chapter FIVE
“WHAT A LOVELY sentiment,” Elena said dryly. “No wonder she left you.”
Something desolate moved over his face then, though he hid it almost the very second she saw it. The lump in her throat stayed where it was.
I hate this, she thought furiously. I hate me like this.
“Alessia Battaglia had exactly one promise to keep,” Alessandro said, no sign of any desolation whatsoever in his hard voice, as if she’d imagined it. “Only one. And she not only failed to keep it, she did so in the most public way possible—designed, I can only assume, to cause me the maximum amount of embarrassment professionally and personally. Which she achieved.” His lips twitched. “What is worth mentioning about that?”
“Sometimes people fall out of love,” she offered. She was such a fool. She wanted that bleakness she’d seen in his eyes to mean something. His dark green gaze was contemplative as he studied her, and it took everything she had not to look away.
“It was a business arrangement, Elena. Love had nothing to do with it.”
An odd sensation worked its way through her then, blooming up from the darkest part of her and uncurling, and it took her long moments to understand that it was a fierce, unwarranted satisfaction. As if the fact he had not loved his fiancée, did not care that she’d left him as much as the fact he’d been left, was not more evidence that he was the worst kind of man—but instead something to celebrate. She despaired of herself.
“And you’re surprised she changed her mind?” she asked. That strange feeling hummed in her, making it hard to sit still, to keep her voice so smooth. “Why would anyone subject themselves to an arranged marriage in this day and age? That sounds like the perfect recipe for a lifetime of misery.”
“As opposed to what?” He laughed. “The great benefits romance brings to the equation? The jealousy, the emotional manipulation, the very real possibility that at any moment, as you say, people could fall out of it? What makes you think that’s the kind of security rational people should build a life on?”
“Because if it’s not entirely rational, at least it’s honest,” she blurted out before she could think better of it. “It’s real.”
“So is a contract.” His voice was dry. Amused. “Which has the added benefit of being tangible. Inarguably rational. And enforceable by law.”
“Maybe you were no more than collateral damage.” Elena didn’t know why she couldn’t stop. Why did she care why this man’s fiancée had abandoned him? He was Alessandro Corretti. Surely that was reason enough for anyone. “Maybe it wasn’t about you at all.”
“I was the only one standing at the altar,” he said, tilting his head slightly as he gazed at her. “Do you imagine she objected to the priest her father chose? Palermo’s great basilica itself? Hundreds of her closest friends and family members?”
“Maybe—” Elena began.
“I don’t want to speculate about Alessia Battaglia’s tangled, self-serving motives,” he said impatiently. “All that matters are her actions. If you want to psychoanalyze a doomed engagement, why not focus on your own?”
“I don’t want to talk about Niccolo again.” Or that doom he mentioned. Especially not that.
“Then let’s talk about you.” He lounged there so casually, but Elena knew better. He was still picking at her resistance, over platters of grilled fish and bottles of wine. Over flickering candles and glistening crystal glasses. Over her own objections. “Since you won’t let me do what I want to do.”
She could almost hear the music they’d danced to, lilting somewhere inside of her. Back when he had looked at her as if she was miraculous, not a battle to be won. Back when he had held her close for such a little while and made her name into a song.
“Fine,” she said. Anything to stop the memories, the emotions, that threatened to break her. The lump in her throat returned, and she had to breathe past it. “What do you want to know?”
“The man is a toad.” Flat. Certain. Daring her to argue with his characterization. She didn’t. “Less than a toad. Yet you agreed to marry him, and for all your faults of character, you don’t strike me as the kind of woman you would have to be to overlook such things.” Alessandro shifted in his chair, looking even more relaxed, but Elena knew better. She could sense what roared there beneath his skin, powerful and predatory. She could feel it. “Why did you?”
“Because I love—” She caught herself. Barely. She’d almost said loved. “I love him.” She watched his eyes flash, and enjoyed the fact he didn’t like hearing that any more than she liked saying it. “And not because he drove a pretty car or promised me a villa somewhere.” She held his gaze, and told the truth. “He was sweet.”
“Sweet.” Alessandro looked appalled.
“He told me that once he’d seen me, his life could never be the same,” she said, letting herself remember when Niccolo had been no more than a handsome, smiling stranger on an otherwise wholly familiar street. “He brought me flowers he picked himself from the hills above the village. He begged me to let him take me to dinner, or even simply take a walk with him near the water. It was the easiest thing in the world to fall for him. He was— He’s the most romantic man I’ve ever met.”
“It sounds like a con.”
