Caroselli's Accidental Heir

by Michelle Celmer

  He still couldn’t fathom how Lucy’s mom could make her pregnant daughter sleep on the couch. He knew they didn’t get along well, but that was just cruel. If she didn’t want to give up her own bed, couldn’t she have at least sprung for an air mattress? He didn’t know much about the woman. Lucy’s family was an off-limits subject, but meeting her mom seemed inevitable now that he was about to be the father of her grandchild.

  It still hadn’t completely sunk in that in three months he was going to be somebody’s parent. He and Lucy still had so much to talk about, so many decisions to make. He wasn’t even sure where to begin.

  Tony’s secretary buzzed him. “Rob and Nick are here. They say it’s urgent.”

  He sighed. And so it begins.

  With a sigh of resignation, he looked at the time on his computer monitor. Nine-fifteen. That hadn’t taken long. “Send them in.”

  Here we go—round one.

  The door opened and his cousins stepped into his office. It was hard to believe that just six months ago they had all been childless bachelors. Now two of them were married and all three were expecting babies. And it was all because of Nonno.

  “So,” Nick said, making himself comfortable in the chair opposite Tony’s desk. “Should I clear my calendar?”

  “For what?”

  “Your next wedding,” Rob said, standing behind Nick, his arms folded.

  As if. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  Nick looked surprised. “You’re not going to marry her? Mr. Responsibility? You always do the right thing.”

  “As far along as she is, I figured you would have set a date by now,” Rob told him.

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Did you find out why she left?” Nick asked. “And why it took her so long to tell you about the baby?”

  “And are you sure it’s yours?” Rob said.

  “Yes, I’m sure that it’s mine. As for why she left, and why she came back when she did, that is between her and me.”

  “I assume she’s claiming that it was an accident,” Rob said.

  “It was an accident. Lucy wasn’t any more anxious than I was to settle down.”

  Rob came back with, “Or so she says.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “How can you be sure?” Nick asked. “Maybe this is some elaborate setup.”

  Lucy didn’t have a devious bone in her body. “It’s not. She had every intention of going back to Florida last night. She didn’t even bring a change of clothes.”

  “Maybe she was betting you would ask her to stay.”

  “Ask? I practically had to beg her to stay in Chicago and move in with me. She flat-out refused to marry me.”

  “You proposed?” Rob said.

  Tony nodded. “I told her I thought it was best for the baby.”

  Nick’s eyebrows rose. “And she said no? I can’t imagine why.”

  “I know how it sounds, but Lucy made it very clear from the time we met that she doesn’t want anything exclusive. She’s incredibly independent, not to mention practical. Sentiments of love would only scare her farther away.”

  “Is it a boy?” Rob asked.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “If it is?” Nick said.

  “Yes, I’m taking the money. Why wouldn’t I?” It was his ticket to freedom. It would benefit him, Lucy and the baby.

  “How’s that going to happen if she won’t marry you?”

  “You have to understand, it’s different for us. You guys are happily married to women you love. You gave up millions of dollars to prove that to them.”

  “You don’t love Lucy?” Nick asked.

  “What I feel is irrelevant. But I do know how Lucy feels, and she happens to be the one calling all the shots right now.”

  “So you’re just going to live together?” Rob asked.

  “For now. At least until the baby is born.”

  “Then what?”

  “She’s been back less than twenty-four hours. We haven’t planned that far ahead yet. We have time.”

  “You think so?” Nick said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Terri is barely showing and she already has the kid on a waiting list for preschool.”

  Preschool? “No way.”

  “It’s not like it was when we were kids,” Rob said. “For any hope of getting a kid into a good college, you have to get them into a good private primary school first, and to do that they have to go to the right preschool.”

  Tony wasn’t even sure if he would want to put his child in private school. As a kid, he would have given anything to go to public school, if for no other reason than to have a little privacy, and anonymity. Any childhood mishaps or embarrassments had been fodder for the entire family. Every time he tried to shirk the rules, it always got back to his parents somehow. He’d had no choice but to behave. Not that he would have been a delinquent otherwise, but being the second oldest cousin—Nick’s sister Jessica beating him out by a year and a half—he’d been held to a higher standard his entire life.

  “They look up to you,” his dad used to tell him, and being the oldest of the three brothers, Antonio Sr. understood sacrifice. “It’s your responsibility to set a good example.”

  That’s how it was in the Caroselli family. No sacrifice was too large. Working for Caroselli Chocolate hadn’t been Tony’s first choice as a career. It hadn’t been his second or third, either, but he fell in line, because that was what families did. Or so he used to think. He was getting tired of playing by their rules.

  He was inching closer to forty every day. When did he get to start living his life the way he wanted to? When he was Nonno’s age?

  “I think Lucy and I will just have to take this one day at a time,” he told his cousins. “Which would be much easier to do if everyone would just give us the time and the space we need to figure this out.”

  “Everyone means well,” Nick said.

  That didn’t change the fact that they were only making things more stressful.

