You were a nurse in the NICU, used to long shifts, sleepless nights, and doing everything in your power to protect the smallest patients in the hospital.
For more than three years, you had believed Duane was your future.
When the two of you finally decided to start a family, Duane claimed there were certain… complications that meant the traditional route wasn't possible. You believed him. Why wouldn't you? You loved him.
So you began treatment at the hospital instead.
Appointments. Tests. Procedures. Weeks of waiting.
Then, right in the middle of everything, Duane's lies finally came apart.
There had been nothing physically wrong with him.
He had simply been seeing someone else behind your back, and his supposed “problem” had apparently existed only when he was with you.
You dumped him immediately.
But despite everything Duane had done, you refused to let him destroy the future you had already started building for yourself. You continued the treatment alone, determined to face whatever came next without him.
Then the hospital called.
There had been a mistake.
A serious one.
The sample registered under Duane's name had somehow been switched with another man's during processing. The hospital was investigating, but until they discovered exactly what happened, they couldn't tell you whose sample had actually been used.
Meaning the new life beginning inside you wasn't connected to Duane at all.
You didn't know who the biological father was.
Apparently, however…
he knew about you.
Several weeks later, you finished another exhausting shift at the NICU and headed home.
You didn't make it there.
When your eyes finally fluttered open again, you weren't in your apartment.
You were lying beneath impossibly soft sheets in an enormous bedroom that looked like it belonged in an Italian mansion. Marble floors. Dark furniture. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking unfamiliar grounds.
Your heart hammered.
Then you noticed the man standing near the window.
Tall.
Broad-shouldered.
Dressed almost entirely in black leather.
“Finally awake, carina.”
He turned slowly toward you.
Dark hair framed a face that was almost unfairly handsome, but there was something dangerous behind those eyes—something that made every instinct inside you scream that this wasn't a man accustomed to hearing the word no.
You recognized him.
Everyone in the city would.
Nerone Cattaneo.
The notoriously powerful head of the Cattaneo family.
And somehow, he was standing in front of you.
His gaze briefly lowered toward your middle before returning to your eyes.
A faint, knowing smile touched his lips.
You immediately pushed yourself upright.
“Where the hell am I?”
“My home.”
“Then take me back to mine.”
Instead of getting angry, Nerone looked almost amused.
He crossed the room slowly, stopping several feet away from the bed.
“There was a mistake at your hospital,”
he said, his thick Italian accent curling around every word.
“Something belonging to me ended up somewhere it had no business being.”
Your blood ran cold.
The hospital call.
The switched sample.
The unidentified donor.
No.
Nerone watched the realization spread slowly across your face.
His expression became deadly serious.
“That mystery you've been trying to solve, carina?”
He leaned slightly closer.
“It's me.”
Your hand instinctively moved toward your stomach.
Nerone's eyes followed the movement before meeting yours again.
“You are carrying something of mine,”
he murmured.
“And Nerone Cattaneo does not abandon what belongs to his family.”
You stared at him in disbelief.
Then his mouth curved into that infuriatingly calm smirk again.
“So it appears you and I have quite a lot to discuss.”