“I’m clean,” he said. Cool and concise. And nothing more.
And the caustic slap of that helped her, strangely. It reminded her who she was, what she was doing here. Why she’d decided to give in to her desire for him in the first place.
“You think I’m a liar and I know very well you are,” she said, trying for a calm tone. “You’ll excuse me if I have no particular reason to believe you.”
Temper streaked across that arrogant face of his. “You know I’m a liar, do you?” His deceptively gentle tone made her skin prickle. “And how exactly do you know that?”
She laughed, deliberately callous. “Because I know your name.”
A deep blackness flashed through his dark green eyes and over his face then, old and resigned, with the faint hint of some kind of pain, and Elena fought off a sharp stab of regret. She shouldn’t care if she hurt this man’s feelings. He certainly didn’t care if he hurt hers. So why couldn’t she stave off the bizarre urge to apologize? To trust him the way that insane part of her urged her to do?
But even as she opened her mouth to do exactly that, she stopped herself. Because their carelessness had changed everything. She knew enough about him to know that he would never send her back to Niccolo if he thought she might be carrying his baby. Not a proud man like Alessandro. Not when the blood between the Falcos and the Correttis had been notoriously bad for generations.
Which meant, after all of this, she really was as safe as she’d always felt with him.
It should have felt something more than hollow.
But she had to keep going no matter how it felt. She had to push this to its logical extreme. This was her chance to stay hidden away in a place Niccolo could never find her. In a place he’d never dream or dare to look.
“I could be pregnant,” she said, steeling herself to the look on his face then, to her own intense horror at what she was doing. But she had no other option. There was so little time left, and she couldn’t let Niccolo find her. She would do anything to keep that from happening, even this.
“I’m familiar with the risks,” Alessandro bit out, temper still dark on his face, in his eyes, shading his firm mouth. “Why the hell aren’t you protected?”
Elena eyed him across the table. “I wasn’t aware that the sole responsibility for protection fell to me. Were you not equally involved?”
He muttered a harsh, Sicilian word beneath his breath, and she was perfectly happy she couldn’t understand the dialect even after her time there.
She reached out to one of the platters, scooping up some of the olive tapenade with a piece of the fragrant bread and settling back to nibble at it as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
“It will be fine, I’m sure,” she said. She met his gaze and allowed herself a callous smirk. “Niccolo will never know the difference.”
Alessandro actually jerked in his chair. His face went white.
“Over my dead body will you pass off a child of mine as his,” he said hoarsely, so furious he nearly lit up the night with it. “Over my dead body, Elena—or yours.”
She smiled. It didn’t matter that he looked at her as if she revolted him completely. It didn’t matter that she hated herself, that she thought she might be sick from this terrible manipulation. It didn’t even matter that she really might be pregnant, which she couldn’t let herself consider. It only mattered that she kept herself safe, one way or another, for this little while longer. Whatever the cost.
And the truth was, she knew somehow Alessandro would never hurt her. Hate her, perhaps, but never hurt her, and after all these months that was the same thing as safe. And it was a far better bargain than being with a man like Niccolo, who had pretended to love her and would likely put her in the hospital if he caught up with her.
“Then we’ll count a month from today,” she said smoothly, as if she’d never had any doubt that it would end this way. That she would get what she wanted. “Plus an extra ten days or so, as these things are so inexact. And we’ll see if any dead bodies are necessary, won’t we?”
His jaw was tight and hard, his gaze like bullets. “Forty days. On my island. Alone. With me.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and she made herself look back at him, shameless and terrible, the woman he’d always believed she was and far worse than he’d imagined. This was her protection. This brazen, horrible creature she’d become, this calculated act. This was how she’d save herself, and the things she held dear.
“Or I could text you,” she offered.
His face was drawn, that serious mouth grim. And his eyes were like the night around them, haunted and destroyed. This was what she’d done. This was what security looked like.