As soon as the door to the small study that he’d lead Julie into closed behind her, she practically tore herself away from him and put a good few steps between them. His first instinct was to go after her and stop her before she could take so much as half a step, but he reined himself back in. There were no other exits in the room, unless she was intending to fling herself out of the massive second-story windows.

As pissed as Julie seemed to be, he doubted she’d go that far. Not with the child in her arms.

“You’ve got some nerve,” she hissed, narrowing her eyes as she paced almost to the opposite end of the room.

She was rocking the baby in her arms, the boy twisting around every time that she turned her back on Antonio, trying to get a better look at him. Antonio’s own attention was painfully split between his beautiful mate, and the fact that he had a son, and that he was here. Both filled his heart with so much joy that he felt like it might just bust out of his chest, for a moment distracting him from all the other implications that came with this discovery.

“Explain,” he said simply, clicking the lock shut on the door.

He didn’t need anyone storming in here, least of all his fiancée. The fiancée he could barely spare an ounce of thought for at the moment.

“Explain?!” Julie spat, whirring around to face him, though there was more than ten feet separating them.

Her face contorted with rage. She would have made for an excellent dragon, he thought. She certainly had the barely suppressed power and bluster bit down to a T.

Julie settled the boy on a carpet in front of a dormant fireplace. He sat down calmly, gray eyes that mirrored Antonio’s own considering the situation around himself with utter calm. Even from this distance, he could see the speckles of gold that seemed to be growing by the minute since they had landed and Antonio had gotten his first good look at the boy. He would be shifting in no time, now that he was surrounded by his own kind, there would be no doubt of that.

“You don’t really need me to explain, do you? You take me from my home, against my will, and fly me out here to… to what? So I could meet your soon-to-be wife? So your mother could tell me that I might be getting my head lopped off for hiding your son? To scare the living daylights out of me?”

“You’re pacing,” he said idly, crossing to one of the windows facing the courtyard and glancing out.

Giovanni was still standing there, his arms crossed over his chest, looking to be putting up a good front to the heated questioning of Rossella and Amira. Antonio would have to talk to both of the women, it was inevitable, but at the moment, he had more important things to do. Like pay attention to his mate, and his heir, and… well, himself.

“I had you brought to me because you have my son. My son should not be kept from his family, from his title… from his destiny,” Antonio said, shrugging his shoulders.

The line about destiny was something so deeply ingrained in him by his father that he couldn’t help but cringe slightly when he uttered the words. He’d never thought it would be so easy to parrot the words of the late alpha of the Capirelli family, especially when Antonio had never sought to take up the mantle so soon.

“I did not keep him from you,” Julie huffed, crossing her arms tighter around her, almost looking like she was cradling herself rather than trying to simply hold in her aggravation. “There was never a question about what that night was supposed to be, not in my head, anyway. I was not fooled into thinking that there could be anything between us beyond that evening together, and you did everything to confirm that.”

A twinge of remorse snaked through him, followed just as closely by the vivid images of the one night he’d had Julie in his arms. There had been something so delicate, so fragile about her from the moment he’d met her, hidden underneath an exterior that told the world that she had no weaknesses. She was an amazing little thing, a perfect jewel made better by her carefully concealed flaws, that had fascinated him.

It was supposed to be a night of simple passion. When he’d set his eyes on her for the first time, one too many whiskeys had been burning in his gut, pushing him into recklessness. One day before his arranged engagement was to be made official… One day before he’d lose the freedom he’d always held precious.

Julie was supposed to be an act of rebellion. Taking a woman who wasn’t even a dragon, but a lowly human, to his villa and fucking her on every surface he could find, was supposed to be a quiet ‘fuck you’ to the ways of his brood, and the heavy mantle that would be set upon his shoulders soon. But it had turned out to be so much more.

“Did you think I would not want to know?” Antonio asked, trying futilely to brush the strands of memory out of his head.

Did I have her in this study? he wondered. I must have.

