by DD Prince
I’ve baked her birthday cupcakes. Zander is on the kitchen floor, banging a wooden spoon on a steel pot, making a racket.
I put the pink frosting on top of one of the cupcakes and taste it. And then I put a little bit on a baby cookie, then squat to give it to my son. Holly would shout me down if she saw me giving him pure sugar like that. But she’s not here to shout me down, so I smile and tell him, in Italian, to eat it.
She’s gotten feisty at times. She’s still my little flower, my girl, but she is coming into her own now that she’s no longer my prisoner.
I’m her prisoner, so she says, and I’m not allowed to ever leave again. I can live with that since life sucked without her. I won’t say it’s been a piece of cake, but I’m a work-in-progress.
Zander tastes the frosting and gives me a big smile and then tries to shove the whole thing in his mouth. It’s a baby cookie so it crumbles.
I ruffle his thick black hair and hit the button to start the dishwasher. She’ll be home soon from the art class she’s doing at the hospital for the children’s ward.
I lift him up and take him to the sink and clean his face off. He points to the bowl of frosting on the counter.
“Dat!” he demands.
I take him closer and he dips his finger in it and then puts it in his mouth and gives me a big smile. He may be a carbon copy of me, but he’s got Holly’s smile. Her dimples, too.
I kiss him on top of his head and take him outside to the front porch to wait for his mama.
Life ain’t all cupcakes and dimples and happy family time. My demons try to rear their heads more than occasionally. But between him and her, I keep finding it in me to keep on fighting them.
***
“You baked this?” she’s in shock.
“I’ve baked them every other time, too. Just not your 20th.”
“Every? What? You’re joking!”
“Yeah. Gave Maria the night off that first time. Second time, I brought the shit with me to the island from the last store before I caught that boat. I used to bake in the kitchen with Mama when we were on the run.”
“Wow. Unknown talents,” she laughs and then she tries to shove as much of it as she can in her mouth. Just like our son tried to do. I laugh.
She takes her time chewing and then washes it down with a glass of milk, “Every other time, I didn’t get to eat it. I wanted to make sure I ate this one.”
I shake my head, smiling, “There’s eleven more over there for you.” I point to the tray of them on top of the stove.
She claps her hands and then she reaches for the wrapped box in front of her and opens her gift from me. We’re heading to Portland shortly, to the restaurant Dario’s sister Luciana and her husband own, for a family party for Holly as well as to exchange Christmas gifts. We’ll be staying overnight. They wanted us there for Christmas, but Holly wanted our first Christmas as a family to be here, at our home.
I like it just us so I had no problem with that. Yeah, I’m trying with the family gettogethers. Never thought it’d be my jam, especially after the whole Jonas and Julie incident, but having Zander and watching him interact with his cousins is different; it’s cool.
“Spanish for Dummies?” she asks as she pulls the book out of the wrapping paper.
I smile big. I’ve smiled more since she hit that panic button than I have in fifteen years.
“Dummy?” she looks at me with mock irritation.
“You’ve gotta be a dummy to have gone along with me and not given up hope,” I tease and lean over and she kisses me.
“Gracias.” Her eyes are bright, like she’s about to cry. “Te amo.”
“Maybe you don’t need those lessons after all. And this one is from your son.” I pass her a small box with a pink bow on it.
She plucks the bow off and sticks it to my forehead. Zander lets out a big belly laugh at the sight of me with a bow on my head and I bust up laughing at his infectious laugher.
She opens the box and sees a key. A car key.
“A key? What did you buy Mommy?” she asks, “You did not buy mommy a car!” She claps her hands. Zander claps his, too.
“Garage,” I say and lead her outside.
We go into the garage and we see her new ride. A new Lexus SUV.
“Already loaded it up for the airport. Ready to go?”
She jumps up and down enthusiastically and kisses me. “I love it. Thank you.” And then she kisses our son, who’s in my arms, and says, “Thank you, baby boy!” He leans forward and slobbers a big kiss on her face.
I open the back door and buckle our son into his car seat.
***
It’s two weeks into January and I’ve rushed home from work, early afternoon, having forgotten some contracts. I merge with the letter carrier, who is walking up our driveway. She passes me a stack of mail. I thank her and give her a nod and go into the house.
I’m headed to the kitchen when I see Holly coming down the stairs with her index finger to her lips.
“Shh. Just got him down for his nap.”
I kiss her. “Just popped home for that file on the table.”
“Oh. It’s still there. Wa-want me to take all that?” she bites her lip and her eyes are big, eyeing the stack of letters in my hand.
I pick up on her demeanor and suspiciously start thumbing through the stack in my hand and stop on a small airmail envelope addressed to Holly Catelli from a Mrs. G. Catelli.
The fucking return address is in Cagliari, Italy. My mother’s home town.
I look at my wife and I’m pretty sure my face is red. The breakfast I ate that morning is threatening to come back up.
“I--- I was gonna tell you. I, uh… can I read it?” she pleads.
I whip it along with the rest of the mail and put my fingers to my temples.