It wasn’t as if she didn’t agree, but she couldn’t show him that. Or admit how ashamed she was of herself for falling for it, head over heels, so easily. Like the little fish she supposed she had been, reeled right into Niccolo’s net.
She sniffed. “Says the man who thinks a chilly business contract is a solid basis for a marriage.”
“But I am not a toad,” he pointed out, dark amusement lurking in his gaze, in the corner of his mouth. “And she did not agree to marry me because I was sweet. She agreed to marry me because her father wished it, and because the life I would have given her was generous and comfortable.” Again, a lift of those sardonic brows. “That is called practicality. Our situations are not at all similar.”
“True.” She aimed her smile at him. “But I don’t expect Niccolo will leave me at the altar, either.”
He stared at her for a long moment, that dark gaze baleful. She shivered, the intensity emanating from him sliding over her skin like a kind of breeze, kicking up goose bumps, though she tried to hide it. Then, not taking his eyes from hers, he threw his napkin on the table and rose.
Liquid and graceful. Powerful and male.
Elena ordered herself to run. But she couldn’t seem to move.
Alessandro rounded the table, and then he was behind her, and she thought the heat that exploded through her then might kill her. It hurt when she breathed. It hurt when she held it instead. His hands came down to rest on her shoulders, light and something like innocuous, so nearly polite, and yet she was sure that he could feel the heat of her skin. The bright hot flame she became whenever he touched her.
Remember— an urgent voice cried, deep inside her. Remember—
But he was touching her again, he was finally touching her, and she couldn’t hold on to a single thought but that.
“Fall for me, then,” he said, bending down to speak softly into her ear, his breath tickling her even as it triggered that volcanic need she’d tried too hard to deny. “I’ll pick you flowers from the meadow if that’s all it takes.”
“Stop it,” she said, but her voice was so insubstantial. Little more than a whisper, and she knew it told him exactly how affected she was. How little resistance she had left.
“I’ll lay you down beneath the moon,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, one clever hand moving beneath her hair to caress the sensitive skin at her nape, and she couldn’t contain her shiver then—couldn’t hide it from him. “And I’ll demonstrate the only kind of love that isn’t a sentimental story. The only kind that’s real.”
He meant sex. She knew he meant sex. And still, that word.
That word with his hands on her. That word in his low voice, wreaking its havoc as it sunk its claws into her. As it left deep marks that made a mockery of every lie she’d told herself since he’d found her on that boat. Every lie she’d told herself so desperately since that fateful night in Rome.
“I promise you, Elena,” he said then, quoting Niccolo, wielding those same words like his own weapon—and a far more deadly one. “Your life will never be the same.”
Her heart slammed against her ribs, so hard she worried they might crack. Once. Then again. Elena was lost. Held securely in his hands and unable to think of a single reason why she should extricate herself. Why she should do anything at all but let herself fall into this magnificent fire and burn herself away until there was nothing left of her but smoke. And him.
His hands dropped to her chair to pull her back from the table, and by the time she stood on her trembling legs, by the time she turned to look at his beautiful face made no less arrogant by the heat stamped across it, she remembered. If not herself, not entirely, than some tiny little spark of self-preservation that reminded her what was at stake. What there was left to lose.
His clever eyes moved over her face, and he frowned, reaching out again to take her upper arms in his hands. His thumbs moved over the skin the sleeveless empire-cut top she wore left bare, sending his personal brand of electricity arrowing straight into her core.
Where she ached. And melted. And ached anew.
“Don’t,” he said, urgency making his voice harsh. “Don’t walk away again.”
“I have to,” she replied, but she couldn’t look away from him. She couldn’t move.
“There’s no one on this island but you and me and the people I pay exorbitantly to keep my secrets,” he said, all temptation and demand, and she could feel him, feel this, feel the dizzying intensity in every cell of her body. In every breath. In the way her heart beat and her pulse pounded. “No one to see what you do. No one to know. No one to contradict you if you lie about it later.”
“I’ll know,” she said quietly.
And knew immediately, when his expression changed, that she’d made a critical mistake. For a moment she didn’t understand, though the air between them seemed to burst into flames. His face lit with a dark, almost savage triumph, and his hard mouth curved.
“Yet we both know where your moral compass points, don’t we?”
“Away from you,” she said hurriedly, but it was too late.
“Another lie is as good a word as any, Elena,” he said then, more wolf in that moment than man. “I accept.”
Alessandro pulled her to him with that ruthless command that undid her—that thrilled her no matter how she wished it didn’t. And her body simply obeyed. She knew she should resist this. She knew she needed to push him away, to wrench herself out of his arms before—
But she didn’t.
