26. ALEX
26
ALEX
W hen I was with Charlotte, every fiber of my being relaxed. I was always so uptight, so strained, so worried about what the next step should be, what the last step would cause. With her, all that fell away, and for ages I’d always felt like I’d been drowning, only now finally able to break the surface and breathe.
We lay on her bed, naked.
She wasn’t shy in front of me anymore.
And she had no reason to ever be shy—she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Not just on the outside but on the inside, too.
She was sweet and kind and caring, but she was also weird in the cutest way, quirky as fuck, and I couldn’t get enough of her.
After a while of lying together, I’d gotten up from the bed to clean myself up and get rid of the condom.
I hadn’t used one at the lighthouse. I should have, but the moment had been so perfect and she’d said it was fine. It would probably have been fine now, too, but I would always rather be safe than sorry.
I wasn’t cut out to be a father. I couldn’t even run a company without the investors getting upset and threatening to pull out. How could I raise a child?
Besides, the background I had, the bloodline, the awful people I’d originated from… no way in hell was I passing that on.
“Are you okay?” Charlotte asked when I climbed onto her bed again.
“I’m better than I’ve been in a long time,” I said with a grin.
She blushed lightly. I loved it when she blushed. She didn’t seem to know how absolutely exotic she was, and complicated always took her by surprise.
I took her hand and interlinked our fingers. Her hands were slim, her fingers long and slender. They were so delicate and small compared to my large, thick hands.
She was my opposite in almost every way possible—petite when I was large and muscular, gentle when I was gruff, kind when I was curt.
Easygoing when I got worked up so easily.
Perfect when I had been found wanting.
“I don’t know how you do it,” I said, still playing with her fingers.
“What?”
“Just… be. You’re always so unapologetically yourself.”
She considered it. “I don’t have a whole bunch of people I need to answer to.”
I shook my head. “It’s more than that. I struggle with control.”
She frowned lightly, and I let go of her hand, reaching for her face instead. I traced my thumb along one eyebrow that punctuated her confused expression.
“What do you mean, you struggle with control?”
“I always feel like I should be in control, and when I’m not… it terrifies me.”
I hadn’t ever said those words out loud. I wasn’t even sure why I was saying them now. They were true, of course, but to admit to something like that…
But Charlotte wasn’t the type of woman to judge. Maybe that was why I felt like I could tell her anything.
“I’m worried about work,” I continued. “About the future and what it will hold. I keep trying my best to keep a handle on things, to go in a certain direction, to make life work. But I always feel like just when I think I’ve got one thing under control, something else goes wrong. It’s like…” I glanced at her, trying to find the right words.
“It’s like trying to wrestle an octopus into a mayonnaise jar.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened for a moment and she laughed. It was such a beautiful sound.
“That sounds rough. Really, really rough.”
I sighed. “You have no idea.”
Charlotte took my hand and pressed her lips to my fingers. Her lips were soft, and her amber eyes locked on mine.
“I know it’s not always easy being you,” she said. “I know you always have eyes on you and that makes life a lot harder to figure out. You can’t just fall and learn from it when everyone is watching.”
“Yeah.” She summed up my life so perfectly.
“But I’ll always be here, okay?”
I looked at her, and her eyes were serious.
“I know it’s tough, but it helps to have someone in your corner, and I’ll always be here, cheering you on. I’ll celebrate your successes with you and listen to you when you need to cry on my shoulder about something you didn’t manage to figure out right away. And then I’ll remind you that it’s okay—we get to try again.”
“God, you’re incredible,” I breathed.
I pulled her closer, and she pressed her body against mine. Although we were both naked, it had nothing to do with sex. This was just about me and her being as close as two people could possibly be.
I’d never had someone like Charlotte. Every woman who’d ever wanted to be with me had wanted something from me. Being with me had never been for me , but for what they could get out of it.
Charlotte looked like she really cared about who I was as a person and not what she could get out of it… she didn’t give a shit what I had.
It was an unfamiliar feeling to be wanted completely and wholly for who I was.
“Do you think I’m controlling?” I asked.
“What?”
“Do you think that I’m demanding? Controlling? Like you’re not allowed to just be yourself around me?”
I was more worried about the reaction to that question than I should have been.
“Of course not,” she said. “Where would I even get that from?”
I lay back and looked up at the ceiling. Charlotte lay on her side, her fingers interlinked with mine, our hands on my chest.
“Women always say that. They say I’m too controlling, expecting too much, and I’m too involved in my career.”
“I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Charlotte said.
I glanced at her.
“I mean, I get it,” she added. “I’m pretty involved in my career, too. If you don’t hold on to what you believe in, you’ve got nothing.”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah. That’s true. And I know what it’s like to have nothing.”
She frowned at me again, that same confusion that made her so adorable it made my heart ache.
“I’m not really a Blackwood, you know.”
Charlotte stayed silent, letting me speak.
