A Scandal in the Headlines

Alessandro had only glared at him.

“Are you really going to marry that Battaglia girl in cold blood?” Santo had asked then, frowning, his dark green eyes so much like Alessandro’s own. “Sacrifice yourself to one of the old man’s plots?”

Santo was the only person alive who could speak to him like that. But Alessandro was a Corretti first, like it or not. Marrying a Battaglia was a part of that. It made sense for the family. It was his responsibility. He would marry for duty, not out of deceit.

Alessandro was not Niccolo Falco.

“I will do my duty,” he had said. He’d tapped his empty glass to his brother’s chest, smiling slightly when Santo took it from him. “A concept you should think about yourself, one of these days.”

“Heaven forbid,” Santo had replied, grinning.

The orchestra had started playing then, and Alessandro had ordered himself to walk away from the strange woman—Niccolo Falco’s woman—no matter how bright her eyes were or how that simple fact made his chest ache. There was no possibility that he could start anything with a woman who was embroiled with the Falcos. It would ignite tempers, incite violence, call more attention to the dirty past Alessandro had been working so hard to put behind him.

Walking away had been the right thing to do. The only reasonable option.

But instead, he’d danced with her, and sealed his fate.

CHAPTER TWO

AND NOW SHE was here.

Alessandro had thought he was hallucinating when he’d first seen her on the yacht. He’d thought the stress was finally getting to him—that or the blows to his head. You’ve finally snapped, he’d told himself.

But his body had known better. It knew her.

He could still feel the heat of her when he’d touched her all those months ago, when he’d pulled her close to dance with her, when his fingers had skimmed that tempting hollow in the small of her back and made her breath come too fast. He still remembered her sweet, light scent, and how it had made him hunger to taste her, everywhere.

He still did. Even though there was no possible way that he could have ignored his responsibilities back then and pursued her, even if she hadn’t been neck-deep in a rival family, engaged to one of the enemies of the Corretti empire. He’d told himself that all he’d wanted after that charity ball was to forget her, and he’d tried. God help him, but he’d tried. And there’d certainly been more than enough to occupy him.

There’d been the pressure of managing his grandfather’s schemes, the high-profile wedding and the docklands regeneration project the old man had been so determined would unite the warring factions of the Corretti family.

“You will put an end to this damned feud,” Salvatore had told him. “Brother against brother, cousins at war with one another. It’s gone too far. It’s no good.”

It was still so hard to believe that he’d died only a few weeks ago, when Alessandro had always believed that crafty old Salvatore Corretti would live forever, somehow. But then again, it was just as well he’d missed that circus of a wedding yesterday.

And if Alessandro had woken from a dream or two over the past few months, haunted by clever eyes as blue as the sky, he’d ignored it. What he’d felt on that dance floor was impossible, insane.

The truth was, he’d never wanted that kind of mess in his life.

His late father, Carlo, had always claimed it was his intensity of emotion that made him do the terrible things he’d done—the other women, the shady dealings and violently corrupt solutions. Just as his mother, Carmela, had excused her own heinous acts—like the affair she’d confessed to yesterday that made Alessandro’s adored sister, Rosa, his uncle’s daughter—by blaming it on the hurt feelings Carlo’s extramarital adventures had caused her.

Alessandro wanted no part of it.

He’d viewed his calm, dutiful marriage as a kind of relief. An escape from generations of misery. He was furious enough that Alessia Battaglia had left him at the altar—what would he have done if he had felt for her?

He’d felt far too much on a dance floor for a woman he couldn’t respect. Far more than he’d believed he could. Far more than he should have. It still shook him.

Alessandro turned the water off and reached for a towel, letting the bright sun play over his body as he walked into his rooms. He didn’t want to think about the wedding-that-wasn’t. He didn’t want to think about the things Santo had told him this morning en route to the marina—all the business implications of losing that connection with Alessia’s father, the slimy politician who held the Corretti family’s future in his greedy hands. He didn’t want to think at all. He didn’t want to feel those things that hovered there, right below the surface—his profound sense of personal failure chief among them.

And luckily, he didn’t have to. Because Elena Calderon had delivered herself directly into his hands, the perfect distraction from all of his troubles.

He didn’t care that she was almost certainly on some kind of pathetic mission from Niccolo and the Falco family, who had been openly jealous of the Corretti empire for decades. He didn’t care why she was here. Only that she was when he’d thought her lost to him forever.

And he still wanted her, with that same wild ferocity that had haunted him all this time.

He’d had every intention of doing his duty to his family, to his grandfather’s final wishes, and it had exploded in his face. Maybe it was time to think about what he wanted instead.

Maybe it was time to stop worrying about the consequences.

He found her in one of the many shaded, open areas that flowed seamlessly from inside to outside, making the whole house seem a part of the sea and the sky above. She was frowning out at the stretch of deep blue water as if she could call back the yacht he’d sent on its way with the force of her thoughts alone. He’d pulled on a pair of linen trousers and a soft white T-shirt, and he ran his fingers through his damp hair as she turned to him.

That same kick, hard to the gut and low. That same wildfire, that same storm.

His.

She looked almost vulnerable for a moment. Something about the softness of her full mouth, the shadows in her beautiful eyes. The urge to protect her roared through him, warring with the equally strong impulse to tear her open, learn her secrets—to figure out how she could want that jackass Niccolo, to start, and fail to see what kind of scum he was. How she could have felt what Alessandro had felt on that dance floor and turned her back on it the way she had.

How she did this to him when no other woman had ever got beneath his skin at all.

And there were no prying eyes here on his island. No whispers, no gossip. No one had to know she’d ever been here. There would be no business ramifications if he finally put his mouth on her. No ancient feuds to navigate, no humiliating scenes in public with his shareholders and the world looking on. Whatever game she and Niccolo were playing, it wouldn’t affect Alessandro at all if he didn’t let it.

No consequences. No problems. No reason at all not to do exactly as he wished.

At last.

“I told you to change into something more comfortable,” he said, jerking his chin at that dowdy little uniform she still wore, not that it concealed her beauty in the least. Not that anything could. “Why didn’t you?”

Clear blue eyes met his, and God, he wanted her. That same old fist of desire closed hard around him, then squeezed tight.

“I don’t want to change.”

“Is that an invitation?” he asked silkily, enjoying the way her cheeks flushed with the same heat he could feel climb in him. “Don’t be coy, Elena. If you want me to take off your clothes, you need only ask.”

His mocking words scalded her, then shamed her.

Because some terrible part of her wanted him to do it—wanted him to strip her right here in the sea air and who cared what came afterward? Some part of her had always wanted that, she acknowledged then. From the first moment their eyes had met.

Elena remembered what it had been like to touch this man, to feel his breath against her cheek, to feel the agonizingly sweet sweep of his hand over the bared skin of her back. She remembered the heat of him, the dizzying expanse of those shoulders in his gorgeous clothes, the impossible beauty of that hard mouth so close to hers.

It lived in her like an open flame. Like need.

She remembered what it had been like between them. For those few stolen moments, the music swelling all around them, making it seem preordained somehow. Huge and undeniable. Fated.

But look where it had led, that careless dance she knew even then she should have refused. Look what had come of it.

“No?” Alessandro looked amused. That sensual gleam in his dark green gaze tugged at her. Hard. “Are you sure?” His amusement deepened into something sardonic, and it didn’t help that he looked sleek and dark and dangerous now, the pale colors he wore accentuating his rich olive skin and the taut, ridged wonder of his torso. “You look—”

“Thank you,” she said, cutting him off almost primly. “I’m sure.”