A Scandal in the Headlines(49)

As if none of this mattered to him, either way. As if this was a minor favor he’d thought he might do her, nothing more.

“Do you really think I’ll let you go like this?” he’d asked a week ago on the island, so fiercely. “Wash my hands of you?”

She’d wanted to believe that he wouldn’t—that he couldn’t. She still did.

“Your choice, Elena.”

He wasn’t even looking at her. As if this conversation, his proposal of marriage, hardly maintained his interest. But she didn’t believe that, either. He was not a man who begged, and yet he had. Surely that meant something. Didn’t it have to mean something?

“I know you have strong feelings about the Corretti name,” he said in the same offhanded way, “but all you have to do is take it and this insanity ends. It’s simple.”

It wasn’t simple, she thought in a wash of something like anguish. It was anything but simple.

But even as she opened her mouth to refuse him—to do the sane thing and leave him, leave Sicily, save herself the only way she knew how—Elena knew she wouldn’t do it. She would take him any way she could have him, even marry him under these questionable circumstances, knowing he would never feel the way she felt.

Nothing had changed. She was the same selfish, foolish girl she’d ever been. She wanted yet another man to love her when she knew that no matter what she’d thought she glimpsed in him now and again, this was nothing more than a game to him, and she no more than another piece on a chessboard he controlled. Eventually, he would grow tired of her. He would leave her.

And yet some part of her was still vain enough to think he might change his mind, that she might change it. Still silly enough to risk everything on that slim, unlikely chance.

She hadn’t learned a thing in all this time.

“By all means,” he said then, languidly scrolling down a page on his tablet, “take your time agonizing over the only reasonable choice available to you. I’m happy to wait.”

Could she do it? Could she surrender the most important thing of all—the one thing even Niccolo had never got his hands on? The entire future of her village. Her family’s heritage. The land. All because she so desperately hoped that Alessandro was different. That he really would do the right thing.

Because she loved him.

Idiot. The voice in her head was scathing.

Elena jerked herself around and stared out his impressive windows at the lights of the city spread out before her, but what she saw were her parents’ faces. Her poor parents. They deserved so much better than this. Than her.

“What a romantic proposal.” She shut her eyes. She hated herself. But she couldn’t seem to stop the inevitable. She was as incapable of saving herself now as she’d been on that dance floor. And as guilty. “How can I possibly refuse?”


Late that night, Alessandro stood in the door of his bedroom and watched Elena sleep. She was curled up in his bed, and the sight of her there made the savage creature in him want to shout out his triumph to the moon. He almost did. He felt starkly possessive. Wildly victorious.

He could wake her, he knew. She would turn to him eagerly—soft and warm from sleep, and take him inside of her without a word. She would sigh slightly, sweetly, and wrap herself around him, then bury her face in his neck as he moved in her.

She’d done it so many times before.

But tonight was different. Tonight she’d agreed to become his wife.

His wife.

He hadn’t known he’d meant to offer marriage until he had. And once he had, he’d understood that there was no other acceptable outcome to this situation. No alternative. She needed to be his, without reservation or impediment. It had to be legal. It had to last. He didn’t care what trouble that might cause.

There were words for what was happening to him, Alessandro knew, but he wasn’t ready to think about that. Not until he’d secured her, made her his. He turned away from the bed and forced himself to head down the stairs.

Down in his home office, he sat at his wide, imposing desk and frowned down at all of the work Giovanni had prepared for his review. But he didn’t flip open the top report and start reading. He found himself staring at the photo that sat on the corner of his desk instead.

It was a family shot he’d meant to get rid of ever since his grandmother had given it to him years ago. All of the Correttis were gathered around his grandmother, Teresa, at her birthday celebration eight years ago. Canny old Salvatore was smirking at the camera, holding one of Teresa’s hands in his, looking just as Alessandro remembered him—as if death would never dare take him.

Alessandro’s father and uncle, alive and at war with each other, stood with their wives and children on either side of Teresa, who had long been the single unifying force in the family. Her birthday, at her insistence, was the one day of the year the Correttis came together, breathed the same air, refrained from spilling blood or hideous secrets and pretended they were a real family.