Dante slid his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s let Sam sleep, cara. Come into the hall and we can talk.”
Bewildered, Tally followed him from the room. “She thinks you and I are married?”
“I don’t know the laws here, cara. But I remember reading about a child somewhere who died because a hospital wouldn’t provide emergency treatment without the permission of a parent.” He clasped her shoulders. “I wasn’t going to run that risk. Not with our little girl.”
Tally swallowed hard. Our little girl. Our little girl.
“Don’t look at me that way, cara. I had no choice. Our Samantha—”
It was her fault, all of it. She had denied Dante knowledge of his child, denied Sam her father. And now, dear God, and now Sam might have died if Dante hadn’t thought quickly—
“Tally.”
She looked up at him. His face was drawn. He had gone through so much today for a child he didn’t know was his, a child he loved.
“Tally.” Dante paused. “I know my timing is bad but—cara, I want to marry you. And I want to adopt Sam. I want to be her father.”
Tears swam in Tally’s eyes. “Oh, Dante…”
“I love you. And I love her, as much as if she were my daughter.”
Tally began to weep. There was no hiding her secret, not anymore.
“Dante,” she said brokenly, “Sam is your daughter!”
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of Dante’s breathing and Tally’s sobs. When he finally spoke, his voice was without inflection.
“What do you mean, Sam is my daughter?”
“I should have told you. I wanted to tell you—”
She gasped as his hands bit into her shoulders. “Tell me what?”
“There was no other man. I made it up. Samantha is—she’s your child.”
Moments, an eternity, slipped by. Tally waited, trying to read Dante’s face, to see something of what would come next.
“Let me make sure I understand this. You didn’t sleep with someone else.”
“No.”
“You didn’t get pregnant by another man.”
“I know I should have told you, but—”
“You knew you were pregnant, and you left me anyway?”
“Dante. Please. Listen to what I’m saying. I knew you’d grown tired of me. How could I have told you I was having a baby?”
“My baby.” His voice was like a whip; he caught her wrists and pushed her back against the wall. “My baby!”
“It isn’t that simple!”
“On the contrary, Taylor. It’s brutally simple. You became pregnant with my child and didn’t tell me. You were going to raise her to think she had no father.”
Tally wrenched her hands free and slapped them over her ears. “Stop it!”
“You were going to raise Samantha—my daughter—as I was raised. Fatherless. Impoverished.”