A Scandal in the Headlines(37)

“I’m risking everything I care about to tell you this,” she continued, and he heard the catch in her voice, the tightness. The fear, he thought. She’s afraid. Of me. “The only things I have left. So please …” She choked back a sob and it made him ache. It made him loathe himself anew. “Please, Alessandro. Prove you’re who you say you are.”

“A Corretti?” He hardly recognized his own voice, scratchy and rough, pulled from somewhere so deep in him he hadn’t known he meant to speak.

She crossed her arms, more to hold herself than to hold him off, he thought. She took a deep breath. Then her chin lifted and her blue eyes were brave and somber as they held his, and he felt everything inside of him shift. Then roll.

“Be the man who does the right thing,” she said, her voice quiet. And still it rang in him, through him, like a bell. Like a benediction he couldn’t possibly deserve. “Who does his duty and would again. If that’s who you are, please. Be you.”


“Come,” Alessandro said in a hushed voice Elena had never heard before.

She was so dazed, so hollowed out by what had happened, what she’d done, that she simply followed where he led. He ushered her out onto a small nook of a terrace that jutted out over the water, settling her into the wide, swinging chair that hung there, swaying slightly in the soft breeze.

“Wait here,” he told her, and then walked away.

She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to, she realized. She drew her knees up onto the bright white seat and leaned back. The chair swung, gently. Rocking her. Soothing her the way his hand had, warm and reassuring along her back as she’d cried. Down below, the rocky cliff fell steeply into the jagged rocks, and the sea sparkled and danced in the afternoon sun, as if everything was perfectly fine. As if none of this mattered, not really.

But Elena knew better.

She’d betrayed her family and her village and every last thing she’d clung to across all of these months, and yet somehow she couldn’t seem to do anything but breathe in the crisp air, the scent of sweet flowers and cut grass in the breeze.

Almost as if she really believed she was safe. Almost as if she thought he was, the way she always had. When she suspected the truth was that she was simply broken beyond repair.

Alessandro returned with a damp cloth in his hand and when he squatted down before her his hard face was so serious that it made her chest feel tight. She leaned forward and let him wash the tears from her face. He was extraordinarily gentle, and it swelled in her like pain.

He pulled the cloth away and didn’t move for a moment. He only looked up at her, searching her face. She had no idea what he saw.

“Tell me,” he said.

It was an order as much as it was a request, and she knew she shouldn’t. Her mind raced, turning over possibilities like tavola reale game pieces, looking for some way out of this, some way to fix what she’d done, what she’d said, what she’d confessed….

But it was too late for that.

This was the price of her foolishness, her selfishness. First Niccolo had tricked her, and then this man had hurt her feelings, and she was too weak to withstand either. Now that her tears were dry, now that she could breathe, she could see it all with perfect, horrifying clarity. She hadn’t kept her village or her family’s legacy safe the first time, and given the opportunity to fix that, she’d failed.

Because he thought too little of her, and she couldn’t stand it.

She was more than broken, she thought then. She was a disgrace.

“Tell me what happened to you,” he said then, carefully, again so very gentle that her throat constricted. “Tell me what he did.”

He rose and then settled himself on the other end of the swinging chair, one leg drawn up and the other anchoring them to the floor. His hard mouth was in a firm line as he gazed at her, his dark green eyes grave. For a moment she was thrown back to that ballroom in Rome, when she’d looked up to see a stranger looking at her, exactly like this. As if the whole world hinged on what might happen next.

Which she supposed it had then. Why not again?

“I’m from a long line of very simple fishermen,” she said, pushing past the lump in her throat, concentrating on her hands instead of him. “But my great-grandfather eloped with the daughter of a rich man from Fondi. Her parents begged her to reconsider, but she refused, and they decided it was better their daughter live as a rich fisherman’s wife than a poor one’s. They gave my great-grandfather her dowry. It was substantial.”

She pulled up her knees, then wrapped her arms around her legs, fully aware that this was as close to the fetal position as she could get while sitting up. And she fought off her sense of disloyalty, the fact that she should be protecting this legacy, not handing it over to man who was perfectly capable of destroying it. On a whim.