“Or perhaps that’s how he likes it. Perhaps he enjoys picturing his woman naked and weeping with ecstasy in another man’s arms.” His eyes were like coals, hot and black. “Perhaps this is a game the two of you play, and I am only the latest in a long line of targets. Perhaps you are the bullet he aims at his enemies, then laughs about it later.”
Elena congratulated herself on achieving precisely what she’d set out to achieve, and in spades. She told herself his opinion of her didn’t matter. That the worse it was, the better. The less he thought of her, the less he’d feel compelled to betray her to Niccolo. She took another nonchalant sip of her wine, and ordered herself to enjoy her curiously bitter-tasting triumph.
“Niccolo is a man of many passions,” she said, and was perversely satisfied by the flash of temper in his gaze.
“Never mind what that makes you.”
She glared at him, determined not to let him see he’d landed a blow. She reminded herself that she could only be used as a bargaining chip if he believed she had some worth.
“Are you calling me a whore?” she asked softly. This is good, she assured herself. This is what you want.
But even the air seemed painful, shattering all around her. As if it was as broken as she felt.
“Is this some kind of twisted retribution for Rome?” he asked after long moments passed, no hint of green in those dark eyes of his.
“I’m not the one who started this,” Elena threw at him before she had time to consider it. Not that he was the first man to think she was a whore, not that Niccolo hadn’t covered the same ground extensively—but somehow, this didn’t feel anything like the triumph it should have been. It hurt. “I was perfectly happy on that boat. But you had to sweep in and ruin everything, the same way you did—”
She cut herself off, appalled at what she’d nearly said. Her heart was rioting in her chest, and she was afraid to look at him—afraid of what she’d see. Or what he would.
“By all means,” he invited her, his voice silk and stone. “Finish what you were saying. What else did I ruin?”
She would never know how she pulled herself together then, enough to look at him with clear eyes and something like a smile on her mouth.
“That was the first ball I’d ever attended, my first night in Rome,” she said, light and something like airy, daring him to refute her. “I felt like a princess. And you ruined it.”
“You have no comprehension whatsoever of the damage you do, do you?” He shook his head. “You’re like an earthquake, leaving nothing but rubble in your wake.”
It’s like he knows, a little voice whispered, directly into that dark place inside of her where she hated herself the most. Like he knows what you nearly let happen.
She set her glass back down on the table with a sharp click. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I would have thought that much was clear,” he replied, a self-mocking curve to that hard mouth she knew too well now. Far too well. “If nothing else. I want you, Elena. Then. Now. Still. God help us both.”
Elena clenched her hands together in her lap, everything inside of her seeming to squeeze tight and ache. Something deep and heavy sat over the table as the sun disappeared for good, and soft lights came on to illuminate the terrace. She could feel it pressing down on her, into her, and the way he was looking at her didn’t help.
“No clever reply to that?” His voice then was quiet, yet no less lethal, and it sliced into her like a jagged blade. “I don’t know what lies you tell yourself. I can’t imagine. But I know you want me, too.”
She shook her head as if that might clear it, pulling in a breath as if that might help. When she looked at him again, she wasn’t playing her part. She couldn’t.
“I want you,” she said in a low voice, letting all of the ways she loathed herself show, letting it all bleed out between them, letting it poison him, too. “I always have. And I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
She thought he looked shaken then, for the briefest moment, but he blinked it away. And he was too hard again, too fierce. She told herself she’d seen only what she wanted to see. He sat forward, those dark, cruel eyes fixed on her, and she reminded herself that nothing shook this man. Nothing could. Especially not minor little earthquakes like her.
“Congratulations, Elena,” he said, his voice a sardonic lash. “I believe that’s the first honest thing you’ve said to me since you told me your name.”
She had to wrench her gaze away from his then, while she ordered herself to stay calm. To tamp down the chaotic emotions that surged inside of her, taking her over, making her want nothing more than to sob—once again—for something she could never have. Something she never should have wanted in the first place.
Unbidden, images of what they’d done together, here on this very same terrace, skated through her mind. His mouth, those hands. The wild heat of him, his impossible strength and his ruthless, intense possession—
Something occurred to her then, slamming through her as hard and as vicious as if he’d punched her in the gut. He might as well have. It couldn’t have been worse.
She had been on birth control pills throughout her relationship with Niccolo, but the past six months had been so hectic. She’d run away and run out of the pills, and she hadn’t wanted to leave any kind of record of where she’d been—so no doctors. She hadn’t imagined it would be an issue. And then, today, she’d simply forgotten she wasn’t protected.
She’d forgotten.
“We didn’t use anything,” she gasped out, so appalled she could hardly get the words past her lips. She felt numb with horror.
Alessandro went still. Too still. And for the first time in their brief, impossible acquaintance, she couldn’t read a thing in the narrow, considering gaze he aimed at her. She could only see the darkness.
“I’m clean,” he said. Cool and concise. And nothing more.
And the caustic slap of that helped her, strangely. It reminded her who she was, what she was doing here. Why she’d decided to give in to her desire for him in the first place.
