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.”
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.”
“Corretti …” she breathed, the reality of what she was doing, the scope of her treachery, like concrete blocks falling through her one after the next.
He saw it, reading her too easily. His dark eyes flashed.
“You cannot marry him,” he said again, some kind of desperation beneath the autocratic demand in his voice. As if he knew her. As if he had the right. “He’ll ruin you.”
Elena would never know what might have happened then, had she not jerked her gaze away from Alessandro’s in confusion—and seen Niccolo there at the side of the dance floor, glaring at the two of them with murder in his black eyes.
Elena was amazed that it was possible to hate herself so much, so fully. And that the shame didn’t kill her where she stood.
“How dare you?” she ground out, all her horror at her own appalling actions in her voice. “I know who you are. I know what you are.”
“What I am?” As if she’d stabbed him.
“Niccolo’s told me all about you, and your family.”
Something like a laugh. “Of course he has.”
“The Correttis are nothing but a pack of violent thugs,” she threw at him desperately, quoting Niccolo. “Criminals. One more stain on our country’s honor.”
“And Niccolo is the expert on honor, I suppose?” His face went thunderous, but his voice stayed cool. Quiet. Somehow, it made him that much more formidable. And it ripped into her like a knife.
“Do you think this will work?” she demanded, furious, and she convinced herself it was all directed at him. All because of him. “Do you really think you’ll argue me into agreeing with you that my fiancé, the man I love, is some kind of—”
“You don’t strike me as naive,” he interrupted her, that fierce, dark edge in his voice, his gaze, even in his hands as he held her. “You must know better. You must.”
He shook his head then, and she watched as bitter disappointment washed over him, turning his dark green eyes black. Making that fascinating mouth hard, nearly cruel. Making him look at her as if there had never been that fire between them, as if she couldn’t still feel the flames, licking over her skin.
And she would never forgive herself, but she ached. She ached.
“Unless you like the money, the cars, the houses and the jewelry.” His gaze was a jagged blade as it raked over her, and she bled. “The fancy dresses. Why ask where any of it comes from? Why face so many unpleasant truths?”
“Stop it!” she hissed at him.
“Ignorance is the best defense, I’m sure,” he continued in that withering tone. “You can’t be a stain on Italy’s honor if you’re careful not to know any of the sordid details, can you?”
None of this should be possible. A look, a dance, a few words with a total stranger—how could it hurt? How could she feel as if her whole world was ripping apart?
“You don’t know what kind of woman I am,” she told him, desperate to reclaim herself. To fix this. “And you never will. I have standards. I can’t wait for Niccolo to do me the great honor of marrying me—to make me a Falco, too. I would never lower myself to Corretti scum like you. Never.”
He looked shattered for a moment, but only a moment. Then contempt moved over his fine, arrogant face, and made her stomach twist in an agony she shouldn’t feel. He led her to the edge of the floor, gazed at her for one last, searing moment and then walked off into the crowd.
Elena told herself that wasn’t grief she felt then, because it couldn’t be. Not for a stranger. Not for a dance.
Not for a man she’d been so sure she’d never see again.
“I don’t really remember,” Elena said now in desperation, standing out on his terrace with only the sea to hear her lies. “It was a long time ago.”
Alessandro only watched her, that wolf’s smile sharp-edged, digging deep into her and leaving marks. He was much too close, and she hadn’t forgotten a thing. Not a single thing.
“Then why are you blushing?” he asked, a knowing look on that battered, somehow even more attractive face—and her heart kicked hard against her ribs.
“I’m not spying on you,” she gritted out, trying to break through the tension that gripped her. Trying to pretend he couldn’t see into her so easily. “And if you really think I am, you should have let me leave with the boat.”
But something had changed. His dark eyes burned. She felt the flames licking at her, seducing her and scaring her in equal measure.
“Alessandro.” Saying his name was a mistake. She saw him react to it as if it was a caress, saw his intense focus on her sharpen, and it stole her breath away. “My being on your boat was a coincidence.”
“Liar.” Implacable. Fierce.
Elena’s stomach knotted. She felt a deep kind of itch work through her, from her neck to her breasts to her core, and she felt a terrible panic bite at her then, as if she was in danger of losing herself completely.
You’re supposed to be beating him at his own game! some last remnant of her self-control cried out inside her head.
