Chapter 7
Rossi
* * *
Two bright headlights flash into the sidelights of my front door three minutes before six.
“Okay, baby girl. He’s here.” I don’t say Fabian. And I certainly don’t say Daddy. Honestly, I don’t know what to say, not that she’d understand any of it anyway.
With the baby on my hip, I check my reflection in the mirror above the console table, tucking my hair behind one ear before placing it back.
My heart gallops, inching up the back of my throat before settling in my ears.
“Is it hot in here?” I ask my daughter, despite the fact that she can’t answer. A nervous dampness collects at the back of my neck, along my hairline. Sniffing my shirt, I ensure I smell just as lovely as the rose bushes outside, and then I fan my warm cheeks. It’s too late to open a window or change from this sweater to a t-shirt. It’s also too late to talk myself out of this weird little frenzy because the sexiest man alive is strutting up my walkway.
Six more steps and he’ll be ringing my doorbell.
Sucking in a long, cool breath, I close my eyes, gather myself, and let it go.
It’s not like I need to impress him …
It’s not like it matters that he’s the most beautiful human I’ve ever laid eyes on—second only to my daughter.
Smoothing Lucia’s shiny onyx hair aside, I make sure her pink satin bow is straight, and that her outfit is stain-free. As soon as I got off the phone with him earlier, I changed her from the spit-up scented onesie she was wearing into a flower-and-duck covered romper. Nothing frilly or Sunday best-ish, but a serious improvement nonetheless.
He’s so close I can hear his footsteps on the other side of the door.
I try to swallow, but I can’t.
The doorbell chimes.
Lucia claps in my arms.
I take one last cleansing breath, tell myself this is going to go wonderfully no matter what, and then I reach for the knob.
“Hey,” I answer with the feigned confidence of a woman who isn’t at all uneasy about this. Stepping aside, I say, “Come on in.”
“Hi there.” His voice is velvet smooth, and his casual infliction is the kind you’d use with an old friend. His dark eyes lock onto mine, holding them captive for a single, endless second. A heady rush blows through me, a spine-tingling burst of air that came out of nowhere.
“You find us okay?” It’s a dumb question to ask, especially given this GPS day and age, but my mind is spinning so fast I can’t come up with something better.
“Yeah.” He slides off his pristine tennis shoes, placing them perfectly on my door mat alongside three pairs of my own. “Nice neighborhood you’ve got here. Reminds me of the one I grew up in. Same kind of houses.”
“It’s adorable, right?” I motion for him to follow me down the hall and to the living room where I’ve already spread out Lucia’s blanket and favorite toys. “You can sit wherever you’d like. I usually hang out on the floor with her …”
His gaze drifts from me to the baby, and his expression straddles the line between intrigue and the way I looked when I used to window shop for rescue cats knowing I was deathly and tragically allergic. There are few things worse than being a cat person but not owning a cat—except for maybe being a baby person and not having a baby.
But I remind myself Fabian isn’t a baby person—he’s said so himself.
I’m imagining things, and reading into every nuance is going to do me no favors.
Keeping a careful distance, he perches on the center cushion of my gray sofa, elbows resting on his knees as he watches his daughter play with a Baby Einstein radio.
“So,” I say with an awkward chuckle. I’ve never formally introduced a baby to anyone before. “This is Lucia.”
“Lucia,” he says her name under his breath. “That’s a beautiful name.”
“I’ve been holding onto it for years,” I say. “Had a hundred names picked out for a boy, but this was the only one that ever felt right for a daughter.”
“When you know, you know.”
“Exactly.” I scoot closer to her, handing off a soft book that she promptly puts in her mouth. “She’s cutting some new teeth … everything’s a teething toy.”
He watches her with intention, hardly moving, studying her like she’s some kind of living photograph. Or maybe he’s trying to mentally capture this moment so he can lock it away forever, knowing there’ll never be another like it.
“I’m not a baby person,” he says. “So I apologize if this is awkward.”
“I wasn’t a baby person before I had her either,” I say. “I mean, I love her because she’s my own, but I was never one to fawn over other people’s babies. It just seems so contrived, you know? Whenever people freak out over other people’s kids, it feels forced to me.”
“When was she born?”
“Last June.”
“My mother was born in June. What day?”
“The seventeenth,” I answer.”
His lips inch into a sad sort of smile. “Hers was the sixteenth.”
Was? Is she no longer living? I don’t ask—it’s none of my business.
“She passed last year,” he volunteers. “About five months after we lost my dad. She would’ve loved to have been a grandmother, but that never happened.”
“No siblings?”
“I have an older sister, but I haven’t seen her since I was a kid. Don’t even remember her, really. Just that she caused our family a lot of grief.”
If his parents have passed and he’s estranged from his only sibling, it makes sense why he wanted to meet his child. The tension in my shoulders dissolves a little more as the man before me transforms from an athletic god to a mere mortal.
But only slightly.
He’s still very much Fabian Catalano—the man, the myth, the legend.
