chapter FOUR
IT WAS WORSE now that he knew, Alessandro thought days later.
Worse now that he’d touched her, tasted her, held her. Lost himself inside her. There was no unknowing her exquisite heat, her lithe body wrapped around his as if she’d been created for that alone. For him. There was no forgetting it.
Alessandro didn’t understand how he could know what he knew and still want her. How she could have used their carelessness as leverage, making him wonder if it had been carelessness on her part at all—and yet, he still wanted her.
He sickened himself.
“You don’t need to look at me like that,” she’d said the other morning out by the pool, not looking up from the glossy English magazine he assumed one of his unfailingly efficient staff had provided for her. Better to focus on that than what she looked like in a scalding red bikini hardly big enough to lick over the curves it displayed. Better to ignore how much he wanted to lick those curves himself. “I’m aware of what you think of me. The dark and terrible glare is overkill.”
“This glare is the only thing between you and my temper,” he’d replied, making no attempt to cushion her from the thrust of that temper in his voice. “I’d be more grateful for it, were I you.”
“And what will you do if you lose it?” Elena had asked, sounding bored. She’d angled a look at him then over the rims of her dark glasses. “Hate me even more? By all means. Try.”
It had taken everything he had not to cross over to her then and there and teach her exactly where his temper would lead. Exactly where it would take them both. The hot glory of the way they could burn each other alive. Only the fact that he wanted it too badly, and was furious at himself for that shocking deficiency in his character, kept him from it.
Alessandro stood up on one of the terraces now, looking out over the sweep of land that made up the rest of the island behind his house. On the far side of the tennis court was the small meadow that ran down to the rocky shore, late-spring grasses and early-summer flowers preening beneath the June sun. Scrappy pines and elegant palm trees scraped the sky. Stout fruit trees displayed their wares—lemons and oranges and leafy almonds. Seagulls floated in the wind, calling out their lonely little songs. And in the center of all that natural beauty was Elena.
Elena. Always Elena.
He’d been so furious that first night he was glad she’d removed herself shortly after dropping her little bombshell about her possible pregnancy—and her intention to stay here, with him. He’d drunk his way into what passed for sleep and had woken the next morning determined to regain the upper hand he never should have yielded in the first place.
She wanted to stay on his island to further some twisted agenda of her own? She wanted to play this game of consequences with him? Va bene. Then she would have to deal with what she’d put into action. And she’d have to face him while she did it.
“I’ll expect you at dinner,” he’d told her that first morning. “Every night.”
She’d been walking into the cheerful breakfast room then, its floor-to-ceiling glass windows pulled back to let the morning in. She’d hardly looked at him as she’d helped herself to the carafe of the strong Indonesian coffee he preferred to the more traditional, milky cappuccinos.
“Your expectations are your own, Alessandro,” she’d said almost sweetly when she’d turned back from the simple, wood-carved sideboard to face him, balancing her coffee cup in her hands.
She’d worn a huge, shapeless sundress, swaddling herself in cheery turquoise from her neck to her toes, and topped off with one of those flimsy, gauzy wrap things that served no discernible purpose at all but to conceal her figure.
He’d liked the idea that she’d felt she had to hide herself from him. That he’d got at least that far beneath her treacherous skin, that he hadn’t been the only one feeling battered that morning.
“If you want to hold me captive on my own island for forty days, that’s the price.”
“The price is too high.”
He’d smiled. “You really won’t like my alternate plan. Trust me.”
“I told you I’d be happy to go my merry way and let you know what happens,” she’d replied, her expression cool but her blue eyes a shade darker than usual. “You were the one who started ranting on about dead bodies. I don’t see why I should have to subject myself to more of the same over dinner.”
“Afraid you won’t be able to control yourself?” he’d taunted her. “Will I be forced to fend off your advances over pasta alla Norma, Elena? Defend what remains of my virtue over the soup?”
Her blue eyes had blazed. “Unlikely.”
“Then I fail to see the problem,” he’d said, still smiling, though his gaze had been a challenge and demand on hers.
Her mouth had curved slightly then, that cool slap of a smile he’d already come to loathe.
“Also unlikely,” she’d replied.
He’d lounged there in his chair and looked at her for a moment, enjoying himself despite the pounding in his head, the stark disillusionment in his heart. Despite what he knew about her now. Despite his own weakness for her that even her distasteful manipulations couldn’t erase.
“I warned you,” he’d said softly. Deliberately. “You wanted this.”
“I wanted—” But she’d thought better of whatever she’d been about to say, and had pressed her lips together.