“I thought I got pregnant from a one-night stand that should have never happened, and that whatever happened next was my responsibility. I still think that. Tony is mine, and to me, he is not a burden. Do you… well…”

Julie averted her gaze from him, looking at the child on the floor. Her lips curved in a gentle smile despite her anger, her features softening from the barely constrained frustration that seemed to be keeping her going. The frayed edges of exhaustion were clear upon her.

Antonio wanted nothing more than to go to her and kiss the tiredness, the stress, the uncertainty out of her.

So he did.

He crossed the distance between them in a couple of long strides. Julie turned toward him, looking up at him with those gorgeous green eyes of hers just in time for him to pull her to him and press his lips to hers.

She tasted like freedom, and like bad decisions that led to the best of consequences. He slipped one hand along her neck and cradled the back of her head as he claimed her in his tight hold, his lips eagerly exploring hers. There was reluctance at first, though she didn’t shy away, but when her lips parted in a moan, Antonio’s world fell away.

His tongue slipped between her pink lips and tasted her mouth, making the dragon rumble out a long, possessive growl in his chest. Her short, curvy body seemed to meld against his perfectly, and it took everything he had to keep from picking her up and carrying her to the first table that he could, to lay her down there and make her scream in pleasure for him as he had time and time again on that sole night they’d shared.

It was Tony’s presence that made Antonio control himself, to rein his desire in to only a wild lick of flame instead of the all-consuming inferno that he felt inside. She was sweet, and fiery, and all his and he couldn’t believe he’d ever let her step out of this house.

He’d known that she was his mate then, and he knew it now.

And just as he’d known then, he knew now that despite it all, they were doomed to be miserable.

He broke the kiss, leaving Julie’s head still cocked back, her eyes hooded as she seemed to revel in the aftermath of the unexpected kiss. The moment her eyes fluttered open, she took a step back and smacked him across the cheek, hard.

Or what counted as hard for a human female smacking a grown dragon shifter. She probably hurt herself more than she did him.

Tony splatted his palms together, reproducing the sound the smack had made.

“Splat!” he hollered, as Antonio rubbed his cheek with bemusement.

“Did that make you feel better?” he asked, glancing from Tony to Julie, who had backed away another couple of steps.

She’d put a high-backed chair between them, as if that would keep him away if he chose to grab her in his arms again.

“The kiss or the smack?” she asked, her lips thinned into a line.

“Both. Either,” he offered with a shrug, crouching down next to Tony and offering the boy his hand.

Tony grabbed his fingers. His grip was strong.

Good.

“No,” she deadpanned. “But I’d appreciate if you’d refrain from ever doing that again.”

“A promise I cannot make,” Antonio murmured, chuckling as Tony hauled himself up and started patting his face with his short, stubby fingers, as if learning the contours of it.

“How would your betrothed feel if she knew you were kissing another woman?” Julie asked, obviously trying to get a rise out of him.

“She would be disappointed that I kissed another woman before I ever did her, I would imagine,” Antonio said with a shrug, scooping Tony up in his arms.

When he righted himself, the boy securely sitting on one forearm, he was met with pure confusion in Julie’s eyes. He cocked a brow at her, only to have it poked by Tony, barely missing his eye.

“You… what?”

“It holds no importance. You are the mother of my child. I have done far more than simply kiss you before, or have you forgotten?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” she said, her brows furrowing into a frown.

“Good, then you should not be surprised if I sought to claim what is mine once again,” he said, turning to walk to the door.

His mind was made up. Julie was here, and so was his child, and it would stay that way. Though, earnestly, Antonio wasn’t entirely certain if he could have let her go even if Giovanni had only brought back her, and that tight, nagging feeling that there was a piece of him out there that he didn’t know about had been nothing but the disillusioned thinking of a desperate dragon.

“I’m not going to stay,” Julie sputtered, rushing to catch up with him. “And I am certainly not going to do… that with you again. I’m not going to be some mistress, some concubine stuck in a tower, waiting for your next whim.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Antonio scoffed, unlocking the door and leading the three of them out of there. “The villa has no towers.”