A Scandal in the Headlines(41)

He hadn’t asked her what she was doing. He’d only stared at her, his black eyes flat and mean, and for a terrifying moment Elena hadn’t recognized him.

She’d told herself she was only being fanciful. It had been well after midnight and she hadn’t heard him approach. But he was still her Niccolo, she’d assured herself. He was in love with her, he was going to marry her, and while they were probably going to fight about his privacy and all these emails she couldn’t understand, it would all be fine.

She’d been so sure.

“I asked him what it meant, because I was certain there had to be a reasonable explanation.” She let out a hollow laugh. “He knew we wanted to conserve the land, protect the village. He’d spent hours talking to my father about it. He’d promised.”

“I imagine he did not have a satisfying explanation,” Alessandro said darkly.

“He slapped me.” Such a funny, improbable word to describe it. The shock of the impact first, then the burst of pain. Then she’d hit the cold stone floor, and that had hurt even more.

Alessandro went frighteningly still.

Elena’s heart raced, and she felt sick. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her own legs, and she still wanted to curl up further, disappear. But it didn’t matter if he believed her, she told herself staunchly. Her own parents hadn’t believed her. It only mattered that she told this truth, no matter what he thought of it.

“He slapped me so hard he knocked me down. Off my stool. To the floor.” She made herself look at Alessandro then, burning there in his quiet fury, his dark green eyes brilliant with rage.

Directed at Niccolo, she understood. Not at her. And maybe that was why she told him something she’d never told anyone else. Something she’d never said out loud before.

“He called me a whore,” she told him quietly. “Your whore, in fact.”

Alessandro swore, and his hand twitched along the back of the swing as if he wanted to reach through her memories, through her story, and respond to Niccolo in kind.

“When was this?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“A few days after the ball,” she said. “After …”

“Yes,” he said in a low voice with too many deep currents. “After.”

She let go of her iron grip on her legs before her hands went numb, and used them, shaky and cold, to scrape her hair back from her face.

“He said it was bad enough he had to marry me to get the land, but now he had to do it after I’d made him a laughingstock with his sworn enemy?” She didn’t see the sea in front of her then. She only saw Niccolo’s face, twisted in a rage. She saw the way he’d stood over her, so cruel, so cold, while she lay there too stunned to cry. “He told me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d shut my mouth and be thankful the land was worth more than I was. And then he walked out of the villa and left me there on the floor.”

“Elena.”

But she had to finish. She had to get it out or she never would, and she didn’t want to think about why it was suddenly so important to her that the man she’d never thought she’d see again know every last detail. Every last way she’d made such a fool of herself.

“I left, of course,” she said, ignoring the wobble in her voice and the constriction in her throat. And all of his heat and power beside her. “But I didn’t really mean it. I thought there was some kind of misunderstanding. He couldn’t have meant to hit me, to say those things to me. Maybe he’d been drinking. I went home to my parents, as I always did.” She swallowed, hard. “And they hugged me, and told me that they loved me, and then they told me they blamed themselves that I’d turned out so spoiled, so high-strung. So selfish.”

She shook her head when he started to speak and he stilled, frowning.

“They were so kind. Niccolo was going to be my husband, they told me, and marriages took work. Commitment. I was going to have to grow up and stop telling terrible stories when I didn’t get my way.” She laughed again, and it sounded broken to her own ears. “Niccolo was a good man, they said, and I believed them. I wanted to believe them. It was easier to believe that I’d made up the whole thing than that he was the person I’d seen that night.”

Alessandro shifted, and put his arm around her, then gathered her close to his side. Holding her again. Holding her close, as if he could fight off all her demons that easily. She wondered if he could, if he even wanted to bother, and her eyes slicked over with a glaze of heat.