“You are adorably ignorant of how much my world revolves around you.”
Sometimes Alex wondered what it would have been like to have fallen in love with Mary instead of seeing her as his sister. It wasn’t like he couldn’t have gone that route to protect her instead of the sibling route. They had no actual blood relation and they hadn’t even grown up together.
But he hadn’t jumped for that and not because it would have been even more difficult to keep her out of the limelight as his wife than as his sister either. Plenty of others who were as high profile (or higher) than Alex had been able to marry and keep their spouse from being mobbed by the public. It wasn’t that difficult of a thing to do and yet…
He hadn’t even considered it.
That didn’t mean that she wasn’t the most important person in his life, far from it, it just meant that he didn’t love her that way.
Though, to be honest, Alex wasn’t even certain that he was capable of loving someone in the way that a man loves a woman and a woman loves a man. He’d tried it in the past and it had never ended well. Even in the midst of a marriage, he had been on the outside looking in and he had hated it more than just about anything else.
So when Mary had been handed to him to protect, he’d gone for the sister route instead of the love at first sight route even though he had loved her at first sight.
Still did, even though she was happily married and, somehow, expecting a baby with her husband. Alex wasn’t even jealous of them, if anything he was just as excited as they were for the baby to be born.
He was also trying to find out just how the baby had come to be in existence in the first place as well because if someone was trying to use his sister and her family for something…
Well, let’s just say that he would use his not inconsiderable assets and resources to stop them.
Permanently.
Breathing In 