A Scandal in the Headlines

He really did smile then.

Alessandro sauntered toward her with all the arrogant confidence and ease that made him who he was, and that smile of his made it worse. It made him lethal. His shower had turned the evidence of his misspent night, all those cuts and bruises, into something very nearly rakish. Almost charming.

No one man should be this tempting. No other man ever was.

She had to pull herself together. The reality that she was trapped here, with Alessandro of all people, on this tiny island in the middle of the sea, had chipped a layer or two off the tough veneer she’d developed over the past few months. She was having trouble regaining her balance, remembering the role she knew she had to play to make it through this.

You will lose everything that matters to you if you don’t snap out of this, she reminded herself harshly. Everything that matters to the people you love. Is that what you want?

He stopped when he stood next to her at the finely wrought rail that separated them from the cliff and the sea below. He was much too close. He smelled crisp and clean, and powerfully male. Elena could feel the connection between them, magnetic and insistent, surrounding them in its taut, mesmerizing pull.

And she had no doubt that Alessandro would use it against her if he could, this raging attraction. That was the kind of thing men like him did without blinking, and she needed to do the same. It didn’t matter who she really was, how insane and unlike her this reaction to him had been from the start. It didn’t matter what he would think of her—what he already did think of her. What so many others thought of her, too, in fact, or what she thought of herself. And while all of that was like a deep, black hole inside of her, yawning wider even now, she had to find a way to do this, anyway. All that mattered was saving her village, preserving forever what she’d put at risk in the first place.

What was her self-respect next to that? She’d given up her right to it when she’d been silly and flattered and vain enough to believe Niccolo’s lies. There were consequences to bad choices, and this was hers.

“I should tell you,” he said casually, as if he was commenting on the weather. The temperature. “I have no intention of letting you go this time. Not without a taste.”

That was not anticipation that flooded through her then. And certainly not a knife-edge excitement that made her pulse flutter wildly in response. She wouldn’t allow it.

“Is that an order?” she asked, her voice cool, as if he didn’t get to her at all.

“If you like.” He laughed. So arrogant, she thought. So sure of her. Of this. “If that’s what gets you off.”

“Because most people consider a boss ordering his employee to ‘give him a taste’ a bit unprofessional.” She smiled pure ice at him. She did not think about what got her off. “There are other terms for it, of course. Legal ones.”

He angled himself so he was leaning one hip against the rail, looking down at her. A faintly mocking curve to his mouth. Bruised and bad, head to foot. And yet still so terribly compelling. Why couldn’t what she knew rid her of what she felt?

“Are we still maintaining that little bit of fiction?” He shrugged carelessly, though his gaze was hot. “Then consider yourself fired. Someone will find another stewardess for my yacht. You, however.” His smile then made her blood heat, her traitorous body flush. “You, I think, have a different purpose here altogether.”

Elena had to fight herself to focus, to remember. Alessandro Corretti was one of the notorious Sicilian Correttis. More than that, he was the oldest son of his generation, the heir to the legend, no matter how they’d split up the family fortune or the interfamily wars the press reported on so breathlessly. He was who Niccolo aspired to become—the real, genuine article. Corrupt and wicked to the marrow of his bones, by virtue of his blood alone.

He should have disgusted her to the core. He should have terrified her. It appalled her that he didn’t. That nothing could break this hold he had on her. That she still felt this odd sense of safety when she was near him, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Oh, right,” she said now. “I forgot.” She sighed, though her mind raced as she tried to think of what she would do if she really was the woman he thought she was. If she was that conniving, that amoral. “You think I’m a spy.”

“I do.”

No man, she thought unsteadily, should look that much like a wolf, or have dark green eyes that blazed when he looked at her that way. It turned her molten, all the way through.

“And what do you think spying on you would get me?”

“I know it will get you nothing. But I doubt you know that. And I’m sure your lover doesn’t.”

That he called Niccolo her lover made her skin crawl. That she’d had every intention of marrying Niccolo—and probably would have, had fate and this man and Niccolo’s own temper not intervened—made her want to curl up into a ball and wail. Or tear off her own skin. But she tacked on a little smile instead, and pretended.

