A Scandal in the Headlines (12 page)

“I should have killed him,” Alessandro replied shortly. “I wanted to kill him.”

But he hadn’t.

He hadn’t
.

“I didn’t say he didn’t deserve it,” she replied in that cool way that he still hated, even now. “I only wondered what horrible thing he might have said to tip you over that edge.”

Alessandro eyed her as he stopped at a traffic light. He considered telling her about real edges, and what lay on the other side of them, but refrained. There
would be time enough to introduce her to all the poison and pain that was his birthright, to tell her what had happened back there and what he’d finally rejected once and for all.

“He called you a whore.”

“Ah,” she said. She sat there so elegantly. So calmly. Her hands folded in her lap, her legs neatly crossed. She smiled, and it scraped at him. “So it’s only okay when you do it?”

Alessandro pulled in a breath through his teeth.

“Damn it, Elena,” he began, but she turned to face the front again, and nodded toward the road with every appearance of serenity.

“The light’s changed.”

He swore in Sicilian as well as Italian, and then he drove with more fury than skill through the city, screeching to a halt at the valet in front of the Corretti Media tower.

Elena let herself out of the car before he had the chance to come around and get her, starting toward the building’s entrance as if she didn’t care one way or the other if he followed her. Gritting his teeth, he did.

She said nothing as they walked through the marble lobby. She only slid her dark glasses onto the top of her head and let him guide her into the elevator when it arrived.

“Is there anything else you plan to throw at me
today?” he asked, tamping down on his temper as the doors slid shut. “Do we need to have another discussion like the one we had about divorce?”

Elena stared straight ahead, her gaze fixed on the far wall and the flashing numbers that announced each floor, though a faint flush spread across her cheeks.

“There’s nothing else,” she said. He didn’t recognize that voice she used, the way she held herself. But he knew she was lying. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

“Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?” he asked quietly.

She looked at him then, and her blue eyes were shadowed. Dark.

“No.” There was something there then. Something making her voice catch, her mouth take on that hint of vulnerability that killed him. “I told you.”

“Elena,” he said. “You have to know—”

But his mobile beeped. She blinked, then looked away, and when she glanced at him again her face was that smooth mask. He couldn’t stand it.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” he urged her. “Tell me what happened.”

“You should answer that,” she said, much too calmly, when his phone kept beeping. “I’m sure it’s important.”

He pulled out the phone to look at the screen, and wasn’t surprised at the number he saw flashing there.

“It’s my family,” he started, not knowing how to compress the history of the Corretti feuds into something coherent. Not knowing how he felt about any of it, now that he’d pulled himself back from the abyss that had stalked him all these years. “There are all these divisions, these petty little wars—”

“I read the papers, Alessandro,” she said gently. “I know about your family.” She nodded at his mobile. “You should take the call.”

“I always take the call,” he gritted out. “And it never helps. Whenever there’s a possibility of ending this nonsense, we make sure to destroy it.” He shook his head. “I’m beginning to believe we always will.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and he had the sense she was weighing something behind those stormy eyes he couldn’t read. She reached over and hit one of the elevator buttons, making his main office floor light up.

“Then you should fix it,” she said. She even smiled, and it was almost real. He almost believed she meant it. “Isn’t that what you do?”

“No,” he said shortly, his gaze searching hers. “Obviously not.”

Her eyes were much too dark, and it ate at him. Something flared between them in the small space, a different kind of fire, and he had the awful sense
that he’d already lost her. That she had already disappeared.

But she was right here, he reminded himself sternly. She had married him slightly more than an hour ago. She was his.

“What’s the right thing?” she asked, her voice too quiet. “Do that, even if it hurts. Your family deserves it.”

“And if they don’t?”

After all these bitter years. After all the pain, the blood.

He thought he saw compassion in her gaze, or maybe he only wanted that. Maybe he was simply desperate for something he recognized, something to ease the gnawing sensation inside of him.

The elevator doors slid open, and she looked away, out toward the hushed executive level of Corretti Media.

His phone beeped again. Insistent. Annoying. He heard Giovanni’s voice from the office floor, the valet no doubt having informed him that Alessandro had returned.

“Your family might not deserve it, Alessandro. But you do.”

“Me?” He hardly made a sound. He hardly breathed. “I fear I deserve it least of all.”