“Be careful what you wish for next, cara,” he’d advised her silkily. “You might get that, too.”
Alessandro moved farther out on the terrace now, frowning down at her. That exchange had been days ago. He’d spent a good hour this morning working out his weakness in his pool, swimming lap after lap and still not managing to shift this thing off him that made him want her like this. That made him hunger for her no matter how little he liked her.
That made him long and yearn and wish, like he was someone else entirely.
Or as if she was.
She sat out in his sweet-smelling meadow on a bright orange blanket, her eyes closed and her head tipped back, soaking in the sunshine like some kind of flower. Like something utterly innocent, clean and pure. His mouth twisted. She wore a short, flirty dress in a pale yellow color that left her golden-skinned arms and legs bare, then tucked in at her delectable waist to highlight the unmistakable elegance of her lean, slender form.
He let his gaze trace the beautiful lines of her face, that perfectly lush mouth and the loose waves of the blond hair that she hadn’t pulled back again since that first night. It danced around her in the ocean breeze, the color of country butter with hints of white-blond, as well, and he hated that she could be so pretty, so effortlessly lovely, when he knew the sordid truth about her.
She was engaged to Niccolo Falco, and she’d slept with him, anyway.
He couldn’t understand why that alone wasn’t the end of this pitched battle inside of him. Why that simple fact didn’t end this need for her that still burned him up and kept him from his sleep. It should have been all he needed to dismiss her from his thoughts entirely. He was not the kind of man who enjoyed poaching, unlike his cousin Matteo. He got no pleasure from finding himself in the middle of other people’s relationships. Life was complicated enough, he’d always thought, and his own parents’ squalid legacy had seemed to confirm it. Why cause himself more trouble?
After all, he had more than his share already. It was his birthright.
He’d spent the bulk of the morning fuming over his voice mail and most of his text and email messages, sending his beleaguered assistant increasingly terse instructions to deal with whatever came up as best he could, and not to bother Alessandro with any of it unless it was an emergency. An objectively dire one. The various pleas and attempts to draw him out from friends and family he deleted without a reply—all except for Santo, who got a terse line indicating that Alessandro was alive, and only because his messages had focused on Alessandro’s well-being instead of the family.
His goddamned family.
He wasn’t coming home to sort out the cursed business deal his aborted wedding had left in tatters. He didn’t want to know that his illegitimate half-brother, Angelo, ignored all his life by their father and understandably furious about it, was making his move at last. He wasn’t interested in what the latest Corretti family scandal was now that he’d removed himself. He didn’t want to hear his mother’s pathetic excuses for the way she’d savaged his sister, Rosa, in earshot of most of Palermo society, dropping the truth of her parentage on her like a loud, drunken guillotine. He didn’t care where his runaway bride had gone and he certainly didn’t want to join in the speculation about whether or not his cousin Matteo had gone with her.
He wanted to be numb. He wanted to encase himself in ice and steel and feel nothing, ever again. No useless sense of duty. No pathetic compulsion to play the rescuer, the hero, for his endlessly needy family members, none of whom ever quite appreciated it. No useless longing for a woman who neither deserved it nor wanted it.
No wondering what it was in him that was so twisted, so ruined and corrupt and despicable, that the bride he’d carefully arranged and contracted abandoned him at the altar and the beautiful stranger he’d fallen for so disastrously at a glance wanted nothing more than to use him for her own ends.
He wanted to be numb.
But if he couldn’t be numb, he decided then, staring down at her luxuriating in all of that sunlight, he might as well explore that darkness inside of him that he’d fought his whole life.
Elena wanted to play her games with him. Dangerous games, because she thought she was dealing with another brutish thug like her fiancé. Maybe he should give her what she wanted. Maybe he should bring out the whole of his arsenal in return.
Maybe it was finally time to be who he was: a Corretti, callous and selfish, destined for nothing but depravity from the moment of his birth.
Just like all the rest of them. Just like the father he’d always despised.
“I want to be inside you,” Alessandro said casually. He was standing at the windows, his back to her. “Now.”
Elena froze in her seat. She set her fork down carefully.
She’d grown used to these long, fraught meals they shared each night, prodding each other for weaknesses. She’d come to enjoy the strange exhilaration she got from matching wits with him, so different from meals with Niccolo—who had done the talking while she’d sat there adoringly, grateful for her good luck.
She’d grown used to the dark looks he sent her way whenever he saw her, cold condemnation and a banked fury, a far cry from the flat coldness she’d once seen in Niccolo’s eyes, moments before he’d showed her who he really was. She’d told herself she was used to this by now. To Alessandro himself. To all this forced exposure to the man who had chased her through dreams for six long months.
