The Greek's Pregnant Bride
Chapter 56

Chapter 56

He shook his head, distaste pouring off him. ‘She worked so hard but we were so poor she couldn’tafford to pay for my school books. We had food in our belly from Mikolaj—whatever was left over fromthe 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 hischildhood. 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 wonderwhy we were so different, why the clothes my mother and I wore were falling into rags. Then I realisedwhat the difference was: money. They had it and we didn’t. So that became my obsession. Money. Iwas determined to learn everything about it: how to earn it, how to make it grow and how to keep it sothat 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 comenaturally to you?’

She thought back to her own single-sex education and how she had resented the strictness, rebellingby refusing to pay attention or do homework until it had become likely she would fail all her exams. Ifshe’d applied herself a bit more, her grandfather would never have felt the need to employ a privatetutor to help her catch up. Javier would never have entered her life. Who knew how different her lifewould have been if she’d never met him?

Would she have stayed a virgin until the age of twenty-five?

She hadn’t been ready for sex with Javier but with hindsight it was because she’d known, even withoutbeing aware of his wife and children, that a sexual affair between them was wrong. The balance ofpower had been too one-sided, in his favour.

But Javier was her reality. She didn’t know if she would have stayed a virgin until the age of twenty-fiveif she hadn’t met him because that would have been a different Alessandra, not the Alessandra shewas today.

‘I studied every hour I could,’ Christian said, adopting the same quiet tone as she. ‘I must have beenten when I realised education was the only way either I or my mother could escape.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said softly after a long silence had formed between them.

‘For what?’

‘I don’t know.’ She raised her 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 abouthim not having a monopoly on childhood pain and abandonment.

At least she’d always had clean clothes and fresh food. Materially she’d had everything she could havewished for; the things she’d been denied were to stop her being spoiled and not due to a lack offinances.

After the mess that had been her relationship with Javier, her grandfather had used money—herallowance—as another means to control her. No allowance meant no money; no money meant shestayed prisoner in the villa without the means to bring any more shame to the good Mondelli name.

A prisoner?

What a self-absorbed brat she had been.

Christian’s whole life came into sharp focus. No more potted snapshots of her Adonis, the hard workingbut poor scholarship student, the small child sharing a mattress in a cramped attic room with hisharridan of a mother...

Now the snapshots formed a whole picture. Formed the man before her; everything it must have takenfor him to drag himself out of the slum. Two decades of suffering before he’d had the opportunity toshower daily.

What must he think of her, the spoiled little rich kid? She knew she’d never been spoiled but incomparison to Christian she might as well have been Imelda Marcos. So her grandfather had been aworkaholic and happy to pass the actual raising of his granddaughter to the female staff of hishousehold? At least she’d never doubted his love. So he’d cut off her allowance? Oh, boo hoo. Hergrandfather had been teaching her a lesson. Without it she would never have felt compelled to getherself a job, would never have answered the advertisement to be a photographer’s assistant andtaken the first steps on the career she loved.