I laugh, the mood lightening somewhat.

“Yeah, I can,” I reply. “But I don’t know many places that are going to deliver to a hospital in the middle of the night.”

“They should set up a special service for women who have just given birth,” she muses out loud, tapping her finger on her chin. “You’d make a killing doing all that. Bringing them their cravings as soon as they pop out the baby. Hey, you know, I think I might be onto something…”

I smile at her fondly as she leaves the room for a moment—and then my grin drops at once as the reality of my predicament settles on top of me once more. Shit, he could come back at any moment—and if he does, it’s not like I have any way to defend myself against him, not anymore. He knows the truth. He knows that he’s the only man I’ve been with since then. I wish I could go back in time and come up with something that would brush him off in an instant, something that would make him look stupid for even wondering.

But I get the feeling he would have found out the truth one way or another. He strikes me as the kind of guy who doesn’t do well not getting what he wants. The way he glowered down at me, the way the tone in his voice seemed to shut down any argument I had left in me…the way he treated me at the ball, so demanding, so controlling. I liked it back then, but now I’m wondering if I should have thought a little further about getting myself involved with someone who seemed to have such a fetish for getting things his way.

Polly curls up against my chest, her little belly rising and falling slowly as she dozes off. I drop a kiss on the top of her head and peer out the door to where Cara is trying to finagle her way to some sushi for me.

I know this should be one of the happiest moments of my life—my daughter is healthy and asleep in my arms, the birth is over with, I don’t have to deal with pregnancy cravings for another damn second, and my best friend is outside, ready to take care of me, even though it’s going to send her nodding to sleep over her desk for the rest of the day.

But despite it all, I can’t help the feeling of dread that creeps up my spine. Because out there, somewhere in the hospital, is a man who knows more than I want him to—a man who knows that I have just given birth to his daughter, and that I didn’t want him to know a thing about it.

And I have no idea what he’s going to do with that information.

4

LUCA

I swirlthe scotch around at the bottom of my glass, watching the amber whirlpool form among the carefully crafted diamonds of crystal. I can feel Emil staring at me, waiting for me to give him some kind of explanation as to why I am acting like this, why I have called him up here to speak after we’ve been doing our best to keep our distance. He shifts his weight from foot to foot in the door to my study, and then lets out a grunt of irritation.

“What’s going on, Luca?” he demands, and I look up at him, jerking my head to indicate that he should come in. He paces through the door, and I can tell from the look on his face that he’s concerned.

I can’t blame him. Given what has been going on with our family business the last few months, he’s got every reason to be worried about what I’m about to lay out to him.

“Is this to do with Dad?” he asks bluntly as he sinks down into the seat opposite me. Though I’ve only been here a few months, this study is probably the place in my new apartment that I’ve most turned into a home, with a drinks’ cart, a desk, andscatterings of paper and notes about my patients among those covering what’s going on back home.

I shake my head quickly. “No, nothing to do with Dad,” I reply. “Have you heard from him? You know what’s going on back home…?”

He returns my headshake.

“Nothing,” he mutters, reaching to pour himself a strong vodka and taking a long sip. “He’s only contacting us through direct messages. No calls, no emails. He doesn’t want us to be tracked here.”

“Yeah, of course,” I agree, though I feel a dig in my chest at the thought. I’m still making sense of being so far from everything that I’ve known for the last few years—sure, I might have studied in this city, but now I’m a grown-ass man, and I don’t want to be reliving my student days.

No, I want to be out there taking care of business. Bringing down those bastard Magliones who have been causing so much trouble for us. They’re the reason my brother and I have been sent here in the first place, because we know that we can’t let them kidnap one of us to use as leverage over our father. Not very many people would dare do something so fucking stupid, but these guys clearly don’t have a damn idea what’s good for them.

“And no news is good news,” he reminds me. “At least when it comes to Dad. We’ll hear about it if something goes wrong. In the meantime…” He trails off. He doesn’t need to finish the rest of that sentence.

In the meantime, all we can do is sit and wait, no matter how much of a pain in the ass it is, no matter how much I fucking hate being taken from my family, my legacy, my business. But, whenDad brought us together a few months ago, he left no room for argument as to how we were going to handle this.

“You’re really just going to let him win like that?” Emil had growled when our father told us what the plan was.

Dad pushed his hand through his dark brown hair, glancing between the two of us.

“Not win,” he snapped back. “They’ll win if they manage to get their hands on either of you. And that’s what I’m trying to avoid. A few months in another city, and this will all be over.”

“But you need us here to?—”

“I can handle myself,” Dad replied, cutting me off before I could go any further. His eyes were sharp, leaving no room for argument—and for a moment, I saw a flash of the man who commanded so much respect in this city. Or at least, the man who had, up until the Magliones started to edge their way into our territory.

My father, Marco Mariana, has a name that would send a shiver down the spine of nearly anyone who hears it—at least, if they’re smart enough to understand his power. He stepped up to take over the Mariana Mafia from his own father a few decades ago, and since then he has expanded our territory out from the southside river that we owned for a long time, to the boundaries of the city. In that time, he’s made an effort to clean things up—clamp down on gang infighting, bring together people who had been clashing, and find a way to make this place run as smoothly as possible. For a while there, nothing and nobody went in or out of the city without him hearing about it, and I know that’s the way he liked it.

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