Alessia (Casella Cousins #4) - Kathryn Shay Page 0,22

Alessia? You knew he was out of your league right from the beginning.

But damn it. He’d pursued her, inviting himself to the wedding. Accepting an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner.

Yeah, but he told you he couldn’t get serious with anybody because he was still grieving.

He freaking didn’t sound like he was grieving in the sexy banter with Jane Carlin.

She sat there a long time, thinking about her life. Luckily, Billy had taken out a big insurance policy when they got married, so she had enough to pay off the house and banked the rest to live on. But it had been so hard for her to raise her family without him. She’d had to quit her job as a teacher’s aide, too, to take care of the twins. Depression haunted her for a long time, then she was just sad. But she made it through all that. And now, she was a strong woman who wasn’t going to dissolve into a puddle of tears because the man she had a crush on was dating someone else.

After a stop at the ladies’ room, she headed to class. But when she got there, she found Derek waiting outside.

He gave her that big, sexy grin. “Hello, there.”

“Hi, Derek.” Something made her add, “Did you have a good weekend?”

“It was a little boring. You?”

“I had fun at the twins’ ice-skating party. Did you have a nice Saturday?”

“Um,” he frowned. “I just told you it was boring.”

“Yeah, you told me a lot of things.” She made a show of checking her watch. “We’d better get inside.”

“Alessia…”

But she was on her way inside.

The final lesson of Interpersonal Communication was more of a wrap up than anything else. The teacher asked them to record the top two things they’d learned and how they would translate into the classroom.

Alessia wrote: How to listen better. It related to classroom by teaching kids how to listen better. She used as an example the talk on listening with the fast speaker.

Second was group work—the students themselves worked a lot in small groups. And from participating, they learned how groups worked and how to facilitate one. Eventually, she’d teach the kids the rules of group work. She cited the eraser lesson where, in order to speak, the student had to have possession of the eraser. He or she was the only one who spoke. When another student wanted to add to the discussion, that person had to summarize what the previous speaker said before he or she got the eraser and stated her point.

She put her pen down just as the teacher called for a full class discussion. “Who would like to go first?”

Alessia raised her hand. She stated her examples. “How many of you put down one or two of what Alessia did?”

About a quarter of the students.

“All right, let’s hear some more.”

But Alessia didn’t listen to them. She was incredibly distracted by the fact that Derek stared at her for almost the whole class period.

* * *

Derek had to end the relationship tonight, even if it killed him. So, he waited for her to come out of class. When she did, he grasped her by the arm and said, “Let’s go get coffee.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You have to. It’s important.”

She conceded without argument and when they settled into a booth in the café, he sat across from her. Instead of drinking the coffee he’d gotten, though, he took her hands in his. She was trembling and he didn’t know why. “I have to tell you something.”

“If it’s about your pillow talk and your dates with Jane Carlin, I already know.”

“What?”

“Before class, I went to hand in my schedule for next semester and the door was ajar.”

Goddamn it, he thought it was closed.

“I’m sorry you heard that. But it’s true. I’ve decided to see Jane, too.”

“And sleep with her?”

“Maybe.”

Alessia’s face paled and those huge dark eyes got bleak. “Why her and not me?”

The truth might help here. “Because I can’t keep it casual with you. I’m starting to care too much about you. So, I thought if I dated someone else, my feelings for you might diminish.”

“Derek, I care about you, too.” Her voice was so sad, and he wished instead she’d get angry. “I care about you more than you know.”

“I sensed that. But Alessia, I can’t fall in love with you after Linda’s only been gone eight months.”

She glanced down and she took a deep breath. “I said I’d respect that. But Derek, you casually screwing Jane Carlin? That breaks