Pregnant With The Billionaire's Baby: Valentino's Love-Child / Innocent Secretary...Accidentally Pregnant. Carol Marinelli

him.

      Perhaps he regretted that intimacy and was even hoping to end their association.

      The pain that thought brought her doubled her over, and she had to pull to the side of the road. Tears came then.

      She never cried, but right now she could not stop.

      She sobbed, the sounds coming from her mouth like those of a wounded animal, and she had no way of stopping them, of pulling her cheerful covering around her and marching on with a smile on her face. Not now.

      She had thought maybe it was her turn for happiness. Maybe this baby heralded a new time in her life, one where she did not lose everyone who she loved.

      But she could see already that was not true.

      She had lost Tino, or was on the verge of doing so.

      Her body racked with sobs, she ached with a physical pain no one was there to assuage.

      What if Tino’s rejection was merely a harbinger of things to come?

      What if she lost this baby, too? She could not stand it.

      The first trimester was a risky one, even though her doctor had confirmed her pregnancy was viable and not ectopic. The prospect of miscarriage was a dark, scary shadow over her mind.

      Falling apart at the seams like this could not be helping, but she didn’t know if she had the strength to rein the tears in. How was she supposed to buck up under this new loss?

      The pain did not diminish, but eventually the tears did and she was able to drive home.

      She had not lied when she told Agata she felt the need to create, but the piece she did that night was not one she wanted to share with anyone. Especially not a woman as kind as Tino’s mother.

      Faith could not make herself destroy it, though.

      Once again it embodied pain she had been unable to share with anyone else.

      It was another pregnant figure, but this woman was starving, her skin stretched taut over bones etched in sharp relief in the clay. Her clothes were worn and clung to the tiny bump that indicated her pregnancy in hopeless poverty. Her hair whipped around her face, raindrops mixed with tears on the visage of a mother-to-be almost certain not to make it another month, much less carry her baby to term.

      The figure reflected the emotional starvation that had plagued Faith for so long. She’d tried to feed it like a beggar would her empty belly in the streets. Teaching children art, sharing their lives. Her friendship with Agata. Her intimacy with Tino, but all of it was as precarious as the statue woman’s hold on life.

      Faith had no one to absolutely call her own and feared that somehow the baby she carried would be lost to her as well.

      She could not let that happen.

      * * *

      VALENTINO CALLED FAITH the next day. He’d tried calling the night before several times, after Gio had gone to bed, but she had not answered. He’d hoped to see her, but she had been ignoring the phone.

      It was the first time she had done so during their association. He had not liked it one bit and had resolved not to avoid her calls in the future.

      This time however, she answered on the third ring, just when he thought it was going to go to voice mail again.

      “Hello, Tino.”

       “Carina.”

      “Do you need something?”

      “No ‘How was your trip?’ or anything?”

      “If you had wanted to tell me about your trip, you would have called while you were away…or answered my calls to you.”

      Ouch. “I apologize for not doing so. I was busy.” Which was the truth, just not the whole truth.

      “Too busy for a thirty-second hello? I don’t think so.”

      “I should have called,” he admitted.

      “It doesn’t matter.”

      “If it offended you, it does.” Of course it had offended her.

      He would not have cared with any of the other bed partners he had had since Maura’s death, but this was Faith. And he cared.

      “I guess you didn’t have time for phone sex and saw no reason to speak to me otherwise,” she said in a loaded tone.

      He had already apologized. What more did she want? “Now you are being foolish.” They had never engaged in phone sex, though the thought was somewhat intriguing.

      “I seem to make a habit of that with you.”

      “Not that I have noticed.”