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“Nothing.” He cleared his throat. “I was just thinking about tonight.”
“You looked—you looked sad.”
“Sad?” He smiled, forced the dark thoughts away. “Nonsense,” he said briskly. “I’m just making sure I’ve thought of everything. Sam’s babysitter. Our dinner reservations.”
“Are we having dinner out?”
“We are. At that place on the beach.”
Tally gave him the look women have always given men who are too dense to understand life’s basic rules of survival.
“That place? But I don’t have anything to wear! You said we’d only need swimsuits. Shorts. Jeans. I can’t go there in jeans, Dante!”
He thought she could go there in what she wore now and still be more beautiful than any woman in the place, but this played right into his hands. He still had things to arrange. The flowers for their meal and for the house when they returned to it later. Candles for the bedroom. More champagne, to drink on the beach once she had his ring on her finger.
“I agree,” he said solemnly. “That’s why you’re going to take my credit card, taxi into town and buy whatever you need for tonight.”
“But—”
He silenced the protest with a kiss.
“Find something long and elegant. Something so sexy it will make every man who sees you want me dead so he can claim you for his own.” He kissed her again and she leaned into him, the baby gurgling happily between them, and half an hour later, holding Sam in his arms, both of them waving as the taxi and Tally pulled away, Dante knew he was, without question, the luckiest man alive.
HE MADE THE BALANCE of the phone calls, arranged for the delivery of white orchids, white candles and bottles of Cristal. The last call went to his attorney in New York, where he left a message asking him to research the state’s adoption laws and to determine the quickest way to effect an adoption.
“I think that about does it, Sammy,” he said, grinning at the way Samantha looked when he called her that. It wasn’t elegant, but he liked it.
Then he turned all his attention on the child who would soon be his.
He took her into the pool, rode her on his shoulders in the warm water as she laughed and clutched at his hair with her fists.
He held her hand as they walked along the beach, helping her pick up shells, making a show of putting them into his pocket for later while surreptitiously letting ones that were too small for her safety fall to the sand.
He made himself a cup of coffee, handed Sam a sippy-cup of juice and shared an Oreo cookie with her, chuckling as he imagined what all those who trembled at his presence in a boardroom would think if they could see him eating the chunks she handed him, baby drool and all.
Late afternoon, with the sun high overhead, he sat on the palm-shaded patio, Sam playing at his feet. She gave a huge yawn.
“Nap time,” he said.
Sam, who was, of course, brilliant for her age, puckered up her baby face and yowled.
“Okay, okay, forget I mentioned it.”
The baby smiled, yawned again, put her head down and her rump up, and promptly fell asleep on the blanket at his feet. Dante yawned, too, picked up the magazine he’d been leafing through, wondered if Tally—his Tally—would be as happy as he wanted her to be when he proposed tonight.
She would—wouldn’t she?
She loved him—didn’t she?
He hadn’t really thought about it until now. Yes. Of course she loved him. The way she sighed in his arms. Smiled into his eyes. The way he caught her watching him sometimes, that little smile curving her lips—
What was that? A dark shape, near his foot.
“Dio mio!”
Sam woke up screaming as a thing with eight legs raced across her outflung hand. Dante scooped the child into his arms, stomped on the ugly black thing and saw the bite marks of its fangs on Sam’s tender wrist.
“Sam,” he said, “Sam, mia figlia—”