“I could find her for you.” I’m probably—okay definitely—overstepping boundaries here, but I can’t help it. “It’s kind of what I do for a living. I mean, partially. I’m a genealogist. I help people track long-lost relatives and help create family trees, that sort of thing. I’m really good at locating people …”
His brows knit as if he’s considering, but then his mouth presses into a hard line. “Appreciate the offer, but that won’t be necessary.”
I’ve rarely heard of someone not wanting to find a long-lost family member, but once again, it’s none of my business so I let it go.
Lucia tosses an orange stacking block in Fabian’s direction and it rolls to his feet. A second later, she’s off to the races, pawing across the living room on all fours until she reaches him. Hoisting herself on his knee with hands covered in slobber, she bounces and grins.
He eyes the wet streaks on his skin, and I toss him a nearby burp rag.
“Sorry, she’s teething.”
“You’d mentioned that.” He cleans up the drool, folds the rag, and places it neatly on the cushion beside him—only to have Lucia grab it and wave it around like a flag. “But it’s fine.”
“Everything’s a toy at this stage …” I say.
He watches her every move, transfixed, as if he’s never seen anything like this. And maybe he hasn’t. He said so himself, he doesn’t want kids and he isn’t a baby person. This is probably a trip to Mars for him.
“She seems like a happy kid,” he says.
“So happy,” I emphasize. “For the first few months of her life, she slept in a bassinet at the side of my bed. I kid you not, starting at about two months, she woke up every single morning with a smile on her face.”
“Maybe she was just happy to see her mom.”
I chuckle. “Yeah, maybe.”
His cocoa eyes—the ones that match my daughter’s speck for speck—divert onto mine for a moment.
“So are you doing this on your own?” He nods toward the baby. “Or is there someone else in the picture.”
“Just me. Which is fine. I mean, I obviously knew
what I was getting into when I went into this. My younger sister lives about ten minutes away. She’s my nanny. And my parents are always a phone call away. And I have the best neighbors. Always willing to help out if I need anything. It’s true when they say it takes a village.”
He slides to the floor and takes a seat closer to our daughter. It’s weird having this rich, famous tennis player in my living room like just another weeknight. Though I’ve never understood the idolization of people just because they’re extremely athletic. I dated a guy once who was obsessed with Tiger Woods. He actually cried when he recalled the time Tiger took a break from golf. He claimed it sent him into an actual depression and called it his own “blue period.” He didn’t touch a golf club again until Tiger was back.
“Do you have any games coming up?” I ask because I don’t know what else to say but this silence is deafening. “Or tournaments? Matches. I don’t know what you call them. I literally know nothing about tennis.”
He laughs through his nose. “I’m playing the Rosemont Open next week in Atlanta. Going head to head with Xander Fox.”
“Never heard of him. Is he good?”
Fabian laughs out loud this time, and his smile is so brilliant it lights his eyes—and the room. This makes him only slightly less intimidating but ten times more gorgeous.
“The media likes to paint us as rivals,” he says, “but we’ve known each other for years. He’s actually a good friend of mine. I was the best man at his wedding two years ago. Of course ESPN didn’t mention that.”
“Does it bother you? Having no say in the way you’re portrayed?” I think of the video of him storming off the interview set.
“It used to.”
“I’m going to be honest with you, after I learned you were Lucia’s donor, I googled you.”
He looks to our daughter, then back to me. “And what’d you find out?”
“Mostly that you have a temper … and a thing for beautiful women.”
“Or maybe beautiful women have a thing for me …” He winks. “It’s hard to meet people. I train most of the year. And when I’m not training, I’m playing. When I’m not playing, I’m fulfilling endorsement deals and other contractual obligations. Half of my relationships have been set up by PR companies. And most of the photos you see, those paparazzi pics of us grabbing coffee or dining outside at some trendy café in New York? Those are staged.”
Well, I feel deceived …
I make a mental note to cancel my US Weekly subscription.
“Why not just try to meet someone the old-fashioned way?” I ask. “And then keep it on the downlow. Plenty of celebrities lead private lives.”
“Success—especially in the world of sports—has more to do with relevancy than anything else. If you don’t keep people talking about you, if you don’t make sure your name is constantly in the news, they’ll move onto the next hot thing and forget you exist. At the end of the day, we’re all replaceable. There’s always going to be someone waiting, ready to take your place.”
“Yeah, but aren’t you kind of a legend? You’ve set world records. People aren’t going to forget that.”
He frowns. “Tennis buffs will remember. I don’t know about everyone else. “
“Is that important to you? To be remembered?”
He hands Lucia the block by his feet. “A man’s legacy is everything.”
“So someday when you’re gone, you want to be remembered for breaking records and being really, really good at tennis?”
“When you put it in simple terms like that, it makes it seem so trivial.”
“That’s not what I meant.” I place a palm out. “I’m not trying to downplay everything you’ve done to get to where you are. It’s just … when I think of legacies, I think of families. Crazy stories being passed down. Reputations being alive and well long past the date on your headstone. Memories. Personal photographs. That sort of thing.”
He nods, silent like he’s absorbing this.
“I never met my great grandmother on my father’s side,” I say, “but the way everyone talks about her, I feel like I know her just the same. To me, that’s a legacy.”
