I wake with my body flung over Dante’s. Head on his chest, arm across his waist, one leg draped over his thigh. Early morning sun is filtering through the roman blinds on the windows.

My body is sore. We had a third encounter, sometime in the night. I smile and stretch, and his eyes open.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

Dante hauls me on top of him, his hands going to my ass. “I was already awake.” He tugs me down for a good morning kiss, and before long I’m wet and horny, sore or not.

I’m straddling him, just about to take him into my body, when Sophie says, “Mama?” My heart stops for a moment until I realize she’s in her crib and can’t see us.

Smiling a rueful apology at him, I climb off and snatch the robe off the floor. “Good morning, sweet girl.” Going through the bathroom, I come out into her room and pick her up.

BeeBee gets up, stretches, and wags her tail. “Good morning. Did you stay here all night?” She wags again, and I scritch her behind her ears.

A door closes in the hallway. I peer out and see that Dante’s taken the guest bathroom and left the one here for me. That reminds me that I need to inspect the master bath.

It’s as nice as I suspected -- nothing over-the-top, that doesn’t suit the house, but it’s all rich colors and fabrics, fine materials and workmanship. The tub is big enough for both of us.

Humming a tune under my breath, I get Sophie ready for the day. I wish I had a change of clothes, but I can hand-wash my panties and wear my same outfit again. I’m about to take her to the kitchen when Dante comes into the room, carrying several paper shopping bags.

“Gina left these for you this morning. They didn’t want to disturb us, so Carlo sent a text to my phone.”

“Oh, how sweet.” The bags don’t just have lingerie and clothes, but skin care, toiletries, and makeup. “She thought of everything.”

And she was right — from the labels, it looks like we wear the same size. Our coloring is different; I have brown hair, not red, though we both have blue eyes. But most of the shades she’s chosen look like ones that will work for me.

Now that I have something to change into, I can’t wait to get cleaned up. “Let’s go get breakfast,” I tell Sophie, and put her down so she can toddle toward the kitchen, BeeBee once more at her side.

I smell food, and hear it, before we go through the doorway. Dante’s at the stove, cooking up an enormous breakfast. I’m starving, so that works for me.

“Sophie,” he says as soon as we’re in the room with him.

“Hi, Tontay.”

“Hi. What do you want to eat? Eggs, or pancakes, or waffles?” His speech is ever so slightly more distinct than usual, and he leaves a tiny pause between the choices.

“Waffa!”

“You got it.” He already has the waffle iron out and heated, and the batter mixed; all he has to do is pour it in to cook.

What if she’d said she wanted eggs? Then I guess he and I would have had waffles, along with everything else, but there’s plenty of food without them. I think he went to all that trouble just to give my little girl choices.

The warm, squishy feeling in my chest throws me into a tailspin. What is going on here? I promised myself one night, no more.

Dante and I aren’t setting up house together.

BeeBee goes under the table again as I put Sophie into her high chair. “Do you know she was next to Sophie’s crib when I went in this morning? I think she spent the whole night there.”

Dante grunts. “I’ll have to put a bed in there for her.”

My heart lurches. A new dog bed does not say temporary arrangement. “Dante …”

He’s busy putting her waffle onto a plate, which he hands to me, pointing me to the island where butter and jelly and syrup are set out. I get busy cutting the perfectly golden-brown waffle up and adding the things Sophie likes, vowing as I do that Dante and I will talk. This morning. No putting it off.

Soon, the table is covered with platters of food: scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, more waffles, and little bowls of diced onion and shredded cheese and homemade guacamole to add to the eggs, and a pitcher of orange juice, plus coffee for the grownups. It’s way too much, but I’m guessing Dante can put away a lot of food. And given all the calories we burned last night, I’m sure I’ll eat more than usual.

As soon as we’re seated, Sophie once more between us, and have our plates loaded up, he says, “We gotta talk.”

“Um. Yes, we do.”

He tilts his head toward Sophie. “Given the circumstances, I don’t think it’s good for your state of mind to be away from her for hours at a time.”

Another worry I hadn’t let myself face, solved before I could fully come to grips with it. The tightness in my chest that’s been underlying my good feelings eases. But it doesn’t disappear entirely.

“I still have to work off my car repairs.”

“Vic’s office is a mess. He never has time to clean it up. You know how to do filing, shit like that?”

I wince. He glances at Sophie, who doesn’t seem to have noticed, but we both know that kids are sponges for what’s said in their hearing. “Anyway,” he prompts me.

“Sure. I took some basic business classes at the community college.”

“I’ll take you in with me, and we’ll put her playpen in the office with you. You work mornings, and then at lunchtime I’ll drop you off with Izzy or one of the nonnas. It’ll take you a few days longer to work off your bill, but you won’t have to worry about her while you’re doing it.”

It’s such a good plan, and I’m so relieved he’s not trying to talk me out of working off my debt, that I give him a big smile. His eyes get warm; I squirm on my seat, and they get warmer.

My face is getting hot, so I concentrate on my food. But every time I look up, Dante’s watching me, and every time our eyes meet it’s another shock to my system. I’m not going to flirt with him in front of my daughter, so I do my best to ignore him.

But I can’t stop looking.

The best way to put a stop to this infatuation — because that’s all it is, getting worked up over someone I don’t even know — is information. The more I know about Dante, the faster I’ll stop looking at him with rose-tinted glasses.

Head down over my plate, cutting my waffle with my knife and fork, I ask, “Do you have any kids?”