“Because he’s your half-brother,” she ticked off her fingers. “Because I would never have sex with someone if I was in love with someone else. Because I—,” she shook her head with frustration. “Do you honestly think I’m capable of that?”
“I don’t know you well enough to say.”
“Did you come here to be deliberately insulting?” She demanded, drawing herself up to her full, not particularly impressive height, and staring down her nose at him.
It was bravado. Inside, her heart was hurting.
“No,” he responded quickly. “I came because I needed to see you.”
“Why?” She whispered, conscious of Dash, not wanting him to hear her anger. “To pick a fight? To remind me, yet again, that this is just a casual sex thing? Believe me, I’ve got that message loud and clear.”
“I can’t explain it,” he said with an irritated shake of his head. “But after I have been with my mother and half-brother, what I want most of all is to spend time with you. It’s as though you can push them from my mind. You can make me feel light, where they draw me into the dark. It doesn’t make sense.”
Doesn’t it? She wanted to shout. To Charlotte, it was so obvious why that was: he was starting to feel something for her. Something that went beyond the boundaries they’d both agreed to.
Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this was what he was like with any woman he slept with. Maybe he just needed the distraction of desire and lust to clear his mind.
She didn’t know, and she hated the uncertainty.
“My mother wanted to talk, tonight. After Caleb left. She told me things she’d never said before. Justifications for leaving him. For leaving me.”
Charlotte, still smarting, carefully bundled up her own feelings for a moment, forcing herself to listen, to hear his words, and to offer the comfort he needed. She pushed his coffee cup across the counter and lifted her own to her lips. “And did it help?”
“I’m still angry with her,” he shrugged. “But if what she told me is true, I can see that desperation forced her hand. I wish…if my father were alive, I could ask him.”
“You think she’s lying?”
“It’s hard to trust someone who’s walked out on you,” he pointed out.
“What does your gut tell you?”
He frowned. “My instincts are clouded by the situation,” he said, after a moment. “She’s my mother. I’m predisposed to believe her, even after everything.”
Charlotte reached across the bench and linked their fingers together, lifting his hand towards her lips and kissing it. Their eyes met and something else sparked between them. Not desire, though that was there too, like the inevitable beating of a drum. This was different. She felt the pull towards him, heart to heart, mind to mind, and sighed heavily, because she’d never felt closer to someone who was so determined to be far away.
“She loves you,” Charlotte said after a beat.
“So she says.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“I believe actions speak louder than words,” he said immediately. “And love is the ultimate action.”
“Perhaps she showed her love by leaving you,” Charlotte pondered, unknowingly echoing Winona’s sentiments. “Perhaps there was more going on than you realised.”
Alessio’s eyes narrowed. “Has she spoken to you of that time in her life?”
Charlotte shook her head. “Never.”
“Then how do you know—,”
“I don’tknowanything. But sometimes I deduce…I suspect…when she talks about her lifebefore, I feel a frailty in her. An uncertainty. I wonder if your parents’ marriage was happy.”
“It wasn’t, as it turns out,” Alessio said, drinking his coffee. He spoke in short sentences then, explaining what Winona had told him that night, and Charlotte listened, a sympathetic expression on her face. She nodded slowly.
“Do you think she was suicidal?”
“It’s certainly what she was implying.”