The moment stretched between them, taut and shimmering
with all the things he did not, could not, feel, except for her. He said her name again. His favorite incantation. His only remaining prayer.

“Go,” she whispered.

And it wasn’t until the elevator door had closed on her, and he was striding toward his responsibilities the way he always did, that he realized what he’d seen flash in her eyes then was a deep, dark sadness.

Elena took an early-afternoon flight out of Palermo’s Falcone Borcellino Airport, headed for Naples and the car she’d hired for the drive back to her village. She settled into the economy-class seat she’d bought with the money she’d earned waitressing and on Alessandro’s yacht, not the money he—or, more likely, his staff—had left for her in the penthouse in a folder with her name on the front and a selection of credit cards and cash within.

And when the plane took off and soared into the air above Sicily, she didn’t let herself look back.

“Because I can,” he’d said to Niccolo. That was why he’d danced with her. That was why he’d done all of this. Married her. Just as she’d suspected, it was all a game. Because he could.

She hadn’t thought she’d hear him admit it.

And as she’d sat in his car in the sun-drenched village square, twisting all of those diamonds around and
around on her finger, Niccolo’s harsh words circling in her head, she’d had to face the facts she’d been avoiding for far too long.

She’d been so sure that she, Elena Calderon,
deserved
what Niccolo had represented. That she
should
be the one chosen from all the girls in the village to swan off into a posh life, dripping in gowns and villas.

Alessandro had been right to accuse her of that, but wrong about why—and around him it was even worse. He was the most powerful man she’d ever met. His ruthlessness was equal parts intimidating and exciting. He was beautiful and lethal, and he’d wanted her as desperately as she’d wanted him.

Some part of her obviously believed that she deserved no less than the CEO of one of the most successful media corporations in Europe. That she deserved rings made of diamonds, private islands and a three-story penthouse perched over Palermo like an opulent aerie.

How remarkably conceited she was.

She remembered then, as the plane winged across the blue sea, one of the last nights they’d spent on the island. They’d sat together on the beach, watching the sunset. He’d been behind her, letting her sprawl between his legs and against his chest.

He’d played with her hair and she’d watched the sun
sink toward the horizon. She’d felt so filled with hope. So unreasonably optimistic.

Until she’d recalled the last time she’d felt that way.

It had been the night of that fateful charity ball. She’d finished dressing in the new, beautiful gown Niccolo had chosen for her, and she’d been unable to stop staring at herself in the mirror of their hotel suite. She’d looked so glamorous, so sophisticated. And she’d felt the same sense of well-being, of happiness, roll through her.

This is exactly how my life should be
, she’d thought then.

On the beach with Alessandro, she’d shivered.

“What’s the matter?” he’d asked, tugging gently on her hair so she’d look back at him. The reds and golds of the setting sun cast him in bronze, once again like a very old god, perfect and deadly.

“Nothing,” she’d lied, and she’d wanted it to be nothing. Just an odd coincidence. No reason at all for that sudden hollow pit in her stomach.

He’d smiled, and kissed her, then he’d wrapped his arms around her like a man in love and had tucked her under his chin in that way she adored, and she’d known without a shadow of a doubt that it was no coincidence. That it had been a sign, and she’d do well to heed it.

That when the forty days were up she had to leave him.
She had to
.

And she’d gone ahead and married him, anyway.

But then, she thought now, shifting in her narrow seat, every decision she’d made for more than half a year she’d made out of fear.

Fear of what Niccolo would do to her. Fear of her parents’ disappointment. Fear of losing Alessandro—a man who had insulted her upon their first meeting, thought the very worst of her even as he slept with her, and had even married her in undue, secretive haste in a sleepy little village where no one knew him.

Niccolo was a disgusting creep, but he’d had a point.

And the truth was, though she never would have phrased it the way he had, she would always smell of fish and hard, thankless work like the people she came from. No matter what airs she tried to put on, what gowns or jewels she wore, she was a village girl. She had no place with a man like Alessandro.

More than that, he was a Corretti.

Maybe Alessandro really was the man he claimed he was, a man who strove to do what was right no matter what his family name. She thought of that painful conversation in the elevator and she ached—because she wanted so badly to believe him. To believe that the darkness she’d seen in him today was an aberration,
not the true face he’d kept from her the way Niccolo had.

Maybe
.

