A Scandal in the Headlines(43)

It had been so different, Elena thought now. She smiled to herself. It had felt like—

But she pushed that thought away, afraid to look at it too closely. Her stomach began to ache, and she cursed herself. Things were precarious enough already. There were any number of ways Alessandro could use what she’d told him against her. No need to tangle her emotions any further. No need to make it that much worse.

No need to walk straight into another disaster as blindly as she had the first.

She climbed from the bed and started for the bathroom, aware with each step that she didn’t feel well—as if her body was finally taking all of the past weeks’ excesses out on her. As if it was punishing her. She had a slight headache. Her stomach hurt. Even her breasts ached. And she felt heavy, all the way through. Almost as if—

She stopped in her tracks and, for a moment, was nothing at all but numb. Then she walked into the bathroom, confirmed her suspicion and had only just come back out again and pulled on the first thing she could find—the long-sleeved shirt he’d been wearing the night before, as it happened—when Alessandro walked through the bedroom door.

He had his mobile phone clamped to his ear, a fierce scowl on his beautiful face, and Elena simply stood there, helplessly, and stared. Everything had changed. Again. She didn’t have any idea how this would go, or what might happen next.

And he still made her heart beat faster when he walked into a room. He still made her knees feel weak. All this time, and she hadn’t grown used to him at all. All of these weeks, and if anything, she was even more susceptible to him than she had been at the start.

She didn’t dare think about what that meant, either. She was terribly afraid she already knew.

“I don’t care,” he growled into the phone. He raked an impatient hand through his hair. “I’m running out of ways to tell you that, Mother, and I ran out of patience ten minutes ago. None of this has anything to do with me.”

He hung up, then tossed the phone on the bed. His dark green eyes narrowed when they found hers. He stilled, that restlessness she could see written all over him fading.

“Has something happened?” Elena asked, and she could hear the nerves in her voice. The panic. His gaze sharpened, telling her he did, too.

“Just one more scandal linked to the Corretti name, though this time, happily, not mine,” he said. “Or not entirely mine, though it gives rise to all sorts of speculation I should probably care about.” His focus was on Elena, his dark green eyes speculative as they swept over her face. “Alessia Battaglia is pregnant.”

Elena swallowed. “Oh,” she said.

She wished she wasn’t wearing only his shirt. It was like déjà vu. The last time she’d worn a man’s shirt—But she couldn’t let herself think that way. It would only make this harder.

“Well,” she said lamely. She had to clear her throat. “I … am not.”

For a long moment, there was only the sound of her heartbeat, loud in her ears. And the way he looked at her across the expanse of his bed, that fierce and arrogant face of his unreadable.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

Her throat was dry. “I am.”

She didn’t know what she expected. But it wasn’t the way his face changed, the way his eyes darkened—a brief, searing flash. It wasn’t the way that pierced her, straight to the bone.

Regret.

That was what she saw on his face, in his dark gaze. For a dizzying moment, she couldn’t breathe.

Because she felt it, too, like a newer, deeper ache. As if they’d lost something today. As if they should grieve this instead of celebrate it, and that didn’t make any kind of sense at all.

“All right,” he said then. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”

She nodded, because she didn’t trust her voice.

“We must be lucky,” he said quietly. But his smile was like a ghost, and it hurt her.

It all hurt.

And she knew why, she thought then, in dawning understanding and a surge of fear. This hadn’t been about the games they played, or any of the things she’d been telling herself so fiercely for so long. The lust and the hurt and the wild, uncontrollable passion had been no more than window dressing, and she’d been desperately ignoring what lay beyond all of that since the moment she’d laid eyes on this man in Rome.

Because it shouldn’t have happened like that. It shouldn’t have happened at all. Love at first sight was nonsense; it belonged in poems, songs. Sentimental films. Real people made choices, they didn’t take one look at a stranger on a dance floor and feel the world shift around them, a key turning in a lock.