‘Yes, here. My mother was a childhood friend of his. When we were kicked out of our old place, Mikolaj and his wife gave us the attic room.’
She looked back at him, her pretty brows drawing together. ‘One room? For the both of you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That must have been hard.’
‘You have no idea,’ he said, more harshly than he’d intended. In those days, Mikolaj had been barely scraping a living for himself and his own family. If not for his incredibly generous heart, Christian and his mother would have lived on the streets. The attic room was given to them for free in exchange for his mother working in the kitchen. She’d been paid a share of the tips. It was all Mikolaj had been able to afford.
When Christian had made his first significant trade, a deal that had earned him a hundred thousand dollars, he’d sent Mikolaj a cheque for half the sum.
Looking back on those early years, it hadn’t been the poverty that had been the hardest to bear. The biggest cross had been living with his mother and her poisonous tongue.
Theos, but he didn’t want to imagine Alessandra losing the spark that made her such a passionate, vivacious person and turning into one of the Furies, as his mother had. He wouldn’t wish it on anyone but especially not her.
‘Do you ever see your father?’
‘No. He left when I was a baby.’
She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her hands on her chin. ‘That must have been hard too.’
‘It was hard for my mother, not me. I don’t remember him.’ He no longer wanted to remember him, although he had as a child, had been desperate to know any detail his mother could spare. As all her details had been disparaging at best, nothing concrete, he’d let his mind fly free to construct him. His father was a superhero who had gone to save a galaxy far, far away—unable to send his mother any money by dint of being in a galaxy far, far away. When that galaxy was saved, he would swoop back to Athens, and the little attic room his wife and son shared, and rescue them.
That fantasy sustained him for a few years until around the age of seven, when he’d overheard a conversation between Mikolaj and his eldest son. They’d been talking about Elena, Christian’s mother.
‘She can’t help the way she is,’ Mikolaj had said. ‘When Stratos left her for that woman, it poisoned her. He packed his stuff and left her with no money when the boy was only six months old.’
Christian had tuned the rest of the conversation out. It had been enough to convince him all his mother’s disparaging comments about his father were true. From that moment on, he’d no longer fantasised about his father. Stratos Markos was never going to swoop in to save them. That would be Christian’s job.
‘HAVE YOU EVER tried to find your father?’ Alessandra asked a short while later, her eyes filled with curiosity.
‘What for?’ he dismissed. ‘Why would I want to involve myself with a man who abandoned his wife and child?’
‘I get that,’ she said, pulling a face.
He closed his eyes. ‘Your father is an alcoholic and a gambler. He was incapable of looking after you. He didn’t abandon you. He’s always been a fixture in your life. There’s a difference.’
She laughed contemptuously. ‘I thought you knew my background. My father dumped me on his father before I was a year old. Rocco took care of me from the moment I left hospital. My father wanted nothing to do with me—he still doesn’t. He’s never been there, not for any of the significant events in my life. My first Holy Communion, my Confirmation, the time I represented Milan in the under tens’ gymnastics,’ she said, ticking the events off on her fingers. ‘He wasn’t at any of them. The few times he’s bothered to join us as a family, he won’t speak to me. He’s never looked at me. I was there, I was present and still he didn’t want me. So don’t try and make out I can’t understand what it was like for you, growing up without a father, because my father abandoned me too, and, worst of all, he abandoned Rocco.’
He and Alessandra were like two peas but from pods grown in very different gardens, Christian realised. They’d both been abandoned by the people who should have been there for them. For good or ill, it had shaped them both. The distrust and avoidance of love and relationships.
They were more alike than he’d ever suspected.
Colour had heightened across Alessandra’s high cheekbones, her eyes ablaze with furious passion, the honey-brown a darkened swirl. He’d seen that swirl before, when she’d been pressed against the wall of her apartment.
Theos, she had felt unbelievably good in his arms, as if her contours had been shaped especially for him.
He regarded her carefully, pushing away thoughts of her naked: the way she had wrapped those lithe legs around him and clung to him, as if trying to burrow under his skin. Those same legs were pressed against his at that very moment…
The V of her dress had dipped, exposing the top of her golden cleavage, below which lay breasts that had become plumper since their time together.
What did they look like now? Did they still taste so sweet…?
This had to stop. Right now. Imagining them in bed together was what had got him into all this trouble in the first place, sitting in that Milanese restaurant, fascinated by her plump lips, imagining them over his…
He would not touch her again until they were legally man and wife. He’d given her his word. He might have screwed things up but he was determined to do the right thing from here on in. On paper, his track record with women was less than complimentary. Given that and her own history, he could understand why Alessandra would be untrusting. It was down to him to prove himself to her.
Theoretically, it should be easy. Christian loved sex—what red-blooded man didn’t?—but he’d never allowed his libido to run his life. With Alessandra… The longer she kept those gorgeous doe eyes fixed on him, the more his blood swirled with the need to consume her again. Everything about her spelled temptation, from the glossy chestnut hair that begged to have his fingers run through it to the toned golden arms his hands itched to trace. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, drink or eat, he would watch those beautiful lips and ache to press his own to them, to feel the heat of her breath merge with his.
Soon. Soon she would be his again.
‘At least you had Rocco,’ he said softly, thinking he would have given anything for a sibling when he’d been a child. It hadn’t been until he’d met his fellow Columbia Four that he’d realised what had been missing in his life: true friendship.
‘Emotionally, I had Rocco,’ she conceded. ‘But he’s seven years older than me. By the time I was eleven he was at university, thousands of miles away. My grandfather loved me but he had no experience of raising girls and preferred to leave me in the hands of the household staff.’
‘Our lives have been very different,’ he said, choosing his words with care. ‘It’s pointless comparing them. You have lived yours and I have lived mine.’
‘How has it been different?’ she pressed, leaning forward.
‘It just was.’
‘But how?’ A troubled look flitted over her face. ‘Christian, we are marrying in five days. I don’t want to marry a stranger.’
He reached for his wine and took a swallow. ‘You, agapi mou, come from a world of glamour and money. You have no comprehension what it was like for us. We were so poor that for a whole year