Larenzo's Christmas Baby

The more time she spent with him, the more she liked him. He could be dryly amusing or gently intent, and his tenderness with Ava had brought the sting of tears to her eyes more than once. And she was having more and more trouble ignoring the chemistry between them. Just brushing past him in the elevator or touching his hand when he handed her something made Emma’s insides go liquid with longing. And knowing that he remembered their night, that he might feel even just a little of what she felt...

It was the sweetest form of torture. Emma knew she had to resolve it one way or another. Either she had to stop dreaming about Larenzo, or she needed to ask him if he wanted their friendship—because she did believe they were now friends—to turn into something more. But something had to give, because the truth was, she acknowledged one night as she stared up at the ceiling, that she was falling in love with the father of her child.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘WHAT’S WRONG?’ LARENZO glanced up from his tablet where he’d been scanning news headlines, and Emma jumped guiltily.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said quickly, and swiped at a few crumbs on the kitchen table with a damp cloth. Ava banged her spoon on the table and then happily flung it to the floor.

Larenzo picked it up and handed it back to his daughter. ‘I can tell something’s bothering you,’ he said mildly. ‘Why don’t you tell me what it is?’ He tried to ignore the tightening of suspicion and fear in his gut. These last few weeks with Emma and Ava had been nearly perfect. Perhaps too perfect, because perfection wasn’t real, couldn’t last.

And yet he’d enjoyed this time with Emma and Ava so much...the mornings alone with Ava, and then breakfast, the three of them around the table, a family. He, a street rat from the slums of Palermo, finally had his own family. It felt like a miracle. It was a miracle. And just seeing Emma frown, sensing her disquiet, made him fear the worst now.

This family, after all, still was more fa?ade than anything else. It wasn’t as if they actually cared about each other.

Although he knew in his gut—and his heart—that that wasn’t true. He cared about Ava...and he cared about Emma.

‘It’s nothing,’ Emma said as she swiped some more toast crumbs into her hand and deposited them into the bin. ‘Really, it’s nothing.’

Larenzo let it go, because he wanted to keep things the way they were, and he was worried, judging from Emma’s frown, that they were already changing.

‘What are you up to today?’ he asked instead and she rose from the table, moving around the kitchen a bit too briskly, not meeting his eye.

‘Tumbling class for Ava and then a few errands.’ She gave him a brief, distracted smile. ‘Nothing too exciting.’

Did he detect a note of restlessness in her voice? Was she unhappy with her life here? He knew she hadn’t wanted to come here originally, but he thought in the last few weeks she’d come around. He’d believed they’d enjoyed each other’s company.

But maybe he was wrong.

‘Sounds fun to me,’ he said lightly, and Emma just shrugged. The fear and suspicion inside him felt like acid corroding his gut. She was hiding something from him, he was sure. He knew the signs. He’d lived them.

He rose from the table and pressed a kiss to Ava’s head. It took all his self-control to smile at Emma as if nothing were wrong before heading to the office.

He had rented an office in midtown to serve as the headquarters of his new operation, LC Investments. It was, Larenzo realised with every day he spent trying to set things up, going to be a long, hard slog. Even though the charges against him had been cleared, mud stuck. People assumed he had some connection to or knowledge of the criminal activity Bertrano had been neck-deep in, and he could hardly blame them. He’d been so blind. Wilfully, stupidly blind, and he would pay the price for that for the rest of his life.

All he could do now was conduct himself honourably and prove to everyone, eventually, that he was indeed an honest man.

Prove it to Emma.

Did she believe in his innocence? Sometimes, when they spent time together, when she’d gazed at him so hungrily from across the chessboard and he’d imagined hauling her into his arms...then he thought she did. But other times he remembered how she’d flung so many accusations at him, how she’d tried to hide Ava from him, and he doubted. He feared. And fear, he’d learned, was a cripplingly powerful force.