‘A few.’ Her mouth flattened and she flipped the page. ‘Actually, can I move your hands?’ Her eyes held his. Something passed between them that inexplicably loosened the tension in his shoulders.
‘Sure.’ He watched as she turned his hands so they lay, palms up and fingers cupped. Her own hands were narrow and warm. Alexei liked the brush of her fingers.
‘You must have been relieved when your stepfather left.’
‘Definitely. He was a difficult man at the best of times and, believe me, there weren’t many of those.’ Alexei remembered the sound of his mother’s sharp cry, waking him in the night. The hard crack of a beefy hand against his jaw and the lash of a belt around his backside. ‘But the trouble didn’t end when he went.’
‘It didn’t?’ She lifted her head.
Alexei shrugged. ‘He’d somehow run up debts in my mother’s name, and loan sharks have no sympathy for defaulters.’ Even if the defaulter was a defeated, desperate woman struggling to make ends meet. ‘My mother worked three jobs to keep us safe from the enforcers.’ Was it any wonder she’d worked herself into an early grave?
Warm fingers clasped his. Carissa didn’t say anything but the gentle pressure was wonderfully soothing. Not that he needed sympathy. He’d conquered his past long ago. Yet he didn’t move, just let her fingers curl around his, enjoying the sense of connection.
‘That doesn’t explain your education.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You indicated your education was patchy. Surely school was free.’
Alexei added tenaciousness to Carissa’s qualities.
‘I missed school to earn money to help out.’
‘How old were you?’ Her brow scrunched.
‘Eleven. Early teens.’
Carissa shook her head and covered his cheek with her palm. The gesture felt like balm. How long had it been since anyone had tried to soothe his hurts? No one had since his mother. ‘Your mother must have been so worried about you.’
Surprise jabbed him. But of course Carissa understood his mother’s concern. After they’d stopped sniping at each other, he’d quickly recognised empathy as one of her core traits.
‘She was, but I had to do my bit for the family.’ There it was again. Family. Until this week he hadn’t let himself think about how it had felt to be part of something bigger than himself. To care and be cared for.
‘Having a mother to love you. That’s special.’
‘At least you and I were lucky enough to know our mothers.’
He frowned, registering Carissa’s brittle smile and wistful eyes. Did she miss her mother? It wasn’t long ago she’d died. ‘I’m sorry, Carissa. Sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you.’ She blinked, her eyes bright. Then she pulled her arm away and sat back.
* * *
Mina had no memories of her mother. She’d told herself that didn’t matter. Her older sister, Ghizlan, had been as good as any mother, making up for their father’s distance.
Yet Alexei’s words reopened a raw wound. One she’d refused for years to recognise. She felt it now, the sharp pain of loneliness, of being rejected by her father, abandoned by the mother who’d died.
Self-pity was pathetic. She had Ghizlan and she couldn’t wish for a better sister. And Huseyn, her brother-in-law, was a sweetie beneath that incredibly gruff exterior. She had her little niece and nephew in Jeirut, and there was her friend Carissa.
But no one just for her.
Mina hated the direction of her thoughts.Look at Alexei.He’d lost his father young and had all sorts of trouble as a kid but he didn’t give in to self-pity.
‘So howdidyou start in IT?’
‘A community youth centre.’ Alexei shook his head. ‘One of the staff was particularly persistent. I look back and realise how hard he worked even to get me to talk. But the place was heated and relatively safe so it appealed.’
‘You weren’t safe?’ Silly to feel concern now. But Mina hated the idea of a young kid alone and scared.