chapter THREE
HOT. WILD.
She was his.
And she kissed him back as if she wanted to devour him, too.
As if he’d set her on fire and this was how they’d burn, together, in this tumult of heat and glory, and her perfect mouth he couldn’t taste enough.
She was better—this was better—than Alessandro had dared imagine in the middle of a hundred nights, when he’d pictured this in stark detail. When the dark fury that she could bewitch him as she had and be so much less of a person than he’d hoped didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter now, either. Need stormed through him, making him closer to desperate than he’d ever been before.
He wanted her skin against his, slick and sweet. He wanted his hands on those tempting breasts, her enchanting curves. He wanted to lick between her legs and stay there until she screamed. He wanted deep inside of her. He wanted. And every kiss, every taste, every little way she moved against him, only drove him higher.
“More,” he said, and he picked her up again, yanking that damned skirt up and over her hips.
Deep masculine elation pounded through him when she lifted her legs and wrapped herself around him. And then he was there. Hard and hot against her melting heat, separated only by his trousers and the slightest wisp of material she wore. A delicate shudder moved through her, and for a moment he thought he might lose control.
But Alessandro wanted her too much, and had for too long. He took her mouth again, thrilled when she met him with a passion he could taste. She arched against him, her arms wrapped around his neck, and it wasn’t enough.
It would never be enough.
He carried her to one of the loungers scattered about the terrace, then set her down. She was unsteady on her feet, her blue eyes wide and dazed, bright with need, and he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anyone else. More than he’d imagined it was possible to want.
“Please,” Elena said, her voice ragged with desire. The most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. “Don’t stop.”
Her hands were still on his chest, and he could feel each touch, each caress, directly in his sex. He kissed her again, deep and demanding, ravaging her mouth, and she thrilled him by returning it in kind.
Out of control. So good it hurt. Again. And again.
“These clothes need to come off,” he muttered, pulling his mouth away from hers.
Alessandro moved to tug her T-shirt over her head, then hissed out a breath when he threw it aside and she stood there before him, bared to the waist. No bra to block him from her perfect breasts, small and round, with nipples like hard, ripe points. Lovely beyond reason. He nearly shook as his hands went to her skirt, working the zipper and then grabbing on to her panties as he tugged all of it down over her hips and out of his way.
And then Elena was naked. Gloriously, beautifully naked, and she was real and here and his. Finally his.
For a moment he only stared at her, a kind of awe sweeping through him as his body went wild, so desperate for her he could hardly bear it. He swept her up and then took her down with him, splaying her out above him as he lay back on the chaise.
Elena twisted against him, and then her frantic hands were on the hem of his T-shirt and he sat up slightly to peel it off. He brushed her hands out of the way to rid himself of his trousers, kicking them aside. And when he pulled her back into place they both sighed in something like reverence. And then she was like silk against him, all over him, soft and naked and hot.
Finally.
Alessandro’s heart pounded. He was so hard it bordered on the painful, and then she rolled her hips and moved all of that slick, wet heat against the length of him, and he groaned. He traced the line of her spine down to her bottom, and then bent to take one of those achingly perfect nipples into his mouth. She made a wild, greedy sort of noise, and he couldn’t wait. He couldn’t take another moment of this magnificent torture.
It had been too long already. It had been forever.
He sat up, holding her against him, her soft thighs falling on either side of his. She knelt astride him, her hands moving from his chest to his shoulders, then burying themselves in his hair. Alessandro reached down between them, sinking his fingers deep inside the molten core of her.
She cried out, and he loved it. He tested her slickness, learned her lush shape, his palm hard against the center of her need. He watched her pretty face flush, felt her hips buck against his hand, and he returned to her breasts, sucking a taut nipple into his mouth and then biting down. Just hard enough.
She broke apart in his arms with a wordless cry, hot and wet in his hand, her head falling forward until her face was pressed into his neck. He lifted her in his arms while she still shook and shuddered, and then he thrust hard and deep inside her.
At last.
She was scalding hot, so deliciously soft, and still in the grips of her climax when he began to move. Alessandro held her hips in his hands and guided her into the rhythm he wanted. Slow, but demanding, catching the fire that was tearing her apart and building it up again with every stroke.
