A Scandal in the Headlines (5 page)

“Of course.” The amusement on his ruthless face did nothing to ease the fierceness of it. And the lie on his lips was laced with laughter. “I am powerless in the face of your machinations, Elena.”

Her pulse was wild in her veins, and she felt like prey—like he was stalking her when he hadn’t moved. He only stood there, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and she felt as if she was running hard and scared with his hot breath
right there
on the back of her neck—

“Somehow,” she managed to say, her voice cool and dry rather than panicked, though it cost her, “I have trouble seeing you as
quite
that submissive.”

“But this is what you want,” he replied in that soft, taunting way, his dark eyes alight. “Isn’t that why we’re here at all? You demanded it. I obeyed.”

Elena had to leave. Now. She had to shut this down before she betrayed herself, before she gave in to the need blazing through her. She would lock herself inside her room, ignore the emptiness and yearning inside of her, and pretend she was locking him out rather than keeping herself in. All she had to do was walk away from him.

She stood in a rush, aware she gave herself away with the speed of it, the total lack of grace. His hard mouth moved into that devastating curve that seemed to curl into the very core of her, making her soften. Ache. She couldn’t trust herself to stay, to try to act her way through this. She wanted to run for the door, but she made herself walk instead. As if she was making a simple choice to leave. As if she didn’t already feel pursued when he still hadn’t moved a muscle.

“I’m not going to chase you through the house, Elena.” His voice slid over her, dark and insinuating. Finding its way into her deepest, blackest, most secret corners, far away from any light. Deep into the places she pretended weren’t there. “Unless you ask nicely.
Is that what you need? Permission to scream
no
at the top of your lungs and know I’ll take you, anyway? No responsibility, no regrets?”

The shudder that worked through her then was fierce and deep, involuntary, and she couldn’t pretend it had anything to do with revulsion. She felt weak. Weak and desperate. She had to stop walking, had to reach out and hold on to the wall near the wide, arching doorway. She had to fight to keep from revealing how tempted she was, how twisted that made her. She had to keep from confirming what he already seemed to know.

“I don’t—” she began desperately, but he sighed impatiently, cutting her off.

“No more lies. Not about this.”

Alessandro was leaning back against one of the windows when she turned to look at him again, but nothing about him was languid. She could see his coiled strength, his seething power. He was dressed all in white tonight, and should have looked relaxed. Casual. But he looked more to her like a warrior king, surveying the field of battle and entirely too confident of his own impending victory.

He smiled again, and she felt it bloom inside of her, almost like pain. That low, impossible almost-pain that never entirely left her and that pulsed now, bright and
demanding and hungry. Between her legs. In the fullness of her breasts. Even behind her eyes.

“I didn’t realize you wanted to play games,” she said stiffly, because she had to say something, and she was rapidly forgetting all the reasons why she couldn’t simply throw herself at him and worry about it later.

“Of course you did.” Laughter lurked in his voice again, gleamed in those dark, knowing eyes. “You want to play them, too.”

“I don’t.” But what if she did? She flushed red hot, imagining.

You are truly shameless
, a cold voice hissed inside her, condemning her anew.

Alessandro only crooked his index finger at her then, ordering her to come to him. To admit the things she wanted—to surrender herself to them. To him.

And she wanted that almost more than she could bear.

“No,” she said too loudly, and she knew she was talking to herself. To remind herself of who she was, before she did something else she’d bitterly regret.

He wasn’t safe, no matter how much that insane part of her insisted otherwise. He wasn’t. And she was too afraid that giving in to him, to this, would make her believe she could trust him with the truth. She couldn’t.

No matter how hard that was to remember.

“Stop pretending, Elena,” he said then, that darker edge in his voice curling around her, drawing her in, calling her out that easily. “You’re halfway to desperate. Up all night, tormented and needy. Longing for more but too afraid to ask for it.”

That wolf’s smile, challenging her. Daring her. Seeing all the things in her she wanted desperately to keep hidden away in the dark. Making her realize that she’d underestimated him, completely. And that he knew that, too.

“I said no,” she managed to get out, but her voice was too thick, and it shook, and his smile only deepened.

“I won’t even make you beg.” He didn’t have to do anything but look at her, predatory and sure, and she wanted everything she couldn’t have, everything she couldn’t risk. She wanted him more than her next breath. “All you have to do is own it. This. Ask and you will receive,
cara
.”

It should have been easy to ignore Alessandro. To shrug off the darkly stirring things he said to her, the fantasies he brought to life within her with so little effort. It should have been simple to concentrate on these weeks of reprieve, and what it meant not to have to look over her shoulder after all these months, not to have to run.