  “There’s another matter we came to talk to you about,” Rob said. “We have concerns about Rose.”

  Rose Goldwyn, the daughter of Nonno’s secretary, had come to them last fall looking for a job. Because of her mother, Phyllis’s, twenty-plus years of dedicated service to Caroselli Chocolate, they’d felt obligated to hire her. Unfortunately, Rose was nothing like her mother. She did her job, but unlike Phyllis, who had been like a part of the Caroselli family until she retired, Rose didn’t fit in. There was something about her that just seemed a little...off. Lately Tony had come to realize that it was an opinion shared by a good majority of the family, and most of her coworkers.

  “Megan pulled me aside yesterday,” Rob told him. Megan, Rob’s younger sister, had just bought her first home and brought Rose in as her roommate. “She said she’s a little creeped out by Rose’s recent behavior.”

  “Recent behavior? She’s creeped me out since the day she was hired,” Nick said. He was one of those guys who got along with practically everyone. If he thought something was off about Rose, they would be wise to listen.

  “Meg said that Rose seems unusually interested in the family,” Rob told them. “She asks a lot of questions about Nonno and Nonna.”

  “What kind of questions?” Tony asked.

  “What they were like, did they have a good marriage?”

  That was odd. “What does she care about our grandparents’ marriage? How could that possibly be relevant to her?”

  “It gets stranger. She asked if Meg had any old family movies.”

  “I suppose this would be a good time to mention that Terri and I caught her coming from the direction of Nonno’s study on the day of our wedding,” Nick said. “Rose claimed she was looking f
or the bathroom and got lost, but then she scurried down the stairs without using the bathroom. I figured she was just nervous being at a family function for the first time. It can be a little overwhelming for an outsider. But Terri was convinced that she was lying.”

  Rob muttered a curse. “A couple of months ago Carrie caught Rose red-handed trying to jimmy the lock on my dad’s office door.”

  And they were just hearing about this now? “I would think you might have mentioned something as important as someone breaking into the CEO’s office,” Tony said.

  “She claimed there was a paper in there that she needed, something my dad’s secretary left for her. She said she forgot to grab it before my dad left and locked his office. She was afraid she would get into trouble if she didn’t take care of it. Then out of the blue she got a call saying she didn’t need to do it after all.”

  “Sounds like she always has an excuse.”

  “Carrie said she looked guilty.”

  “All the more reason to report it,” Nick said.

  “I didn’t want to get Rose in trouble if she hadn’t done anything wrong. I meant to look into it, then we found out that Carrie was pregnant, and I totally forgot to follow through.”

  “Understandable,” Nick said.

  “No kidding,” Tony mumbled, and Rob chuckled.

  “Do we even know for sure that Rose is Phyllis’s daughter?” Nick asked. “It’s not like we can ask Phyllis since she’s dead. Rose could be an impostor. She could be a spy going after company secrets. She could be an undercover reporter working on an exposé.”

  “An exposé about chocolate?” Tony couldn’t think of anything less interesting. “Why? Or is there something else going on here that I don’t know about?”

  “If there is, I don’t know about it, either,” Rob said. “I only know that Meg is worried. And that has me worried.”

  “We could take it to our parents, tell them what we know,” Nick said.

  “Why don’t we do a little digging first?” Rob said. “I don’t want to get her in trouble if her only crime is being a little odd.”

  “It’s your call,” Tony told him.

  “Give me a week or two,” Rob said.

  Tony found himself hoping that Rob did discover some nefarious activity. With any luck it would take the focus off him for a while. At least until he figured out what to do. Lucy would marry him eventually, of that he was positive. It was just a matter of wearing her down and making her see reason.

  * * *

  The rich and salty scent of frying bacon woke Lucy from a deep sleep with a smile on her face. Tony almost always made her breakfast when she spent the night. Even if he only had time to toast bread or pour her a bowl of cereal before he left for work. He kept her favorite kind around for such occasions, which had been more frequent in the weeks before she left.

  Until just now, Lucy had never stopped to consider what a nice gesture that was. In fact, he did an awful lot of nice things for her. She couldn’t help feeling that she’d taken him for granted.

  She wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

  She pried her lids open and looked at the clock. She blinked several times, sure that her eyes were playing tricks on her. It couldn’t possibly be 11:30 a.m. That would mean that she’d slept for almost eighteen hours.

  On the bedside table her phone chirped, alerting her that she had new text message. She reached over and grabbed it.

  Ugh.

  There were half a dozen text messages. All from her mom.

  Lucy had taken the coward’s way out last night. Instead of calling, she’d messaged her mom to say that she wouldn’t need a lift from the airport after all, and she’d be staying in Chicago a little longer than expected.

  How long and with who? had been her mom’s immediate response.

  As tempting as it was to throw her mom’s words back at her—wouldn’t marry a woman like me, my ass—that sort of thing always seemed to blow up in her face. After careful consideration, Lucy decided that it wouldn’t be worth the temporary feeling of satisfaction. The less her mom knew at this point, the better.

