Filed to story: Submitting to My Bestie’s Daddy Read Online >>???
“Noted.” I pressed the phone to my shoulder and twisted to face Olivia. “What do you want to do?”
Olivia pressed a shaking hand to her cheek and shook her head. “I don’t know. I think… I think we need to give her a chance, just talk to her, and let her explain. She’s not part of your world, Gio. I don’t think her brain would go where yours does.”
I scrubbed a hand across my face. In this, the worst of all situations, Olivia still found a way to see the silver lining, to believe in people. It was what I loved best about her, and after everything, I couldn’t deny that belief now.
I took her hand off her cheek and kissed it. “Alright, carina. We’ll do this your way.”
I put the phone back to my ear. “Here’s what we’re gonna do: you stay there for now. Don’t go in, just watch. If she spots you and approaches, you can engage, but don’t freak her out.” I glanced at Olivia, who mouthed the word ‘comfort.’ I sighed. “Be reassuring if you can, but only if she approaches you first.”
“Gotcha,” Alessandro said. “Then what?”
Olivia took my free hand, and I felt her fingers shake in mine.
“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” I said. “We’re going to talk to her. No one is to approach until we arrive.”
“No one?” asked Alessandro and Olivia in unison.
I swallowed. “I’m sending a back-up team with the same instructions, just in case.” We’d need to watch every exit in the house. We couldn’t let her slip away.
“Consider it done,” Alessandro said.
I hung up the phone.
Olivia quirked an eyebrow. “A back-up team?”
I shrugged helplessly. “This is a delicate situation, and I trust your judgment. We will do this your way. But if I’m right, I want people already in place to handle things.”
“Handle things?” she repeated, her voice ticking up an octave. “Gio, do you mean you’re planning to kill our surrogate? Kill our baby?”
Her eyes grew enormous, and her whole body began trembling. I folded her into my arms.
“That is not the plan, carina, I promise.” I kissed the top of her head. “It’s just security. It makes me feel better.”
She took a deep, shaky breath. Her breasts pressed into me, and I realized we were both still naked. We had to get dressed, get moving. Elena seemed quiet for now, but I couldn’t trust that would last.
I stood and held out my hand to Olivia. “How do you want to handle this?”
A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “No men with guns.”
“Can we compromise on a few men with guns you can’t see, and I will go in believing to the best of my ability that we can handle this by talking?”
She put her hand in mine. “I guess I can compromise. But you really have to believe it, Gio, or it’s not gonna work.”
I pulled her to standing, and we headed for the closet, hand-in-hand.
“I will do my best,” I promised as I texted Gabriele to bring a discreet, five-man team to the address Alessandro had given me.
She shook her head. “I’m not joking. If you keep looking out the window, she’s gonna know. She’s been here. She’s seen the armed security.”
I put my hands up as she reached for a set of pale purple underwear.
“The windows are dead to me,” I said. I wanted to keep joking around, wanted to see her smile, but I couldn’t deny her argument made good sense. If Elena was twitchy or trigger-happy, any indication of backup could set her off.
I slipped into a pair of boxers, then a pair of jeans. Casual clothes seemed better for such a situation.
Olivia nodded and grabbed a pair of jean shorts.
“But it’s more than that, Gio. I don’t think I was wrong in the beginning. I think she’s a genuinely good person who wanted to help people, and something happened. I don’t know what that something was, and I want to find out. Once we know that, we can figure out what to do next. I actually want to hear what she has to say, and I need you to want that, too.”
Olivia turned to face me in nothing but shorts and a bra, and part of me wanted to sweep her up and kiss her, take her back to bed. I couldn’t help but love her when she talked like this. When she talked to me like this.
“I want to hear her,” I said, and was surprised to find the words felt honest. “I should have been trusting your instincts all along. You were right about her falling for me more than I could control, so maybe you are right about her now, too.”
She crossed her arms and nodded. “Okay. Good.”
I plucked one of my T-shirts off the shelf and wrapped an arm around her waist. “But I need you to keep me focused on us and our baby. She deserves to be heard, but I don’t want to put her concerns above our family.”
Olivia smiled shakily up at me. “I’m having a hard time thinking of anything else,” she admitted. “I’m trying to believe in Elena, in that feeling I got in the office that first day, but part of me wants to say we should do absolutely anything to make sure our baby is safe.”
I dropped a kiss on her lips. “That’s why we’re the perfect people to handle this. You believe enough for the both of us, and I have the ability to do anything we need. Between the two of us, Elena doesn’t stand a chance.”
She swatted me and pushed away. “Don’t say that. We all stand a chance of resolving this without violence.”
I nodded and swallowed down a smile as I shrugged my T-shirt on over my head. “Of course.”
She grabbed a plain black T-shirt of her own, and as it settled over her shoulders, we looked at each other and burst out laughing. We’d picked the exact same outfit, except she wore shorts where I had on jeans, and my T-shirt fit a little looser than hers.
“Should I change?” I asked.
She bit her lip and shook her head. “I think it’s a good sign. We’re in this together, and we can face anything together.”
She looped her arm through mine, and we marched through the halls of the compound. Dahlia caught up to us in the hallway.
“Alessandro called,” she said breathlessly. “Are you going now? Should I come? Can I do anything?”
Tallon raced in from another room. “Ditto! Seconded!”
Olivia released me to lay a hand on Dahlia’s arm. “You guys are sweet, but this is ours to handle. We made this mess. It’s time to see if we can clean it up.”
Neither of them argued, and something deep in my heart warmed to see just how easily the people who loved Olivia listened to her. Her face had taken on the sort of steady determination I saw from her only rarely but led inevitably to her getting what she wanted. As Dahlia squeezed her hand and looped back to the kitchen with promises of comfort food when we got home, I realized suddenly that I believed just as deeply that we could fix this problem with Elena without violence.
If anyone could do it, my wife could.
I sent one of the men at the door to pull the armored SUV around. The day outside was still stormy in the way of late summer in Italy, and a warm rain pelted the driveway. I stared out at the gray sky and took a deep breath.
Olivia reappeared behind me and stuck her hand in my back pocket as the SUV pulled up.
Another moment of stillness passed between us, brimming with nerves and hopes and the desperate desire to get our baby back safely. Then, we moved to the car as one. I gave the address quietly, and the short drive passed in near silence. The rainy day whisked by outside, and the sound of the windshield wipers provided all the audio.
Finally, we reached the house, a low bungalow in old Tuscan style. Olivia took my hand and squeezed. Our wedding rings clacked together in a familiar, homey way.
“I love you,” she said.
I squeezed her hand back. “I love you, too,”
