Mia darts a look at Mateo, clutching Dominic closer to her chest. He grabs a fistful of her hair and tries to eat it.
I don’t even really think about what I’m doing, or who’s watching, I just walk over and take Mia’s hair out of his hand, pushing it back over her shoulder so it’s out of his reach. He looks up at me, the new face in his line of sight, and my own brown eyes look back at me.
That could be wrong. They could be Mateo’s.
But are they? Mia wasn’t allowed to get pregnant prior to Vegas because of Meg, she already told me that. So I had the first shot at her open womb, then possibly Rafe, then Mateo.
Fuck, Rafe has brown eyes, too. He’s blonde, like his own mother. This baby isn’t blonde, but his hair is much lighter than mine or Mateo’s. More Adrian’s shade. Mia is blonde though, so maybe…
Dom offers me a toothless little grin and kicks his legs at me. A faint smile tugs at my lips. I reach a tentative finger toward him to see if he’ll grab it. He does. Tries to eat it. I shake my head at him.
“That’s not gonna taste very good.”
He squeals at me in response. Then he babbles, like he’s telling me a story. I nudge the car seat out of the way with my foot and kneel down by Mia’s legs. She has him sitting on her lap now so he can look at me. His little tongue sticks out. He’s drooling like it’s his job, but he’s not worried about it.
Mia clears her throat, then points at the seat I moved away from her. “Can you give me the little cloth there so I can wipe his chin?”
I turn back to look for it, but it’s like I’m seeing a baby seat for the first time. It hits me that this is the seat he sits in every day, the seat Mia buckled him into to bring him to this dinner. The little giraffe toy left behind in the seat belongs to him, and the cloth printed with little zoo animals… all belong to him.
Who does he belong to?
Dominic.
I shake myself out of it and grab the cloth, turning back to give it to Mia. She murmurs a thank you and dabs at the baby’s mouth, but her “thanks” sounds a little thick. I look up and see tears shining in her eyes. Why is she crying?
“Did I do this?” I ask her, softly.
Mia swallows, but doesn’t answer. I think she’s afraid to move. I can feel her wanting to look at Mateo. I don’t know what she needs—his protection, his permission, his interference, but I can feel her needing him and it pisses me off. Even as it pisses me off, though, this cheerful baby looks at me with brown eyes he may have got from me. If this baby is mine…
Mia hasn’t answered me, but that feels a little like an answer. I ask, “Can I hold him?”
This time Mateo answers with a hard, cold, “No.”
I turn my head to glare at him. I’m kneeling here like an asshole and I don’t want to be, so I rise up so I can look down at him. “Why not?”
“With your track record, do you really have to ask?” Mateo returns. Dismissing me with a look, he flicks a look across the table. “Go sit down, Vince.”
“Is that my baby?” I demand.
“That’s my son,” he informs me, fire igniting in his eyes. “My wife. My son. Mine.”
A chair scrapes the floor. Mateo’s gaze moves to where Carly’s seated.
Looking back at me with a raised eyebrow, Mateo adds, “I suggest you take better care of what is yours, before you lose that, too.”
Now my gaze snaps to where Carly should be, but she’s walking away.
Aw, fuck.
“Carly, wait.” I jog after her, but she shrugs my hand off when I catch up.
“Just give me a minute, Vince. No one told there was a baby.”
“Well, I didn’t know there was a baby. I still don’t. I don’t know—”
She spins around to stare at me. “But it could be. That could be your baby. And… it’s not like it was a hook-up, Vince. If that’s your baby….”
We haven’t directly referred to what I did to Mia in Vegas, but there’s an unspoken understanding that we both know. It’s too fucking awkward to really talk about, even though Carly is good at talking about sticky things, but that’s something even she hasn’t touched. We’ve talked about the kidnapping part, she assumed worse happened, I let her assume and never verified.
A baby sort of verifies the unspoken.
A baby sort of makes it hard to gloss over.
But it might not be mine. It could be Mateo’s. It could even be Rafe’s, I assume. He took her back to his house that night. I didn’t want to think about it, because frankly even that’s my fault. I’m the one who dragged Mia onto Rafe’s radar. He didn’t even know who she was or that she existed until I dragged her ass across the country and kept her a prisoner in my home. Mia needed a helpful friend and Rafe was the only option—but Morelli men do not make harmless friends.