She didn’t even try.
He took her mouth, masterful and merciless at once, inevitable, and Elena melted against him, went up on her toes, and met him.
Finally.
His mouth was on her again, at last, and it wasn’t enough. Her taste flooded him, driving him wild. Her tongue was an exquisite torture against his, her head tilting at the slightest touch of his hand for that perfect, slick fit he craved. He pulled her even closer, bending her back over his arm, kissing her as if both their lives depended on it.
Mine, he thought, with a ferocity that shook through him and only made him want her that much more.
She was pliant and beautiful, graceful in his arms, her luscious body plastered against him. He could feel her breasts against his chest, her hips pressed to his, and he was fervently grateful she was the sort of woman who wore shoes with wicked heels so gracefully. It made it that much easier to haul the delectable place where her legs met against the hardest part of him, right where he wanted her.
God, how he wanted her.
He lost his head. He forgot what he’d planned, what he’d intended here—he tasted her and the whole world fell away, narrowed down to one specific goal. To thrust himself inside her, again and again. To make them both shatter into a thousand pieces.
To take them both home.
He reached down and pulled her black top up over those fantastic breasts she never covered with any kind of bra, muttering words he hardly understood in Sicilian as well as Italian. He ran his fingers over her taut nipples, watched her bite her lip against the pleasure of it, her head falling back to give him better access.
But it wasn’t enough, so he backed her up against the table and set her there, leaning down to lick his way from one delicious crest to the other. To lose himself in the softness of her warm skin, the scent of it, and those small, high cries she made when he took a nipple deep into his mouth.
She was gripping the edge of the table, her breath coming in hard, quick bursts, and she was so beautiful he thought he might die if he couldn’t bury himself in her. If he couldn’t feel her tremble all around him, screaming out his name. If he couldn’t drive so deep into her he’d forget all about who he’d once imagined she was. Who she should have been.
Who she wasn’t, damn her.
He remembered the stark, sensual picture he’d drawn for her at that dinner weeks back and smiled then, against the delicate skin beneath one of her breasts. He straightened, tugged her to her feet and found himself distracted by the glaze of passion in her bright summer eyes, the color high on her cheeks. He held her face between his hands, his thumbs sweeping from her temples to those elegant cheekbones that drove him mad, and plundered her mouth.
Taking, tasting. Exulting in this, in her. Making her his the only way he could.
He tore his mouth from hers, then spun her around. He felt her tremble against him as he leaned her forward, spreading her before him over the table, using one hand to push a forgotten serving dish, piled high with the remains of fluffy, fragrant rice, out of her way.
“Alessandro …” she whispered as she bent there, offering him the perfect, delectable view. A prayer. A vow. So much more than simply his name.
He smoothed his hands down her back, the sensual shape of her making him harder, making him desperate. But he didn’t rush. He reached around beneath her to flatten his hands against the delectable curve of her belly.
He held his hands there for a moment, savoring the fine, low tremor that shuddered through her. Letting her absorb the heat of his hands. And then he moved lower, pulling open the button fly of her trousers with one hand as the other slid inside to cup her scalding heat in his palm.
She was panting now, leaning her forehead against the table, and he held her femininity in his hand, hot and damp and swollen with desire. And then he squeezed.
Elena bucked against him, against the table, and he did it again. Then again.
Slowly, deliberately, he built up a rhythm. Teasing her. Seducing her. Pressing against her urgent center with every stroke. Her breath grew ragged, her heat bloomed into his hand, and only then—only when she was mindless before him, stretched out breathless and boneless and his to command—did he pull his hand away.
Leaving her trembling right there on the edge.
She sobbed something incoherent into the arm she had thrown up near her head and then let out a moan as Alessandro tugged on her trousers, peeling them over her hips and shoving them down her legs to her knees. He left her panties where they were, an electric blue thong that beautifully framed then disappeared between the perfect twin curves of her pert bottom.
She was restless, shifting her weight from one foot in its high wedged sandal to the other, her hips swaying in an age-old invitation that speared into him like a new heat, mesmerizing him for a moment. Her shoes lifted her to him, making her arch her back slightly as she sprawled there before him, mindless and moaning. His in every way.
He loved it. He thought he could die in this moment a happy man at last, this woman his own, perfectly crafted feast—and he intended to eat every bite. He traced over her thong with a lazy finger, then ran his hands over her bottom, vowing that one day he would learn every millimeter of her with his mouth. Every hollow. Every mark. With his teeth. His tongue.
But not now. His need was like a wild storm in him, pounding in his blood, making his chest tight and his vision narrow.
