again, he’d have enough penance to keep him talking for a month.
It felt strange to enter the church where he’d grown up, served as an altar boy and made his First Communion, strange to take a seat in the pew where his family had sat since before he was born. Now his four sisters were married or engaged, and sprinkled among the adults was a raft of his nieces and nephews. His older sister, Camilla, came with her family and as he watched, several of the Domenico clan slipped into the pew ahead of him where they’d always sat.
His interest picked up, but Sophie wasn’t with them. Instead, the Domenico pew steadily expanded to two full rows, filled with a new generation ranging from a preteen boy that had to be Stefano’s son down to a fussing infant in pink carried in by a man he assumed was Violetta’s husband.
Sophie’s sister Arabella smiled and blew him a kiss as she took the last empty seat on the far end. He noticed she turned and looked toward the rear of the church several tunes, and when she smiled and beckoned, he glanced back to see Sophie coming down the aisle. It was an opportunity too good to miss. Before Belle could shove everyone in her pew together to squeeze her sister in, he stood and caught Sophie’s hand as she stopped at the pews.
“You can sit here,” he murmured. “I won’t bite.”
He’d forgotten how small she was. She barely came up to his chin, even in the heels she’d worn to Mass. She tilted her head up to look him in the eye, and he felt her subtly trying to withdraw her hand, but he only tightened his clasp. Her eyes were wide—the deep, rich chocolaty velvet that he remembered so clearly—and she hesitated for a moment.
But just as he’d expected, Sophie was too well-bred to make a scene in church, and after that first long, searching glance, her face relaxed into a small, cool smile. “Thank you,” she said, and this time he let her have her hand back after he drew her into the pew.
When she sat, he followed suit, brushing just close enough that his arm grazed hers. It didn’t escape him that she was quick to draw back, though they were both wearing jackets and it was as innocuous as a touch two strangers might exchange.
She didn’t look at him again, simply linked her fingers in her lap, and he heard the rustle of silk sliding over silk as she crossed her legs. His gaze dropped and he studied the shape of her slim thighs in the pretty royal-blue skirt that matched her jacket. She probably hadn’t lost very much weight, but what she had lost had enhanced the natural beauty that she’d always possessed and trimmed her womanly curves to hourglass proportions.
Then the service began, and guilt tore his gaze away from her. He might have gotten away from the church too much to suit his folks, but he had the superstitious feeling that a lightning bolt might just seek him out for thinking lecherous thoughts in a house of worship.
Sophie managed to ignore him during the exchanging of peace between members of the congregation by darting up to the pews ahead of them to greet members of her family. It was, to his mind, a telling sign that she wasn’t as indifferent to him as she’d appeared on her mother’s back porch the other day.
As he spoke the familiar responses, something inside him relaxed. His mother’s soft voice on his right side and Sophie’s on his left, the shuffle and hush that accompanied the rituals of worship...it felt right in a strange way, a way he’d never realized he missed, but needed now that he’d found it again.
When he finally limped back to the pew, he couldn’t kneel. Instead, he had to sit like the little old ladies who were too feeble to get on and off their knees any more, shifted to the edge of the seat with his back bent forward and his right leg stiffly stuck out before him. His prayers consisted mainly of a single desperate plea: Lord, please get this over with.
And his prayers were answered. The service was concluded swiftly. Sophie was out of the pew like a shot when the postlude began to play. She immediately immersed herself in the crowd made by her large family, moving as far from him as she could get.
He wasn’t a particularly patient man, but he knew she couldn’t avoid him forever, so he allowed her to move ahead of him down the aisle and out of the church. He suffered through the welcomes of other members of the congregation, watching her to be sure she didn’t sneak away, and when he saw her break off and head across the parking lot toward her little car, he went after her.
He was slow. He had refused to bring the cane along this morning because he was well rested, he reasoned, and getting stronger every day, and the doctor had told him to start doing without it from time to time. It was frustrating as hell not to be able to stride across the macadam and catch her at her car door. Instead, he forced himself to move carefully, and by the time he reached her car, she was buckled in and had started the engine.
She saw him coming. But until he walked around to her driver’s door and tapped on the glass, she simply sat there with the windows rolled up. He put a hand on the door latch and then she punched a button, rolling down her window and smiling at him, though it didn’t reach her eyes and he suspected it was only for the benefit of others around them.
“Hello again,” she said. “Thank you for the seat this morning.”
“We have a lot of catching up to do,” he said, ignoring her casual words. “How about dinner tomorrow night?”
But she shook her head. “No, thank you.”
It was a bald, simple response, delivered in a calm, almost flat tone of voice, and he lifted an eyebrow. “Okay, we can make it Tuesday if tomorrow night doesn’t suit.”
Sophie made an impatient sound, lifting her hand to rest on the open windowsill. “Marco, tomorrow night would suit just fine—if I wanted to go out with you. I don’t.”
“Is it because of the baby?”
Her eyebrows rose, and he thought he detected a hint of shock. “Excuse me?”
“We could take it along if you like.” He’d never minded kids, enjoyed them, in fact, and though he didn’t want to think about his Sophie in the arms of another man, he was intensely curious about her child.
She was frowning slightly, not looking at him. Her thumbs were rubbing back and forth along the edges of her steering wheel, and when he glanced at the small motion, he realized she was gripping the wheel hard enough to make the tips of her fingers white. “I didn’t realize you had a child,” she said.
Now it was his turn to frown. “I don’t.”
She looked at him then, and her gaze was cool and clear again. “Whose baby, exactly, are we discussing, then?”
Marco drummed his fingers against the side of his thigh. “Yours. I don’t mind—”
“I don’t have any children,” she said. Silence lay like a wet towel for a long pause, and he thought she seemed upset. “I don’t know where you got that idea.”
“Your mother,” he said shortly, not particularly liking the feeling of relief that coursed through him. He wanted her, badly, but it wasn’t as if he couldn’t live without her. “She came out the door the other day and asked you about feeding the baby. If it wasn’t yours, then whose was it?”
“Oh, that baby.” Her eyes momentarily softened and he caught a glimpse of something sad in her eyes before she stifled it. “That was a foster child who was waiting for a temporary placement. I’d picked her up the night before and couldn’t place her until later Saturday, so she was stuck with
