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Charlotte shivered. It was impossible to imagine anyone as dynamic and confident as Winona ever feeling like that. “She must have been miserable.”
“With my father. With me.”
“Not because of you,” Charlotte made the distinction gently. “She left to save herself. She left you because she didn’t trust herself. Isn’t sacrifice like that proof of a truly great love?”
He finished his coffee and stood, not to leave, but because his body was too tense to stay folded a moment longer. “I don’t know,” he said quietly, after a moment. “Anger, it turns out, is a habit. Once you have felt it for long enough, it becomes impossible to let it go. I can’t imagine not feeling this way towards her.”
“Then don’t. Don’t push it. Just…keep an open mind and see if time changes your heart.”
“My heart?” He said with a sombre expression. “My heart no longer exists,cara,remember?”
Alessio pushedthe covers back quietly, one eye on the sleeping form of Charlotte, his gut tight as he stared at her and felt,felt, things he hadn’t known before. Reluctance to leave. An appreciation that went beyond her beauty and the way she was such a match for him in bed. It was an appreciation of all that she was: as a woman, a chef, a lover and a mother. She was everything his own mother hadn’t been for him.
And for all that he could now, with the fullness of time, understand that his mother’s situation had been more complex than he’d appreciated, that didn’t change the fact that she’d returned to England, married Grant, given birth to Caleb, and lived a happy, prosperous, busy life, with Alessio having no part in it.
Anger coursed through his veins, worse than ever before, because it had no target. It was a free-floating rage: at his mother, father, at Caleb and Grant.
He needed to leave this place. To leave Charlotte. Because even she made him feel…feel far more than he wanted to.
You’re running from yourself.
He ground his teeth together, ignoring his mother’s appraisal. She didn’t know him. She couldn’t understand what made him the way he was. She had no right to weigh in on his personality. She’d abandoned him.
He moved to the door, placed his hand on the knob and held it there, every cell in his body revolting against the idea of leaving her. In the madness of this situation, in the cold, heartless rage that swirled inside of him, Charlotte was his calm. She offered a peace he’d never known. When he was with her, when he held her, looked at her, spoke to her, it was like a part of himself was being forged anew, rewired or rediscovered.
And that scared him half to death.
“DID YOU KNOW ABOUT this?”Winona stage-whispered to Charlotte, who smiled across the seats at her. She nodded slowly.
“Alessio is accompanying the choir?”
“He got them out of a real bind.” Charlotte tried to hide the possessive affection from showing in her voice, the pride—as if she had any right to feel proud of him! But she couldn’t help the warm tingling in her body as she watched Alessio on stage, his fingers moving over the keys as the children sang along, their little voices high and proud, excited and lovely. Charlotte and Dash had come to this concert every year since moving, and it never failed to bring a tear to Charlotte’s eye. She loved Christmas—everything about it, but even more so now she had Dash to care for.
It was so important to her to make it magical and special, particularly as his grandparents would be meeting her afterwards to take him away.
She hated not having him to wake up with in the morning, but it seemed a fair trade off, for having him all year round. Besides, she’d see him again for Christmas night.
Choosing not to think about that now, she made a point of watching the children, even when her eyes fell to Alessio as though he had his own gravitational pull.
From time to time, he’d look up and his eyes would immediately land on her and the air between them would shimmer so brightly she was sure everyone must be able to see it, to feel it. In fact, as the concert went on, she began to worry that the woman sitting beside herhadseen it, or something like it.
Winona regarded Charlotte with an appraising look, before passing a glass of Buck’s Fizz along that Caleb had procured from the makeshift bar out the front of the church. Charlotte’s cheeks flushed as she took several quick gulps, needing something to calm herself down.
But it was impossible to tear her eyes away. She looked from Alessio to Dash, and felt her heart, her soft, aching heart, fill to the brim, so full it could almost have exploded, and she knew then that this was so much more than they’d originally agreed.
Despite the risks, and the futility, she’d fallen in love with Alessio.
She loved him.
As sure as she loved Dash, she knew that Alessio belonged in her heart and soul and always would. He was a part of her, a part of what she wanted in her family.
Family!
She gasped, because it was such a burdensome word, a concept that barely held weight for Charlotte. Michael had been her brother, but that was the beginning and end of her experience with family. With the exception of the brief, happy phase of her life when there’d been Michael, Maggie and Dash to spend time with, and Charlotte had felt their warmth and love bask her just by being in their presence, she’d never known anything quite so romantic as the idea of family.
But that didn’t stop her from wanting, now.
From wanting more.