“You think I’m a liar and I know very well you are,” she said, trying for a calm tone. “You’ll excuse me if I have no particular reason to believe you.”
Temper streaked across that arrogant face of his. “You know I’m a liar, do you?” His deceptively gentle tone made her skin prickle. “And how exactly do you know that?”
She laughed, deliberately callous. “Because I know your name.”
A deep blackness flashed through his dark green eyes and over his face then, old and resigned, with the faint hint of some kind of pain, and Elena fought off a sharp stab of regret. She shouldn’t care if she hurt this man’s feelings. He certainly didn’t care if he hurt hers. So why couldn’t she stave off the bizarre urge to apologize? To trust him the way that insane part of her urged her to do?
But even as she opened her mouth to do exactly that, she stopped herself. Because their carelessness had changed everything. She knew enough about him to know that he would never send her back to Niccolo if he thought she might be carrying his baby. Not a proud man like Alessandro. Not when the blood between the Falcos and the Correttis had been notoriously bad for generations.
Which meant, after all of this, she really was as safe as she’d always felt with him.
It should have felt something more than hollow.
But she had to keep going no matter how it felt. She had to push this to its logical extreme. This was her chance to stay hidden away in a place Niccolo could never find her. In a place he’d never dream or dare to look.
“I could be pregnant,” she said, steeling herself to the look on his face then, to her own intense horror at what she was doing. But she had no other option. There was so little time left, and she couldn’t let Niccolo find her. She would do anything to keep that from happening, even this.
“I’m familiar with the risks,” Alessandro bit out, temper still dark on his face, in his eyes, shading his
firm mouth. “Why the hell aren’t you protected?”
Elena eyed him across the table. “I wasn’t aware that the sole responsibility for protection fell to me. Were you not equally involved?”
He muttered a harsh, Sicilian word beneath his breath, and she was perfectly happy she couldn’t understand the dialect even after her time there.
She reached out to one of the platters, scooping up some of the olive tapenade with a piece of the fragrant bread and settling back to nibble at it as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
“It will be fine, I’m sure,” she said. She met his gaze and allowed herself a callous smirk. “Niccolo will never know the difference.”
Alessandro actually jerked in his chair. His face went white.
“Over my dead body will you pass off a child of mine as his,” he said hoarsely, so furious he nearly lit up the night with it. “Over my dead body, Elena—or yours.”
She smiled. It didn’t matter that he looked at her as if she revolted him completely. It didn’t matter that she hated herself, that she thought she might be sick from this terrible manipulation. It didn’t even matter that she really might be pregnant, which she couldn’t let herself consider. It only mattered that she kept herself safe, one way or another, for this little while longer. Whatever the cost.
And the truth was, she knew somehow Alessandro would never hurt her. Hate her, perhaps, but never hurt her, and after all these months that was the same thing as safe. And it was a far better bargain than being with a man like Niccolo, who had pretended to love her and would likely put her in the hospital if he caught up with her.
“Then we’ll count a month from today,” she said smoothly, as if she’d never had any doubt that it would end this way. That she would get what she wanted. “Plus an extra ten days or so, as these things are so inexact. And we’ll see if any dead bodies are necessary, won’t we?”
His jaw was tight and hard, his gaze like bullets. “Forty days. On my island. Alone. With me.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and she made herself look back at him, shameless and terrible, the woman he’d always believed she was and far worse than he’d imagined. This was her protection. This brazen, horrible creature she’d become, this calculated act. This was how she’d save herself, and the things she held dear.
“Or I could text you,” she offered.
His face was drawn, that serious mouth grim. And his eyes were like the night around them, haunted and destroyed. This was what she’d done. This was what security looked like.
This was one more thing she’d have to live with when all of this was done.
“Just remember,” he said, threat and promise laced through that low voice, bright in his dark eyes. “You asked for this.”
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS WORSE now that he knew, Alessandro thought days later.
Worse now that he’d touched her, tasted her, held her. Lost himself inside her. There was no unknowing her exquisite heat, her lithe body wrapped around his as if she’d been created for that alone. For him. There was no forgetting it.
Alessandro didn’t understand how he could know what he knew and still want her. How she could have used their carelessness as leverage, making him wonder if it had been carelessness on her part at all—and yet, he still wanted her.
He sickened himself.
“You don’t need to look at me like that,” she’d said the other morning out by the pool, not looking up from the glossy English magazine he assumed one of his unfailingly efficient staff had provided for her. Better to focus on that than what she looked like in a scalding red bikini hardly big enough to lick over the curves it displayed. Better to ignore how much he wanted to lick those curves himself. “I’m aware of what you think of me. The dark and terrible glare is overkill.”
“This glare is the only thing between you and my temper,” he’d replied, making no attempt to cushion her from the thrust of that temper in his voice. “I’d be more grateful for it, were I you.”
“And what will you do if you lose it?” Elena had asked, sounding bored. She’d angled a look at him then over the rims of her dark glasses. “Hate me even more? By all means. Try.”
