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“We have little to talk about,” he said after a moment. “We’re like strangers.”
“But why?” Charlotte asked, gently, frustrated by the distance between them now, so she came to his side of the bench and pulled up onto it, sitting right beside him.
He tilted his face, so their eyes met, and a frisson of awareness danced down her spine.
“We rarely see one another.”
“I know that, but I’ve never understood…”
“How could you?”
She frowned. “I know your mum has missed you terribly. She thinks of you often. So why—,”
“How do you know that?” He prompted, voice flat.
“There’s a brokenness about her. As if part of her is missing. I have felt that from our first meeting—I see the same thing in Maggie’s parents. I feel it in here,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest. “It’s a certain weariness that invades people who’ve lost in a profound way.”
“Her husband died,” he pointed out.
“It’s not that. It’s…sadder than death.”
He scanned her face. “I think you’re imagining something that’s not there.”
“Do you?” She sipped her wine, but before she could swallow it, he brought his mouth to hers, stealing half of the liquid and kissing her at the same time.
“I really don’t want to talk about my mother,” he said, moving between the triangle of her legs. “Let’s go to bed.”
* * *
“What’s this?”He gestured to a small tattoo on her ankle, tracing it with his finger, then lifted his eyes to hers so Charlotte’s heart did that now very familiar little skippedy-skip.
“A tattoo.”
“Of…”
“A cat,” she smiled. “I got it forever ago.”
He arched a brow. “When you were, what? Five?”
She laughed. “Fifteen.”
“Is that legal?”
“You need parental consent. My dad wasn’t really in the picture but Michael—my brother—took me and pretended. I don’t think the tattoo guy particularly cared, one way or another.”
Alessio dropped his lips to the cat and kissed it. “Why a cat?”
“When I was a little girl, a friend of Michael’s had a cat, who had a litter. Michael got given one. We had to hide it from dad at first—I’m pretty sure he didn’t even want the kids he’d been lumbered with, let alone a fur baby, but Michael and I adored her. She was so cute and tiny, and trembling—she slept in my bed, curled up just beside my pillow. I was half-terrified of squashing her flat.”
Alessio came higher in the bed until he was lying beside her, one arm casually draped over her naked waist, his fingers tracing invisible patterns on her back.
“She was the darkest black you’ve ever seen, with turquoise eyes. We called her Squiddy, like the ink, you know?”
His lips lifted at the corners, his eyes probing hers, so she felt a humming between them that had nothing to do with the fact they were naked and had been for the last four hours. This was different. More intimate even than sex.
“She was our cat, but really, she was mine. Tiny and precious and I loved her so much. She lived in my room for the first few months.”
“And your dad didn’t know?”
