But she didn’t know what else to do.
“He was a proud man and he didn’t want their money,” she continued, swallowing back the self-recrimination. “But my great-grandmother convinced him to put it toward a big stretch of land along the coast, so her family need not be as dependent on the whims of the sea as the rest of the village. And the land has been handed down ever since, from eldest son to eldest son.”
She looked past him then, out toward the water, as if she could squint hard and see all the way across the waves to the remote little village she was from, tucked up in its rocky hills so far away. She could imagine every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, as if she was standing there now. She knew every house that clung to the hillside, every boat in the harbor. And most of the faces, too.
“It must,” Alessandro said quietly, “be worth a great deal more now than it was then.”
Elena should have thanked him, she thought, her eyes snapping back to his, for reminding her where she was. And who he was. She wasn’t sharing this story with him—she was gambling everything on the slim possibility he was a better man than she thought he was. She nodded.
“It is,” she said. “And my parents had only me.”
“So the land is yours?” he asked, his brows lifting.
“My father is a traditional man,” Elena said, looking down the sweep of her legs, staring at her feet against the bright white cushions. Anywhere but at Alessandro. “When he dies, if I’m not married, the land will be held in trust. Once I marry it will transfer to my husband. If I’m already married when he dies, my husband will get the land on our wedding day.”
“Ah,” Alessandro said, a cynical twist to his lips when she looked at him again. “You must have been Niccolo’s dream come true.”
“Last summer my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor,” she told him, pushing forward because she couldn’t stop now. “There was no possible way to operate.” So matter-of-fact, so clinical. When it had cast her whole world into shadow. It still did. “The doctors said he had a year to live, if he was lucky.”
“A year?” His dark green gaze felt like a touch. The long arm he’d stretched out along the back of the seat moved slightly, as if he meant to reach for her but thought better of it. That shouldn’t have warmed her. “It’s nearly July.”
She hugged herself tighter, guilt and shame and that terrible grief flattening her, making it hard to breathe.
“About a month after we got the news, I was walking home one evening when a handsome stranger approached me, right there in the street,” she said softly.
Alessandro’s lips thinned, and he muttered something guttural and fierce in Sicilian. He looked furious again, dark and powerful, like some kind of vengeful god only pretending to sit there so civilly. Only waiting.
“Do you want to hear this?” she asked then, lifting a hand to rub at the pressure behind her temple and only then realizing that she was shaking. “All of it?”
“I told you,” he said, a kind of ferocity in his voice, all that ruthlessness and demand gleaming in his dark green eyes. He touched her then, reaching over to tuck a wayward strand of her hair behind her ear, that hard mouth curving when goose bumps rose along her neck, her shoulder. “I want everything.”
And Elena understood then that she was open and vulnerable to this man in ways she’d never been before. This really was everything. This was all she had left inside of her, all she’d had left to hold, laid out before him because she’d finally given in. She’d finally let go. This was everything lost, her whole world ruined, and nothing left to hope for but the possibility of his mercy.
This was surrender. Everything else had been games.
“I didn’t think I was particularly naive,” she said then, because he was looking at her in that too-incisive way of his, and she was afraid of what he might see. And of what he might do when she was finished. “I’d been to university. I have a law degree. I was starting to take on all the duties and responsibilities of the family business. The land. The money. The constant development proposals.” She shook her head, scowling at her own memories. Her own stupidity. “I wasn’t just some silly village girl.”
And that was the crux of it. She felt new tears prick at the backs of her eyes, and hurriedly blinked them back. She’d thought she was better than where she came from. She’d thought very highly of herself indeed. She’d been certain she deserved the handsome, wealthy stranger who had appeared like magic to sweep her off her feet.