  She texted back, A friend, not sure how long, no time to discuss it. If Lucy believed for a second her mom was concerned for her well-being, she would have answered. She knew better.

  She rolled out of bed and looked around for her clothes, then remembered that Tony had offered to wash them for her. He must have forgotten to take them out of the dryer.

  She grabbed his flannel robe from the back of the closet door where he’d always kept it. The scent of his soap and aftershave tickled her nose as she pulled it on over the white undershirt he’d given her to wear last night. While the shirt was so huge it hung to just above her knees, the robe didn’t quite make it all the way around her tummy.

  With the baby doing aerobics on her bladder, her first stop was the bathroom. Tony used to keep a hot pink toothbrush for her in the vanity drawer, but he wouldn’t have kept it all this time. Would he?

  She slid the drawer open, gasping softly when she saw it lying there next to a brand-new tube of her favorite toothpaste. How did he remember that? And why keep her toothbrush if he was planning to marry someone else?

  One thing at a time, she reminded herself. She brushed her teeth and finger-combed her hair into place. She had always worn her hair on the short side, but her current style, a messy-ish pixie cut, was by far the easiest to maintain, and she knew Tony liked it that way. Her mom claimed it made Lucy look like an elf. The way Lucy looked at it, the less she had to fuss over herself, the more time she would have to fuss over the baby.

  Knowing they had much to discuss, Lucy was ravaged by nerves as she walked to the kitchen. To Tony. But as she rounded the corner and saw who it was standing at the stove, she wished she would have stayed in bed. She froze in the kitchen doorway, wondering if she could sneak back to the bedroom, but Tony’s mom must have had eyes in the back of her head.

  “Sleep well?” she asked Lucy, still facing away, using a fork to lift several crispy slices of bacon from the pan onto a paper towel. On the counter beside the stove sat a plate with golden French toast made from thick, crusty, Italian bread. Just like the kind Tony used to make her.

  Her mouth started to water and her stomach howled for nourishment.

  “Where is Tony?” Lucy asked her. And what the heck are you doing here making me breakfast?

  “He was gone when I got here,” she said, patting away the extra grease from the bacon with an edge of the paper towel. In slip-on flats, she was just about the same height as Lucy, but that was where any similarity ended.

  “When was that?” Lucy asked.

  “Thirty minutes ago, give or take.” She put the bacon on the plate and turned to Lucy, giving her a quick once-over, one brow slightly raised. “I hope you’re hungry.”

  She held the plate out and Lucy took it, so nervous her hands were trembling. If his mom noticed, she was kind enough not to point it out. She gestured to the table and said, “Sit down. Eat it while it’s hot.”

  Obediently Lucy sat. It was like her worst nightmare come true. Coming face-to-face with the mother of the man whose baby she was carrying, and doing it not only alone, but in his T-shirt and robe. Could this get any worse?

  “Maybe I should call Tony,” Lucy said, tugging the robe tighter around her belly.

  “Why don’t you and I chat for a while?” his mom said, taking a seat across from Lucy. “I’d like to know a little bit about my future daughter-in-law.”

  Oh, boy, this was going to fun to explain. “Maybe we should wait for Tony.”

  She dismissed the idea with a flutter of perfectly manicured nails, her smile patient yet firm. “Tell me about yourself. How did you meet my son?”

  “We met at the bar where I was working,” she said, leaving it at th
at.

  When Tony’s mom realized that was all Lucy planned to tell her, she asked, “How long have you been seeing each other?”

  “Mrs. Caroselli—”

  “It’s Sarah. Or Mom. Whichever you’re more comfortable with.”

  Mom? She was sure she wasn’t ready for that. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Tony and I, we’re not...we were never anything but friends. I know this will be hard to believe, but I didn’t come here intending to break up the wedding. I didn’t even know it was a wedding. I had heard that he was getting married and knew I should tell him about the baby. I was planning to go right back to Florida after I talked to him.”

  Looking amused, Sarah said, “And how did Tony feel about that?”

  She shifted in her seat. She didn’t want to offend Sarah, or come off as a bitch. Or even worse, seem as if she was hiding something. But it didn’t seem right talking about this without Tony present. “Suffice it to say that we have a lot to work out.”

  “In other words, mind my own business,” Sarah said, looking more amused than angry.

  “Sarah, I can only imagine what you must think of me. What your entire family must think.”

  “Lucy...can I call you Lucy?”

  “O-of course. Absolutely.”

  “Take my word for it, anyone who saw the look on your face when you stepped into the room yesterday knew you were just as stunned to see us as we were to see you. I would say, considering my son’s reaction when he saw you, and his demand that you announce your business to everyone, you two must have a very complicated relationship.”

  She had no idea.

  “You don’t have to answer that,” she said. “Not only is it not my business, all that really matters to me is that you stopped my son from marrying that horrible woman.”

  Four

  Horrible woman? Lucy blinked in surprise. “You didn’t like Alice?”