Higher. Hotter. Hungrier.
He heard her breath catch again, felt her stiffen, heard the shocked sound she made in his ear. She gripped his shoulders tight and shook all around him again, just as he wanted. He watched her arch back into the sunlight—so painfully, perfectly beautiful. This woman, his woman, lost to her pleasure, mindless and writhing against him, while he moved hard and deep inside of her.
He rolled them over on the lounger, coming on top of her and deeper into her. Alessandro let his head drop down next to hers, and then her arms wrapped around him, her hips meeting his in a wild, uncontrollable dance.
He felt her move beneath him, heard her gasp anew, and each hitch in her breath, each mindless cry, made him want her more. He was so deep inside of her, and they moved together like a dream—like a dream he’d had a thousand times, only much slicker, much hotter, much better.
And this time, when she began to break apart around him, when she threw her head back once more and arched up against him, Alessandro called out her name like the incantation it was and fell right along with her.
Elena came back to herself slowly. Painfully.
She was tucked up against Alessandro’s side. He was sprawled out on the lounger beside her, one arm thrown over his head, looking for all the world like some kind of lazy, sated god. There was no reason he should be so appealing, even now, with his dark lashes closed, his arrogant features with the marks of the previous night’s violence stamped into his skin. And yet …
She sat up gingerly, surprised her body still felt at all like her own when he’d made it his—made her his—with such devastating completeness. Her body still hummed with pleasure. So much pleasure Elena could hardly believe she’d survived it, that she was still in one piece.
Then again, perhaps she wasn’t.
He shifted, and she felt his hand on her back, smoothing its way down to curl possessively over her hip. Impossibly, she felt something in her catch anew. A spark where there should have been nothing but ash and burned-out embers.
Surely this was the end of it. Succumbing to what had burned so bright between them had to have destroyed it, didn’t it? But his fingers traced a lazy alphabet across her skin, spreading that fierce glow deep into her all over again, making her realize this wasn’t over at all.
Elena had made a terrible mistake, she understood then. There were many ways to pay, and she’d just discovered a brand-new one. Perhaps, on some level, she’d held out the hope that what had surged between them was all smoke, no fire. That indulging it would defeat it.
Now she knew better. Now she knew exactly how hot they burned. She would have to live with that, too.
“Come here,” he said, and she felt his voice move in her like magic, making her chest feel tight.
Despite herself, she turned. She looked down at him, bracing herself for a smug expression, a cocky smile—but that hard gaze of his was serious when it met hers. Almost contemplative. And that was worse, because she had no defense against it.
He reached up and traced a lazy line from her collarbone down over the upper swell of her breasts, and there was a dangerous gleam in his eyes when she caught his hand in hers and stopped him.
“Alessandro …” she began, but she didn’t know what to say.
He didn’t respond. Instead, he tugged her back down beside him, surrounding her once again with all that warm male strength. As if she were safe, she thought in a kind of despair. As if she’d finally come home.
When she knew perfectly well neither one of those things were true.
His gaze darkened as he watched her. He slid a hand around to the nape of her neck, but she was the one who closed the distance between them, pressing her mouth to his, spurred on by a great wealth of emotion she didn’t want to understand.
This time, there should have been no wild explosion, no impossible heat. This time, she should have been more in control of herself, of all these things she didn’t want to feel.
But his mouth moved on hers and something incandescent poured through her, lighting her up all over again. She felt that spark ignite, felt that same fire grow again inside of her. His kiss was tender, something like loving, and it ripped her into pieces.
She kissed him back, desperately, letting her hands learn his fascinating body all over again, letting herself disappear into this madness that she knew perfectly well would destroy her. It was only a matter of time.
And this time when he slid into her it was a different kind of fire. Slow, deliberate. It stripped her bare, made her eyes fill with tears, battered what was left of her defenses, her carefully constructed veneers. He gazed down at her as he moved inside of her, his dark eyes grave and something more she didn’t want to name, as he spun this wicked fire around them.
As he wrecked her totally, inside and out, and she loved every second of it.
And then he pushed them both straight over the edge of the world.