She got better at it all the time.

“You’ve caught me,” she said. “You’ve unveiled my cunning master plan.” She lifted her eyes heavenward. “I’m a spy. And I let myself be caught in the act of … stewardessing. Also part of my devious mission! What could I possibly want next?”

He looked amused again, which only made the ferocity he wore like a shield around him seem that much more pronounced.

“Access,” he said easily. “Though I should warn you now, my computers require several layers of security, and if I catch you anywhere near them or near me when I’m having a private conversation, I’ll lock you in a closet. Believe that, Elena, if nothing else.”

He said that so casually, almost offhandedly, that smile playing around his gorgeous, battered mouth—but she believed him.

“You’ve clearly given my imaginary career in espionage a great deal of thought,” she said carefully, as if she was appeasing a raving lunatic. “But ask yourself, why would I risk this? Or imagine you’d let me?”

His expression of amusement edged over into something else, something voracious and dark, and her pulse jumped beneath her skin.

“Your fiancé was not blind, all those months ago,” he said softly. She felt him everywhere, again, as if he was touching her the way she knew he wanted to do. The way she couldn’t help but wish he would. “Nor was I.”

For a moment, she forgot herself. His dark green eyes were so fierce on hers then, searing into her. Challenging her. The world fell away and there was nothing but him and all the things she couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell him. All the things she shouldn’t want.

And despite herself, she remembered.

Six months ago …

“Tell me your name,” he demanded, sweeping her into his arms without even asking her if she’d like to dance with him.

Elena had seen the way he looked at her. She’d felt it, like a brand, a claim, from halfway across the room. She told herself that Niccolo, who had gone to fetch her a drink, wouldn’t mind one dance. They were in full view of half of Rome. It was all perfectly innocent.

She knew she was lying. And yet, somehow, she didn’t care.

He was stunning. Overwhelmingly masculine, impossibly attractive and, she thought with a kind of dazed amazement, hers. Somehow hers. He looked at her and set her alight. He touched her, and her whole body burst into a hectic storm of sensation, like being dropped headfirst into freezing cold water at the height of summer.

“Your name,” he urged her. His hands were on her, hard and hot, making her shiver uncontrollably. His dark head was bent to hers, putting that mesmerizing mouth of his much too close. Tempting her almost past endurance.

“Elena,” she whispered. “Elena Calderon.”

He repeated it, and made it into something else. A kind of song. It swelled in her, changing her. It hung there between them, like a vow.

“I am Alessandro,” he said, and then they’d danced.

He swept her along, every step perfect, his attention on Elena as if she was the only woman in the room. The only woman alive. Lightning struck everywhere they touched, and everywhere they did not, and some shameless, heedless part of her gloried in it, as if she’d been made for this. For only this. For him.

She felt him in the treacherous ache of her breasts, the unmistakable hunger low in her belly and the glazed heat that held her in its relentless grip as surely as he did. She felt him—and understood that what she was doing was wrong. Utterly, indisputably wrong.

She understood that she would have to live with this. That this was a defining moment. That her life would be divided into before and after this scorching hot dance, and that she would never again be the person she’d believed she was before this stranger pulled her against him. But his eyes were locked to hers, filled with wonder and fire, and she didn’t pull away. She didn’t even try—and she understood she’d have to live with that, too.

And then he made it all so much worse.

“You cannot marry him,” he said, those dark green eyes so fierce, his face so hard.

It took her longer than it should have to clear her head, to hear him. To hear an insult no engaged woman should tolerate. It was that part that penetrated, finally. That made her fully comprehend the depths of her betrayal.

“Who are you?” she demanded. But she still let him hold her in his arms, like she was something precious to him. Or like she wished she was. “What makes you think you can say something like that to me?”

“I am Alessandro Corretti,” he bit out. She stiffened, and his voice dropped to an urgent, insistent growl. “And you know why I can say that. You feel this, too.”