Alexei shrugged. As usual, his shirt hung open over his broad chest and she watched the play of his muscles. It made her slightly dizzy. She wanted to plant her palm there, where his heart beat.
‘It wasn’t a good neighbourhood. There were gangs.’ His tone was dismissive. ‘And it didn’t matter where we moved, the heavies collecting the money we owed always found us.’
We owed.Not his mother, or even his stepfather.
We.
Alexei had assumed responsibility for something that shouldn’t have been his concern. He should have been running around a school playground without a care.
A lump rose in Mina’s throat and she swallowed hard. Why was she so sentimental? Millions of children lived in harsh conditions they didn’t deserve, some in her own country. She and Ghizlan were particularly active in supporting disadvantaged children. But why did Alexei’s past hurts specifically unsettle her?
Because you care for him.
You care too much.
‘They had an old computer. One of the guys taught me and I discovered an aptitude for it.’
‘You make it sound easy. You don’t go from being a kid with a second-hand computer to launching a megasuccessful software and communications company.’
‘True. But I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow description.’
Mina opened her mouth to protest. She was fascinated. She wanted to hear more about Alexei. Anything about him. But she sensed he’d had enough of the subject.
‘How did they meet, your parents?’
His winged eyebrows lifted, giving him the look of a particularly rakish fallen angel, especially with that tousled hair threatening to flop over his forehead.
Fire ripped through her.
‘Don’t move a muscle.’ She flipped a page and started drawing, trying to get the haughty angles, the stark beauty of spectacular cheekbones and determined jaw, the sensuality of his mouth.
As she worked, darting looks at him and then back to the paper, something changed. His expression grew less arrogant and more focused, the gleam in his eyes brighter. Mina became more than ever aware of Alexei’s scent—cedar, citrus and male, with an undertone of musk. She inhaled deeply, her hand moving furiously across the paper. If Ghizlan could bottle that scent at her perfumery, the enterprise would make a fortune.
‘Finished?’ Those malachite eyes glinted more brightly than any faceted gem.
‘Almost.’ Mina read his impatience, sensed his arousal and strove for something to distract him. ‘You didn’t tell me how your parents met.’
‘At the Olympics. He was an athlete and she was a physio travelling with the Russian team. They fell in love and eloped the day before the closing ceremony.’
‘Wow! That’s fast. They must have been head over heels.’
‘They were. Completely and utterly in love. When my father died, my mother was devastated. It was almost too hard for her to go on.’ His mouth twisted and Mina felt a thud of pain in her middle. ‘That’s why she remarried. She couldn’t face the loneliness.’
Mina watched emotions play across Alexei’s face. He looked angry, as if he blamed his mother. She’d made his life miserable with her rotten choice of second husband.
Yet things were rarely black and white. ‘Maybe she wanted someone to take your father’s place, for your sake. So you’d have a dad.’
The spasm of pain across his face lasted only a moment but it told her so much.
He felt guilty about his mother’s choice?
And maybe for blaming her?
‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘How did your parents meet?’
Mina felt a flutter in her chest. A battle between innate honesty and her need to cover for Carissa. Mina was increasingly uncomfortable with these lies. Surely Carissa was safe. The elopement was supposed to happen this weekend. She wanted so badly to blurt the truth but couldn’t risk it.
Because you don’t want this to end, do you? You want to stay here with Alexei and dream of impossible things.