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She shrugged. “It didn’t feel like my place.”
They all groaned. It drove them crazy when Sofia made a distinction between herself and them. True, they weren’t related by blood, but having lost her father in tragic circumstances as a nine year old girl, and having been given the cold shoulder by her mother ever since, she’d been raised, as much as possible, by Gianni and Maria. She was their goddaughter, and to all the siblings and cousins, she was a sister.
“Okay, I just didn’t want to seem overly sentimental. In case you’re not aware, there’s a bit of testosterone overload here,” she gestured around the various screens. “I don’t want to be painted as the sappy, girly one.”
“You are a girl,” Francesco pointed out.
“She’s a woman,” Portia chimed in, smiling.
“Can we get back to this?” Marco asked, glancing at his watch. “Portia and I have an appointment.”
“Everything okay?” Dante asked.
Portia looked at Marco and then grinned. “I’m pregnant.”
There was a collective sound of surprise, then Salvatore chimed in with, “Again?”
“Well, it took a long time last time, so we thought we should, you know. Get a move on,” she said with a laugh. “Apparently, this baby is filled with buckets of Santoro determination.”
“I thought we were waiting to tell them until after the ultrasound,” Marco said, but with a huge grin, as he wrapped an arm around her and pulled her to his chest. Pride beamed from his face.
“It’s family,” she said with a shrug, and then kissed him, so the others laughed.
“E famiglia è tutto,” Sofia chimed in, repeating Maria Santoro’s favorite phrase. Family is everything.
And Rocco’s family was Maddie. He knew it. He knew it as sure as night followed day—he hoped, with all the hope in his heart, that she felt it, too.
“Congratulations, guys.” Dante said. “Though I’m not sure this will ever not be weird,” he teased, because long before Portia was Marco’s wife, she was his much relied upon assistant.
Portia poked out her tongue. Even through the screen, their work chemistry and mutual affection was apparent.
“Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking,” Rocco called their attention back and went through one of the most important pitches of his life. He didn’t want them to agree because he was in love with Maddie, so he intentionally left that part out. Instead, he made it about the area, his desire not to create something new but rather to pay homage to the old, to the architectural styles that were synonymous with that part of the country. He projected the spreadsheet onto their screens, so everyone could see the numbers he’d been working on. It was Marco—an actual genius—who was first to speak.
“It adds up,” he said.
“You’re sure you’re not just saying that because you’ve got somewhere else to be?” Salvatore teased.
“Nah, it’s good.” Marco grinned. “I like it. It’s a curve ball, but those are always fun,” he said, wiggling his brows as he turned to Portia, who laughed, then put her head on his shoulder.
“So, I have the board’s approval?”
“You’ve got mine,” Dante spoke first, and the rest chimed in almost instantaneously, before quickly moving on to cover a few other matters. Rocco didn’t hear any of it. He was completely and utterly in a world of his own.
“You look beautiful,” Rocco said, when she pulled the door inwards that night, to greet him for their date. Of course, she’d agreed to go out with him. It was just one date, she’d told herself. One date, and that was okay.
Except it wasn’t. Maddie had listened to him last night, she’d let his words seep into her soul, and they’d replayed over and over again all day, and each and every rendition had made more and more sense to her, had worked on her until she’d known, in a simple way one just ‘knows’, that Rocco could be trusted.
And more than that…he had her heart.
Not in an intellectual way, like how she’d tried to rationalize herself into loving Brock, but in a way that went so far beyond it.
She’d never bought into the idea of soul mates before. It seemed like exactly the kind of thing her mother would say. ‘We were destined for each other.’ So silly and reductive, so childlike! Until Maddie experienced it for herself, and she realized it wasn’t the belief structure that was wrong—soulmates existed—but rather her mother’s selection criteria. She’d thought any man who looked at her for longer than two seconds was a contender, and she’d gambled again and again.
Maddie had assiduously avoided anything like that, so she knew this was the real deal. She just knew it.
So, you see, in the end, it wasn’t even a choice she could make.
Asking Maddie if she wanted to be with Rocco was akin to asking her if she wanted to keep breathing. One didn’t choose to breathe, one simply inhaled and exhaled for all the days of their life, just as she would love Rocco.