“I gave in to that urge once already,” she murmured. “And look what’s happened.”
She hadn’t thought to worry about sex.
She hadn’t imagined it would be an issue, after that first day. He’d looked at her as if he’d rather die than touch her again, and she’d told herself she was glad of it.
Of course she was.
“I might be pregnant,” she reminded him now, though she tried to think of it as little as possible. It was too much to take in. She kept that faintly amused note in her voice. “And we are trapped here, strangers who think the worst of each other. I’ll pass on a reprise, thank you.”
“This table will do well enough,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, turning so she could see his starkly sensual expression. And that passion in his dark green eyes. Elena’s heart gave a hard kick to her ribs, and she felt much too warm, suddenly. “All you need to do is bend over.”
The image exploded through her, too vivid, too real. It didn’t take much effort at all to imagine him behind her, deep inside her—
“You’ve obviously had too much to drink,” she said. She pressed her napkin to her mouth, more to check that she wasn’t trembling than to wipe anything away. She had to stay calm, focused. She had to remember why she was here, why she was doing this.
“Does it make you feel better to think so?” He smiled, and the heat of it catapulted her back to that night in Rome. That dance. The way he’d looked at her, smiled at her, as if she was precious to him. “I haven’t. But I want you either way.”
She forced a cool smile, and tried to force the past from her head. “You can’t have me.”
“Why not?” He looked amused, his face carved in those fiercely sensual, powerfully masculine lines, his dark eyes gleaming. Elena fought to restrain her shivery reaction, to ignore that melting, pulling sensation low in her belly. “You’ve already betrayed your fiancé. What does it matter now how many times you do it?”
She was shocked by how easily he could hurt her, when he should never have had that kind of power in the first place. She should have been pleased that he hated her so openly, that he disdained her so completely. She’d gone out of her way to make sure he did. Instead, it hurt. It hurt.
But she couldn’t show him that. She could only show him what he wanted to see—what he already saw. A cold, hard woman. Brazen and base.
“I don’t like to repeat myself,” she said, holding his gaze. “It’s boring.”
She expected the lash of his temper, but Alessandro laughed. It made the green in his eyes brighten, and worse, made everything inside of her seem to squeeze tight. Breath, belly, core. Even her traitorous heart.
“But you’re the one in control, are you not?” he asked, too arrogant, too confident, to believe what he was saying. “Your wish is my command. If you’re bored, you need only demand that I relieve it and I will.” His smile took on that wolfish edge. “I’m very inventive.”
She had a sinking sensation then, as if she’d somehow strayed into quicksand and was moments away from being sucked under. Think, she ordered herself in a panic. Turn this around!
“And that’s all it takes?” She arched her brows high in disbelief. “I need only click my fingers and you’ll serve my every whim?”
“Of course.” The amusement on his ruthless face did nothing to ease the fierceness of it. And the lie on his lips was laced with laughter. “I am powerless in the face of your machinations, Elena.”
Her pulse was wild in her veins, and she felt like prey—like he was stalking her when he hadn’t moved. He only stood there, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, and she felt as if she was running hard and scared with his hot breath right there on the back of her neck—
“Somehow,” she managed to say, her voice cool and dry rather than panicked, though it cost her, “I have trouble seeing you as quite that submissive.”
“But this is what you want,” he replied in that soft, taunting way, his dark eyes alight. “Isn’t that why we’re here at all? You demanded it. I obeyed.”
Elena had to leave. Now. She had to shut this down before she betrayed herself, before she gave in to the need blazing through her. She would lock herself inside her room, ignore the emptiness and yearning inside of her, and pretend she was locking him out rather than keeping herself in. All she had to do was walk away from him.
She stood in a rush, aware she gave herself away with the speed of it, the total lack of grace. His hard mouth moved into that devastating curve that seemed to curl into the very core of her, making her soften. Ache. She couldn’t trust herself to stay, to try to act her way through this. She wanted to run for the door, but she made herself walk instead. As if she was making a simple choice to leave. As if she didn’t already feel pursued when he still hadn’t moved a muscle.
“I’m not going to chase you through the house, Elena.” His voice slid over her, dark and insinuating. Finding its way into her deepest, blackest, most secret corners, far away from any light. Deep into the places she pretended weren’t there. “Unless you ask nicely. Is that what you need? Permission to scream no at the top of your lungs and know I’ll take you, anyway? No responsibility, no regrets?”
