A Scandal in the Headlines

by Crews Caitlin

  After all, he had more than his share already. It was his birthright.

  He’d spent the bulk of the morning fuming over his voice mail and most of his text and email messages, sending his beleaguered assistant increasingly terse instructions to deal with whatever came up as best he could, and not to bother Alessandro with any of it unless it was an emergency. An objectively dire one. The various pleas and attempts to draw him out from friends and family he deleted without a reply—all except for Santo, who got a terse line indicating that Alessandro was alive, and only because his messages had focused on Alessandro’s well-being instead of the family.

  His goddamned family.

  He wasn’t coming home to sort out the cursed business deal his aborted wedding had left in tatters. He didn’t want to know that his illegitimate half-brother, Angelo, ignored all his life by their father and understandably furious about it, was making his move at last. He wasn’t interested in what the latest Corretti family scandal was now that he’d removed himself. He didn’t want to hear his mother’s pathetic excuses for the way she’d savaged his sister, Rosa, in earshot of most of Palermo society, dropping the truth of her parentage on her like a loud, drunken guillotine. He didn’t care where his runaway bride had gone and he certainly didn’t want to join in the speculation about whether or not his cousin Matteo had gone with her.

  He wanted to be numb. He wanted to encase himself in ice and steel and feel nothing, ever again. No useless sense of duty. No pathetic compulsion to play the rescuer, the hero, for his endlessly needy family members, none of whom ever quite appreciated it. No useless longing for a woman who neither deserved it nor wanted it.

  No wondering what it was in him that was so twisted, so ruined and corrupt and despicable, that the bride he’d carefully arranged and contracted abandoned him at the altar and the beautiful stranger he’d fallen for so disastrously at a glance wanted nothing more than to use him for her own ends.

  He wanted to be numb.

  But if he couldn’t be numb, he decided then, staring down at her luxuriating in all of that sunlight, he might as well explore that darkness inside of him that he’d fought his whole life.

  Elena wanted to play her games with him. Dangerous games, because she thought she was dealing with another brutish thug like her fiancé. Maybe he should give her what she wanted. Maybe he should bring out the whole of his arsenal in return.

  Maybe it was finally time to be who he was: a Corretti, callous and selfish, destined for nothing but depravity from the moment of his birth.

  Just like all the rest of them. Just like the father he’d always despised.

  “I want to be inside you,” Alessandro said casually. He was standing at the windows, his back to her. “Now.”

  Elena froze in her seat. She set her fork down carefully.

  She’d grown used to these long, fraught meals they shared each night, prodding each other for weaknesses. She’d come to enjoy the strange exhilaration she got from matching wits with him, so different from meals with Niccolo—who had done the talking while she’d sat there adoringly, grateful for her good luck.

  She’d grown used to the dark looks he sent her way whenever he saw her, cold condemnation and a banked fury, a far cry from the flat coldness she’d once seen in Niccolo’s eyes, moments before he’d showed her who he really was. She’d told herself she was used to this by now. To Alessandro himself. To all this forced exposure to the man who had chased her through dreams for six long months.

  “I gave in to that urge once already,” she murmured. “And look what’s happened.”

  She hadn’t thought to worry about sex.

  She hadn’t imagined it would be an issue, after that first day. He’d looked at her as if he’d rather die than touch her again, and she’d told herself she was glad of it.

  Of course she was.

  “I might be pregnant,” she reminded him now, though she tried to think of it as little as possible. It was too much to take in. She kept that faintly amused note in her voice. “And we are trapped here, strangers who think the worst of each other. I’ll pass on a reprise, thank you.”

  “This table will do well enough,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, turning so she could see his starkly sensual expression. And that passion in his dark green eyes. Elena’s heart gave a hard kick to her ribs, and she felt much too warm, suddenly. “All you need to do is bend over.”

  The image exploded through her, too vivid, too real. It didn’t take much effort at all to imagine him behind her, deep inside her—

  “You’ve obviously had too much to drink,” she said. She pressed her napkin to her mouth, more to check that she wasn’t trembling than to wipe anything away. She had to stay calm, focused. She had to remember why she was here, why she was doing this.

  “Does it make you feel better to think so?” He smiled, and the heat of it catapulted her back to that night in Rome. That dance. The way he’d looked at her, smiled at her, as if she was precious to him. “I haven’t. But I want you either way.”

  She forced a cool smile, and tried to force the past from her head. “You can’t have me.”

  “Why not?” He looked amused, his face carved in those fiercely sensual, powerfully masculine lines, his dark eyes gleaming. Elena fought to restrain her shivery reaction, to ignore that melting, pulling sensation low in her belly. “You’ve already betrayed your fiancé. What does it matter now how many times you do it?”

  She was shocked by how easily he could hurt her, when he should never have had that kind of power in the first place. She should have been pleased that he hated her so openly, that he disdained her so completely. She’d gone out of her way to make sure he did. Instead, it hurt. It hurt.

  But she couldn’t show him that. She could only show him what he wanted to see—what he already saw. A cold, hard woman. Brazen and base.

  “I don’t like to repeat myself,” she said, holding his gaze. “It’s boring.”

  She expected the lash of his temper, but Alessandro laughed. It made the green in his eyes brighten, and worse, made everything inside of her seem to squeeze tight. Breath, belly, core. Even her traitorous heart.

  “But you’re the one in control, are you not?” he asked, too arrogant, too confident, to believe what he was saying. “Your wish is my command. If you’re bored, you need only demand that I relieve it and I will.” His smile took on that wolfish edge. “I’m very inventive.”

  She had a sinking sensation then, as if she’d somehow strayed into quicksand and was moments away from being sucked under. Think, she ordered herself in a panic. Turn this around!

  “And that’s all it takes?” She arched her brows high in disbelief. “I need only click my fingers and you’ll serve my every whim?”

  “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 curv
e 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 replie
d, 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.