Elena didn’t understand why she couldn’t seem to do it.

“It’s only a matter of time,” he’d said in his devastating way that night, when she’d finally turned to go. “Inevitable.”

“Nothing is inevitable,” she’d bit out over her shoulder, fully aware that he’d been throwing that word back in her face. Remembering exactly when she’d whispered it to him, what she’d felt when she did.

He’d laughed at her. “Keep telling yourself that.”

So she did—fervently and repeatedly—but it didn’t seem to work.

The nights were long and precarious. Each night she lay awake for hours, trying desperately to think of anything but him, and losing herself in need-infused fantasies instead. Or worse, reliving what had already happened.

Every touch. Every sigh. Every telling whisper.

Even if she managed to fall asleep, there was no relief. She would dream only of him and then wake, heart pounding and mouth dry, her body screaming for his touch. Memories of his possession hot and red in her head, branded into her.

The days were no better. No matter what she did, or where she went in his rambling house or the surrounding grounds, he found her. He was always there. Always watching her with those dark, hungry eyes of
his, that wicked smile on his cynical mouth. Always, she understood, a word from her away from catapulting them both straight back into that glorious, terrifying fire that was never quite banked between them.

And all the while, she had to play her role. Cool, sometimes amused, forever teetering on the edge of boredom. The kind of hard, amoral woman Alessandro thought she was. And maybe, she was forced to acknowledge, he wasn’t far off.

She could be pregnant—
pregnant
—and all she thought about was the way he’d touched her. While he—the man who might even now be the father of her child—believed she’d sought him out deliberately for sordid reasons of her own, and kept angling to touch her again, anyway. It was appalling. Heartbreaking. Sickening, even. Yet she had no choice but to keep the charade going.

She tried to give him exactly what he expected.

Give him what he wanted, she reasoned, and—assuming she wasn’t pregnant, as she had to or she’d go mad—when their time was up he’d send her on her way without another thought, Rome nothing but a distant and dismissed memory. That meant that she would be safe from him and the dark menace of the Corretti family. She was gambling that it also meant he wouldn’t bother to use her as any kind of leverage or bartering piece with Niccolo.

But the sick part of her … yearned. No matter what terrible thing came out of her mouth. No matter how much she wished otherwise. It had been hard enough to dance with him, to look at him on that dance floor and
know
him like that. To open up a part of her she’d never known was there, that only he called into being. To feel so safe, so cherished, so perfectly fitted to a complete stranger.

It was worse now. She knew what it was like to have him. She didn’t have to
imagine
, she could
remember
. One taste of him wasn’t enough. And despite what a mess this all was, despite how much messier it could get if she wasn’t careful—she wanted more.

She hated herself for that. It only underscored everything that was wrong with her. Niccolo had been bad enough—but at least he’d fooled her. At least she’d honestly believed he was the man he pretended he was. There was no excuse at all for anything that happened with Alessandro. She’d known better even back in Rome.

She knew better now. But she still couldn’t seem to stop.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said one night at another long and perilous dinner, his dark voice amused as it so often was. “The story of Elena. We’ll endeavor to ignore the sexual tension in the room and you can tell me lies about your idyllic childhood.”

“My childhood really was idyllic,” she replied, moving her perfectly grilled fish around on her plate.

There was still that part of her that wanted her to tell him everything, to trust him. That part of her that viewed his dark strength as a shelter. He made a sound of disbelief, snapping her out of that same old internal battle.

“It was,” she said. “I was loved. I was happy.”

He stared at her as if he couldn’t make sense of her words, and something twisted inside of her. If he was this thrown by the idea of a happy childhood, it spoke volumes about his own, didn’t it?
Don’t make him into some kind of misunderstood hero
, she cautioned herself.
He’s not one
.

And yet her voice was softer when she continued.

“My parents are good people,” she said. It killed her that she had let them down so badly. That she might let them down still further. That she couldn’t answer her mother’s carefully uncritical emails asking when she’d come home the way she should. It made her want to cry, as usual, and she nearly did. “It was a good life.”

“Yet not quite good enough,” he said cynically. “You took to Niccolo Falco’s version of the high life with alacrity.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Elena replied, trying to keep the bite from her voice. Though
she knew she couldn’t defend herself. Not the way she wanted. And certainly not with the truth.

“Money, cars, houses and jewels,” he taunted her, as he had long ago. “They make the transition to the ballrooms of Rome feel a great deal smoother, I imagine.” His cynical mouth quirked in one corner. “All you have to do is sell your soul, isn’t that right?”