It had taken everything he had not to cross over to her then and there and teach her exactly where his temper would lead. Exactly where it would take them both. The hot glory of the way they could burn each other alive. Only the fact that he wanted it too badly, and was furious at himself for that shocking deficiency in his character, kept him from it.
Alessandro stood up on one of the terraces now, looking out over the sweep of land that made up the rest of the island behind his house. On the far side of the tennis court was the small meadow that ran down to the rocky shore, late-spring grasses and early-summer flowers preening beneath the June sun. Scrappy pines and elegant palm trees scraped the sky. Stout fruit trees displayed their wares—lemons and oranges and leafy almonds. Seagulls floated in the wind, calling out their lonely little songs. And in the center of all that natural beauty was Elena.
Elena. Always Elena.
He’d been so furious that first night he was glad she’d removed herself shortly after dropping her little bombshell about her possible pregnancy—and her intention to stay here, with him. He’d drunk his way into what passed for sleep and had woken the next morning determined to regain the upper hand he never should have yielded in the first place.
She wanted to stay on his island to further some twisted agenda of her own? She wanted to play this game of consequences with him? Va bene. Then she would have to deal with what she’d put into action. And she’d have to face him while she did it.
“I’ll expect you at dinner,” he’d told her that first morning. “Every night.”
She’d been walking into the cheerful breakfast room then, its floor-to-ceiling glass windows pulled back to let the morning in. She’d hardly looked at him as she’d helped herself to the carafe of the strong Indonesian coffee he preferred to the more traditional, milky cappuccinos.
“Your expectations are your own, Alessandro,” she’d said almost sweetly when she’d turned back from the simple, wood-carved sideboard to face him, balancing her coffee cup in her hands.
She’d worn a huge, shapeless sundress, swaddling herself in cheery turquoise from her neck to her toes, and topped off with one of those flimsy, gauzy wrap things that served no discernible purpose at all but to conceal her figure.
He’d liked the idea that she’d felt she had to hide herself from him. That he’d got at least that far beneath her treacherous skin, that he hadn’t been the only one feeling battered that morning.
“If you want to hold me captive on my own island for forty days, that’s the price.”
“The price is too high.”
He’d smiled. “You really won’t like my alternate plan. Trust me.”
“I told you I’d be happy to go my merry way and let you know what happens,” she’d replied, her expression cool but her blue eyes a shade darker than usual. “You were the one who started ranting on about dead bodies. I don’t see why I should have to subject myself to more of the same over dinner.”
“Afraid you won’t be able to control yourself?” he’d taunted her. “Will I be forced to fend off your advances over pasta alla Norma, Elena? Defend what remains of my virtue over the soup?”
Her blue eyes had blazed. “Unlikely.”
“Then I fail to see the problem,” he’d said, still smiling, though his gaze had been a challenge and demand on hers.
Her mouth had curved slightly then, that cool slap of a smile he’d already come to loathe.
“Also unlikely,” she’d replied.
He’d lounged there in his chair and looked at her for a moment, enjoying himself despite the pounding in his head, the stark disillusionment in his heart. Despite what he knew about her now. Despite his own weakness for her that even her distasteful manipulations couldn’t erase.
“I warned you,” he’d said softly. Deliber
ately. “You wanted this.”
“I wanted—” But she’d thought better of whatever she’d been about to say, and had pressed her lips together.
“Be careful what you wish for next, cara,” he’d advised her silkily. “You might get that, too.”
Alessandro moved farther out on the terrace now, frowning down at her. That exchange had been days ago. He’d spent a good hour this morning working out his weakness in his pool, swimming lap after lap and still not managing to shift this thing off him that made him want her like this. That made him hunger for her no matter how little he liked her.
That made him long and yearn and wish, like he was someone else entirely.
Or as if she was.
She sat out in his sweet-smelling meadow on a bright orange blanket, her eyes closed and her head tipped back, soaking in the sunshine like some kind of flower. Like something utterly innocent, clean and pure. His mouth twisted. She wore a short, flirty dress in a pale yellow color that left her golden-skinned arms and legs bare, then tucked in at her delectable waist to highlight the unmistakable elegance of her lean, slender form.
He let his gaze trace the beautiful lines of her face, that perfectly lush mouth and the loose waves of the blond hair that she hadn’t pulled back again since that first night. It danced around her in the ocean breeze, the color of country butter with hints of white-blond, as well, and he hated that she could be so pretty, so effortlessly lovely, when he knew the sordid truth about her.
She was engaged to Niccolo Falco, and she’d slept with him, anyway.
He couldn’t understand why that alone wasn’t the end of this pitched battle inside of him. Why that simple fact didn’t end this need for her that still burned him up and kept him from his sleep. It should have been all he needed to dismiss her from his thoughts entirely. He was not the kind of man who enjoyed poaching, unlike his cousin Matteo. He got no pleasure from finding himself in the middle of other people’s relationships. Life was complicated enough, he’d always thought, and his own parents’ squalid legacy had seemed to confirm it. Why cause himself more trouble?
A Scandal in the Headlines Page 5
