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He stopped walking, lifting a hand to her cheek. ‘Do you wonder why I would have insisted on marrying you?’
A tingle ran through her. She swayed slightly—not intentionally, but because her legs seemed to have forgotten how to do their job. ‘How could any man behave like that?’
‘He was worried about the consequences of claiming me,’ Alejandro said with a shrug, an air of assumed nonchalance not fooling Sienna for a minute.
‘What consequences?’
‘My father is an Italian count. His family fortune is considerable. I suppose he worried he might be disinherited. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could abandon a sixteen-year-old woman, but that’s all I know.’
She blinked, anger firing through her. ‘That’s disgusting.’
Amusement quirked his lips, despite the seriousness of their conversation. ‘Yes.’
‘And now that you’re Alejandro Corderó, world-famous success story, do you ever think about contacting him?’
‘To what end?’
‘Well, I don’t know, but if I were you I’d have fantasised about tipping a drink or three over his head.’
Alejandro laughed, a sound that shook her to the core. ‘Satisfying in the moment, but then again, why allow him to think that I care?’
‘Don’t you?’
His frown was reflexive. ‘I care for the pain my mother endured—needlessly. I care for the life she should have lived, the care he could have given. He did not have to marry her, but he could have supported her financially.’
‘And he could have known you. Loved you.’
He jerked his gaze away, looking towards the ocean. For a moment, he was a little boy again. She saw it, saw him, all the facets that made him the complex, fascinating man he was today. ‘As a child, I wanted that. I needed it. But now, I need nothing from him.’
‘Or anyone.’ She hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud, but somehow, she was glad she’d said them, because she needed the answer.
When he turned to face her, there was relief in his expression, as though she understood him and he was glad. ‘Or anyone,’ he repeated quietly, squeezing her hand. ‘And I never will.’
There was a handful of people who knew how to access his penthouse without contacting him first. The concierge. Alejandro’s driver, Raul. And Luca.
When Alejandro heard the door click open, some time before seven, when the smell of coffee had just started to fill the room, he tensed immediately, ready to fight, to defend, to protect Sienna, who was still sleeping down the corridor.
But the moment he saw Luca, different emotions knotted inside him. He remained tense.
‘What are you doing here?’
Luca stood just inside the door, his dark eyes sweeping the apartment before landing on Alejandro. ‘You have not been answering your phone. I was worried.’
A frown crossed his face. Where even was his phone? Usually, it was within arm’s reach at all times, but since the night before he’d ignored it, wanting to blot out the world, the passing of time, everything. More than likely, it was charging in his bedroom.
‘I didn’t realise you were trying to contact me. Is everything all right?’
Luca prowled into the kitchen quietly, bracing his palms on the counter. His countenance had Alejandro worried. ‘Probably.’ He shrugged before fishing his own phone from the pocket of his dark jeans. ‘Explain this.’ He slid the device across the counter, and when Alejandro looked at it, something like lava poured down his throat.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘It ran in a gossip column a day ago.’
Alejandro couldn’t take his eyes off the picture. Sienna had been so reluctant to dance, and yet there she was, in leather trousers, hair flaming down her back, body moving as though the music were running inside her bloodstream. He wanted to keep staring at it, but he was conscious of Luca and the implications of this photograph, and he felt the walls pushing in on him. The simple lie by omission was now an enormous canyon, and he stood right at the edge of it, precariously close to falling.
‘It’s Sienna, right?’
The idea of denying it didn’t enter Alejandro’s mind. It was one thing not to mention their relationship but quite another to lie to his best friend’s face. Heat flushed his body as the reality of what they’d been doing slammed into him. He felt the sharp edge of the question, and badly wished Luca hadn’t come here to ask it. But of course he had. What choice had Alejandro left him? His eyes flickered to the photo once more. Careless. Stupid. He should have taken better care of her. He’d failed Sienna, and Luca, and for the first time in a long time Alejandro grappled with a sense of wrongdoing.
