Page 36 of Alessio

She didn’t miss a beat.

Innocent, but sinful.

Sly, but sweet.

He found it odd he was able to sit down and have an intellectual conversation with her about things that no one else ever wanted to talk about—like his appreciation of the written word. She calmed his constant, excessive energy, and brought him back down to earth with nothing more than a conversation. On the flip side of that coin, he watched her handle an uptight and stiff Corrado, and make him more playful than Alessio had ever seen.

He had yet to grasp how to deal with it. Unlike everything else, compartmentalizing this woman was impossible. It was how Alessio liked to deal with anything in his life. Things fit in neat little boxes inside his mind, and he handled them accordingly.

Ginevra was not the same.

At all.

There were too many facets to her personality, and he couldn’t unveil them all before another one came along to make him do a double-take of her yet again. He was still trying to find that thing in this woman that had made Corrado change the landscape of their relationship, but the longer he searched for it, the more Alessio realized something else.

He liked Ginevra.

Finding the parts of her that had Corrado spun up in the woman became almost insignificant when suddenly, Alessio had his own interests in her.

And that was a goddamn problem.

He didn’t ask for that.

None of it.

“Want to try it?”

Alessio blinked to find Ginevra had stopped dancing and came to stand on the other side of the island from where he sat. On the wooden spoon in her hand, a red sauce coated the concave tip. A rich red, and smelling like spices, his mouth watered as she held it out like it was a treat she might tease him with.

That cunning smile on her lips said the same.

“Well?”

“Who taught you to cook, hmm?” he asked.

Ginevra grinned. “My Mama.”

“Oh?”

“She worked a lot, so I had to look after my little sisters. They didn’t like things that came from a box when our mom wouldn’t dare feed them something like that, so I had to learn how to make them what they liked.”

“And you liked that.”

She arched a brow. “What do you mean?”

“Taking care of your sisters.”

He didn’t miss the way her throat jumped, or how a sadness dimmed her eyes. “Of course, I did. I love them, Les.”

“You haven’t seen them in a while, huh?”

“Too long. I don’t like to think about it. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t talk to them, they can’t be told where I am, so … I don’t bother.”

Yeah, he could tell.

The emotion in her eyes, and the thickness in her tone, that made him lean forward to take her sauce. Perhaps then, she would go back to smiling and dancing, and his chest wouldn’t feel like a fucking elephant was sitting on it because she was sad.

Yeah, fuck.