Page 104 of Arianna

I look through the letters and notice she painted and drew on each envelope.

This is her.

This is who my sister is.

A ray of sunshine.

The thought of the pain I might have caused written on these letters cripples me. I can't do it.

I am not strong enough.

“Ma!” Ella singsongs, bringing me back and away from the painful thoughts. Placing the letters aside, I rise from the couch and move towards where she’s happily clapping her hands, jumping on her baby swing. I smile through the pain in my heart when I see her making grabby hands at me. I used to correct her when she called me mom, but I stopped when her eyes teared up. I can't handle tears, especially from this little girl who owns me wholeheartedly.

I don’t know where the hell her real mother is, but I am all she’s got. God help her soul. A mother’s burden is another woman’s blessing. Is that how the saying goes? Whatever, you get what I mean.

I love Ella as if she were my own, and I don’t have the heart to refuse her when she calls out to mom because if that is how she sees me, then that is what I will be to her.

Whatever she needs, I will be.

I take her out of the swing and hug her to my chest. “You got bored of the ugly little pig, huh?”

“Cubcak!” She tilts her head to the left and smiles sheepishly at me. She means cupcakes. The one she helped Benjamin bake last night. She made more of a mess than help, not that I would ever tell the little hellion that.

She has her father’s temperament.

Speaking of her father…

He came home late last night, not that I was waiting for him or anything, but like most nights, I couldn’t sleep and heard him pull up. Even in the dark, I could make him out, dressed impeccably in a navy suit. I swear he sensed me looking at him through my bedroom window because one second, he was strolling up the pathway to the main double doors, and the next, he stopped right below my window.

He confuses me, and I am not someone who enjoys not being in control.

With him, I lose all of it.

Control of my emotions and my actions.

However, he does too.

I don’t need life or world experience to understand that he feels it, too, whatever the hell it is that is growing between us.

And after yesterday’s moment of insanity on my part, I understood that it was all his fault.

Yes, I am blaming the man for it all.

He did something to me, and now all I see is him.

When I close my eyes at night, it is his face I see, and when I wake up in the morning, he is there too.

Haunting me.

The beautiful bastard.

Because as many faults as the man has, and he has many, enough to draw up a list, there is also the undoubted fact that he is beautiful in every sense of the word.

Sebastian is so devastatingly gorgeous he tripped up my feet and set my cold heart on fire. Made it burn for the first time in years.

In a way, it never had.

In a way, I am sure no one else ever will.

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