“All four of us are adopted.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You can’t tell?”
“Well, no…” She considered it. “I’ve never met your brothers or anything, but I’ve seen pictures. I guess I just figured your family has a really, really good gene pool.”
I laughed, and it was a release of tension.
“My parents couldn’t have children,” I said, the laughter fading again. “They adopted us one by one, saving us from the homes we’d grown up in. The home where I’d started had been…” I hesitated. “Abusive.”
Charlotte’s intake of breath was very quiet, but I didn’t miss it.
“My mom and dad, the two wonderful people who took me in, are really great. They made me feel like a part of the family from day one, gave me the Blackwood name, and since then the Blackwood legacy, the company, all of it was supposed to come to me and to the others. My DNA had never had anything to do with it.”
“That’s so special,” Charlotte said.
I nodded. “Yeah, it is. And most of the time I can believe it. I’m a Blackwood. I am the CEO of a huge company, one of four who will carry on the legacy… but that part scares me.”
“Why?”
My deepest, darkest secrets were coming out now—things I’d never even thought about saying out loud.
“I can run a company just fine, and as long as my dad and brothers are on board that’s great. We’re doing the right thing. But when it comes to the other stuff—marriage, children—I don’t know if I can do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how can I be a good father if I’m… this?”
“What’s this ?” Charlotte asked.
I shrugged and chuckled ruefully. “I don’t actually know. I just know that everything my parents are and ever were to us growing up, I can never be. I may have the Blackwood name and the title and the money and the fame, but deep down inside I’m not a Blackwood. I’m the kid who got beaten to a pulp every night because I…” My voice caught in my throat, and I couldn’t say the words. Because I’ve never been good enough.
“Whatever they did to you when you were a kid, they were wrong, Alex,” Charlotte said sternly. “Don’t you dare for one second think any of it was your fault. People who beat children belong in jail, and there’s a very special place reserved in hell for them. How could you have stopped something like that?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. Of course I knew that. Theoretically, the facts made sense. But to feel that was something different.
“I just can’t fill my dad’s shoes,” I said in a hoarse voice. “He was a fantastic role model, the best dad anyone could ever ask for. But I can’t live up to that. I can’t ever be the kind of man he is.”
“No,” Charlotte said and it stung. “You can’t ever be him because, Alex… you’re you . Do you know what I see when I look at you?”
I shook my head, the sting wearing off again. She hadn’t meant to agree with me about the skewed vision I had of myself.
“I don’t see a Blackwood when I look at you. I don’t see your money or your company or your popularity. I know that’s what the rest of the world sees but when I look at you, I see a man who cares. I see someone who’s so kind and gentle that when the world got fucked up and hurt you, you shut down to save yourself. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with you . You’re an incredible man, and I will keep telling you that, if that’s what you need to hear, until you see in yourself what I see.”
I looked at Charlotte. She was a vision, an angel sent from the heavens to save me.
“What on earth did I do to deserve you?” I asked.
“Alex, you have no idea how great you are.” She leaned forward and kissed me. “But that’s okay because I’ll just have to remind you until you do.”
“So… speaking of the Blackwoods, we’re having a family barbecue this weekend.”
What the fuck was I doing?
“Do you want to come with me?”
She tilted her head to the side, her hair hanging to the pillow.
“As…?”
“As my date,” I said before I could stop myself. “I think they’ll like you.”
She thought about it. “Do you really want to introduce me to your family?”
I nodded, determined to see this through.
“If it won’t be weird, then sure.”
“It won’t be.” I pulled her closer for a kiss. “You’ll love them, too. Especially my parents. I meant it when I said they’re wonderful people.”
“Okay,” she said with a smile. “I mean, I’m nervous as hell, but if we’re going to really do this, I’m going to have to meet them sooner or later, right? Besides, you already know my brother, so it’s only fair.”
She offered me a cheeky smile but my stomach twisted when I thought about Gabe.
She deserves better than me and you.
That was what he’d said to me when we’d talked about Charlotte, about who she knew and who was worthy to date her.
Maybe I would have been more confident about him knowing about this if I’d thought he was wrong, but a voice at the back of my mind screamed that he was right.
She thought I was such a great guy, and it was amazing to be seen like that when people never usually bothered to look. But she didn’t know me to my very core—not yet. And what if she did get to know me in time and found she didn’t like what she saw after all? What if she realized that deep down, at the depths of my being, I was rotten after all?
No one wanted to hitch their wagon to a falling star. No one wanted to be tethered to a bad apple.
And she deserved so much more than that.
We didn’t talk. We just lay together, skin against skin, kissing, relishing in our closeness.
I knew eventually I would have to get up, get dressed, and leave. But for now, I was going to let the spell that was Charlotte mesmerize me, and I would stay here for as long as I could.
But I was too fucking selfish to push her away, to let her go right now. I needed her, and for a while longer, I would hold on to her before I finally had to set her free.