He freed himself from his trousers and quickly rolled on the protection he’d carried in his pocket, then bent over her, shoving her thong down and out of his way. She was still trembling, still breathing hard and fast, and her eyes were shut tight. He braced himself on one arm, his hand flat against the table near her shoulder.
“Alessandro,” she said again, her voice strangled, but she lifted her hips when he slid a hand beneath her, pressing her face against the table as if it was a pillow.
He reached down and pressed hard against her center even as he shifted his position and drove straight into her.
She came apart beneath him, sobbing and wild.
He had to grit his teeth as she shuddered, as her fingers pressed into the table’s hard surface as if she could find some hold. He let her ride it out, waiting hot and hard and deep inside of her, her perfect bottom snug against him, almost more enticement than he could bear.
When she started to come back to him, he began to move.
He wasn’t gentle. She made that small, highly aroused noise in the back of her throat, the sweetest sound he’d ever heard, and met him, thrust for thrust. She was sinuous and lithe, arched there before him with her black top flowing all around her as she moved with him, like some kind of erotic dance.
It was almost too much for him. He reached out and held the nape of her neck in his hand, making her shudder, then keeping her still.
And then he simply took her.
He ravaged. He savored. He took.
And all the while she cried out her pleasure, her hips wild against his, her eyes shut tight and her cheeks stained red with all of that desperate, delicious heat.
It was perfect. She was perfect.
“You are mine,” he ground out from between his teeth, his hips hard against hers, riding her, devouring her. “Mine.”
When he couldn’t hold on any longer he slid a hand beneath her once more, finding the heart of her hunger and rubbing hard against it, making her jerk against him.
“Again,” he ordered her, his voice so deep, so guttural, he hardly recognized it. And he didn’t care, his own climax roaring toward him. “Now.”
She obeyed him with a beautiful scream, her feet leaving the ground as she shattered into a flare of white hot heat around him, catapulting over that edge once more.
And finally, finally, he followed.
Alessandro didn’t know how long it was before he caught his breath. Before he was himself again, and not just a handful of scattered fragments thrown to every corner of this island. Of the globe.
Elena still lay beneath him, her cheek pressed against the tabletop, and he could feel every breath she took. He angled himself back and off her, regretting that he had to pull out of her soft heat.
She didn’t move, or open her eyes. Alessandro rid himself of the protection he’d used, fastened his trousers, and still she lay there. Making a perfectly debauched, impossibly lovely picture. Her trousers and thong were a tangle at her knees, her sweet bottom and the feminine secrets beneath on display as she bent there over his table so obediently, her mouth slightly ajar as she breathed and her slender arms thrown out before her as if in total surrender.
Desire coiled within him again, and he rubbed his hands over his face as if that might make sense of this hunger. Nothing eased it. Not even the one thing that should have.
He wondered, then, if it would ever leave him. If he would ever be free of it. Of her.
Is that what you want? a voice queried from a place inside of him he preferred to ignore, and he shoved it away.
“Elena.”
She stirred then, her eyes fluttering open, and Alessandro watched as she slowly peeled herself up from the table, then reached down to pull her panties and her trousers into place, all without looking his way. All a bit shaky, a bit too careful, as if she wasn’t sure her legs would hold beneath her. Her hair was a wanton tangle around her face but she ignored it, not even pushing it out of her way as she buttoned up her denim trousers.
So he did it for her, tucking a silken blond sheaf behind one ear.
“Are you all right?”
Her gaze flicked to his, then away.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was rough and she coughed. “Of course.”
But there was a defenseless cast to her jaw as she said it, and he reached over to tilt up her chin, forcing her to look at him. Her blue eyes were stormy, and there was something somehow bruised about the way she stared back at him. He felt cold.
“Are you?” he asked again, his tone serious. Gruff.
She knocked his hand away. He let her.
“Please don’t patronize me.” She looked around as if in search of something, but only hugged herself instead. As if, he thought, she was very small. The cold in him grew wider, deeper. “I said I was fine.”
He studied her, battling the strangest urge to pull her into his arms, to hold her against him. To warm them both. It was ridiculous.
And then he did it anyway, not understanding himself at all.
She fit beneath his chin and securely against his chest, and he couldn’t have said what he felt then. It didn’t make sense. He didn’t recognize it—or himself. And yet he held her, he listened to her breathe, and he hated it when she pulled away from him.
“Stop this,” she said in a low voice, her gaze dark and troubled. “I don’t need your backhanded form of comfort.”