“I’m sorry. We’ve been communicating. Me and your grandmother. She doesn’t do email. But she speaks and writes English. We’ve been discussing a visit. I sent her some pictures of Zander and maybe this has pictures of your family in it. It looks thick. I got Wesley to give me the address. He advised against me doing this behind your back. This is all me, so don’t be mad at him.”
I’m fuming. It’s taking every ounce of self-control to not grab her throat and pin her against the wall.
“She wants to know you, Alessandro. She wants to meet Zander, too. I… I thought I’d just see if they were open about meeting you and if they were, I’d let you decide. Wesley said they know a bit of what you’ve been through, how hard it has been for you. I told her how hard it’d be for you and I didn’t make promises, but … I think if you think about it… look at the letters, maybe see if there’s pictures…”
“Are you fucking joking right now?” I shout.
She winces.
I storm past her, go to the kitchen table and grab the file I forgot that morning.
“She’s saved your mom’s ashes. If you come, they’ll do a scattering with you there.”
I’m seething so bad I can’t hardly see straight. “We’ll talk tonight. Maybe.” I storm out and leave her standing there in the hallway with all the mail scattered by her feet. I have to fucking go so I don’t do something I’ll regret. So I don’t do something that further verifies that I’m still a fucking animal.
Holly
Alessandro climbs in bed with me. It’s late, after one o’clock in the morning and I hadn’t seen or heard from him since lunchtime when we had that awful scene. I didn’t want it to go that way but I should know that deceit will always come back to bite you in the butt. It always does.
Life isn’t always easy. He has bad dreams sometimes and sometimes I can see things weighing on him. But he’s a good husband and I couldn’t ask for a better Daddy for our son. He hates that he left me alone when I was pregnant.
I hit that button twenty times the day he left and he ignored it. I took the necklace off and put it in a drawer after Melbourne and seeing Rocco, who refused to tell me where he’d gone.
<
br /> I almost hit it again when I realized I was late and then took a pregnancy test. But, I was angry. And I felt deserted.
I thought maybe he’d notice. Or that Dario, Zack, or Wes would tell him. They’d all said he hadn’t been in contact. Dare wanted to go find him when I revealed I was pregnant but I begged him not to. I got a little upset and decided that I could do it on my own. Fuck him. How dare he give up so easily when I’d held strong and refused to give up on him for all that time!
And then I was thinking that maybe he was having me tailed, watched. Maybe he’d get word when I got a big belly. I even contemplated cutting my hair again. And then I heard the heartbeat in the doctor’s office and I decided to be strong. For our baby. I took care of myself. I spent five months studying like a madwoman getting my high school diploma online. I finally opened that check, which was ten million dollars, which nearly made me fall over. I put it in the bank and lived off interest until a few weeks before my due date when, after a good long talk with Wes, I decided to buy the little place on the island off the coast of Tasmania.
And the whole time, I kept telling myself that maybe he was watching. Maybe he was waiting for the right time to make his approach.
I decided to have the baby in Tasmania, too. And I did. Eli and Wes and Tash were all there with me and we filmed it for Alessandro. I told him about it but he didn’t want to watch yet.
“One day, princesa. Okay? It kills me that I wasn’t there for that. I’m not ready to watch you in pain delivering our baby without me.”
And then I decided, after my son was a week and a half old, to press the panic button again. And thankfully, he came. Also, Wes had talked to Rocco and knew where he was and was prepared to go get him and drag him to me. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that.
When I went to bed tonight, I left the DVD of Zander’s birth on the kitchen table with a note.
“I want you to watch this and then I want you to think about how beautiful our family is and how much more beautiful it can be if we expand it with great grandparents for our little boy and any future children we have. I’m sorry for doing that secretly but it’s only out of love for you. Please forgive me. And if you watch this and you still don’t want to go to Italy, I won’t bring it up again. Love you.”
He came to bed a little after one o’clock and turned me into him.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too. Did you get my note?”
He nodded, “yeah.”
“Did you watch it?”
He nodded again and squeezed me tight. Too tight.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I was there for you. And you’re right. Write back to her. Book the flights. I don’t wanna go, because it’ll hurt me, but it might help them. So, we’ll go.”
“I’m so proud of you,” I say and kiss his lips softly, “And I think it’ll help you, too.”
“I don’t deserve you,” he tells me, wiping my tears away with his thumbs.
“I know,” I said.
He laughs. “But I’m keepin’ you, anyway.”
“Good. Cuz now you’re my captive, so you have no choice. We’re stuck together. You go and try to leave me and I’ll spend every dime, every ounce of energy to hunt you down and bring you back.”
“Shit,” he grumbles.
I whack his bottom and then roll us so I can climb him. I run my hand between his legs as I kiss his jaw and then move to his mouth.
“I want another baby. I wanna be there for every minute this time,” he says.
“Okay,” I tell him.
And then he slides inside me and I wrap my arms around him and his mouth finds mine.
Alessandro
Cagliari Italy
As we pull down the driveway on a dirt road to a very nice but modest house in the country that’s surrounded on both sides by fruit trees and grape vines, I see them. At least twelve of them file out onto the porch. Smiling. Some of them with shiny water-filled eyes. Familiar to me as I know who almost every one of them is without introductions. She told me so much about the people back home. About her family. Our famiglia.