“I’m tired of talking about Niccolo,” she said, because she couldn’t argue with him without giving herself away, and the fact that she still wanted to explain this to him, that she still so desperately wanted him to know who she really was, horrified her. She eyed him. “What about you?”

“My childhood was significantly less idyllic.”

He might as well have been an unyielding, forbidding wall as he gazed back at her. And yet she felt that twist inside of her again.

That poor child
, she thought, unable to keep herself from it.
Growing up with those people
.

His eyes narrowed as if he could sense her softening.

“Have we covered enough ground?” he asked, the hint of impatience in his voice, his gaze. “Are you ready to stop playing this game?” His eyes were so dark, so knowing. “I beg of you,” he whispered. But he wasn’t really begging. He wasn’t a man who begged. “Say the word.”

But she couldn’t let herself do that. She might trust him on some primitive level that defied all reason, that she didn’t even understand—but she didn’t trust herself. It was much too risky. She shook her head slowly, not looking away from him.

“Don’t tell me this is your version of misplaced loyalty,” he said, his dark gaze moving over her face. “Once was business, but twice is a betrayal of your beloved Niccolo?”

“Business?” she asked in confusion, but then she remembered. She sighed. “Yes, because I’m spying on you. Over decadent gourmet meals. So far the only thing I’ve discovered, Alessandro, is that you employ a fantastic chef.”

He shook his head, as if she’d disappointed him. “He doesn’t deserve your loyalty. He never did.”

“Enough about Niccolo,” she said, pretending she didn’t feel his disappointment like a blow. Pretending she wasn’t clamoring to share everything with this man who was wise enough to hate Niccolo. She forced a smile, aware that it was brittle. “Why don’t we talk about your fiancée, for a change?”

“What about her?” he asked, as if he’d forgot he ever had a fiancée in the first place. He laughed. “She’s hardly worth mentioning. In truth, she never was.”

“W
HAT A LOVELY
sentiment,” Elena said dryly. “No wonder she left you.”

Something desolate moved over his face then, though he hid it almost the very second she saw it. The lump in her throat stayed where it was.

I hate this
, she thought furiously.
I hate
me
like this
.

“Alessia Battaglia had exactly one promise to keep,” Alessandro said, no sign of any desolation whatsoever in his hard voice, as if she’d imagined it. “Only one. And she not only failed to keep it, she did so in the most public way possible—designed, I can only assume, to cause me the maximum amount of embarrassment professionally and personally. Which she achieved.” His lips twitched. “What is worth mentioning about that?”

“Sometimes people fall out of love,” she offered. She was such a fool. She wanted that bleakness she’d
seen in his eyes to mean something. His dark green gaze was contemplative as he studied her, and it took everything she had not to look away.

“It was a business arrangement, Elena. Love had nothing to do with it.”

An odd sensation worked its way through her then, blooming up from the darkest part of her and uncurling, and it took her long moments to understand that it was a fierce, unwarranted satisfaction. As if the fact he had not loved his fiancée, did not care that she’d left him as much as the fact he’d been left, was not more evidence that he was the worst kind of man—but instead something to celebrate. She despaired of herself.

“And you’re surprised she changed her mind?” she asked. That strange feeling hummed in her, making it hard to sit still, to keep her voice so smooth. “Why would anyone subject themselves to an arranged marriage in this day and age? That sounds like the perfect recipe for a lifetime of misery.”

“As opposed to what?” He laughed. “The great benefits romance brings to the equation? The jealousy, the emotional manipulation, the very real possibility that at any moment, as you say, people could fall out of it? What makes you think that’s the kind of security rational people should build a life on?”

“Because if it’s not entirely rational, at least it’s
honest,” she blurted out before she could think better of it. “It’s real.”

“So is a contract.” His voice was dry. Amused. “Which has the added benefit of being tangible. Inarguably rational. And enforceable by law.”

“Maybe you were no more than collateral damage.” Elena didn’t know why she couldn’t stop. Why did she care why this man’s fiancée had abandoned him? He was Alessandro Corretti. Surely that was reason enough for anyone. “Maybe it wasn’t about you at all.”

“I was the only one standing at the altar,” he said, tilting his head slightly as he gazed at her. “Do you imagine she objected to the priest her father chose? Palermo’s great basilica itself? Hundreds of her closest friends and family members?”

“Maybe—” Elena began.

“I don’t want to speculate about Alessia Battaglia’s tangled, self-serving motives,” he said impatiently. “All that matters are her actions. If you want to psychoanalyze a doomed engagement, why not focus on your own?”

“I don’t want to talk about Niccolo again.” Or that doom he mentioned. Especially not that.

