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“Not fair!” Sam said. “I have to go pick up the kids and make dinner here.”
“Sucks to be you,” Cat said, reaching for her phone.
“Megan!” Sam begged. “Call me!”
“I will.” Megan laughed. Cat clicked off on Sam’s protests.
♦
Chapter 25
Alessandro ignored Yasmin’s texts and calls and tried to sleep. But for two days, he couldn’t. The little house was too empty, too hollow. “Sources” had said that Megan had gone to visit her family for a few days. Gossip leaped on the tiny crack in their happy image. That Alessandro couldn’t drag himself to two pre-Oscar parties that week didn’t help either.
Finally, he called Colson, his stuntman friend. “Can I come work out at your place today?”
“Sure. Everything okay?”
“Yes. It’s fine. I just need to… blow off steam.”
“Is Megan coming too?”
“No.”
There was a pause on the line, then Colson said, “Well, sure, buddy. Come on over.”
Max was ready to pick him up within minutes of his call. The car was too damn big without her in it. Max said nothing. If Alessandro noticed that the man looked in the rearview mirror at him a few times, he ignored it.
The car was ushered through the solid wood and steel gates at the end of Cassidy’s driveway and carried Alessandro away from his disaster of a life into comforting arms.
Colson said very little, just brought him to the fully equipped gym in a glass-fronted room at the back of the house and gave him a towel. Alessandro pounded the treadmill for longer than usual, but the pain in his heart wasn’t replaced by exhaustion. Then he went to the weights. He needed to extend himself, to punish his body until it submitted and he could stop thinking about her. But when he began to set up for a bench press and kept on loading up the weights, Colson finally spoke.
“Dude. You want help with that?”
Alessandro hadn’t been counting. He was in shape, sure, but even he couldn’t lift the number of plates he’d added to the bar. And he was on the bench, about to lift the damn thing off the rack and probably cave in his ribs.
His body collapsed, his arms going out to the sides, his back arching, his legs splaying out. Sweat poured off him; he felt shaky. That was when he realized he hadn’t had anything but coffee today.
Colson sat on the bench next to him. “Wanna talk about it?”
No, he didn’t want to talk about it. Nothing like this had happened to him since he’d left home, and any setbacks he’d had, he’d dealt with himself.
“I will be okay,” he said.
“I beg to differ.” Cassidy appeared out of nowhere holding a pitcher of water filled with lemon and orange slices and two glass mugs. “Here. Sit up.” Alessandro did as he was told, which was when he saw the servant come in behind Cassidy with a tray of bagels with lox, eggs Benedict, and fruit.
Cassidy handed him a glass and poured him a drink, then directed the servant to put the tray down on a third bench. She sat gracefully next to it and began to put cream cheese on a poppy-seed bagel. “You’re here without Megan,” she said conversationally as she did so, “and even this dumb actress can see that she isn’t just hopping over to the East Coast for a family weekend. What did you do?”
He laughed shortly and took another deep draft of the water. “Of course it is something I did.”
“If it wasn’t, you would have told us by now,” Colson said.
Alessandro shook his head at them. “There are some things you cannot joke your way out of,amico.”
“Can you love your way out of them?” Cassidy asked.
Alessandro couldn’t bear to meet her eyes. Could he have done that? Could he have simply loved Megan, listened to her, changed his whole way to be and welcomed in her way?
Not this guy. “Not this time,” he said. “I discovered that she doesn’t know what”—he gestured to his chest—“what makes me, me. My brothers showed up, and she let them in.”
