A Scandal in the Headlines(62)

She felt turned inside out. Rubbed entirely raw. Her parents had done nothing but love her since her return yesterday afternoon. Her mother had wept. Her father had smiled as if she was a blessing from on high. Elena was humbled. Grateful.

And she’d still been unable to sleep, her mind and her body torturing her with memories of Alessandro. Images of Alessandro. All of that heat and light, fire and need.

She’d learned nothing.

The sloping streets and ancient stone stairs that led the way down the hillside were second nature to her. Each house, each alley, each clothesline hanging naked in today’s weather, was like its own separate greeting. This was home. It had always been home. She was made to smell of the sea, the salt and the sun and the bounty they provided. There was no shame in that.

Yet today she felt out of place in a way she never had before.

It will come, she assured herself as she came to the bottom of the steep hill that led into the main square. You’ve been away for a long time.

Everything seemed different in the thick mist. Sounds were muffled, and strange echoes seemed to nip at her heels. She narrowly avoided one of the village’s biggest gossips, darting around the far side of the great statue that sat in the center of the square, and was so busy looking back over her shoulder to be sure she’d escaped that she ran right into someone.

Elena opened her mouth to apologize, but she knew that rock-hard chest. She knew the strong hands that wrapped around her upper arms and righted her.

It seemed to take a thousand years to lift her gaze to his, to confirm what she already knew.

What her body was already celebrating, with an insistent ache in her heart and core alike.

“What are you doing here?” she gasped out.

Alessandro’s wicked brows rose in arrogant amazement.

“You left me.”

“I had to come home,” she blurted out in a rush, the strangest urge to apologize to him, to offer him comfort, working its way through her. Proving, she thought, her terrible weakness. “And what does it matter to you?”

“You left me,” he said again, each word distinct and furious.

Elena ignored the things that clamored in her then, all of that fear and despair that she’d lost him, all of her desperate, foolish love for a man she couldn’t have. Not really. Not the way she wanted him.

“Is this about the land?” she asked baldly. “Because you didn’t have to come all the way here for that. You don’t have to pretend anymore.”

His eyes blazed, so lethally hot she took a step back, and then cursed herself for it. Alessandro was a lot of things, but he wasn’t Niccolo. She knew he would never hurt her—not like that.

“It turns out,” Alessandro bit out, betrayal and accusation in those dark green eyes, “that I am sick and tired of being discarded on my wedding day.”

Elena paled, then reddened.

“Not here,” she managed to get out.

She ducked into one of the ancient passageways that wound around behind a few of the shops and deposited them on a lonely stretch of the rocky cliffs overlooking the small harbor. And then she faced him.

He stood there, dark and furious, dressed in one of those impossibly sleek suits that made him look terrifying and delicious all at once, a symphony of powerful, wealthy male beauty. It reminded her that she was only a village girl in old clothes and messy hair, no doubt smelling again of fish.

“What exactly are you doing, Elena?” he asked, his voice clipped.

“This is where I belong,” she said defiantly. “This is who I am.”

He only watched her, his dark green eyes narrow and fierce.

“I brought you something,” he said after a moment. He reached into an inside pocket of his suit jacket and she was sure, for a dizzy moment, that he was going to pull out those torn panties and then what would she do? But instead, he handed her a thick envelope.

Elena took it, her fingers acting of their own accord, a miserable, sinking sensation washing through her, from her throat to her heart to her belly.

“Is this—?” Her throat was so dry she could hear the words scrape as she formed them. “Are these divorce papers?”

This was what she wanted, she tried to tell herself. This was a good thing. But she wanted only to curl up somewhere and cry.

His hard mouth curved into something far too angry to be a smile.

“It’s a legal document,” he said, his eyes never leaving hers. “It relinquishes any claim I might have had to your family’s land, and hands it back to you.” Elena made a small noise, her fingers clutching almost convulsively at the envelope. “And I suggest you take note of the date. It was signed three days ago.”