A Scandal in the Headlines(37)

She got to her feet then, stiff and jerky, as if she thought she might break apart where she stood. “I would never lower myself to a Corretti scum like you,” she’d hissed at him on that dance floor, and he’d believed her then.

He didn’t know why he wanted so badly not to believe her now.

“Is this what you meant by real, Alessandro?” she asked in a harsh whisper, her bright eyes ablaze. “Are you satisfied?”

“It would be so much easier to simply give in,” he threw at her, his voice unsteady. As if he’d lost control of himself, which was unacceptable, but he couldn’t stop. “To simply be the man everyone thinks I am, anyway, no matter what I do. Even you, who shouldn’t dare to throw a single stone my way for fear of what I could throw back at you. Even you.”

She sucked in a breath, as if he really had thrown something at her.

“Because there could be no one lower in all of Italy.” Something in the way she said it ripped at him, or maybe that was the way she looked at him, as if he’d finally managed to crush her—and he detested himself anew. “Not one person lower than me. Yet you can’t keep your hands off me, can you?”

“You know exactly what kind of man Niccolo is,” he said then, because he couldn’t handle what her voice did to him. What that look in her eyes made him feel. “You’re here at his bidding, to do whatever dirty work he requires. And it’s certainly been dirty, hasn’t it? But you sneer at my name?”

“I am here,” she threw back at him, her voice still so ragged and her eyes so dark, too dark, “until we discover whether or not our recklessness results in a pregnancy neither one of us wants. We risked bringing a brand-new life into all of this bitterness and hate. That’s the kind of people we are, Alessandro.”

“Why don’t you teach me,” he said then, his gaze on hers, hot and hurt and too many other things he couldn’t define and wasn’t sure he wanted to know, though he could feel them all battering at him.

“Teach you what? Manners? I think we’re past that.”

“You’re the expert on men like me,” he said, fascinated despite himself when she blanched at the way he said that. “You know all about it, apparently. Teach me what that means. Show me. Help me be as bad as you think I am already.”

Something shifted in the air between them. In her gaze. The way her blue eyes shone with unshed misery, and the way she suddenly looked so small then, so vulnerable. So shattered.

And all he felt was … raw. Raw and ruined, all the way through to his bones.

Or maybe that was the way she looked at him.

“Let me guess what makes me the perfect teacher,” she said, her voice cracking.

“You tell me, Elena,” he said, his own voice a low, dark growl. “You’re the one in bed with the enemy.”

And she swayed then, as if he’d punched her hard in the gut. He felt as if he had, a kind of hot, bitter shame pouring over him, almost drowning him. But she steadied herself, and one hand crept over her heart, as if, he realized dimly, it ached. As if it ached straight up through her ribs, enough for her to press against it from above.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

Her voice was thick and unsteady, and he had the impression she didn’t see him at all, though she stared right at him. Her eyes were wide and slicked with pain, and he watched in a kind of helpless horror as they finally overflowed.

“I don’t …” She shook, and she wept, and it tore him apart. And then her uneven whisper smashed all the pieces. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Alessandro reached for her then because he didn’t know what else to do. Elena threw her free hand out to stop him, to warn him. Maybe even to hit him, he thought—and he’d deserve it if she did. He did yet another thing he couldn’t understand, reaching out and lacing his fingers through hers, the way he had on that dance floor long ago. She shuddered, then drew in a harsh breath.

But she didn’t pull away, and something in him, hard and desperate, eased.

“I can’t breathe anymore,” she whispered, those tears tracking down her soft cheeks. He felt the tremor in her hand, saw it shiver over her skin. “I can’t breathe—”

He pulled her to him, cradling her against his chest as if she was made of glass, the need to hold her roaring in him, loud and imperative and impossible to ignore. She bowed her head into him and he felt the hand she’d held against her own heart ball into a fist against the wall of his chest.