When she woke a second time, the sun was beginning to sink toward the sea, bathing the sky in peaches and golds, and Alessandro wasn’t next to her. Elena sat up in confusion, only realizing as she almost let it slide from her that she was draped in something deliciously silky. A robe, she discovered when she frowned down at it.
She pulled it on as she stood, belting it around her waist, and when she looked up she saw him.
He sat at a nearby table in the gathering dusk, a wineglass in one hand, his gaze trained on her. He hadn’t bothered with his shirt. A quick glance assured her he was wearing those loose, soft trousers, low on his narrow hips. That lean, smoothly muscled body was even more beautiful from a distance and now, of course, she knew what he could do with it. She knew. She snapped her attention back to his face—and went still.
He was watching her with an expression that made her breath catch in her throat. She recognized that look. This was the Alessandro Corretti she remembered, brooding and dark.
And it seemed he’d remembered that he hated her.
Elena steeled herself. It was better this way. This was what she’d wanted. She ran her hands down the front of the silk robe, but then stopped, not wanting him to see any hint of her agitation.
“Sit down,” he said, indicating the table before him and the selection of platters spread out across its inlaid mosaic surface. His voice was cold. Impersonal. A slap after what they’d shared, and she was sure he knew it. “You must be hungry.”
The moment he said it she realized she was ravenous, and she told herself that was the only reason she obeyed him and sat. Alessandro seethed with a dark menace, lounging there with such studied carelessness, watching her with a slight curl to his lip.
She’d expected this, she reminded herself. She’d known sleeping with him would make him despise her, would confirm his low opinion of her, when he believed her still engaged to Niccolo and all manner of other, horrible things. But it shocked her how much it hurt to see it, how it clawed into her, threatening to spill out of her eyes. She blinked it away.
And then she settled herself in the seat across from him as if she hadn’t a care in the world, and gazed down at the food spread out before her. A plate of plump, ripe cheeses, tangy cured meats and an assortment of thick, lush spreads—an olive tapenade, a fragrant Greek-style taramasalata—next to a basket of fresh, golden semolina bread. A serving dish piled high with what looked like an interesting take on the traditional Sicilian caponata, a cooked aubergine salad laden here with succulent morsels of seafood, rich black and green olives and sweet asparagus spears.
Elena took the wine he poured for her, a rich and hearty red, and sipped at it, letting the mellow taste wash over her, wash her clean. She tried to match his seeming insouciance, leaning back in her chair and holding her glass airily, as if she spent most of her evenings with her various lovers in their magnificent island estates. As if this—as if he—was nothing but run of the mill.
“It’s quite good,” she said, because she thought she should say something.
Not for the first time, she was painfully aware of how deeply unsophisticated she really was—how categorically unsuited to playing in these deep, dark waters with men like him. Niccolo had dressed her up and taught her how to play the part, but here, now, she was forcefully reminded that she was only Elena Calderon, a nobody from a remote village no one had ever heard of, descended from a long line of mostly fishermen. She was out of her league, and then some.
Alessandro only watched her. Something about that cold regard, that dark, silent fury, made her feel raw. Restless.
“Alessandro Corretti with nothing to say?” She attempted a smile. “Shocking.”
“Tell me,” he said in that calm, easy way that only emphasized the deadly edge beneath. “When you run back to your fiancé and tell him what you did here, how detailed a picture will you paint for him? When you tell him you slept with a man he loathes, will you also tell him how many times you screamed my name?”
Elena paled, even though she knew she shouldn’t—that she should have expected this. That she had expected this. Her fingers clenched hard on the stem of her glass.
“Or perhaps that’s how he likes it. Perhaps he enjoys picturing his woman naked and weeping with ecstasy in another man’s arms.” His eyes were like coals, hot and black. “Perhaps this is a game the two of you play, and I am only the latest in a long line of targets. Perhaps you are the bullet he aims at his enemies, then laughs about it later.”
Elena congratulated herself on achieving precisely what she’d set out to achieve, and in spades. She told herself his opinion of her didn’t matter. That the worse it was, the better. The less he thought of her, the less he’d feel compelled to betray her to Niccolo. She took another nonchalant sip of her wine, and ordered herself to enjoy her curiously bitter-tasting triumph.