I turn the car off and pull the key, blowing out a breath, as ready as I’ll ever be, to take my wife and son to meet them.
Holly smiles at me and leans over and puckers for a kiss.
“I am so proud of you,” she says.
I kiss her lips and whisper, “Thank you,” against them, “Thank you for saving me. From those demons. From myself.”
She gives me dimples.
“Dat!” Zander says and I look in the rearview. He’s pointing at the people on the porch.
“That’s our family, Zander,” Holly says brightly and Zander claps his hands and shows his dimples.
From the Author
I hope you enjoyed this story. I fell for Holly as much as I did for Alessandro, because she just sees past his mask and knows that there’s something more there.
When I was writing Dare and Angel’s story and it came to me that Angel had broken for her tormenters in order to save her little sister, Holly’s story started to come to me, too, and I knew it was one I’d have to tell.
And when I met Alessandro Romero while writing Unbound I had to stop myself from putting Unbound down and writing Saved instead. This man and all his pain and anger hit me hard. But what hit me harder was the fact that Holly just wouldn’t give up on him. What she saw in him, what he didn’t want her to see, but kept showing her hints of, probably did keep him from falling over that precipice that he couldn’t come back from. Her perseverance was something that did make a difference to him.
Imagine having someone who never gave up on you, who loved you unconditionally? That’s what struck me hard with this story.
Big thanks to my Chickadees for the love & support and for putting up with AND requesting my teasers (Sherihan!). And for the extra ideas about excessive testosterone results (Linda & Kass).
Thanks to Kass for beta reading before this was done. Thanks to Maria for being the first one to tell me she loved this story and for being my #1 fan in a non-Misery way.
And a special shout-out to Marquitta who loved Alessandro unconditionally (like Holly) before she knew much about him, because she loves the bad boys and… because she has faith in me that I’ll deliver a story that will resonate. I hope it did, chickie!
Thanks to the many ARC readers and bloggers (Sansa, Mariah, Divya, Kimberly, Breanne) who have helped and promise to help me spread word about this book as well as for your invaluable feedback.
Thanks to all my readers, who wait patiently for my work (even though it sometimes takes me a lot longer than you’d like to wait for me to deliver!). Thank you for helping me live my dream.
XO
Dee
Play List
All of Me – John Legend
(I’m Gonna Love You) Inside Out – Chainsmokers (feat. Charlee)
Thank You – Chris Cornell
Sucker for Pain – Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Imagine Dragons
Fallin’ – Alicia Keys
Sex on Fire – Kings of Leon
Killing me Softly – Fugees
I’ll Stand by You – The Pretenders
Sorry – Buckcherry
What’s next?
Next up is finishing Joyride (Beautiful Biker 2), Jenna & Rider’s story. I started writing it with Saved and Alessandro grabbed me and wouldn’t let go until his story was told.
Sorry to those who were waiting for Rider & Jenna (Heather! Forgive me!), but the good news is that the story is already started so I just gotta jump back on the back of Rider’s bike and see where it takes me. I’m very excited about the fifty pages I’ve gotten written down so far!
Will there be more Ferrano stories? I think so. I’d love to tell Tessa & Zack’s story. And John Lewis from book 1 & book 3 of The Dominator books has been nudging at me, too. Well, his new nanny is the one who’s actually nudging at me. No idea of any ti
melines yet because I have some biker books to write first.
And who knows, maybe we’ll have to ‘ship’ Baby Carina & Baby Zander in a couple years. Can you imagine how wild that story could be? Heheh.
Thanks, as always, for reading my work. If this is your first DD Prince book, I hope you’ll look at some of my other books. If you’ve read some or all my work so far, thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your support!
Lotsa love,
-D
Xo
PS: Reviews, likes, and shares or even just comments on my social media posts helps me get word out about my books. Indie authors rely heavily on their fan base to help them continue to write. Thank you!
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Other Books by DD Prince
Dark Mafia Romance: dark romance with a debt flesh payment plot.
Tommy & Tia’s story.
This one is dark. Non-consensual / rough sex. An anti-hero you may love to hate and hate to love.
The Dominator
US | UK| CA | AU
The Dominator II; Truth or Dare
Sex slave rescue romance with dark themes.
US | UK| CA | AU
The Dominator III; Unbound
More Tommy. More Dare. More Domination!
US | UK| CA | AU
The Dominator Box Set – bit.ly/dominatorboxset
Dark Paranormal Romance: Vampire dark romance / kidnapping
Nectar Trilogy (Includes Nectar, Ambrosia, and Essence). Tristan is the ultimate biting, protective alpha book boyfriend!
Tristan & Kyla’s story.
US | UK| CA | AU
MC Romance: Romantic suspense with comedy, angst, steamy scenes, and a little bit of gritty darkness. This alpha-male is not an alpha-hole. You’re going to FLOVE Deacon Valentine.
Detour (Beautiful Biker 1)
US | UK| CA | AU
Coming Soon:
Joyride (Beautiful Biker 2) – Jenna and Rider