“Then let’s talk about you.” He lounged there so casually, but Elena knew better. He was still picking at her resistance, over platters of grilled fish and bottles of wine. Over flickering candles and glistening
crystal glasses. Over her own objections. “Since you won’t let me do what I want to do.”

She could almost hear the music they’d danced to, lilting somewhere inside of her. Back when he had looked at her as if she was miraculous, not a battle to be won. Back when he had held her close for such a little while and made her name into a song.

“Fine,” she said. Anything to stop the memories, the emotions, that threatened to break her. The lump in her throat returned, and she had to breathe past it. “What do you want to know?”

“The man is a toad.” Flat. Certain. Daring her to argue with his characterization. She didn’t. “Less than a toad. Yet you agreed to marry him, and for all your faults of character, you don’t strike me as the kind of woman you would have to be to overlook such things.” Alessandro shifted in his chair, looking even more relaxed, but Elena knew better. She could sense what roared there beneath his skin, powerful and predatory. She could feel it. “Why did you?”

“Because I love—” She caught herself. Barely. She’d almost said
loved
. “I love him.” She watched his eyes flash, and enjoyed the fact he didn’t like hearing that any more than she liked saying it. “And not because he drove a pretty car or promised me a villa somewhere.” She held his gaze, and told the truth. “He was sweet.”

“Sweet.”
Alessandro looked appalled.

“He told me that once he’d seen me, his life could never be the same,” she said, letting herself remember when Niccolo had been no more than a handsome, smiling stranger on an otherwise wholly familiar street. “He brought me flowers he picked himself from the hills above the village. He begged me to let him take me to dinner, or even simply take a walk with him near the water. It was the easiest thing in the world to fall for him. He was— He’s the most romantic man I’ve ever met.”

“It sounds like a con.”

It wasn’t as if she didn’t agree, but she couldn’t show him that. Or admit how ashamed she was of herself for falling for it, head over heels, so easily. Like the little fish she supposed she had been, reeled right into Niccolo’s net.

She sniffed. “Says the man who thinks a chilly business contract is a solid basis for a marriage.”

“But I am not a toad,” he pointed out, dark amusement lurking in his gaze, in the corner of his mouth. “And she did not agree to marry me because I was
sweet
. She agreed to marry me because her father wished it, and because the life I would have given her was generous and comfortable.” Again, a lift of those sardonic brows. “That is called practicality. Our situations are not at all similar.”

“True.” She aimed her smile at him. “But I don’t expect Niccolo will leave me at the altar, either.”

He stared at her for a long moment, that dark gaze baleful. She shivered, the intensity emanating from him sliding over her skin like a kind of breeze, kicking up goose bumps, though she tried to hide it. Then, not taking his eyes from hers, he threw his napkin on the table and rose.

Liquid and graceful. Powerful and male.

Elena ordered herself to run. But she couldn’t seem to move.

Alessandro rounded the table, and then he was behind her, and she thought the heat that exploded through her then might kill her. It hurt when she breathed. It hurt when she held it instead. His hands came down to rest on her shoulders, light and something like innocuous, so nearly polite, and yet she was sure that he could feel the heat of her skin. The bright hot flame she became whenever he touched her.

Remember
— an urgent voice cried, deep inside her.
Remember—

But he was touching her again, he was finally touching her, and she couldn’t hold on to a single thought but that.

“Fall for me, then,” he said, bending down to speak softly into her ear, his breath tickling her even as it triggered that volcanic need she’d tried too hard to
deny. “I’ll pick you flowers from the meadow if that’s all it takes.”

“Stop it,” she said, but her voice was so insubstantial. Little more than a whisper, and she knew it told him exactly how affected she was. How little resistance she had left.

“I’ll lay you down beneath the moon,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, one clever hand moving beneath her hair to caress the sensitive skin at her nape, and she couldn’t contain her shiver then—couldn’t hide it from him. “And I’ll demonstrate the only kind of love that isn’t a sentimental story. The only kind that’s real.”

He meant sex. She knew he meant sex. And still,
that word
.

That word
with his hands on her.
That word
in his low voice, wreaking its havoc as it sunk its claws into her. As it left deep marks that made a mockery of every lie she’d told herself since he’d found her on that boat. Every lie she’d told herself so desperately since that fateful night in Rome.

“I promise you, Elena,” he said then, quoting Niccolo, wielding those same words like his own weapon—and a far more deadly one. “Your life will never be the same.”