“Niccolo is a man of many passions,” she said, and was perversely satisfied by the flash of temper in his gaze.
“Never mind what that makes you.”
She glared at him, determined not to let him see he’d landed a blow. She reminded herself that she could only be used as a bargaining chip if he believed she had some worth.
“Are you calling me a whore?” she asked softly. This is good, she assured herself. This is what you want.
But even the air seemed painful, shattering all around her. As if it was as broken as she felt.
“Is this some kind of twisted retribution for Rome?” he asked after long moments passed, no hint of green in those dark eyes of his.
“I’m not the one who started this,” Elena threw at him before she had time to consider it. Not that he was the first man to think she was a whore, not that Niccolo hadn’t covered the same ground extensively—but somehow, this didn’t feel anything like the triumph it should have been. It hurt. “I was perfectly happy on that boat. But you had to sweep in and ruin everything, the same way you did—”
She cut herself off, appalled at what she’d nearly said. Her heart was rioting in her chest, and she was afraid to look at him—afraid of what she’d see. Or what he would.
“By all means,” he invited her, his voice silk and stone. “Finish what you were saying. What else did I ruin?”
She would never know how she pulled herself together then, enough to look at him with clear eyes and something like a smile on her mouth.
“That was the first ball I’d ever attended, my first night in Rome,” she said, light and something like airy, daring him to refute her. “I felt like a princess. And you ruined it.”
“You have no comprehension whatsoever of the damage you do, do you?” He shook his head. “You’re like an earthquake, leaving nothing but rubble in your wake.”
It’s like he knows, a little voice whispered, directly into that dark place inside of her where she hated herself the most. Like he knows what you nearly let happen.
She set her glass back down on the table with a sharp click. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I would have thought that much was clear,” he replied, a self-mocking curve to that hard mouth she knew too well now. Far too well. “If nothing else. I want you, Elena. Then. Now. Still. God help us both.”
Elena clenched her hands together in her lap, everything inside of her seeming to squeeze tight and ache. Something deep and heavy sat over the table as the sun disappeared for good, and soft lights came on to illuminate the terrace. She could feel it pressing down on her, into her, and the way he was looking at her didn’t help.
“No clever reply to that?” His voice then was quiet, yet no less lethal, and it sliced into her like a jagged blade. “I don’t know what lies you tell yourself. I can’t imagine. But I know you want me, too.”
She shook her head as if that might clear it, pulling in a breath as if that might help. When she looked at him again, she wasn’t playing her part. She couldn’t.
“I want you,” she said in a low voice, letting all of the ways she loathed herself show, letting it all bleed out between them, letting it poison him, too. “I always have. And I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
She thought he looked shaken then, for the briefest moment, but he blinked it away. And he was too hard again, too fierce. She told herself she’d seen only what she wanted to see. He sat forward, those dark, cruel eyes fixed on her, and she reminded herself that nothing shook this man. Nothing could. Especially not minor little earthquakes like her.
“Congratulations, Elena,” he said, his voice a sardonic lash. “I believe that’s the first honest thing you’ve said to me since you told me your name.”
She had to wrench her gaze away from his then, while she ordered herself to stay calm. To tamp down the chaotic emotions that surged inside of her, taking her over, making her want nothing more than to sob—once again—for something she could never have. Something she never should have wanted in the first place.
Unbidden, images of what they’d done together, here on this very same terrace, skated through her mind. His mouth, those hands. The wild heat of him, his impossible strength and his ruthless, intense possession—
Something occurred to her then, slamming through her as hard and as vicious as if he’d punched her in the gut. He might as well have. It couldn’t have been worse.
She had been on birth control pills throughout her relationship with Niccolo, but the past six months had been so hectic. She’d run away and run out of the pills, and she hadn’t wanted to leave any kind of record of where she’d been—so no doctors. She hadn’t imagined it would be an issue. And then, today, she’d simply forgotten she wasn’t protected.
She’d forgotten.
“We didn’t use anything,” she gasped out, so appalled she could hardly get the words past her lips. She felt numb with horror.
