Romeo had instructed the staff to have both blue cheese and hard-boiled eggs ready for me since then. Philippa included these items in every meal, too.
Ever since the wedding when the maid had run to the pharmacy to secure me a pregnancy test, we’d become a little closer. It was an odd relationship. She’d been here with me since the beginning, when she’d helped keep me in my gilded cage. Yet now that I could wander the mansion and grounds at will, she almost felt like a friend.
Romeo preferred me to stay in our quarters or with my siblings when he was busy working. Not because I’d head for the hills, but because he seemed to doubt the intentions of his father’s staff. Not to mention his father.
“I don’t want to go into it,farfalla, but I’ve seen his men do things that I don’t want you exposed to. I don’t know that they’d hurt you—because I’d slaughter them if they ever laid a finger on you—but your safety isn’t something I wish to risk.”
He never expressly said Angelo himself would be violent toward me, but that was the impression my husband gave me. As always, I would abide by Romeo’s wishes.
I was three months along when I found Philippa weeping in an empty room. I’d never seen her emotional before, and when I approached her and put a hand on her shoulder, she jumped as if I’d electrocuted her.
“Signorina,” she sputtered out, her eyes shooting daggers at me as if furiously angry. “What are you doing in here?”
“I heard crying and came to investigate. What’s made you so upset?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, wiping her eyes swiftly. “I should get back to my duties.”
As far as I knew, her duties were to deliver meals to me and do some light housekeeping. But I let her get away with her excuse. I supposed whatever had made her sad was none of my business, really. Though I didn’t know why me finding her like that would aggravate her so much. She looked like she wanted to strangle me for a moment, almost as if she hated me, which didn’t make any sense. Philippa and I had always gotten along just fine.
Besides, what possible reason could she have to hate me? I must have misinterpreted her response.
Yet, a couple of weeks later when Chiara and Alessandra were teasing me, I thought I caught another aggravated look from the maid.
“I am not waddling,” I told my sisters. “I’m only fourteen weeks along.”
“Prove it,” Alessandra insisted. “Walk across the room.” I did so, feeling like I’d walked as normally as I always had. But then my sister cackled, and Chiara joined her. “See? You’re swaying back and forth.”
All their crazy nonsense culminated when the twins demanded that we go to the dance studio where I worked out gently every day to take advantage of the long mirror there. “Okay, look at yourself as you go,” Alessandra said, giggling. “You should see it now.”
“Chiara, tell me you don’t agree,” I said, as I paced in front of the mirror. My eyes detected no real change in my gait. “Is Alessandra just making fun of me?”
“Well,” Chiara looked from me to her twin diplomatically. “Let me just say that it’s entertaining to watch you two disagree.”
I huffed out annoyed at them both, when I noticed Philippa standing in the doorway. She had such an unusual look on her face in her reflection in the mirror, her lips twisted into something resembling a snarl and her eyes narrowed, that I turned around to take her in properly. Her features cleared then, as if she’d taken an eraser and created a clean slate, but her eyes had flitted from my face to my hand, which I’d unconsciously had over my belly.
“Philippa, did you need something?” I asked her.
“No,signorina. Just passing through,” she stated with a false lightness in her tone, but before I could ask her anything else, she’d vanished.
It’d felt a chill go up my spine, a slight niggle at the back of my psyche that told me something was off, and I wondered if everything was okay with her. The next day when she brought my lunch, I decided to make an effort to check on her.
“Did your sister-in-law crave anything other than liver?” I asked, initiating a discussion with her.
“What?” Philippa whipped her head around to gawk at me.
“Your sister-in-law,” I repeated, worried about her. “You said she craved liver when she was pregnant. Did she crave anything else?”
“No,” she responded quietly, arranging my meal on our dining room table. “Not that I know of.”
“What was the sex?” And again, she acted as though I’d asked her something impertinent. “Of the baby? Do you have a niece or a nephew?”
“It was a girl. Emilia Rose.”
“What a pretty name. Romeo has already told me he would like Dahlia if ours is a girl.”
“For his mother…” she trailed off, staring out the window.
“Oh, you’ve heard about his mother?”
