He shook his head, distaste pouring off him. ‘She worked so hard but we were so poor she couldn’t afford to pay for my school books. We had food in our belly from Mikolaj—whatever was left over from the day before—but there was no money for anything—not birthdays, not Christmas, not anything.’

Alessandra swallowed, the familiar ache forming in her belly that always came when she thought of his childhood. She hated imagining what he’d lived through.

His gaze bore into her. ‘I was obsessed with people like you.’

‘Me?’ she queried faintly.

‘I would see men and women like you, people who were clean and wore beautiful clothes, and wonder why we were so different, why the clothes my mother and I wore were falling into rags. Then I realised what the difference was: money. They had it and we didn’t. So that became my obsession. Money. I was determined to learn everything about it: how to earn it, how to make it grow and how to keep it so that my mother and I too could be clean and wear beautiful clothes.’

‘You certainly realised your dreams,’ she said quietly. ‘Did you have to study hard for it or did it come naturally to you?’

she’d applied herself a bit more, her grandfather would never have felt the need to employ a private tutor to help her

she have stayed a virgin until the age of

hindsight it was because she’d known, even without being aware of his

Javier was her reality. She didn’t know if she would have stayed a virgin until the age of twenty-five if she

tone as she. ‘I must have been ten when I realised education was the only way either

after a long silence had formed between

‘For what?’

shoulders, wishing she could articulate the shame churning within her. She recalled the little rant she’d had in Mikolaj’s taverna when she’d put Christian in his place about him not having a monopoly on

could have wished for; the things she’d

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