A Scandal in the Headlines(23)

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.”