chapter SIX
“I WANT YOU in my bed,” he said curtly later that same night, appearing in the doorway of her bedchamber.
Elena was curled up in the blue-and-white armchair near one of the sweeping, open windows, staring out at the dark sea and the silver pathway that rippled there, stretching toward the swollen orange moon hanging low on the horizon. She’d been thinking about resistance. About surrender.
About how to use this uncontrollable passion for her own ends before it swallowed her whole.
“I knew I meant to lock that door,” she murmured, dropping her mask into place as she turned to look at him.
“Tonight,” Alessandro told her in that same clipped, commanding tone, the slight narrowing of his fierce eyes the only indication he’d heard her. “And for good. This particular game is over and I think we both know you lost.”
He’d showered. She could smell the faint scent of his soap, fresh and clean. His thick hair lay in damp waves on his head, and he no longer looked the way he had when she’d left him in the dining room. Bereft, she might have said, if he were a smaller creature, a lesser man.
He expected her to resist him. Still. Again. Elena could see it in the way he held himself, the fine lines of his powerful body taut. She could see it in the way his dark green gaze was hooded, yet tracked her every breath.
So what if you lose a little bit more of yourself? she asked herself briskly, shoving aside what felt like a kind of despair, concentrating instead on that ravenous hunger for him she couldn’t seem to escape. That was what she had to exploit. The possibility of a pregnancy had brought her this far—passion would do the rest. It had to. There are worse things to lose—and far worse fates.
“All right,” she said.
The moment stretched out. He cocked his head slightly to one side, eyes narrow and jaw hard. “What did you say?”
“I’m agreeing with you, Alessandro.” She swung her feet off the chair, pressing her bare toes into the polished wood floor beneath her. Like that would keep her grounded. Like anything could. “You win.”
There was a tense, shimmering silence. Elena kept her gaze trained down at her bare feet, on the toes she’d painted a bright pink in some attack of hopefulness when she’d still worked on his yacht—but then, she didn’t have to look at him to feel the way he was glaring at her. The fire and the force of him like a wild heat against her skin. A dark magic inside of her, changing her. Ruining her.
Only if I let it, she assured herself. She might lose a bit of herself, but it was worth it, wasn’t it? She was safe here, and she needed to stay that way. And he would lose interest in her all the quicker once she ceased to be a challenge, because that was how men like him operated—so this would ensure that when their forty days were up, he would wash his hands of her. Discard her, happily, without bothering to inform on her to Niccolo. She would be free, and Niccolo would have lost her trail completely.
This was insurance, plain and simple.
“And what,” he asked, his low voice threaded with seductive, sensual menace, “do I win, Elena? Be specific.”
She lifted her head. His expression was deeply cynical, his stance tense, and yet that same passion burned in him, bright and hot, as obvious to her as if it was tattooed across his face.
“Whatever you like,” she told him.
She raised her brows as he only stood there in the doorway and did no more than continue to study her, as if she was a code he intended to break. A trickle of apprehension worked its way down her spine—because she couldn’t let him do that. He could have her, but not all of her. And never the truth.
“Isn’t this what you want?” she asked, taunting him. Distracting him. She smiled, cool and challenging. “My complete and total surrender, entirely on your terms? Well, here it is. This is what it looks like. You should be pleased, surely.”
“Is that meant to shame me?” he countered, a dark gleam in his eyes then, and Elena had to fight back an involuntary shiver. “I think you’ll find I’m far past that. Nothing can. Certainly not you.”
“Then you have nothing to fear.” She stood, smoothing her hands down the front of the silk-and-lace chemise she wore, in a soft champagne shade that she knew made her eyes that much bluer. “I found this on the end of the bed, like all the rest of the clothes I’ve found waiting for me since I got here. It’s as if you make them all yourself in some secret workshop in the night.”
“Not me.” There was a sardonic curve to his mouth, but his dark eyes burned as he watched her walk toward him. Possessive. Hungry. “My cousin Luca runs a fashion house. We may not be close, but the clothes speak for themselves.”
Elena didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure she could, now that she was really going through with this. It was one thing to decide to surrender herself to this man, at least in bed. It was something else again to do it.
