A Scandal in the Headlines(26)

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.”