“I want more.” I reached again to place my hand over where she carried our future.
“What I’d tell you, Andre?” she said, putting my hand over her still-flat stomach. “Easy.”
More men streamed into the room to assist. Before I was moved and taken to the clinic, I grinned at her.
“Nice and slow?” I guessed.
I didn’t care how she wanted me to behave as her patient. She could be my nurse anytime she wanted.
Never my maid.
Not my captive.
Just the woman that I would spend the rest of my life with, each and every day a trial of earning her love.
40
SOFIA
Five months later…
With a wide smile splitting my face, I took a couple of steps forward.
Then stopped.
Oleg chuckled, pausing with me as he held his arm out. It seemed like a complete circle was closing for him to walk me down the aisle. He had been so skeptical of my being in Andre’s household at first, but now, he accepted me as a friend, as his boss’s partner, and as a family member he’d always trust.
Anya paused the music. She waited at the piano in the big ballroom at Mikhail and Claire’s residence. Her fingers poised above the keys, she raised her brows. “Do we need a take three now?”
Oleg shook his head, still chuckling.
I growled lightly. “No.”
Baby Owen babbled from the side while Mikhail held him. He waved his pudgy little arms and tried to grab Claire’s dress. She hissed as he got a handful of her hair and she canted over.
Picking up a fistful of white fabric to hold my dress up higher, I bit my lip to keep from laughing.
“I think this would be take four,” Esmeralda said from where she sat in a wheelchair off to the side.
Behind her, Thomas, the driver’s son who’d helped me get her to freedom, shook his head. “No, it’d be take three.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Andre said, watching me ruefully. “Just get over here already.” He pointed at the open space in front of him.
That was it.
I lost it. Cracking up and laughing hard, I bent over and had to reclaim another handful of my dress. My too-long dress.
And it would be the fourth attempt to get this thing going.
“Don’t. Don’t laugh,” Anya warned. “You’ll?—”
I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, laughing harder. “I’m not going to pee in my wedding dress.”
With how big my belly swelled with this baby, though, my bladder was tested daily.
“Sofia…” Andre warned, laughter in his voice too.
“Okay. Okay.” I held up my free hand, raising the bouquet. I cleared my throat and tried to get a straight face again.
