“You can’t stop looking at her,” Winona said with a small smile. “She’s very beautiful, I know. But it’s more than that. You seem…smitten.”
Alessio stood very still, but his insides were in a state of panic.
“I am not, nor have I ever been, smitten,” he denied with a slow drawl, to convey the ridiculousness of the idea.
Winona lifted her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I know I gave up any right to have an interest in who you date a long time ago,” she said with a twist of her lips. “But Charlotte is…”
He waited, wondering at the tightness in his gut.
“She’s very special to me. To us.” Her brows drew together. “You know how your brother feels about her. I would hope…” the words trailed off into nothing, as Winona sought the right words, and Alessio, though he had an idea what was coming, did nothing to help her out.
Winona sighed. “Please, don’t do anything stupid, darling.”
“Such as?”
Winona waved her hands around, as if she could pluck the right words from thin air.
“Such as seducing her to hurt my half-brother?” Alessio prompted after a few moments had passed.
Winona’s skin paled. “I’m sure you’d never dream—,”
“It occurred to me,” Alessio contradicted with a lift of his shoulders, his temper rising. “But in the end, Charlotte’s appeal goes way beyond Caleb’s delusional fantasies.”
Winona closed her eyes and drew in a breath, taking a moment to steady her nerves.
“So, youareseeing her?”
It was as though Alessio was being detached from himself, one part pulled from the other, so he saw and heard the conversation but almost from across the room. He knew he should deny it, but the lie felt beneath him somehow, beneath what he and Charlotte were, even when he had promised her discretion.
At best, he could say nothing. “That’s personal,” he supplied, finally, aware it might as well have been a confession.
“Alessio, listen to me,” she said, moving closer, talking in a soft voice, but with a degree of urgency. “Charlotte isn’t—I know you’re—,”
“Yes, mother?” He asked when she floundered once more.
“Charlotte isn’t like you. She isn’t like the women you usually date. She’s gentle and innocent and sweet and inexperienced. She’s…”
“Too good for me?” He prompted with a strange ache in the pit of his gut.
“Of course, that’s not what I mean!” Winona insisted quickly. “She’s not right for you, and you’re not—I don’t think you’re right for her,” she said, finally.
“But Caleb is?”
Winona’s eyes scrunched closed, her hands clasping in front of her stomach. “Don’t do that,” she said with a shake of her head. “Don’t make this a competition between him and you.”
“Isn’t everything?” Alessio pushed.
“This is about Charlotte,” Winona quietly returned to the topic at hand. “I know she seems very confident and in control, but she’s had a lot of things happen in her life, difficult events that she’s had to work past to get over. She’s pulled herself up by her bootstraps; I admire her hugely. She’s smart, incredibly hard-working, and her dedication to Dash is second to none. I don’t want her to get hurt, that’s all.”
“And you presume that not only are we seeing each other, I’m bound to hurt her?” He said, the ache in his gut spreading through his body.
“You aren’t looking for any kind of permanence, especially, I think, with someone like Charlotte.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Am I wrong?”
Years of conditioning, of training, of hard wiring his brain to avoid commitment, love and the inevitable hurt that came from surrendering yourself to another, came to the fore now.