Alessandro went still. Too still. And for the first time in their brief, impossible acquaintance, she couldn’t read a thing in the narrow, considering gaze he aimed at her. She could only see the darkness.
“I’m clean,” he said. Cool and concise. And nothing more.
And the caustic slap of that helped her, strangely. It reminded her who she was, what she was doing here. Why she’d decided to give in to her desire for him in the first place.
“You think I’m a liar and I know very well you are,” she said, trying for a calm tone. “You’ll excuse me if I have no particular reason to believe you.”
Temper streaked across that arrogant face of his. “You know I’m a liar, do you?” His deceptively gentle tone made her skin prickle. “And how exactly do you know that?”
She laughed, deliberately callous. “Because I know your name.”
A deep blackness flashed through his dark green eyes and over his face then, old and resigned, with the faint hint of some kind of pain, and Elena fought off a sharp stab of regret. She shouldn’t care if she hurt this man’s feelings. He certainly didn’t care if he hurt hers. So why couldn’t she stave off the bizarre urge to apologize? To trust him the way that insane part of her urged her to do?
But even as she opened her mouth to do exactly that, she stopped herself. Because their carelessness had changed everything. She knew enough about him to know that he would never send her back to Niccolo if he thought she might be carrying his baby. Not a proud man like Alessandro. Not when the blood between the Falcos and the Correttis had been notoriously bad for generations.
Which meant, after all of this, she really was as safe as she’d always felt with him.
It should have felt something more than hollow.
But she had to keep going no matter how it felt. She had to push this to its logical extreme. This was her chance to stay hidden away in a place Niccolo could never find her. In a place he’d never dream or dare to look.
“I could be pregnant,” she said, steeling herself to the look on his face then, to her own intense horror at what she was doing. But she had no other option. There was so little time left, and she couldn’t let Niccolo find her. She would do anything to keep that from happening, even this.
“I’m familiar with the risks,” Alessandro bit out, temper still dark on his face, in his eyes, shading his firm mouth. “Why the hell aren’t you protected?”
Elena eyed him across the table. “I wasn’t aware that the sole responsibility for protection fell to me. Were you not equally involved?”
He muttered a harsh, Sicilian word beneath his breath, and she was perfectly happy she couldn’t understand the dialect even after her time there.
She reached out to one of the platters, scooping up some of the olive tapenade with a piece of the fragrant bread and settling back to nibble at it as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
“It will be fine, I’m sure,” she said. She met his gaze and allowed herself a callous smirk. “Niccolo will never know the difference.”
Alessandro actually jerked in his chair. His face went white.
“Over my dead body will you pass off a child of mine as his,” he said hoarsely, so furious he nearly lit up the night with it. “Over my dead body, Elena—or yours.”
She smiled. It didn’t matter that he looked at her as if she revolted him completely. It didn’t matter that she hated herself, that she thought she might be sick from this terrible manipulation. It didn’t even matter that she really might be pregnant, which she couldn’t let herself consider. It only mattered that she kept herself safe, one way or another, for this little while longer. Whatever the cost.
And the truth was, she knew somehow Alessandro would never hurt her. Hate her, perhaps, but never hurt her, and after all these months that was the same thing as safe. And it was a far better bargain than being with a man like Niccolo, who had pretended to love her and would likely put her in the hospital if he caught up with her.
“Then we’ll count a month from today,” she said smoothly, as if she’d never had any doubt that it would end this way. That she would get what she wanted. “Plus an extra ten days or so, as these things are so inexact. And we’ll see if any dead bodies are necessary, won’t we?”
His jaw was tight and hard, his gaze like bullets. “Forty days. On my island. Alone. With me.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and she made herself look back at him, shameless and terrible, the woman he’d always believed she was and far worse than he’d imagined. This was her protection. This brazen, horrible creature she’d become, this calculated act. This was how she’d save herself, and the things she held dear.
“Or I could text you,” she offered.
His face was drawn, that serious mouth grim. And his eyes were like the night around them, haunted and destroyed. This was what she’d done. This was what security looked like.
This was one more thing she’d have to live with when all of this was done.
“Just remember,” he said, threat and promise laced through that low voice, bright in his dark eyes. “You asked for this.”