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Amelia was looking at him. He felt her gaze like a touch, a caress. Softer than he probably deserved and hotter than he expected. But when he caught it, and held it, a blush rose to her cheeks and memories of the night before crashed through his mind.
The waiter slapped down a bottle of water and impatiently demanded their orders. Amelia hid the choke of a laugh behind her hand as Alessandro ordered them coffee and a selection of pastries, sure that Amelia would be hungry by now.
‘That’s funny to you? People being rude to me?’ he asked, amused by her reaction.
‘I just wondered what your staff would think to have seen that interaction.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, they are...in awe of you. I doubt they’d even believe their eyes.’
He frowned. ‘I don’t...am I...?’ He rarely stuttered, but the thought that his staff might be in any way intimidated by him was terrible.
As if sensing his thoughts, she reached across the table, her small fine hands cool despite the heat. ‘No. You are an excellent boss. You can just be a littlestern.’
He nodded, acknowledging the truth of it. He knew that. Stern was probably a good description. And when the waiter returned with their drinks and the pastries, he felt the shift in mood, as if she was gearing herself up to meet her part of the task she had set them.
She retrieved her phone, unlocked the screen and swiped it a few times as if searching for something on it. Then she passed it across the table to him where he saw a picture of Amelia with her arm around a beaming brunette, younger than her, but the connection between them unmistakable. Isabelle Seymore was holding a giant ice-cream sundae, the sisters cheek to cheek, the pure joy emanating from them infectious.
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling with such affection it was a physical presence. ‘Taken on her eighteenth birthday.’
He frowned, searching Isabelle’s features for the differences time had wrought between then and the recent picture of her with Gianni.
‘I thought she was blonde.’
‘Gianni doesn’t like brunettes,’ Amelia explained.
It was true. Gianni’s tastes ran to blonde, tall, easy and quick—to leave, that was. But instinctively he knew that none of those descriptions would fit Isabelle Seymore.
‘This is what you’re most proud of?’ he asked, distracted as to what her meaning was. Getting her sister to lure his cousin into a trap? Their plans for vengeance?
‘Mysister.’ Amelia stressed the words as if reading his thoughts. ‘My sister is what I’m most proud of. We weren’t always close, not when we were younger.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I’d imagine from the outside looking in, we were just two more rich girls spoiled silly for their entire lives. We bickered over unimportant things as if it were the end of the world and took everything, especially each other, for granted. But after... There were so many ways in which Issy could have taken a different path. A darker path. She was younger than me when our father’s business collapsed. And in the year that followed both he and our mother battled their own demons. Bit by bit Mum lost herself to addiction and Dad lost his health, as you know.
‘But there are so many ways a young woman can hurt without parental stability, so many ways that hurt can be twisted and turned into dangerous things—dangerous self-beliefs... There were so many ways in which she could have fallen off the rails and she didn’t.’
‘You didn’t let her,’ he guessed correctly.
‘A little. But that doesn’t take into account the fact that she is who she is—and that is a genuinely good person. She is an auxiliary nurse on a children’s hospital ward. She isgoodin a selfless way that I admire and had absolutely nothing to do with.Shenurtured that goodness, protected it, not once letting our parents’ selfishness darken or break that.’
Just the way she spoke of her sister made him want to meet her. Different from Amelia, because there was a thread of darkness to Amelia. No, not darkness. Just...experience. Acceptance that bad things happened in life, bad things she’d seen and felt. Different from his own, but still present, and fundamentally entwined with him and his.
Because—now that the anger and sense of betrayal over the Aurora deal was dissipating—he could see just how much Amelia had needed to take on at such a young age. To care for her sister, herself and even her mother, that would have been a heavy burden to bear alone, with no real help.
Our only real concern, he remembered one of the senior management members saying of Amelia,is that her self-sufficiency could lead to an isolation amongst her team members.At the time, Alessandro hadn’t been overly concerned, sure that she was just focusing too much on her projects. But now he wanted to curse the parents who had forced their daughter to grow up far too soon.
He wondered what would have happened to Amelia and her sister if they hadn’t been set on the path of revenge that had consumed ten years of their lives. What their lives would have looked like, who they would have been. And then, he couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if Gianni hadn’t called him with the news, if he hadn’t been warned about Amelia. Not with him, or Rossi Industries, but for the two sisters who would have reached their goal.
‘What did you plan to do after?’ he asked.
‘After?’
‘Yes, if you were successful. If you’d brought RI to its knees. What were you going to do after?’
For the first time since he’d known Amelia she looked—blank, desperately trying to hide something behind that nothing expression.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, and his heart broke just a little for the girl she had once been.
