“Just one more scandal linked to the Corretti name, though this time, happily, not mine,” he said. “Or not entirely mine, though it gives rise to all sorts of speculation I should probably care about.” His focus was on Elena, his dark green eyes speculative as they swept over her face. “Alessia Battaglia is pregnant.”
Elena swallowed. “Oh,” she said.
She wished she wasn’t wearing only his shirt. It was like déjà vu. The last time she’d worn a man’s shirt—But she couldn’t let herself think that way. It would only make this harder.
“Well,” she said lamely. She had to clear her throat. “I … am not.”
For a long moment, there was only the sound of her heartbeat, loud in her ears. And the way he looked at her across the expanse of his bed, that fierce and arrogant face of his unreadable.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
Her throat was dry. “I am.”
She didn’t know what she expected. But it wasn’t the way his face changed, the way his eyes darkened—a brief, searing flash. It wasn’t the way that pierced her, straight to the bone.
Regret.
That was what she saw on his face, in his dark gaze. For a dizzying moment, she couldn’t breathe.
Because she felt it, too, like a newer, deeper ache. As if they’d lost something today. As if they should grieve this instead of celebrate it, and that didn’t make any kind of sense at all.
“All right,” he said then. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”
She nodded, because she didn’t trust her voice.
“We must be lucky,” he said quietly. But his smile was like a ghost, and it hurt her.
It all hurt.
And she knew why, she thought then, in dawning understanding and a surge of fear. This hadn’t been about the games they played, or any of the things she’d been telling herself so fiercely for so long. The lust and the hurt and the wild, uncontrollable passion had been no more than window dressing, and she’d been desperately ignoring what lay beyond all of that since the moment she’d laid eyes on this man in Rome.
Because it shouldn’t have happened like that. It shouldn’t have happened at all. Love at first sight was nonsense; it belonged in poems, songs. Sentimental films. Real people made choices, they didn’t take one look at a stranger on a dance floor and feel the world shift around them, a key turning in a lock.
Elena had been telling herself that for months, and here she was anyway, not carrying his child and as absurdly upset about it as if they’d been trying to get pregnant instead of simply unpardonably reckless.
She was in love with him, God help her. She was in love with him.
It rang in her, long and low and deep. And it wasn’t new. It had been there from that very first glance. It had happened that fast, that irrevocably, and she simply hadn’t wanted to accept that it could be true. But it was.
And now she simply had to figure out how to survive the end of her time with him, the end of these months that had changed her life forever, without giving him that last, worst weapon to use against her.
“Yes,” she agreed, aware he was watching her with those clever eyes of his and she knew he saw too much, the way he always did. “Very lucky.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FORTIETH DAY dawned with no less than three emails from his assistant detailing the precise time the helicopter would arrive to transport him back to Sicily, and Alessandro still wasn’t ready.
He’d run out of excuses. He had to return home or risk damaging Corretti Media in a way he might not be able to fix, and despite his attempts to cut off the part of him that cared about that, he knew he couldn’t let it happen. He was the CEO, and he was needed. And he had to deal with his family before they all imploded, something his mother’s daily, increasingly hysterical voice-mail messages suggested was imminent.
He had to go back to his life. His attempt to leave it behind had only ever been a temporary measure, a reaction to that cursed wedding. It wasn’t him. Duty, responsibility—they beat in him still, and grew louder by the day.
But he couldn’t leave Elena. Not now that he’d discovered she was the woman he’d believed she was from the start. Not now that everything had changed.
He didn’t know what she wanted, however, and the uncertainty was like a fist in his gut. It had been hard enough to convince her to remain on the island once she’d discovered she wasn’t pregnant.
“There’s no reason to stay here any longer.” She’d attempted that calm, cool smile he hated and he’d taken pleasure in the fact she couldn’t quite pull it off, sitting there so primly in the sitting area of his bedchamber, dressed only in one of his shirts and all of the smooth, bare flesh of her legs on display. “Our arrangement was based entirely around waiting to find out—”