A Scandal in the Headlines(32)

“Do you think this will work, Elena?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “This suspicious capitulation, this attempt at seduction, coming so soon on the heels of your deep concerns about respect?”

“You should ask yourself,” she said, her tone light, though her gaze was hard on his, “why even when I do what you say you want, you accuse me of something. Anything.”

“Because it won’t,” he said, answering his own question. His mouth twisted. “Not the way you imagine. I don’t care how you come to me. I don’t care how I have you. I don’t care at all, so long as I do. Are you prepared for that?”

“I told you,” she said softly. “You win.” She held out her arms like some kind of supplicant, but she smiled like a queen. “To the victor go the spoils—isn’t that what they say?”

“They do.”

He reached over and traced a deceptively lazy trail from the wildly fluttering pulse in her throat to the hollow between her breasts. All of his ruthlessness, all of his simmering power, in that one fingertip.

“You should be afraid of me,” he told her then, and his voice moved in her, threat and promise, sex and demand, and something even darker in his eyes. “Why aren’t you?”

“I’m terrified,” she whispered, but she wasn’t. And she could see he knew it.

“I wish I knew which one of us is the greater fool,” he replied in the same harsh whisper, and it made her throat constrict.

“Someone once told me you should be careful what you wish for, Alessandro,” she said, because it was better to taunt him. It was better to push. Safer. “You just might get it, and then what will you do?”

Her heart beat like a hammer in her chest, in her breasts, between her legs, and she could swear he heard it, too, because his hard mouth curved, not a trace of cynicism to be seen. Only desire.

And that was all the warning she got.

He hauled her up into the air, then threw her over one shoulder like she weighed nothing at all. Like the warrior king she’d imagined him. Claiming her that easily—that completely.

She gasped—but his hand came down on her bottom, his big, hard palm holding her fast and warning her, and she gulped her own words down.

His shoulder was wide and hard against her belly as he moved through the house; his hand was a hot brand of fire against the exposed skin of her behind, the backs of her thighs. She caught a glimpse of herself as they passed a mirror, hanging down his strong back, her hair wild and her face flushed, and it made her breath go shallow. She couldn’t stop trembling, and it still wasn’t fear.

Surrender, she told herself. It’s the only way to save everything else that matters. But what scared her wasn’t the act of surrendering to him. It was that it was so easy. That it felt so good.

Alessandro tossed her down in the center of his bed, and she had only a quick impression of bold colors, dark woods and arching windows wide open to let the night inside. Then her gaze fixed on him, and stayed put. He stood by the side of the wide bed for a moment, looking down at her as she sprawled there, and she couldn’t quite read the intense look in his eyes, on his hard face.

But she trembled. And wanted. And melted into liquid fire.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t ply her with more of those lethal, sensual promises of his, those half terrifying and half intriguing things he’d said he would do to her, with her, if only she’d ask.

He simply took.

And she gloried in that, too.


This is exactly what you wanted, Elena reminded herself a week or so later as she stood in that gorgeous shower room built outside to take in the sunlight and the crisp sea air.

She tilted her face up into the spray, and let the heat work its way into her as she considered her success. Her delicious, dangerous surrender.

There was no part of her body Alessandro hadn’t claimed. No millimeter of skin he hadn’t investigated with his fingers, his mouth, his wicked tongue. He took her with a ferocity and a kind of desperation she understood too well, because it was in her, too, this terrible hunger. It was never satisfied. It never dimmed.

No matter how many times he tore her apart, no matter how often she screamed his name and then held him close as he collapsed against her, it was still there. Moving within her. Ripping her open. Making her fear it would be impossible to ever really leave this man, that this kind of hunger would mark her, scar her….

But she’d returned the favor. She’d thrown herself headfirst into that fire, and who cared what burned? She’d pushed him down on that same dinner table and climbed on top of him, using her mouth and hands to make him groan. She’d learned what made him burst into flame, what made him roll her over and take control, what made him laugh in the dark as they explored each other. She’d teased him, taken him, taunted him—and then slept wrapped up against him, held close against that powerful chest of his, lulled into sleep by the steady beat of his heart.