A few weeks later, she’d found out she was pregnant. Her uncle had been furious, her aunt disappointed in her.
For the last fourteen months, even as Tess’s two best friends, Hallie Hatfield and Lola Price, had rolled their eyes, she’d stubbornly insisted that Stefano would someday return to claim her and their baby. After all, even if she didn’t know his last name, he knew hers. Stefano could find her anytime he wanted.
If he hadn’t come yet, there had to be a good reason. Maybe he had amnesia, or his plane had crashed on a desert island. Those things happened, didn’t they? Tess imagined every reason she could think of, except for the obvious one. Her friends thought she was nuts.
But Tess had to believe Stefano would return. Because, otherwise, she’d surrendered all her dreams for nothing. She’d given up her chance for a career, for marriage, for one love that would last her whole life—all for a one-night stand that had left her pregnant, abandoned and alone.
If Stefano didn’t come back, it would mean the world was a cold and unforgiving place, and all the fairy tales her mother had read her as a child were wrong. Tess didn’t want to live in a world like that. So she’d done her best to believe.
Suddenly, tonight, she couldn’t.
Not for one more second.
Tess’s shoulders drooped as she wearily pushed her five-month-old baby’s stroller out of the Campania Hotel New York. It was ten o’clock on a warm, humid night in early September, but the night was just getting started. The streets were crowded with people leaving restaurants and streaming out of Broadway theaters, their faces animated and bright as they passed beneath the sparkling lights of the hotel’s porte cochere.
Tess felt empty and sad. She’d just watched her friend Hallie sing at her husband’s luxury hotel. After Hallie’s amazing performance, Cristiano had publicly declared his love for his wife.
She was glad for Hallie, truly she was. Her friend deserved every happiness, especially after what she’d gone through. Normally, Tess would have told herself that seeing a couple so deeply in love proved that it might still happen for her, too.
But not tonight.
She’d been up since four that morning, working at her uncle’s bakery while also caring for her baby. She felt sweaty and exhausted. Tendrils of her long red hair were plastered to her neck. Even Tess’s jaunty handmade outfit, a vintage-style shirt and midi pencil skirt with mixing patterns, was wrinkled. She looked down at her adorable sleeping baby, her plump cheeks and dark hair, and a hard lump rose to her throat.
For over a year, she’d ignored her uncle’s criticism, her aunt’s disappointed sighs and her friends’ teasing. She’d told herself Stefano would come back to her. But after seeing Hallie and Cristiano together, so happy together in their own little world, Tess had realized she was fooling herself.
Give it up. A memory came of Lola’s tart voice. He’s never coming back, Tess.
Tess stopped. As streams of people passed by her stroller on both sides of the sidewalk, she savagely wiped tears off her cheeks. She’d planned to take the subway back to Brooklyn with her baby rather than ask Hallie for a ride and risk crying in front of her. Her friends always teased her about being too cheerful and optimistic. She couldn’t let them know how she really felt inside.
But that was wrong. Hallie was her friend, and Tess had left without so much as a farewell. Taking a deep breath, she tried to smooth her face into a smile. She’d go back inside now and congratulate Hallie. And if she asked why Tess was crying—
As Tess started to turn, she walked into a wall.
Not a wall. A man.
For a second, she saw stars from the blunt force of hitting her head against his chest. Dizzy, she shook her head, mortified.
“I’m so sorry,” she blurted out. “It was my fault—”
Then she saw him.
For a second, Tess couldn’t breathe. Her heart pounded in her throat as she tilted her head back to stare at the man’s handsome face, his sharp cheekbones and jawline shadowed by the lights of the hotel’s grand porte cochere.
Tall and dark-haired, the man wore a sleek black jacket that emphasized his broad shoulders, and trousers that fit snugly over powerful thighs. His tailored shirt was open a single button at the neck.
He wasn’t strictly handsome, perhaps. His aquiline profile was a bit too arrogant, the set of his square jaw too thuggish. But he gave the impression of intense masculine beauty. His face was arresting, his body powerful, giving him the look of a dark angel.
The man’s eyes widened, the irises so dark as to be almost black against his olive-colored skin.
Tess’s lips parted.
“Stefano?” she whispered, gripping the handle of the stroller for balance. “Is it really you?”
She knew those dark eyes. That handsome face. Those cruel, sensual lips. She knew every bit of him. She’d dreamed of him, day and night, for over a year.
“Tess,” he murmured.
His low, husky voice caressed the short syllable of her name. So he was real, then. He was real.