But she had to accept that it was just as likely that he was exactly who Niccolo had told her he was. Exactly who she’d believed he was.

It was time to go home. It was time to stop playing at games she hardly understood. It was past time.

Elena needed to face up to what she’d done. She needed to beg for her parents’ forgiveness—not for calling off one wedding, not for marrying yet another man who might very well ruin everything, but for not trusting them enough. For not staying and fighting the lies Niccolo had told. For not believing that they could love her enough to overcome their disappointment in her. For running away instead.

It had solved nothing. It had been a selfish, scared act. It had hurt the people who loved her. And it had broken her heart.

The land was out of her hands, she thought now, her eyes easing closed as she accepted that bitter reality. As she acknowledged her own failure. In the end, it was only land. Dirt and stones and trees. It wasn’t worth all of this suffering.

Elena had to believe that.

She closed the window shade beside her so she wouldn’t give in to the temptation to look back, shut her eyes tight and prayed she’d make it home in time.

A
LESSANDRO SAT ALONE
in his office on the executive floor of the Corretti Media tower. His mobile beeped insistently at him, but he ignored it. Just as he ignored the new proposal Giovanni had drafted for him, comprising Alessandro’s bid for the cursed docklands regeneration project. All he needed to do was sign it.

And then, of course, persuade Alessia Battaglia’s grasping, two-faced father to honor the commitment he’d made back when Alessandro and Alessia had agreed to marry.

But instead he’d cleared his office.

The proposal was one more gauntlet thrown down in this same old war. It cut out his cousins completely, following right along in Carlo’s footsteps, adhering to the same script his father and uncle had written in their blood decades back.

Alessandro pushed back from his desk and roamed
restlessly around his great office, a suitable corporate celebration of a man of his wealth, power and position. It was a space meant to intimidate. To assert in no uncertain terms the full weight and heft of Corretti authority.

That goddamned name.

He walked to the windows, and looked out over the city of his birth. Palermo basked before him in the summer sun, corrupt and decaying, beautiful and serene. A mass of contradictions imprinted with the fingerprints of history, this place; streets marked with violence surrounding ancient green squares of breathtaking loveliness. Byzantine churches, leftover city walls, influences ranging from the Phoenicians to the Mafia. And it was inside of him. It was home. Unlike his brother, he had never wanted to live abroad. Sicily sang in his blood. Palermo was the key to who he was.

And who he was, who he had always been, was a Corretti.

But he was no longer sure what that meant.

He could have become his father at any time in all these years. He could have stepped all too easily into Carlo’s shoes today. He’d finally felt what that would mean. He’d wanted it. He’d even thought Niccolo Falco deserved it.

But the woman who’d told him that he deserved what was right, whatever that was, deserved better
than a violent criminal as her husband. And it made him question not only himself, but this whole notion of who the Correttis were. If it was a curse, this name—or it was merely one more choice they all kept making.

Today Alessandro had chosen not to take the easy way, the corrupt and criminal way. His father’s way. He’d spent his life believing he did what was right, that he did his duty.

Now it was time to prove it.

He walked back over to his desk and shoved the proposal out of his way, picking up his mobile to make two calls he should have made years ago. To offer, if not an olive branch, a start. A fresh, clean start.

His duty to his family should be about the living, not the dead. The Corretti name should not be forever synonymous with the actions of those long buried.

Because the past didn’t matter. What mattered were the choices they made now. He, his half-brother, Angelo, and his cousin Matteo shouldn’t have to follow along in the footsteps of monsters, simply because those monsters were their fathers. And they certainly didn’t have to become them.

Surely, he told himself, they could simply … stop this.

His cousin Matteo picked up the phone, and Alessandro braced himself for a necessary, if excruciatingly awkward, conversation.

It was only as dark as they allowed it to be, he thought. And it was long past time for the light.

Elena let herself out of her parents’ house high up on the rocky hillside, and pulled the door closed behind her quietly, so as not to disturb her father’s rest. It was a gray, foggy morning, the air thick and cool against her skin. She pulled her old jacket tighter around her, and set off down the slanting street.

She felt turned inside out. Rubbed entirely raw. Her parents had done nothing but love her since her return yesterday afternoon. Her mother had wept. Her father had smiled as if she was a blessing from on high. Elena was humbled. Grateful.

