Again, a bit exaggerated but wholly based in truth.
“This is a…cozy room, Ms. Shah.” Cruel humor touched each word, along with a hefty dose of disbelief. “Nothing in the luxury repertoire of the DiCarlo hotels could match this.”
“It’s my home, Mr. DiCarlo,” she said, matching his exaggerated sweet tone. “And no, nothing you own would make me feel as happy or as safe.”
A sense of hurried alarm seized her as he surveyed the large, airy room with a leisure that grated on her nerves.
She had enough savings, from her work as a documentary maker and event videographer, to afford the biggest room in the Victorian house that one of her friends rented out. But she was also seven months pregnant, working all hours, and tired.
The room, as a result, was extremely untidy—not that she was a tidy person even on usual days. Piles of books, camera equipment, and baby bits made the room shrink to almost half. Her temporary wardrobe on a portable wheeled rack—mostly black tights and loose, colorful sweaters—took up one wall.
Boxes and boxes of baby things that she had been collecting for months—gently used clothes, toys, blankets—took up all the floor space. And then there was her knitting stuff, because it was the only way she had been able to calm her mind in the last few months, given that she couldn’t even have a glass of wine.
More importantly, she had been nesting, preparing to be a mother as well as she could on her own. The realization sent a warm feeling down her spine, washing away the little flicker of embarrassment.
This was her haven, her home, where she was in control, and she felt safe. After months of fertility shots, Pia’s emotional outbursts, and the mountain of lies they had been sitting on, and then the car accident and the news of her pregnancy, she had needed to be alone. While she had wholeheartedly agreed to be the surrogate for Pia, her stepsister didn’t make things easy for anyone.
Had needed to find her center again after a horrible few months. Had needed respite from her mother’s opinionated commentary and her stepdad John’s grief. This sunny room had given her a sense of control back after months of being near Pia for the IVF treatments.
“I can see that you’ve been busy preparing for what’s ahead.”
For just a moment, she’d forgotten Mr. DiCarlo’s presence. Something the man wouldn’t be used to, she thought, mouth twitching.
She turned around, just in time to catch the myriad of emotions crossing his face as he peeked at the boxes. Neither did she miss the thin thread of reluctant admiration in his tone.
Leaning against the opposite wall, she managed to check him out in turn. She refused to feel even a flicker of shame about this, too.
Twenty-six, pregnant, and apparently—thanks to one of the twisting side effects of her pregnancy—unbelievably horny. But even if she were none of those things, she could still appreciate, especially as an artist, the sheer sensual appeal of a man like Renzo DiCarlo.
Interestingly, he was the less classically handsome DiCarlo brother.
Santo had been like a marble bust with sharp cheekbones, a straight nose and thick lips. She’d just had her heart broken by someone when she met him for the first time as an art professor in one of the summer courses she’d been attending in Italy. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that his perfectly boring good looks did nothing for her, though.
And soon after, Santo had turned Pia’s head.
Santo and Renzo’s younger brother, Massimo, had boyish good looks with twinkling eyes and a surly temperament.
But this man’s appeal was something Mimi had come to appreciate only as she’d gotten older. As she’d begun to understand her own sexuality.
Renzo DiCarlo was made of imperfections—a bump in the middle of his nose, a scar through his eyebrow, a strange little dimple near his upper lip that was like a permanent indent.
As if an absent-minded sculptor, a woman surely, had gotten lost in the beauty of what she’d been creating and left a little thumbprint in his flesh.
Then there were his deep-set gray eyes and the constant dissatisfied expression that he wore. As if nothing in the world was up to his standard.
He should have been unremarkable—he had flaws enough for that—but he was more than the sum of his individual features. He had an appeal that blazed hotter than Santo’s boringly perfect features ever could.
It was the air of authority and confidence he carried. And something about that air of “I can deal with anything the world throws at me” had always turned Mimi on. Even when she hadn’t understood why her stepsister’s new brother-in-law, who looked at them as if they were little better than garden pests, made her belly tighten and her core dampen.
She was a woman who liked to be competent in her own life, and who took matters into her own hands. Nor did she understand to this day why his confidence made her knees weak.
Maybe it was the novelty of a tall, dark, Italian billionaire being in her sphere at all. Maybe because she’d never known her own father. Her stepdad, John, like Santo, never asserted himself. Or maybe it was the age-old instinct of wanting the smartest, sexiest, strongest man around to satisfy that deep-rooted survival instinct.
Renzo DiCarlo was all of those things.
She’d stopped trying to make sense of it ages ago. It wasn’t as if anything could happen between them. Then there was the fact that, within minutes of interacting with him, like now, the attraction took a back seat. The man possessed an uncanny knack for riling her up.
So she simply stood there and admired the breadth of his shoulders and how the white dress shirt neatly hugged his tapered waist, and when he went to his haunches to open the flap on the boxes of baby stuff that were everywhere, the sleek hardness of his thighs. The air inside the room was filled with his bergamot and citrus scent.
