A Scandal in the Headlines(38)

He ran his free hand down the length of her spine and then back up. Again and again. He found himself murmuring words he didn’t entirely comprehend, half-remembered words from the long-ago nannies who had soothed his nightmares and bandaged his scrapes as a boy. He bent his head down close to hers and rested his cheek on top of her head.

She shook against him, silent sobs rolling hard through her slender body, and he held her. He didn’t think about how little sense this made. He didn’t think about what this told him about himself, or how terrified he should be of this woman and the things she made him feel. And do. He simply held her.

And when she stopped crying and stirred against him, it was much, much harder than it should have been to let her pull away. She stepped out of his arms and dropped his hand, then scrubbed her palms over her face. And then she looked up at him, tearstained and wary with a certain resolve in her brilliant blue eyes, and something flipped over in his chest.

“I’m not a whore,” she said, something naked and urgent moving over her face and through her remarkable eyes as they met his. “I’m not engaged to Niccolo. I ran out on him six months ago after he hit me, and I’ve been hiding from him ever since.”

He only stared at her. The world, this island, his house, even he seemed to explode, devastating and silent, leaving nothing but Elena and the way she looked at him, the faint dampness against his chest where she’d sobbed against him and what she’d said. What it meant.

She was not engaged. She was not a whore. She wasn’t a spy.

It beat in him, louder and louder, drowning out his own heartbeat.

“I’m risking everything I care about to tell you this,” she continued, and he heard the catch in her voice, the tightness. The fear, he thought. She’s afraid. Of me. “The only things I have left. So please …” She choked back a sob and it made him ache. It made him loathe himself anew. “Please, Alessandro. Prove you’re who you say you are.”

“A Corretti?” He hardly recognized his own voice, scratchy and rough, pulled from somewhere so deep in him he hadn’t known he meant to speak.

She crossed her arms, more to hold herself than to hold him off, he thought. She took a deep breath. Then her chin lifted and her blue eyes were brave and somber as they held his, and he felt everything inside of him shift. Then roll.

“Be the man who does the right thing,” she said, her voice quiet. And still it rang in him, through him, like a bell. Like a benediction he couldn’t possibly deserve. “Who does his duty and would again. If that’s who you are, please. Be you.”


“Come,” Alessandro said in a hushed voice Elena had never heard before.

She was so dazed, so hollowed out by what had happened, what she’d done, that she simply followed where he led. He ushered her out onto a small nook of a terrace that jutted out over the water, settling her into the wide, swinging chair that hung there, swaying slightly in the soft breeze.

“Wait here,” he told her, and then walked away.

She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to, she realized. She drew her knees up onto the bright white seat and leaned back. The chair swung, gently. Rocking her. Soothing her the way his hand had, warm and reassuring along her back as she’d cried. Down below, the rocky cliff fell steeply into the jagged rocks, and the sea sparkled and danced in the afternoon sun, as if everything was perfectly fine. As if none of this mattered, not really.

But Elena knew better.

She’d betrayed her family and her village and every last thing she’d clung to across all of these months, and yet somehow she couldn’t seem to do anything but breathe in the crisp air, the scent of sweet flowers and cut grass in the breeze.

Almost as if she really believed she was safe. Almost as if she thought he was, the way she always had. When she suspected the truth was that she was simply broken beyond repair.

Alessandro returned with a damp cloth in his hand and when he squatted down before her his hard face was so serious that it made her chest feel tight. She leaned forward and let him wash the tears from her face. He was extraordinarily gentle, and it swelled in her like pain.

He pulled the cloth away and didn’t move for a moment. He only looked up at her, searching her face. She had no idea what he saw.

“Tell me,” he said.

It was an order as much as it was a request, and she knew she shouldn’t. Her mind raced, turning over possibilities like tavola reale game pieces, looking for some way out of this, some way to fix what she’d done, what she’d said, what she’d confessed….