And she’d still been unable to sleep, her mind and her body torturing her with memories of Alessandro. Images of Alessandro. All of that heat and light, fire and need.

She’d learned nothing.

The sloping streets and ancient stone stairs that led the way down the hillside were second nature to her. Each house, each alley, each clothesline hanging naked in today’s weather, was like its own separate greeting. This was home. It had always been home. She was made to smell of the sea, the salt and the sun and the bounty they provided. There was no shame in that.

Yet today she felt out of place in a way she never had before.

It will come
, she assured herself as she came to the bottom of the steep hill that led into the main square.
You’ve been away for a long time
.

Everything seemed different in the thick mist. Sounds were muffled, and strange echoes seemed to nip at her heels. She narrowly avoided one of the village’s biggest gossips, darting around the far side of the great statue that sat in the center of the square, and was so busy looking back over her shoulder to be sure she’d escaped that she ran right into someone.

Elena opened her mouth to apologize, but she knew that rock-hard chest. She knew the strong hands that wrapped around her upper arms and righted her.

It seemed to take a thousand years to lift her gaze to his, to confirm what she already knew.

What her body was already celebrating, with an insistent ache in her heart and core alike.

“What are you doing here?” she gasped out.

Alessandro’s wicked brows rose in arrogant amazement.

“You left me.”

“I had to come home,” she blurted out in a rush, the strangest urge to apologize to him, to offer him comfort, working its way through her. Proving, she
thought, her terrible weakness. “And what does it matter to you?”

“You left me,”
he said again, each word distinct and furious.

Elena ignored the things that clamored in her then, all of that fear and despair that she’d lost him, all of her desperate, foolish love for a man she couldn’t have. Not really. Not the way she wanted him.

“Is this about the land?” she asked baldly. “Because you didn’t have to come all the way here for that. You don’t have to pretend anymore.”

His eyes blazed, so lethally hot she took a step back, and then cursed herself for it. Alessandro was a lot of things, but he wasn’t Niccolo. She knew he would never hurt her—not like that.

“It turns out,” Alessandro bit out, betrayal and accusation in those dark green eyes, “that I am sick and tired of being discarded on my wedding day.”

Elena paled, then reddened.

“Not here,” she managed to get out.

She ducked into one of the ancient passageways that wound around behind a few of the shops and deposited them on a lonely stretch of the rocky cliffs overlooking the small harbor. And then she faced him.

He stood there, dark and furious, dressed in one of those impossibly sleek suits that made him look terrifying and delicious all at once, a symphony of powerful,
wealthy male beauty. It reminded her that she was only a village girl in old clothes and messy hair, no doubt smelling again of fish.

“What exactly are you doing, Elena?” he asked, his voice clipped.

“This is where I belong,” she said defiantly. “This is who I am.”

He only watched her, his dark green eyes narrow and fierce.

“I brought you something,” he said after a moment. He reached into an inside pocket of his suit jacket and she was sure, for a dizzy moment, that he was going to pull out those torn panties and then what would she do? But instead, he handed her a thick envelope.

Elena took it, her fingers acting of their own accord, a miserable, sinking sensation washing through her, from her throat to her heart to her belly.

“Is this—?” Her throat was so dry she could hear the words scrape as she formed them. “Are these divorce papers?”

This was what she wanted, she tried to tell herself. This was a good thing. But she wanted only to curl up somewhere and cry.

His hard mouth curved into something far too angry to be a smile.

“It’s a legal document,” he said, his eyes never leaving hers. “It relinquishes any claim I might have had
to your family’s land, and hands it back to you.” Elena made a small noise, her fingers clutching almost convulsively at the envelope. “And I suggest you take note of the date. It was signed three days ago.”

Meaning, it took her a confused moment to understand, that he had signed the land over to her before their wedding.

“I don’t …” she whispered.

“In case there is any lingering confusion,” he said in that deadly way of his, “I never wanted the goddamn land. I wanted you.”

Which meant he really was the man she’d wanted him to be—but Elena couldn’t process that. There was nothing but a roar of thunder inside her, loud and overwhelming.

He didn’t love her, she reminded herself then, cutting through all the noise. No matter what kind of man he was.

The envelope shook in her hand. “I don’t know what to say.”

“What a surprise.” His voice was cool, but his eyes burned hot, and she burned with them. “And here I thought your silent defection was so eloquent.”