“Guess we have different definitions.” He swipes the rag off the carpet and folds it once more.
Before I became a mom, I used to be a neat freak. Now I choose my battles. You can only pick up a living room so many times in a row before it becomes a fruitless and epic waste of time.
Abandoning her perch near Fabian, Lucia crawls to me, sidling into my lap and reaching for a strand of my hair like she always does when she’s sleepy.
“She’s getting tired,” I say as she cozies against me and releases a big yawn. The weight of Fabian’s stare anchors us into place. “Is this all you wanted? Just to see her?”
He bites his lip. “Yeah.”
“If you want to hold her, you can. I mean, I’m okay with it …”
Fabian shifts in his seat, as if the thought of taking Lucia into his arms makes him uncomfortable.
“You don’t have to,” I say.
Straightening his shoulders, he says, “No, it’s fine. I want to.”
Rising, I carry Lucia over and place her in his arms, distracted by the fact that his biceps are the size of her head.
She squirms at first, a flash of panic in her eyes when she realizes she’s been handed off, but eventually she settles against him.
“You can sit back and relax, you know.” I laugh at his rigid posture. “She’s not going to break.”
Sliding back against the couch, he cradles her closer, lips skimming up enough to reveal a flash of a dimple in the center of his chiseled cheek. It’s a tender, albeit bittersweet, little moment.
I don’t know him well enough to know what he’s thinking, obviously, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t capture this moment for Lucia.
“Hold on.” I launch toward the kitchen to grab my phone, and when I return I have my camera cued and ready.
Only the instant he sees my crouching photographer stance, all the sweetness fades from the moment like a deflated balloon.
Lifting a hand, he says, “No pictures.”
I don’t mean to, but I laugh because I’m positive this is a joke. I’m not some paparazzo and this isn’t a celebrity photo op.
My amusement fades when I realize he’s not joking. “Are you serious?”
“I’m sorry.” Rising, he hands Lucia back.
Snapping a picture of the two of them was half the reason I agreed to this meeting. I wanted to have something to give to my daughter someday … a special photograph she could keep whenever she wanted to remember the other half of her DNA.
“O … okay.” I place Lucia over my shoulder, patting her back as she nuzzles her face into the bend of my neck. She’s going to be out like a light soon.
“Thanks for letting me meet her. You have a lovely home and you seem like a great mother.” His tenderness is gone, replaced with the kind of insincere tone you reserve for a stranger.
I follow him to the door, standing back as he slips his shoes on and readies his car keys.
“I didn’t mean to upset you with the picture thing, I just thought it’d be nice to have something to commemorate … this.”
“It’s just odd to me that not long ago you wanted nothing to do with me,” he says. “Then you invite me into your home and want to take pictures.”
“I had a change of heart. It happens.” I narrow my gaze, trying to comprehend where he’s going with this. “Just like you, I’m taking this whole thing minute by minute.”
“Why’d you turn down the clinic’s offer?”
I wrinkle my nose. Random, but okay. “Because it was laughable.”
“So you’re gaming for more money.”
“I’m not gaming for anything—I just want to talk to an attorney first and see what my options are.”
“Exactly.” He rubs his hand along his chiseled jaw.
“I’m sorry, I’m really confused. We were having a nice
conversation and then the second I grabbed my phone …” I think of him storming off the set of that talk show months back. Clearly something triggered him. “Was it something I said?”
Not that it matters at this point, but if I don’t get an answer, I’ll forever wonder.
The hollow below his cheekbone divots. “I don’t know you well enough to know that you wouldn’t go selling that picture.”
Taking a step back, I almost choke on my spit. “So that’s the issue? You think I want to extort you?”
“You said yourself that you’re going to talk to an attorney because you think you can get more money.”
Sniffing, I say, “Yeah, more than the twenty-five grand the clinic wants to give me.”
His expression softens, but his brows are still knit. “That’s all they were offering you?”
I nod. “They said because the breach didn’t involve my name, they didn’t owe me anything, but they wanted to offer that anyway.”
Pinching his nose, he blows a hard breath between his lips. “I’m sorry, Rossi. This entire situation is—”
“—insane,” I say. “Complex. Life-altering. Bittersweet.”
Our eyes catch in my dim foyer.
“I wish this could be simpler for us,” his voice is low, his tone apologetic. “For her.”
“I don’t know what it’s like to have the weight of the world on my shoulders, to have millions of strangers watching my every move, ready to judge or take advantage of you or accuse or assume at a moment’s notice. But at the end of the day, we’re only human—and we’re both trying to preserve the lives we’ve worked so hard to create. You have to do what’s best for you, and I have to do what’s best for us.” I bounce Lucia on my hip. “If you don’t want a picture, I’m disappointed for my daughter’s sake, but I respect that.”
We linger in silence, and I get the sense there’s something more he wants to say, only those words never come.
“I should get going. Early flight tomorrow.” He reaches for the door. I walk him out, following him to the parked Range Rover in the middle of my driveway.
The Match: A Baby Daddy Donor Romance Page 6