It might very well shred her into tiny little pieces she wasn’t sure she’d ever manage to put back together. But she knew this was the only way.
And she couldn’t deny the fact that it excited her. That he did. That the idea of sharing his bed made her shiver with need, no matter what price she’d end up paying.
She walked toward him, holding his gaze. Letting her hips sway beneath the silken embrace of the fabric that clung to her. Letting him watch, wait. She could see the stamp of hunger across his face. She could see the blaze of it in his eyes.
And felt more powerful in this moment than she had in a very long time. Since she’d looked up from her life to find a shockingly beautiful man watching her as if she was a goddess come down to earth. She felt it hum in her like an electrical current.
She stopped when she was no more than a breath away and stood there. She waited. He tensed, but he didn’t move. His hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his loose black trousers as if he was perfectly at ease, but she knew better.
“Do you think this will work, Elena?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “This suspicious capitulation, this attempt at seduction, coming so soon on the heels of your deep concerns about respect?”
“You should ask yourself,” she said, her tone light, though her gaze was hard on his, “why even when I do what you say you want, you accuse me of something. Anything.”
“Because it won’t,” he said, answering his own question. His mouth twisted. “Not the way you imagine. I don’t care how you come to me. I don’t care how I have you. I don’t care at all, so long as I do. Are you prepared for that?”
“I told you,” she said softly. “You win.” She held out her arms like some kind of supplicant, but she smiled like a queen. “To the victor go the spoils—isn’t that what they say?”
“They do.”
He reached over and traced a deceptively lazy trail from the wildly fluttering pulse in her throat to the hollow between her breasts. All of his ruthlessness, all of his simmering power, in that one fingertip.
“You should be afraid of me,” he told her then, and his voice moved in her, threat and promise, sex and demand, and something even darker in his eyes. “Why aren’t you?”
“I’m terrified,” she whispered, but she wasn’t. And she could see he knew it.
“I wish I knew which one of us is the greater fool,” he replied in the same harsh whisper, and it made her throat constrict.
“Someone once told me you should be careful what you wish for, Alessandro,” she said, because it was better to taunt him. It was better to push. Safer. “You just might get it, and then what will you do?”
Her heart beat like a hammer in her chest, in her breasts, between her legs, and she could swear he heard it, too, because his hard mouth curved, not a trace of cynicism to be seen. Only desire.
And that was all the warning she got.
He hauled her up into the air, then threw her over one shoulder like she weighed nothing at all. Like the warrior king she’d imagined him. Claiming her that easily—that completely.
She gasped—but his hand came down on her bottom, his big, hard palm holding her fast and warning her, and she gulped her own words down.
His shoulder was wide and hard against her belly as he moved through the house; his hand was a hot brand of fire against the exposed skin of her behind, the backs of her thighs. She caught a glimpse of herself as they passed a mirror, hanging down his strong back, her hair wild and her face flushed, and it made her breath go shallow. She couldn’t stop trembling, and it still wasn’t fear.
Surrender, she told herself. It’s the only way to save everything else that matters. But what scared her wasn’t the act of surrendering to him. It was that it was so easy. That it felt so good.
Alessandro tossed her down in the center of his bed, and she had only a quick impression of bold colors, dark woods and arching windows wide open to let the night inside. Then her gaze fixed on him, and stayed put. He stood by the side of the wide bed for a moment, looking down at her as she sprawled there, and she couldn’t quite read the intense look in his eyes, on his hard face.
But she trembled. And wanted. And melted into liquid fire.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t ply her with more of those lethal, sensual promises of his, those half terrifying and half intriguing things he’d said he would do to her, with her, if only she’d ask.
He simply took.
And she gloried in that, too.
This is exactly what you wanted, Elena reminded herself a week or so later as she stood in that gorgeous shower room built outside to take in the sunlight and the crisp sea air.
She tilted her face up into the spray, and let the heat work its way into her as she considered her success. Her delicious, dangerous surrender.