“You can call me any names you like,” she threw at him, desperate to find her balance again—to claw her way back to solid ground. “It won’t change a thing. I met you once a long time ago. It wasn’t particularly memorable.”
That ruthless, cynical mouth kicked up in the corner, and his gaze turned jet black. It rolled through her, too hot to bear, shaking her apart from the inside out. Until there was nothing at all but this moment.
This. Him. Now.
“Such a liar,” he whispered.
He reached out as if to touch her, but she knew she couldn’t let that happen—she couldn’t—so she threw out her own hand to catch his.
Skin against skin, after all this time. The same way their hands had touched once before, on that glimmering dance floor far away.
And they both caught fire.
The sea and the sun and the whole bright world disappeared into the blaze of it. There was only this man, who she should have run from the moment she’d seen him six months ago. This man, who had eyes like thunder and saw straight through into the heart of her. This man, who had claimed her from across a crowded room with a single, searing glance.
There was only the riot inside of her, the electricity that roared between them. Skin to skin. At last.
Neither one of them moved. Elena wasn’t sure she breathed. This disastrous, unquenchable attraction seemed to swell and grow, radiating from his hand to hers, a hard, gnawing ache that every heartbeat only made worse. It penetrated every part of her, and made her want. Crave. Need.
“It haunts you,” he said, a dark, male hunger stamped across his face. “I haunt you. Believe me, Elena. I know.”
She jerked her hand from his. But as she did, she had a searing burst of clarity.
She wanted him. She always had. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense, that a single dance should never have affected her so much. It had. He had. And that wanting had ripped apart her world, changed everything. She’d been paying for it for six long months, in isolation and often in fear, moving from odd job to odd job across the whole of Italy, trying to keep herself out of sight and away from Niccolo.
All because of this. All because of Alessandro.
She had already been crucified for this crime. She paid for it every day. Why not commit it?
And if there was a part of her that knew that this was also the best way to prove to Alessandro that she was exactly the kind of woman he believed her to be, that this would cement his opinion of her, she told herself that only made the decision easier.
“This isn’t a haunting,” she whispered, watching the thunder roll through his eyes. “Neither one of us is a ghost.” She smiled then. “I can prove it.”
And then she indulged the roaring inside of her, that terrible hunger, and put her hands on him.
Not a light touch on his shoulder as she had when they’d danced, polite and appropriate. She slid her palms over the whisper-soft cotton that strained against his marvelous torso, and felt the pure, raw heat of him. The iron strength. Her head spun, dizzy and delicious.
Alessandro let out a sound that was almost a laugh, and then he tugged her closer, lifting her up against him. Her aching breasts pressed hard against his beautiful chest, sending a frantic shiver through her, and he muttered a curse. He settled her on the rail, his arms strong and hard and exquisite as they held her fast. She heard her boat shoes fall off, two loud slaps against the stone floor, and then she forgot them.
Alessandro stepped between her legs, and it wasn’t enough. Her skirt kept him from pressing against her, into her, even as he leaned into the palms she’d flattened against him. She was surprised to see her hands were shaking. She was shaking. Or maybe the world was, all around them, and she didn’t care.
This was finally happening. Finally.
He held her with one hand in the small of her back, hot and hard and his, while his other hand moved to her neck, her jaw, tracing patterns. Igniting her. And it wasn’t enough—
“Look at me,” he commanded her, that low voice of his snaking through her like a brushfire, making her skin seem to pull tight over her bones, and she would do anything. Anything he wanted. Anything at all.
Anything to keep them both burning like this.
His dark green eyes flashed, triumph and fire, and that wonder she knew was only theirs. Only this. His mouth looked nearly grim with need, and she knew she should be afraid. Of him. Of what was about to happen—what had always been going to happen, sooner or later.
But again, she felt only that wild passion. That desire. And that conviction that she was safer now, in his clever, dangerous hands, than she had been in months.
“Inevitable,” she whispered before she knew she meant to speak, and the faintest hint of a smile moved across his mouth, then was gone.
“Hold on,” he ordered her with a gruff intent that made her core seem to glow.
He moved his hands to cradle her face between them, and she grabbed his shirt in greedy fists.
At last, that voice chanted inside of her, again and again. At last.
And then he took her mouth with all of that ruthlessness and command, and Elena lost her mind.