The shudder that worked through her then was fierce and deep, involuntary, and she couldn’t pretend it had anything to do with revulsion. She felt weak. Weak and desperate. She had to stop walking, had to reach out and hold on to the wall near the wide, arching doorway. She had to fight to keep from revealing how tempted she was, how twisted that made her. She had to keep from confirming what he already seemed to know.
“I don’t—” she began desperately, but he sighed impatiently, cutting her off.
“No more lies. Not about this.”
Alessandro was leaning back against one of the windows when she turned to look at him again, but nothing about him was languid. She could see his coiled strength, his seething power. He was dressed all in white tonight, and should have looked relaxed. Casual. But he looked more to her like a warrior king, surveying the field of battle and entirely too confident of his own impending victory.
He smiled again, and she felt it bloom inside of her, almost like pain. That low, impossible almost-pain that never entirely left her and that pulsed now, bright and demanding and hungry. Between her legs. In the fullness of her breasts. Even behind her eyes.
“I didn’t realize you wanted to play games,” she said stiffly, because she had to say something, and she was rapidly forgetting all the reasons why she couldn’t simply throw herself at him and worry about it later.
“Of course you did.” Laughter lurked in his voice again, gleamed in those dark, knowing eyes. “You want to play them, too.”
“I don’t.” But what if she did? She flushed red hot, imagining.
You are truly shameless, a cold voice hissed inside her, condemning her anew.
Alessandro only crooked his index finger at her then, ordering her to come to him. To admit the things she wanted—to surrender herself to them. To him.
And she wanted that almost more than she could bear.
“No,” she said too loudly, and she knew she was talking to herself. To remind herself of who she was, before she did something else she’d bitterly regret.
He wasn’t safe, no matter how much that insane part of her insisted otherwise. He wasn’t. And she was too afraid that giving in to him, to this, would make her believe she could trust him with the truth. She couldn’t.
No matter how hard that was to remember.
“Stop pretending, Elena,” he said then, that darker edge in his voice curling around her, drawing her in, calling her out that easily. “You’re halfway to desperate. Up all night, tormented and needy. Longing for more but too afraid to ask for it.”
That wolf’s smile, challenging her. Daring her. Seeing all the things in her she wanted desperately to keep hidden away in the dark. Making her realize that she’d underestimated him, completely. And that he knew that, too.
“I said no,” she managed to get out, but her voice was too thick, and it shook, and his smile only deepened.
“I won’t even make you beg.” He didn’t have to do anything but look at her, predatory and sure, and she wanted everything she couldn’t have, everything she couldn’t risk. She wanted him more than her next breath. “All you have to do is own it. This. Ask and you will receive, cara.”
It should have been easy to ignore Alessandro. To shrug off the darkly stirring things he said to her, the fantasies he brought to life within her with so little effort. It should have been simple to concentrate on these weeks of reprieve, and what it meant not to have to look over her shoulder after all these months, not to have to run.
Elena didn’t understand why she couldn’t seem to do it.
“It’s only a matter of time,” he’d said in his devastating way that night, when she’d finally turned to go. “Inevitable.”
“Nothing is inevitable,” she’d bit out over her shoulder, fully aware that he’d been throwing that word back in her face. Remembering exactly when she’d whispered it to him, what she’d felt when she did.
He’d laughed at her. “Keep telling yourself that.”
So she did—fervently and repeatedly—but it didn’t seem to work.
The nights were long and precarious. Each night she lay awake for hours, trying desperately to think of anything but him, and losing herself in need-infused fantasies instead. Or worse, reliving what had already happened.
Every touch. Every sigh. Every telling whisper.
Even if she managed to fall asleep, there was no relief. She would dream only of him and then wake, heart pounding and mouth dry, her body screaming for his touch. Memories of his possession hot and red in her head, branded into her.
The days were no better. No matter what she did, or where she went in his rambling house or the surrounding grounds, he found her. He was always there. Always watching her with those dark, hungry eyes of his, that wicked smile on his cynical mouth. Always, she understood, a word from her away from catapulting them both straight back into that glorious, terrifying fire that was never quite banked between them.
And all the while, she had to play her role. Cool, sometimes amused, forever teetering on the edge of boredom. The kind of hard, amoral woman Alessandro thought she was. And maybe, she was forced to acknowledge, he wasn’t far off.
She could be pregnant—pregnant—and all she thought about was the way he’d touched her. While he—the man who might even now be the father of her child—believed she’d sought him out deliberately for sordid reasons of her own, and kept angling to touch her again, anyway. It was appalling. Heartbreaking. Sickening, even. Yet she had no choice but to keep the charade going.
She tried to give him exactly what he expected.
