A Scandal in the Headlines(34)

“Good morning to you, too,” she said in her usual way, arch and arid, but this time he sensed her temper beneath it. And he couldn’t have said why he wanted to see it so much, so badly. “And no. There are a few days left before I’d jump to any conclusions.”

For a moment, they only gazed at each other, and he could feel what flowed between them. That wild electricity, as always, but there was something else beneath it. Something real. He was sure of it.

She shifted position, and smiled in a way she knew by now was guaranteed to poke at his hunger. Her fingers plucked at the ragged hem of the denim shorts she wore beneath an open-necked, nearly sheer shirt that flowed all around her in bright reds and deep blues, hinting at the delectable curves beneath. Her smooth legs went on forever, sun-kissed and shaped so beautifully. She patted the lounger beside her, and it caused him physical pain not to put his hands on her. Not to wrap those legs around his waist, throw them over his shoulders, revel in all the ways he wanted her.

But it wasn’t enough, and he didn’t care that she wanted it that way. That she was using their explosive chemistry to hide in. He couldn’t allow it any longer.

“I wonder what would happen if we kept our clothes on,” he said then, quietly, and her eyes widened. “What then, Elena? What do you think we’d discover?”

“That we are perfect strangers,” she replied coolly, but her clear eyes darkened. “Who never should have met in the first place.”

“I’m not convinced.” He held her gaze, saw the hint of panic in hers. “What are you hiding?”

He was sure he saw her flinch, then control it. Almost too fast to track.

“What could I possibly be hiding?” she retorted. “You’ve taken everything. You know everything. There’s nothing left.”

“I’ve taken your body, yes,” he agreed. “I know it very well, just as you intended. But what about the rest of you?”

He watched her struggle, one emotion after the next moving across her face, and he knew he was right. She shook her head, her blue eyes cloudy.

“What do you care?” she asked quietly. “You have what you want.”

“I want everything,” he said, raw and intense, and smiled when she jerked back against the lounger.

And everything might not be enough, a voice whispered deep inside of him. He might have been a ruined thing, twisted and dark all the way through, but he needed this. He needed her. He didn’t care why. He only knew he did.

He watched her pull in a breath, then another, and she curled her hands into tight fists on her thighs. He forced himself to wait. She looked away for a long, tense moment, and when her eyes met his again, he saw her. Her.

At last.

“I knew it,” he said with deep satisfaction. “I knew you were right there, simmering beneath the surface.”

“What do you want, Alessandro?” she asked, and her voice was neither cool nor amused, for the first time in a very long while. “We only have a few days left here. Why ruin them with this?”

“I want the woman I met in Rome,” he told her. “I don’t want a damned sex toy.”

She let out a short, derisive laugh. “Of course you do. Men like you always do.”

He felt that same familiar darkness in him expanding, rising, sweeping through him, reminding him how ruined and twisted he was and always had been, since the day he was born. Men like you. Would he never escape his name? Was he doomed to be exactly like his father, no matter how hard he’d struggled against it?

“I don’t care if you hate me, Elena,” he gritted out. “But whatever else this is, whatever happens, I want it to be real.”

Because one thing in his life had to be. Just one thing.

“‘Real,’” she repeated in a flat tone. “You. That’s almost funny. What do you know about real?” Her face heated as she spoke, her temper flooding in like a rising tide and as beautiful to him, however perverse that was. “You almost married a woman for what? A business expense?”

“Duty,” Alessandro corrected her, and she laughed. She laughed.

“The reality, Alessandro, is that you are not a good man,” she said with an awful, deliberate finality, staring straight at him, deliberate and pointed. “How could you be? You’re a Corretti.”

Condemnation and curse, all wrapped up in his name. His damned name. She said it as if it was the vilest word imaginable. As if the very saying of it blackened her tongue. He felt something crack open inside of him.

Because, of course, he wasn’t simply a Corretti. He was the one his family was happy to sacrifice to serve their own ends. He was the one who was expected to do his duty, because he always had. His own parents had used him as a pawn. His grandfather had manipulated him. His “business expense” had walked out on him. Then Elena had crashed into his life like a lightning bolt, illuminating all of his darkest corners in that single, searing, impossible dance, but she hated him—he’d made sure of it. He had never been anything but a dark, ruined thing, masquerading as a man.