A Scandal in the Headlines(39)

But it was too late for that.

This was the price of her foolishness, her selfishness. First Niccolo had tricked her, and then this man had hurt her feelings, and she was too weak to withstand either. Now that her tears were dry, now that she could breathe, she could see it all with perfect, horrifying clarity. She hadn’t kept her village or her family’s legacy safe the first time, and given the opportunity to fix that, she’d failed.

Because he thought too little of her, and she couldn’t stand it.

She was more than broken, she thought then. She was a disgrace.

“Tell me what happened to you,” he said then, carefully, again so very gentle that her throat constricted. “Tell me what he did.”

He rose and then settled himself on the other end of the swinging chair, one leg drawn up and the other anchoring them to the floor. His hard mouth was in a firm line as he gazed at her, his dark green eyes grave. For a moment she was thrown back to that ballroom in Rome, when she’d looked up to see a stranger looking at her, exactly like this. As if the whole world hinged on what might happen next.

Which she supposed it had then. Why not again?

“I’m from a long line of very simple fishermen,” she said, pushing past the lump in her throat, concentrating on her hands instead of him. “But my great-grandfather eloped with the daughter of a rich man from Fondi. Her parents begged her to reconsider, but she refused, and they decided it was better their daughter live as a rich fisherman’s wife than a poor one’s. They gave my great-grandfather her dowry. It was substantial.”

She pulled up her knees, then wrapped her arms around her legs, fully aware that this was as close to the fetal position as she could get while sitting up. And she fought off her sense of disloyalty, the fact that she should be protecting this legacy, not handing it over to man who was perfectly capable of destroying it. On a whim.

But she didn’t know what else to do.

“He was a proud man and he didn’t want their money,” she continued, swallowing back the self-recrimination. “But my great-grandmother convinced him to put it toward a big stretch of land along the coast, so her family need not be as dependent on the whims of the sea as the rest of the village. And the land has been handed down ever since, from eldest son to eldest son.”

She looked past him then, out toward the water, as if she could squint hard and see all the way across the waves to the remote little village she was from, tucked up in its rocky hills so far away. She could imagine every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, as if she was standing there now. She knew every house that clung to the hillside, every boat in the harbor. And most of the faces, too.

“It must,” Alessandro said quietly, “be worth a great deal more now than it was then.”

Elena should have thanked him, she thought, her eyes snapping back to his, for reminding her where she was. And who he was. She wasn’t sharing this story with him—she was gambling everything on the slim possibility he was a better man than she thought he was. She nodded.

“It is,” she said. “And my parents had only me.”

“So the land is yours?” he asked, his brows lifting.

“My father is a traditional man,” Elena said, looking down the sweep of her legs, staring at her feet against the bright white cushions. Anywhere but at Alessandro. “When he dies, if I’m not married, the land will be held in trust. Once I marry it will transfer to my husband. If I’m already married when he dies, my husband will get the land on our wedding day.”

“Ah,” Alessandro said, a cynical twist to his lips when she looked at him again. “You must have been Niccolo’s dream come true.”

“Last summer my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor,” she told him, pushing forward because she couldn’t stop now. “There was no possible way to operate.” So matter-of-fact, so clinical. When it had cast her whole world into shadow. It still did. “The doctors said he had a year to live, if he was lucky.”

“A year?” His dark green gaze felt like a touch. The long arm he’d stretched out along the back of the seat moved slightly, as if he meant to reach for her but thought better of it. That shouldn’t have warmed her. “It’s nearly July.”

She hugged herself tighter, guilt and shame and that terrible grief flattening her, making it hard to breathe.

“About a month after we got the news, I was walking home one evening when a handsome stranger approached me, right there in the street,” she said softly.