Give him what he wanted, she reasoned, and—assuming she wasn’t pregnant, as she had to or she’d go mad—when their time was up he’d send her on her way without another thought, Rome nothing but a distant and dismissed memory. That meant that she would be safe from him and the dark menace of the Corretti family. She was gambling that it also meant he wouldn’t bother to use her as any kind of leverage or bartering piece with Niccolo.
But the sick part of her … yearned. No matter what terrible thing came out of her mouth. No matter how much she wished otherwise. It had been hard enough to dance with him, to look at him on that dance floor and know him like that. To open up a part of her she’d never known was there, that only he called into being. To feel so safe, so cherished, so perfectly fitted to a complete stranger.
It was worse now. She knew what it was like to have him. She didn’t have to imagine, she could remember. One taste of him wasn’t enough. And despite what a mess this all was, despite how much messier it could get if she wasn’t careful—she wanted more.
She hated herself for that. It only underscored everything that was wrong with her. Niccolo had been bad enough—but at least he’d fooled her. At least she’d honestly believed he was the man he pretended he was. There was no excuse at all for anything that happened with Alessandro. She’d known better even back in Rome.
She knew better now. But she still couldn’t seem to stop.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said one night at another long and perilous dinner, his dark voice amused as it so often was. “The story of Elena. We’ll endeavor to ignore the sexual tension in the room and you can tell me lies about your idyllic childhood.”
“My childhood really was idyllic,” she replied, moving her perfectly grilled fish around on her plate.
There was still that part of her that wanted her to tell him everything, to trust him. That part of her that viewed his dark strength as a shelter. He made a sound of disbelief, snapping her out of that same old internal battle.
“It was,” she said. “I was loved. I was happy.”
He stared at her as if he couldn’t make sense of her words, and something twisted inside of her. If he was this thrown by the idea of a happy childhood, it spoke volumes about his own, didn’t it? Don’t make him into some kind of misunderstood hero, she cautioned herself. He’s not one.
And yet her voice was softer when she continued.
“My parents are good people,” she said. It killed her that she had let them down so badly. That she might let them down still further. That she couldn’t answer her mother’s carefully uncritical emails asking when she’d come home the way she should. It made her want to cry, as usual, and she nearly did. “It was a good life.”
“Yet not quite good enough,” he said cynically. “You took to Niccolo Falco’s version of the high life with alacrity.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Elena replied, trying to keep the bite from her voice. Though she knew she couldn’t defend herself. Not the way she wanted. And certainly not with the truth.
“Money, cars, houses and jewels,” he taunted her, as he had long ago. “They make the transition to the ballrooms of Rome feel a great deal smoother, I imagine.” His cynical mouth quirked in one corner. “All you have to do is sell your soul, isn’t that right?”
“I’m tired of talking about Niccolo,” she said, because she couldn’t argue with him without giving herself away, and the fact that she still wanted to explain this to him, that she still so desperately wanted him to know who she really was, horrified her. She eyed him. “What about you?”
“My childhood was significantly less idyllic.”
He might as well have been an unyielding, forbidding wall as he gazed back at her. And yet she felt that twist inside of her again.
That poor child, she thought, unable to keep herself from it. Growing up with those people.
His eyes narrowed as if he could sense her softening.
“Have we covered enough ground?” he asked, the hint of impatience in his voice, his gaze. “Are you ready to stop playing this game?” His eyes were so dark, so knowing. “I beg of you,” he whispered. But he wasn’t really begging. He wasn’t a man who begged. “Say the word.”
But she couldn’t let herself do that. She might trust him on some primitive level that defied all reason, that she didn’t even understand—but she didn’t trust herself. It was much too risky. She shook her head slowly, not looking away from him.
“Don’t tell me this is your version of misplaced loyalty,” he said, his dark gaze moving over her face. “Once was business, but twice is a betrayal of your beloved Niccolo?”
“Business?” she asked in confusion, but then she remembered. She sighed. “Yes, because I’m spying on you. Over decadent gourmet meals. So far the only thing I’ve discovered, Alessandro, is that you employ a fantastic chef.”
He shook his head, as if she’d disappointed him. “He doesn’t deserve your loyalty. He never did.”
“Enough about Niccolo,” she said, pretending she didn’t feel his disappointment like a blow. Pretending she wasn’t clamoring to share everything with this man who was wise enough to hate Niccolo. She forced a smile, aware that it was brittle. “Why don’t we talk about your fiancée, for a change?”
“What about her?” he asked, as if he’d forgot he ever had a fiancée in the first place. He laughed. “She’s hardly worth mentioning. In truth, she never was.”