Caroselli's Accidental Heir. Michelle Celmer
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I?” It was his ticket to freedom. It would benefit him, Lucy and the baby.
“How’s that going to happen if she won’t marry you?”
“You have to understand, it’s different for us. You guys are happily married to women you love. You gave up millions of dollars to prove that to them.”
“You don’t love Lucy?” Nick asked.
“What I feel is irrelevant. But I do know how Lucy feels, and she happens to be the one calling all the shots right now.”
“So you’re just going to live together?” Rob asked.
“For now. At least until the baby is born.”
“Then what?”
“She’s been back less than twenty-four hours. We haven’t planned that far ahead yet. We have time.”
“You think so?” Nick said.
“Yes, I do.”
“Terri is barely showing and she already has the kid on a waiting list for preschool.”
Preschool? “No way.”
“It’s not like it was when we were kids,” Rob said. “For any hope of getting a kid into a good college, you have to get them into a good private primary school first, and to do that they have to go to the right preschool.”
Tony wasn’t even sure if he would want to put his child in private school. As a kid, he would have given anything to go to public school, if for no other reason than to have a little privacy, and anonymity. Any childhood mishaps or embarrassments had been fodder for the entire family. Every time he tried to shirk the rules, it always got back to his parents somehow. He’d had no choice but to behave. Not that he would have been a delinquent otherwise, but being the second oldest cousin—Nick’s sister Jessica beating him out by a year and a half—he’d been held to a higher standard his entire life.
“They look up to you,” his dad used to tell him, and being the oldest of the three brothers, Antonio Sr. understood sacrifice. “It’s your responsibility to set a good example.”
That’s how it was in the Caroselli family. No sacrifice was too large. Working for Caroselli Chocolate hadn’t been Tony’s first choice as a career. It hadn’t been his second or third, either, but he fell in line, because that was what families did. Or so he used to think. He was getting tired of playing by their rules.
He was inching closer to forty every day. When did he get to start living his life the way he wanted to? When he was Nonno’s age?
“I think Lucy and I will just have to take this one day at a time,” he told his cousins. “Which would be much easier to do if everyone would just give us the time and the space we need to figure this out.”
“Everyone means well,” Nick said.
That didn’t change the fact that they were only making things more stressful.
“There’s another matter we came to talk to you about,” Rob said. “We have concerns about Rose.”
Rose Goldwyn, the daughter of Nonno’s secretary, had come to them last fall looking for a job. Because of her mother, Phyllis’s, twenty-plus years of dedicated service to Caroselli Chocolate, they’d felt obligated to hire her. Unfortunately, Rose was nothing like her mother. She did her job, but unlike Phyllis, who had been like a part of the Caroselli family until she retired, Rose didn’t fit in. There was something about her that just seemed a little...off. Lately Tony had come to realize that it was an opinion shared by a good majority of the family, and most of her coworkers.
“Megan pulled me aside yesterday,” Rob told him. Megan, Rob’s younger sister, had just bought her first home and brought Rose in as her roommate. “She said she’s a little creeped out by Rose’s recent behavior.”
“Recent behavior? She’s creeped me out since the day she was hired,” Nick said. He was one of those guys who got along with practically everyone. If he thought something was off about Rose, they would be wise to listen.
“Meg said that Rose seems unusually interested in the family,” Rob told them. “She asks a lot of questions about Nonno and Nonna.”
“What kind of questions?” Tony asked.
“What they were like, did they have a good marriage?”
That was odd. “What does she care about our grandparents’ marriage? How could that possibly be relevant to her?”
“It gets stranger. She asked if Meg had any old family movies.”
“I suppose this would be a good time to mention that Terri and I caught her coming from the direction of Nonno’s study on the day of our wedding,” Nick said. “Rose claimed she was looking for the bathroom and got lost, but then she scurried down the stairs without using the bathroom. I figured she was just nervous being at a family function for the first time. It can be a little overwhelming for an outsider. But Terri was convinced that she was lying.”
Rob muttered a curse. “A couple of months ago Carrie caught Rose red-handed trying to jimmy the lock on my dad’s office door.”
And they were just hearing about this now? “I would think you might have mentioned something as important as someone breaking into the CEO’s office,” Tony said.
“She claimed there was a paper in there that she needed, something my dad’s secretary left for her. She said she forgot to grab it before my dad left and locked his office. She was afraid she would get into trouble if she didn’t take care of it. Then out of the blue she got a call saying she didn’t need to do it after all.”
“Sounds like she always has an excuse.”
“Carrie said she looked guilty.”
“All the more reason to report it,” Nick said.
“I didn’t want to get Rose in trouble if she hadn’t done anything wrong. I meant to look into it, then we found out that Carrie was pregnant, and I totally forgot to follow through.”
“Understandable,” Nick said.
“No kidding,” Tony mumbled, and Rob chuckled.
“Do we even know for sure that Rose is Phyllis’s daughter?” Nick asked. “It’s not like we can ask Phyllis since she’s dead. Rose could be an impostor. She could be a spy going after company secrets. She could be an undercover reporter working on an exposé.”
“An exposé about chocolate?” Tony couldn’t think of anything less interesting. “Why? Or is there something else going on here that I don’t know about?”
“If there is, I don’t know about it, either,” Rob said. “I only know that Meg is worried. And that has me worried.”
“We could take it to our parents, tell them what we know,” Nick said.
“Why don’t we do a little digging first?” Rob said. “I don’t want to get her in trouble if her only crime is being a little odd.”
“It’s your call,” Tony told him.
“Give me a week or two,” Rob said.
Tony found himself hoping that Rob did discover some nefarious activity. With any luck it would take the focus off him for a while. At least until he figured out what to do. Lucy would marry him eventually, of that he was positive. It was just a matter of wearing her down and making her see reason.
* * *
The rich and salty scent of frying bacon woke Lucy from a deep sleep with a smile on her face. Tony almost always made her breakfast when she spent the night. Even if he only had time to toast bread or pour her a bowl of cereal before he left for work. He kept her favorite kind around for such occasions, which had been more frequent in the weeks before she left.
Until just now, Lucy