AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A muscle jerked at the base of his jaw and she knew that she was right.
She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his chest. She felt him still, and was afraid to look up, afraid to meet his eyes, because something was building inside her, a feeling that was growing and bursting, a feeling that terrified her. A feeling she couldn’t understand but that she knew she needed to run from. ‘Let’s go back now, Alejandro. This isn’t your life anymore.’
She was wrong. It would always be his life. He had grown up, but never away, from that life, those nights, those feelings.
He watched her sleeping, fascinated by the gentle undulations of her breasts, the subtle rise and fall of her creamy skin, the fire-engine red of her hair, the parting of her full, lush lips, the fluttering of her eyelids and the shifting of her thick, dark lashes. He watched her sleep but he felt the weight of his past and failure, the heavy ache of his own inability to save his mother, to remove her from that situation, when he’d had the skills all along. True, he’d been younger, but after she’d died, and he’d made his way in the world, he’d been better off than when they’d lived in that apartment. If only he’d made her leave sooner, made her run away from that life, those obligations.
She’d been so young, still a child herself in many ways. She’d had no one to fight for her.
He couldn’t help it. Despite the fact Sienna slept so peacefully—that she was exhausted—he reached out and brushed his finger over her cheek, lightly, just because he needed to feel her and to know that she was real, that she was here. Attempting to slot her into the box other women had occupied in his life had failed. She wasn’t like them, and nor was this affair.
She anchored him in a way he’d never known before. Having her here changed his apartment in some vital way, as though it had become an actual ‘home’, and not just a place to sleep, and he couldn’t put his finger on how or why she’d done that, but he knew that he liked it.
And that was, in and of itself, a danger.
Because Alejandro didn’t want to get used to the comfort she offered. He didn’t want to soften the edges his life had carved into hard planes. He didn’t want to forget that he was alone, that he couldn’t rely on anyone, that he didn’t want to carry the burden of someone else’s happiness and protection lest he fail all over again. He could never forgive himself for the ways in which he’d let down his mother. The thought of doing so again—and to someone like Sienna—was impossible to contemplate.
He’d taken her to dinner in an attempt to get them out of the bedroom, to stall the emotional intimacy that had been luring them closer, dangerously close, and because he’d wanted to lighten the mood between them, but the ploy had failed. And because of him. He was the one who’d taken her to the streets he’d grown up in, given her a necklace and shown her more of his true self than he ever had another soul. He’d aimed to push her away a little and instead he’d shown her a part of him that he usually kept locked away.
And he had no idea why, but he did know he had to get a grip on the situation, before things went any further. He stood abruptly and strode from the room, from Sienna, simply to prove to himself that he still could.
Across the Balearic Sea, in Rome, Luca stared at the photograph with a flush of fever-like heat. Alejandro he’d recognise anywhere, and his face was towards the camera when the picture was snapped. The woman he was dancing with was less discernible, given that her back was turned, her face only very slightly in profile. But her skin was pale and her hair flame red, and there was something in the way she had been photographed moving that drove a stake through his chest, because he knew instantly who it was.
What was less clear was how in the world his wife’s sister had been photographed dancing in a tapas bar in Barcelona with Luca’s best friend. The picture, poor quality so presumably taken from a cell phone by an opportunistic diner who saw a chance to make a quick buck by on-selling the image to the tabloids, was nothing new—Alejandro was photographed at events often. But with Sienna?
Years of friendship and goodwill lived in Luca, but for a moment there was rage too, because he’d trusted Alejandro, and the idea of Sienna being tossed aside after a brief fling—which was the only way Alejandro knew how to treat women—made Luca’s blood boil. He’d asked the man to protect her, not to treat her like any of his other lovers. Alejandro was incapable of genuine emotion with women, incapable of commitment—there was no other conclusion but that he was flirting with Sienna for fun. And she stood to get hurt if she believed, for even one second, that Alejandro was boyfriend material. Everything he knew about Sienna had come from Olivia. He knew how sheltered she’d been, how protected, how badly bullied by their mother, how that had impacted her self-esteem. He also knew that she had no experience with men, particularly not a man like Alejandro who saw sex as the scratching of a physical itch and nothing more.
He closed the paper hurriedly as Olivia entered the kitchen.
‘Everything okay, caro?’
‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Of course.’
And it would be—just as soon as he’d seen Alejandro and got an explanation as to what the hell was going on.
