The second it leaves my mouth, I know it is the wrong thing to say. Her face closes off. Not in anger this time. In hurt.
My jaw tightens. I push the plate of vegetables closer to her, an offering disguised as impatience. “Eat.”
She picks up another carrot. “Stop ordering me around.”
“Then stop giving me reasons.”
Her laugh is soft and brittle. “You don’t need reasons, Lorenzo. You do whatever you want.”
I say nothing to that because there is nothing to say.
She takes another bite, chewing slowly, and I keep watching her. The aversion to the meat. The refusal of the wine. The pale cast to her face at the mention of salami. Small things, maybe. Innocent things.
Maybe.
But the thought that stirred upstairs stirs again now, darker and more insistent. She was gone for nearly four months… it’s possible. I think back to the tampered birth control. Fuck. Did I set her up to carry another man’s child?
I can’t stop looking at her now. At the way the blouse falls loose over her. At the guarded way she sits. At the careful distance she keeps between herself and everything I offer her. I think back to the dressing room, and how she had the cardigan clutched at her stomach. Fuck. Fucking fuck.
Her head lifts suddenly, catching me staring. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
I set my own glass down untouched. “Eat your carrots,cara.”
She narrows her eyes. “Don’t call me that.”
I watch as she takes another bite of carrot and keeps her gazefixed somewhere over my shoulder, as if she can avoid me simply by refusing to look. I let the silence stretch between us and study her openly now.
My gaze drifts lower before I can stop it. The blouse is loose. Deliberately so. The slacks, too. Not baggy enough to invite notice from anyone who isn’t looking for it, but enough to blur the lines of her curvy body.
Enough to hide changes.
A strange feeling creeps into my chest. The rushed wedding. The haste. The secrecy. The fiancé waiting at the altar while she played the trembling bride in white. Something inside me goes very still, and my jaw locks. Across from me, she reaches for another carrot, but her hand hesitates slightly before she picks it up. She looks tired. Not just upset. Not just shaken.
Tired in a way I recognize.
A memory rises uninvited—Sienna’s mother, Santee, at one of those endless family dinners years ago, quietly refusing wine with some airy excuse while the older women exchanged knowing looks over crystal glasses and candlelight. She told me that night we were expecting our first and only child.
I stare at Elizabeth.
My pulse slows into something dangerous. Russo was in such a hurry to marry her. The thought lands like a hammer blow to the sternum. I lean back against the counter, my expression giving away nothing, though it feels as if something has just reached into my chest and started twisting.
She notices the silence first.
“What?” she asks sharply.
“Nothing.”
“Right.” She gives a humorless laugh and sets the carrot down. “You’ve been staring holes through me for the last ten minutes.”
I say nothing. Because if I speak right now, I may saysomething I cannot take back. I’ll ask the question already pounding against the inside of my skull.
Is she pregnant?
And worse?—