He reached out for her other hand, taking it in his, and Elena watched in stunned silence—as if it was not her hand at all, as if it was connected to someone
else—as he reached into a different pocket and slid the rings she’d left in the penthouse back onto her finger.

“I don’t want those,” she croaked out. His hand closed around hers then, and she felt that electric charge sizzle all the way up her arm.

“They’re yours,” he bit out, his dark eyes flashing. “Just like the clothes you left behind. If you don’t want them, fine. Sell them. Burn them in your back garden. But I won’t take them back.”

She yanked her hand away, as if her palm was on fire. It felt like it was. It felt like she was.

But Alessandro was a dream and it was time to wake up. She had to stop prostrating herself to impossibilities. She had to stop dreaming about what she thought she ought to have, and concentrate instead on what she did have. And that wasn’t him.

“I appreciate this more than I can say,” she said in a low voice, stepping back from him and tucking the envelope in the pocket of her jacket.

“All I asked was that you have a little faith,” he gritted out. “Was that really so hard, Elena? Did it warrant you running away from me mere hours after our wedding?”

“We have sex,” she said evenly, because it was time to accept reality. “That’s all it is, Alessandro. That’s all it ever was.”

“You’re still such a liar,” he said in a kind of wonder.

“It’s not real,” she continued, determined to make him see reason. “It’s chemical. It fades.”

“We do not
just
have sex,” he said, moving toward her then. “What we have, Elena, is extraordinary. It was there from the moment we met.”

He reached over and slid his palm along her jaw, her cheek, anchoring his fingers in her hair. That same fire roared in her, that easily. That same old connection that had caused all this trouble. And he knew it. His mouth curved.

“You can’t—” she began, but he only pressed a finger over her lips and she subsided, her heart pounding.

“And if you want something real,” he said in a low, stirring voice that did nothing to conceal his temper and seemed to echo in her bones, her veins, her core, making something like shame twist in her, low and deep, “then you’re going to have to treat me like I’m real, too. Not something you have to bend and contort to get around. Just a man, Elena. Nothing more or less than that.”

That thudded into her, hard. She wrenched herself back, away from his touch. She fought for breath.

“You’re a man, yes,” she threw at him. “I know that. But your only form of communication is in bed—”

“Do not,” he interrupted her furiously, “
do not
claim I can’t
communicate
when your version of a discussion
involves sneaking off for a plane ride and two hours’ drive.”

“You don’t understand!” She hardly knew what she was saying. She was panicked. Cornered. “I loved you so much I was willing to do anything. I wrecked my engagement. I betrayed my family. I lost myself—anything to have you. But that’s not love, Alessandro.” She shook her head wildly. Desperately. “It’s an addiction.
It’s just sex
.”

“Thank you,” he said grimly, “for using the past tense. Keep sticking your knife in, Elena. Twist it, why don’t you.”

But she couldn’t stop. It was as if something else had taken control of her.

“We never should have met,” she told him. “We were never
meant
to meet. It was a complete disaster at first sight.”

“It was love at first sight,” Alessandro snapped at her. “And you know it.”

That was like a deep, terrible rip, so far inside her she didn’t think she could survive it.

“Don’t you dare say that!” she hurled at him. “Don’t you dare pretend!”

“I love you!” he thundered, the words ricocheting from the stone walls of the village, the rocky cliffs, the thick fog and the water below.

Or maybe that was only in her head. Maybe that was her heart.

Alessandro found her gaze, held it. Frustration and determination gleamed there in all of that dark green, along with something else.

Sincerity, she thought, from some stunned distance.
He meant it
. She heard a small noise, a kind of gasp, and only dimly realized she’d made it.

“I love you, Elena,” he said, his voice serious. Certain. “Since the moment I saw you, I’ve never been the same.”

“You …” But she couldn’t seem to speak.

“There were no contracts,” he said then, fiercely. “No discussions about assets or settlements. No prenuptial agreement. I simply married you, because I can’t be without you. I can’t let you leave me.” His dark eyes flashed.
“I can’t.”

She tried to say his name, formed the syllables of it with her mouth, but no sound came out.

“I have a great darkness in me,” he said then, intently. “I can’t pretend I don’t. But it’s not going to win. It can’t, if I have you.”