Surviving Mateo (Morelli Family 2)

Dante glances from Vince to Mia, but he doesn’t comment. I’ve come to realize over the course of this meal that Mateo’s brother, while similarly handsome, does not have Mateo’s charisma. He rarely speaks and his dinner date looks tempted to stab him with her butter knife.

I realize no one is really speaking to his companion, so I attempt to offer an olive branch. “So, Colette, you’ve been here before?”

She nods, pushing her food around her plate. “Long time ago.”

“Not that long,” Dante mutters.

“A lifetime,” she says, glaring at him, but he doesn’t bother looking up at her.

Picking up on the obvious tension, Mateo says, “Things seem to be going well. Now here you are, Dante’s… companion again.”

“Prisoner,” she corrects, stabbing a glazed carrot. “The word you’re looking for is prisoner.”

Dante doesn’t bother refuting. He just reaches across the table for another dinner roll, unperturbed.

Mia nods, as if she understands.

I join in with a nod of my own, since, well, we’ve all been there.

“This is fun,” Vince remarks dryly. “You guys should come more often.”

“Hard pass,” Colette mutters.

“Damn,” I murmur, reaching for my wine, but stopping, going for my water instead.

Dante breathes in and then out, and when he exhales, I swear to God, I hear him growl. Glancing up, startled, I watch him finally glare over at this girl. She meets his gaze, but her eyes are still narrowed with dislike. Without another word, Dante pushes his chair back, confusing all of us, including the girl, until he grabs her by the arm and yanks her out of her chair, hauling her out into the hall.

Mateo merely watches with raised eyebrows, while Mia and I both sort of gape. I wonder if we should do something, but then, this is the Morelli house, so we should probably keep our noses out of it.

Mia cuts a glance at Mateo. “Jesus Christ, your brother is intense.”

“He’s making me feel like the fun one,” he says dryly.

Dante hauls her back in, but she still jerks her arm out of his grasp before dropping into the seat beside him. She is less mouthy through the rest of dinner though. I kind of feel bad for her; I wouldn’t want to be going home with him, and it doesn’t seem like she does either.

Chapter Twenty Four

I stare at the stick for several minutes before I fully accept the results.

I, Meg Milano, am carrying Mateo Morelli’s baby.

Biting back a grin, I go to deposit the evidence in the garbage. I stop just before dropping it in. Mateo wouldn’t miss a disposable pregnancy test tossed in the garbage can, and while he probably won’t come back to the bedroom before our date tonight, I don’t want to take the chance. He’s at the gym now, so it’s possible he’ll come back for a shower.

I shove the stick back into the box instead. It’s my first morning at the bakery, so I can just throw it away there.

Man, pregnant.

It hasn’t fully hit me yet. When I found out with Lily, that hadn’t been planned either, but there was a certain amount of horror then. Obviously I adore Lily and wouldn’t change it now, but at the time, I really didn’t want to be tied to Rodney for the rest of my life.

Having a little baby of Mateo’s, on the other hand, feels exciting. I love Mateo, and knowing he wanted more kids anyway, I’m actually excited to share this news with him. With Rodney, I hadn’t been sure of how he’d take it. He acted like he was pleased, but there was terror in his eyes.

Turns out for good reason, since he wasn’t cut out for the role.

But this… this is going to be different. This is going to be a real family, with this baby sealing together the little family it’s already felt like we had with our girls.

Maybe Mateo will finally get his son.

By the time I get dropped off at the bakery, I’m walking on sunshine. The baby news is finally starting to set in, and I’m picturing tiny little baby shoes on tiny little half-Mateo baby feet. I’m sort of glad I do have to be at the bakery, because there’s no way I would be able to keep this quiet until our date night if I would’ve been home today.

The bakery ends up being quite a bit of work. With Francesca gone, there was no one to make an order. The baker hasn’t even shown up in a week, because he showed up and couldn’t get in, so I have to call him after I get there to explain there’s been a management shift but we are open now, so if he still wants to work there, he can come on in and help me get things going.

Once he gets there, he helps fill me in on what I need to be doing. The bakery is dead most of the morning, possibly due to being closed for a week, possibly just because it’s a Monday morning. I have to make a supply order for a store I haven’t spent a single day in. I go with the numbers Francesca put down last, but I’ll need to look into the difference in orders between that week and this, not to mention reach out to all the people who had orders we should’ve fulfilled last week.