He didn’t understand any of this. Why was he having this conversation in the first place? He didn’t tolerate scenes like this. He avoided even the faintest hint of what he saw swimming there in all of that summer blue. So why was he still standing here?
“Elena,” he began.
She blew out a breath. “I asked you to stop,” she whispered.
Alessandro felt profoundly off balance. Uneven down into his soul. He scowled.
“So I can take you any way I please,” he said in a less pleasant voice than he might have, had he been able to make this strange feeling disappear. Had any of this made sense to him. “I can bend you over a table and make you scream and shake, and you’ll submit to that happily. Greedily.”
Her face paled, but that didn’t stop him. And whatever was happening inside of him shifted, turned furious. At himself, at her—he couldn’t tell the difference. He just needed this feeling to stop. Now.
“There is nothing I couldn’t make you beg me to do to you, is there?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Nothing at all.”
“Does this make you feel better?” she asked, lifting her head, her eyes flashing.
“I’m not the one who has convenient pretensions of modesty, Elena,” he bit out. “But only when it suits.”
He watched her shake that off, a quick jerk of her smooth shoulders, and wondered that it even hurt her.
“I know you don’t respect me, Alessandro,” she said, and her voice wasn’t angry. It was something else. Something that worked in him like shame, oily and thick. “I know exactly what you think of me. You’ve told me repeatedly. You don’t have to act it out again now.”
“You don’t respect yourself!” he threw at her. How did she dare?
“But you should.” She shook her head, then he saw to his horror that her eyes were full. Though she didn’t cry. She only looked at him with tears bright in her gaze and he felt small. Mean. “Shouldn’t you? What kind of man does the things you do with me, revels in them, and yet has no respect for me at all?”
“Elena,” he began, but there was too much inside of him. It was too big and too dangerously unwieldy, and it had something to do with that way she looked at him. As if she thought he was a better man. That he ought at least to try. And that vulnerability in the way she held herself, as if she knew what he’d long suspected—that, deep down, he wasn’t. And never had been.
“You call me a whore and then you call me yours,” she said quietly. “Am I the one who doesn’t respect myself or is that you?”
He felt buffeted by wild, treacherous storms—but yet he stood still, and there was only that way she gazed at him, as if she saw through all of his darkness and saw what lay there on the other side of it. Something he refused to name.
Something that could not exist. He wouldn’t allow it.
“It’s like you’re two different women,” he told her when he was sure he could keep his balance. When he’d beat back the storms as best he could. “One I know all too well. One who would marry a man like Niccolo Falco and defend that choice, call it romantic.”
She looked away from him then. In shame? In some kind of triumph that he cared this much, so much more than he should, than he even admitted to himself?
How could he still not know?
“But the other, Elena.” He dropped his voice, and saw her eyes close against it, as if it tempted her beyond endurance, or hurt her. As if he did. “The other …”
Was the woman he’d imagined she was when he’d met her. The woman he’d wanted so desperately he’d ignored her association with Niccolo to dance with her, to hold her. The woman he’d called his before he knew her name. The woman he sometimes saw in her still—like now….
That woman doesn’t exist, he reminded himself harshly. She hadn’t then and she never would.
“People are complicated,” she said after a moment, a bleakness making her blue gaze gray when she looked at him again. “You can’t shove them into little boxes. And you can’t really know them unless they let you.”
“Or they show you,” he agreed. “As you have.”
She swallowed, and then her head bowed forward, only slightly, but Alessandro saw it. He knew defeat when it stood before him. That should mean he’d won, that he was victorious in this—whatever this was. It should mean he felt triumph at the very least. And instead what he felt was empty.
“The show’s over, Alessandro,” she whispered, and he couldn’t make sense of what he saw on her face then.
Perhaps because he couldn’t, he didn’t stop her when she turned and walked away from him, again, leaving him there alone in the quiet room, the echoes of the passion they’d shared seeming to cling to the walls like rich, wild tapestries.
And still he tried to work out what he’d seen on her elegant features before she’d left. Temper, certainly. The lingering trace of that powerful desire that, it seemed, never truly left either one of them. A kind of weary resignation.
And sadness.
It was like a punch to the gut.
Elena was sad. And he’d made her that way.
She had looked at him like he was a monster. Worse, as if she knew he’d chosen to become exactly that. As if she knew he’d vowed he would never become this kind of man—a man of cruelty and dark impulse like his father—no matter the provocation, and then had gone ahead and done it, anyway.
As if she knew.
He wasn’t sure he could live with it. He wasn’t sure he could bear being this much of a disappointment to himself, this much of a bastard.
But he didn’t know how to stop.