A Scandal in the Headlines(53)

She looked nothing at all like herself.

And why should you? a caustic voice inside her demanded. Elena Calderon was no more. She was Alessandro’s wife now. Signora Elena Corretti.

She swallowed against the tide of emotion she didn’t dare examine here, and chanced a look in Alessandro’s direction. He was her husband. Her husband.

But he didn’t love her.

Better to deal with the repercussions of that sooner rather than later, she thought, bracing herself. Better to ensure she didn’t fall prey to her own imagination, her own precarious hopes. And what better place to make everything between them perfectly clear than the lounge of a town hall in a sleepy village, fitted with two ugly chairs and a desperate-looking sofa arranged around a cracked wood floor?

Congratulations on your hasty and secretive wedding, Signora Corretti, she mocked herself. No expense or luxury was spared for your happy day!

Alessandro stood near the closed door, on his mobile. The phone had beeped some thirty seconds after they’d signed the register. He’d announced he needed to take the call, and had waved her back into the antechamber she’d used before the ceremony.

She was almost positive she’d seen pity on the mayor’s face before Alessandro had closed the door behind them.

“When do you think we should divorce?” she asked briskly when he ended his call, looking out through the small windows at the Sicilian countryside. Proud mountains with vineyards etched into the lower slopes. Red-roofed houses clinging to green hillsides. Olive groves and ancient ruins. All of it piercingly, hauntingly lovely. There was no reason at all it should have made her chest ache. “Did you have a particular time frame in mind?”

When he didn’t respond, Elena turned away from the window—

And found him staring at her in amazement.

“We have been married for ten minutes, Elena,” he said in a voice that made her skin pull tight. “Possibly fifteen. This conversation seems a trifle premature.”

“This was the only reasonable choice I had, as you pointed out, and a convenient way to fix the Niccolo problem.” She was suddenly too aware of the rings he’d slid onto her finger—a trio of flawless diamonds set in platinum on the drive over, and a diamond-studded platinum band during the ceremony, such as it was. It occurred to her that she was, in fact, deeply furious with him. She’d wanted this to mean something. She’d wanted it to matter. She was an idiot. “Nothing more than that. What does it matter if we discuss it now?”

He went incandescent. She actually saw him catch fire. His dark eyes were ferocious, his mouth flattened, and she was certain she could hear his skin sizzle with the burn of his temper from across the tiny room.

And it didn’t scare her. She welcomed it. It was a happy alternative to the icy cold CEO who’d taken Alessandro’s place since they’d returned to Sicily. Since the paparazzi had found them and plastered their faces across every gossip magazine and website in Europe. Since he’d shocked her with his proposal. He’d been distant. Controlled. He hadn’t laid a finger on her, and there’d been nothing but winter in his dark green eyes.

She preferred this Alessandro. She knew this Alessandro.

No matter how tight and close it felt suddenly, in such a small room, with him blocking the only exit.

“I suggest you drop this subject,” he advised her, hoarse with the force of his temper. There was that glitter of high passion, furious desire, in his too-dark eyes, and she exulted in it. She needed it.

“Oh,” she said brightly, unable to help herself. “Were you thinking an annulment would work better?”

He laughed. It was a hard, male sound, primitive and stirring. It coursed through her, made her shiver with the heat of it. Made her ache. And the look he turned on her then melted her bones.

“I did warn you,” he said.

He reached behind him and locked the door, and Elena felt it like a bullet. Hard and true, straight into her core. He crossed the room in a single stride, hauled her to him and then pulled her down with him as he sat on the sad, old sofa. Then he simply lifted her over his lap.

He hiked her dress up over her hips, ripped her panties out of his way with a casual ferocity that made her deliciously weak, then stroked two long fingers into the melting furnace of her core. Elena gasped his name. He laughed again at the evidence of how much she wanted him, all of her molten desire in his hand. She braced her hands on the smooth lapels of his wedding suit, another stunning work of art in black, and not half as beautiful as that mad hunger that changed his face, made him that much starker. Fiercer.