The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance Read Free Page A

open at night to help her sleep.
     
    Our fathers were who they were, so we were who we were. She had probably taken it much better than other girls in her position would. I mean, there was the whole little fact that she had managed to live most of her life without knowing the truth of her family business. If she had known how our families knew each other and how it was that her dad had been putting food on the table since she was a little girl, then maybe , she would have reacted better.
     
    She did react better than I did though. I almost felt sorry for her in that room when her father broke the news to her. She looked so insulted, like someone had just called her and her mother a bitch. She would have looked less shocked if you told her that her whole life had been a simulation like ‘ The Truman Show.’ If you thought about it… it sort of had all been a simulation.
     
    The truth had been hidden from her, and her reaction was warranted. She was probably too much of a lady to really get into it with her dad though. I knew what my family did, where our fortune had come from, and still, the news that I was going to be married to Frank Dandolo’s daughter was some of the most hideous words out of my father’s mouth.
     
    We had fought before. I was my father’s son. As a matter of principle, we never had guns on us when we did, but he had raised his hand to me more than once. He was my father. It was his right to do it. The fight that followed the news of my marriage was one of the worst knock-down, drag-out affairs we’d ever had. I knew that, because of who we were, I couldn’t just marry anyone .
     
    Marcelo Orsini. That was me. My life was set the moment my father fucked my mother without a condom twenty-eight years ago. I had known that my parents would have a say in who it was that I ended up bringing into the family, but fuck, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. I knew I was my father’s son, but I hadn’t been a boy for a long time. We were men . Both of us. And what he did was foul. Would it have been so hard to ask me first? Would it have been so hard to let me go for Sophia and make her fall for me myself? I didn’t want to attribute my marriage to another man. I didn’t want another man to be the person who was responsible for my marriage, even if it was my father. He wasn’t going to be with us in our bed every night, so I didn’t need him to hold my hand and lead me to my future wife.
     
    My wife .
     
    Shit, I hadn’t even been thinking about marriage when he sprang it on me. I think the thing that was the most insulting was the fact that he hadn’t even told me first. He had told Frank first. They had made the arrangement between themselves, and then they had come to me, as a courtesy, just to inform me that my wedding was coming up and I had to go get fitted for a tux.
     
    Dad had been insistent. It was Sophia or nothing. I was going to marry the Dandolo girl or we were done, he and I. I would be disinherited, and I would no longer be able to call myself Agosto Orsini’s son. What was so great about the girl anyway? Why did it have to be her? It would probably insult her a little if she found out, but she just happened to have been the daughter of the man my father wanted on his side the most. If it was anyone else who was causing my father as much grief as Frank Dandolo was, it would have been their daughter. It was just bad luck that her father happened to be at the top of my father’s hate list. His men had gotten too close. They had gotten too close and a few guns had gone off, fired from both sides. Instead of taking the losses, he had come up with an unorthodox plan B. If you can’t beat them, marry your son to their only daughter and create an empire.
     
    Dandolo’s daughter, Sophia, was… straight up, not the kind of woman I would have considered to become Mrs. Marcelo Orsini. She was indelicate and strong willed. She was belligerent and hot tempered. She was bitchy, but