Her heart slammed against her ribs, so hard she worried they might crack. Once. Then again. Elena
was lost. Held securely in his hands and unable to think of a single reason why she should extricate herself. Why she should do anything at all but let herself fall into this magnificent fire and burn herself away until there was nothing left of her but smoke. And him.

His hands dropped to her chair to pull her back from the table, and by the time she stood on her trembling legs, by the time she turned to look at his beautiful face made no less arrogant by the heat stamped across it, she remembered. If not herself, not entirely, than some tiny little spark of self-preservation that reminded her what was at stake. What there was left to lose.

His clever eyes moved over her face, and he frowned, reaching out again to take her upper arms in his hands. His thumbs moved over the skin the sleeveless empire-cut top she wore left bare, sending his personal brand of electricity arrowing straight into her core.

Where she ached. And melted. And ached anew.

“Don’t,” he said, urgency making his voice harsh. “Don’t walk away again.”

“I have to,” she replied, but she couldn’t look away from him. She couldn’t move.

“There’s no one on this island but you and me and the people I pay exorbitantly to keep my secrets,” he said, all temptation and demand, and she could feel
him, feel
this
, feel the dizzying intensity in every cell of her body. In every breath. In the way her heart beat and her pulse pounded. “No one to see what you do. No one to know. No one to contradict you if you lie about it later.”

“I’ll know,” she said quietly.

And knew immediately, when his expression changed, that she’d made a critical mistake. For a moment she didn’t understand, though the air between them seemed to burst into flames. His face lit with a dark, almost savage triumph, and his hard mouth curved.

“Yet we both know where your moral compass points, don’t we?”

“Away from you,” she said hurriedly, but it was too late.

“Another lie is as good a word as any, Elena,” he said then, more wolf in that moment than man. “I accept.”

Alessandro pulled her to him with that ruthless command that undid her—that thrilled her no matter how she wished it didn’t. And her body simply obeyed. She knew she should resist this. She knew she needed to push him away, to wrench herself out of his arms before—

But she didn’t.

She didn’t even try.

He took her mouth, masterful and merciless at once, inevitable, and Elena melted against him, went up on her toes, and met him.

Finally
.

His mouth was on her again, at last, and it wasn’t enough. Her taste flooded him, driving him wild. Her tongue was an exquisite torture against his, her head tilting at the slightest touch of his hand for that perfect, slick fit he craved. He pulled her even closer, bending her back over his arm, kissing her as if both their lives depended on it.

Mine
, he thought, with a ferocity that shook through him and only made him want her that much more.

She was pliant and beautiful, graceful in his arms, her luscious body plastered against him. He could feel her breasts against his chest, her hips pressed to his, and he was fervently grateful she was the sort of woman who wore shoes with wicked heels so gracefully. It made it that much easier to haul the delectable place where her legs met against the hardest part of him, right where he wanted her.

God, how he wanted her.

He lost his head. He forgot what he’d planned, what he’d intended here—he tasted her and the whole world fell away, narrowed down to one specific goal. To
thrust himself inside her, again and again. To make them both shatter into a thousand pieces.

To take them both home.

He reached down and pulled her black top up over those fantastic breasts she never covered with any kind of bra, muttering words he hardly understood in Sicilian as well as Italian. He ran his fingers over her taut nipples, watched her bite her lip against the pleasure of it, her head falling back to give him better access.

But it wasn’t enough, so he backed her up against the table and set her there, leaning down to lick his way from one delicious crest to the other. To lose himself in the softness of her warm skin, the scent of it, and those small, high cries she made when he took a nipple deep into his mouth.

She was gripping the edge of the table, her breath coming in hard, quick bursts, and she was so beautiful he thought he might die if he couldn’t bury himself in her. If he couldn’t feel her tremble all around him, screaming out his name. If he couldn’t drive so deep into her he’d forget all about who he’d once imagined she was. Who she should have been.

Who she wasn’t, damn her
.

He remembered the stark, sensual picture he’d drawn for her at that dinner weeks back and smiled then, against the delicate skin beneath one of her breasts. He straightened, tugged her to her feet and
found himself distracted by the glaze of passion in her bright summer eyes, the color high on her cheeks. He held her face between his hands, his thumbs sweeping from her temples to those elegant cheekbones that drove him mad, and plundered her mouth.

Taking, tasting. Exulting in this, in her. Making her his the only way he could.

He tore his mouth from hers, then spun her around. He felt her tremble against him as he leaned her forward, spreading her before him over the table, using one hand to push a forgotten serving dish, piled high with the remains of fluffy, fragrant rice, out of her way.

“Alessandro …” she whispered as she bent there, offering him the perfect, delectable view. A prayer. A vow. So much more than simply his name.