A Scandal in the Headlines(29)

Desire coiled within him again, and he rubbed his hands over his face as if that might make sense of this hunger. Nothing eased it. Not even the one thing that should have.

He wondered, then, if it would ever leave him. If he would ever be free of it. Of her.

Is that what you want? a voice queried from a place inside of him he preferred to ignore, and he shoved it away.

“Elena.”

She stirred then, her eyes fluttering open, and Alessandro watched as she slowly peeled herself up from the table, then reached down to pull her panties and her trousers into place, all without looking his way. All a bit shaky, a bit too careful, as if she wasn’t sure her legs would hold beneath her. Her hair was a wanton tangle around her face but she ignored it, not even pushing it out of her way as she buttoned up her denim trousers.

So he did it for her, tucking a silken blond sheaf behind one ear.

“Are you all right?”

Her gaze flicked to his, then away.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was rough and she coughed. “Of course.”

But there was a defenseless cast to her jaw as she said it, and he reached over to tilt up her chin, forcing her to look at him. Her blue eyes were stormy, and there was something somehow bruised about the way she stared back at him. He felt cold.

“Are you?” he asked again, his tone serious. Gruff.

She knocked his hand away. He let her.

“Please don’t patronize me.” She looked around as if in search of something, but only hugged herself instead. As if, he thought, she was very small. The cold in him grew wider, deeper. “I said I was fine.”

He studied her, battling the strangest urge to pull her into his arms, to hold her against him. To warm them both. It was ridiculous.

And then he did it anyway, not understanding himself at all.

She fit beneath his chin and securely against his chest, and he couldn’t have said what he felt then. It didn’t make sense. He didn’t recognize it—or himself. And yet he held her, he listened to her breathe, and he hated it when she pulled away from him.

“Stop this,” she said in a low voice, her gaze dark and troubled. “I don’t need your backhanded form of comfort.”

He didn’t understand any of this. Why was he having this conversation in the first place? He didn’t tolerate scenes like this. He avoided even the faintest hint of what he saw swimming there in all of that summer blue. So why was he still standing here?

“Elena,” he began.

She blew out a breath. “I asked you to stop,” she whispered.

Alessandro felt profoundly off balance. Uneven down into his soul. He scowled.

“So I can take you any way I please,” he said in a less pleasant voice than he might have, had he been able to make this strange feeling disappear. Had any of this made sense to him. “I can bend you over a table and make you scream and shake, and you’ll submit to that happily. Greedily.”

Her face paled, but that didn’t stop him. And whatever was happening inside of him shifted, turned furious. At himself, at her—he couldn’t tell the difference. He just needed this feeling to stop. Now.

“There is nothing I couldn’t make you beg me to do to you, is there?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Nothing at all.”

“Does this make you feel better?” she asked, lifting her head, her eyes flashing.

“I’m not the one who has convenient pretensions of modesty, Elena,” he bit out. “But only when it suits.”

He watched her shake that off, a quick jerk of her smooth shoulders, and wondered that it even hurt her.

“I know you don’t respect me, Alessandro,” she said, and her voice wasn’t angry. It was something else. Something that worked in him like shame, oily and thick. “I know exactly what you think of me. You’ve told me repeatedly. You don’t have to act it out again now.”

“You don’t respect yourself!” he threw at her. How did she dare?

“But you should.” She shook her head, then he saw to his horror that her eyes were full. Though she didn’t cry. She only looked at him with tears bright in her gaze and he felt small. Mean. “Shouldn’t you? What kind of man does the things you do with me, revels in them, and yet has no respect for me at all?”

“Elena,” he began, but there was too much inside of him. It was too big and too dangerously unwieldy, and it had something to do with that way she looked at him. As if she thought he was a better man. That he ought at least to try. And that vulnerability in the way she held herself, as if she knew what he’d long suspected—that, deep down, he wasn’t. And never had been.