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‘It is beautiful.’ She looked away, seeming almost as if she was suppressing a shiver. ‘Beautiful and isolated and very cold.’
‘That sounds like a rather mixed description.’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t like it growing up. I couldn’t wait to get away.’
‘Why? Just because it was cold?’
She hesitated, and he waited, sensing she had something more important to reveal. ‘No, because my father was…well, suffice to say, we didn’t get along.’ She kept her gaze on Ella, catching their daughter’s chubby hand in her own and gently removing it from her hair.
‘And your mother?’ Alessandro asked quietly.
‘She died when I was fourteen. I’d say of a broken heart, but I know how melodramatic that sounds.’
‘No.’ His mother had wasted away, worn to the bone by work and poverty. It was possible, Alessandro knew, to die of things that ate at you the same way a physical disease did. ‘Is your father still alive?’
‘I don’t actually know.’ Mia looked up at him then, her blue eyes icy with a hard anger he’d never seen before, not even in their stormiest moments. ‘I haven’t seen him in eight years, and that is fine by me.’
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p; ‘I see.’ Although he didn’t see the whole picture, he was starting to get a glimpse. Whatever had happened with her father, Mia clearly had emotional scars from it. He didn’t know what they were exactly, but at least he knew they were there.
‘Anyway.’ Mia shrugged, her gaze back on Ella. ‘With the background you just told me about, how did you get to be a billionaire by age—what? Thirty-something?’
‘Thirty-seven. I worked my way up.’
‘From slums to a billionaire lifestyle?’ She shook her head slowly, seeming impressed. ‘That’s quite a steep climb.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did it happen?’
Alessandro shrugged. ‘I was lucky and I worked hard. I started in property, buying rundown buildings and flipping them. It grew from there.’
‘It has to have been more than luck.’
‘Like I said, I worked hard.’
‘Very hard, I imagine. You’ve always seemed…driven to me.’
‘Yes, I suppose I am.’ Although, coming from her, he didn’t know whether it was a compliment or not.
‘What about your mother?’ Mia asked. ‘Is she still alive?’
‘Sadly, no. She died when I was nineteen, just when I was starting, but we’d lost touch a few years before.’
‘That’s sad.’ Mia hesitated. ‘It seems as if we have something in common.’
‘Yes.’ It saddened him, to think that both he and Mia had come from such fractured, damaged families—and it made him more determined to make sure their own little family wasn’t. ‘Our family doesn’t have to be like that, Mia,’ he said, a new note of urgency entering his voice. ‘This can be a fresh start for the three of us.’
‘I’d like to believe that,’ she said after a moment, but her tone sounded wistful, even dubious, and that stung.
‘Why can’t you?’
‘It’s just… I don’t know enough about you, Alessandro. And sometimes the past isn’t so easy to overcome.’
‘We’re getting to know each other,’ he persisted. ‘And we’ll keep doing that. What’s your favourite colour?’
‘My favourite colour?’
