“I will not be a weapon to be used against them,” she’d said again and again. “I’m not a prize.”
“Do you know what’s weird? I did so many things in life to enrage her. It wasn’t enough to leave her.
“I became closer and closer to Greta. I took up modeling because I knew my mother would not approve. I…refused to even visit her, despite numerous calls from Steve. I thought I was hurting her. But really I only hurt myself.”
“You did whatever you had to in order to survive.”
She scrubbed at her tears roughly. “She reached out to me again after Charlie was born. I went, not to take her up on the olive branch, but because I was curious about Charlie. I was curious about how she would love this baby, if she did at all.
“And she did. I could see it in her eyes—he was a piece of her heart. She loved him like she never did me. And it broke my heart all over again.
“I love him so much now, but when he was first born I was so jealous of this small baby, Vincenzo. Can you believe it? This tiny human being had what she’d always denied me. Now she’s gone. And Charlie’s lost everything too.”
“Shh…tesoro. Shh…none of this is your fault. Grief and guilt are a poisonous cocktail, cara,” Vincenzo crooned as she broke into heart-wrenching sobs. He pressed his mouth to her temple and held her in a firm grip, his chest tight with an ache he couldn’t name.
Her pain felt like his own, and his guilt that he’d only made it worse… It raked claws through him.
“How horrible does it make me that I don’t truly miss her? I only miss what could have been…if we’d patched up our relationship.”
He understood her so perfectly at that moment. The tangle of emotions that could choke your breath, a beautiful future slipping through your fingers and the helplessness it brought… His arms tightened around her and he rocked them both gently.
His mind turned to the implicit trust he had seen between Leo and Massimo Brunetti. The ethics they’d strived hard to instill in themselves were becoming clearer as he delved into BFI’s operations ever since Silvio had been kicked out—with Greta’s help, indeed—and Leo had taken over as CEO.
The bond the brothers shared despite Silvio Brunetti’s cruelty toward his own sons… He’d seen the evidence of it with his own eyes.
Slowly, she turned into a languorous weight on his muscles. Sinking his fingers into her thick hair, he whispered sweet nothings in Italian. “You’re human, bella. Not horrible. What might have been taunts us all.”
Her fingers dug into his muscles, her mouth open against his shoulder. “You were right, you know.”
“About what?” he whispered.
“I’m impulsive. I’m… I run away from hard situations. I take things on for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes, I’m…”
“What, Alessandra?”
“I’m scared, V. So much.”
“About what, bella?”
She took a bracing breath. “What if I’m not the right person to raise Charlie, V? What if that jealousy I initially bore for him translates into my future actions? What if he can see it in me? What if he ends up believing I don’t really love him? What if you were right, and I haven’t thought this through completely?
“He’s so scared right now. Only seven years old and he’s been through so much already. I can’t be another person who lets him down.”
The fear in her voice cut Vincenzo deeply. With rough movements, he turned her until she was looking into his eyes. With her own puffy from her tears, her hair a ragged mess, she was still the most real thing he’d ever laid eyes on. “Listen to me, Princess! You came storming back into this marriage just for him. Your love for him shines through in every word, every action. Trust me—he knows it.
“You don’t know how amazing it is to see your strength, cara. You hated asking me for help, yet you did. Fighting me with everything you had. For Charlie. He’s incredibly fortunate to have you.”
He pressed another kiss into her hair, loving the silky tumble of it. Breathing in the essence of this woman who fought to do the right thing even when she was terrified. “It made me see things in you I’ve never seen before.”
She stilled in his arms, her mouth a warm heat against the hollow of his throat. Her fingers dug into his muscles, but he welcomed the contact. “Like what?”
He shrugged, loath to share his doubts. Doubts she’d created in him.
“I thought of what a ferocious mother you’d be to any children we have,” he finally answered.
She moved out of his arms and the loss of her warmth, her softness was acute.
He swallowed the urge to pull her back into his embrace. “You’re one of those women around whom families are built. Your loyalty…staggers me. You give back everything you receive a hundredfold.”
“And yet you would change the very core of me.”
“No,” he said with careful emphasis. “I only reminded you that I had a right to your loyalty too.”
She looked away and then back, and he noted the resolve in her eyes. He could practically see her emerge from this bout of intense grief, bent but not broken. Ready to take on whatever came next. And that determination aroused him as much as the beautiful dress offering him flashes of long, honey-colored limbs.
“Do you think we made a mistake?”
He didn’t need to ask her to clarify. “No.”
“I don’t want to think of…us having children for a long time. Not until things are…settled. With Charlie. With us.”
“That’s fair,” he said softly, swallowing away the instinctive protest.
“Would you forgive me if I did something like that?”
“Like what?”
“If I cheated on you, like my mother did to Steve. If I slept with another—”
“No!” His answer bounced off the walls and the floor, increasing in volume until it was reverberating all around them.
The idea of losing Alessandra—to