There was no part of her body Alessandro hadn’t claimed. No millimeter of skin he hadn’t investigated with his fingers, his mouth, his wicked tongue. He took her with a ferocity and a kind of desperation she understood too well, because it was in her, too, this terrible hunger. It was never satisfied. It never dimmed.
No matter how many times he tore her apart, no matter how often she screamed his name and then held him close as he collapsed against her, it was still there. Moving within her. Ripping her open. Making her fear it would be impossible to ever really leave this man, that this kind of hunger would mark her, scar her….
But she’d returned the favor. She’d thrown herself headfirst into that fire, and who cared what burned? She’d pushed him down on that same dinner table and climbed on top of him, using her mouth and hands to make him groan. She’d learned what made him burst into flame, what made him roll her over and take control, what made him laugh in the dark as they explored each other. She’d teased him, taken him, taunted him—and then slept wrapped up against him, held close against that powerful chest of his, lulled into sleep by the steady beat of his heart.
This is what success feels like, she told herself now. You should be happy. But instead, she pictured them dancing, around and around in that ballroom, all of that wonder and delight between them. It glowed in her still, even here. Even now.
What they could have been. What they should have been.
She shouldn’t let herself dream about such things, because it only hurt her. She shouldn’t let herself imagine what it would be like if none of what had happened on this island had that darker undertone, if this wasn’t one more game they played. If it really meant something when he kissed her face and smiled at her, when she held him close and whispered his name.
If it meant what she’d seen back then, glimmering between them, just out of reach—
Snap out of the daydream, she ordered herself now, annoyed at herself and that gnawing ache in her chest that made her feel so hollow. You’re here to be the whore he thinks you are. Nothing more.
It turned out, she was good at that.
She shut off the water and reached for her towel, and he was there when she opened her eyes. Her stomach still clenched. Her heart still jumped. He was still so impossibly beautiful, fierce and male, standing in the open door between his suite and the open shower area, his arms crossed over his bare chest.
“How long have you been there?” she asked. She had to fight to make her voice smooth, and she didn’t know why. It should have been easy after all this practice. It should have been second nature by now.
“Not long.”
“Weren’t you going for a run?”
“I was.” He smiled. “I did.”
“I must have spent more time in the shower than I realized.”
She wanted to sound light. Easy. She couldn’t understand why that raw, hollow place inside of her still bled into everything. As if it mattered how close this all was to what it should have been, yet wasn’t.
And won’t ever be, she reminded herself.
“Do you think you’re pregnant?” he’d asked one afternoon, the sun pouring in through the windows, bathing them both in white light as they moved together on his bed. He’d run his hands over her belly, his gentle touch at distinct odds with his gruff voice. It had been too much. There’d been that look in his eyes, so close to a kind of yearning. It had torn her up inside.
She’d been straddling him, and she’d twisted her hips to take him deep inside of her. Sex was better than emotion. Easier. He’d hissed out a breath, his dark eyes narrowing.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” she’d said, reminding him who they were, moving against him to make her point. “And then we can stop pretending there’s anything more to this than sex.”
He’d reached up to pull her mouth down to his, and he’d whispered something against her lips. It had only been later, when they’d collapsed again, breathless and destroyed, that she’d realized what he’d said. Damn you.
She walked toward him now, wrapping the towel around her, and he stepped back to let her pass. She made her way into his bedroom and over toward the massive bed that dominated the far wall, angled for the best view out of the many windows.
None of this was what she’d thought it would be. He wasn’t the man she’d believed he was. He was nothing like Niccolo, and she didn’t know how to process that. She’d expected the fire to dissipate the more she indulged herself in him, showing her what horrors lay beneath. But Alessandro wasn’t made of Niccolo’s brand of bright surface charm to hide the bully within, or if he was, he was better at concealing it. He was gruff and hard, ruthless and demanding—but he was also surprisingly thoughtful. Caring in ways that made it hard for her to breathe, much less throw out the next, necessary barb. As likely to take the hairbrush from her hand and brush her hair, making her tremble with something far different from lust when he met her eyes in the mirror, as he was to throw her up against the nearest wall and let the raging fire consume them.
He’s like Niccolo. He’s worse than Niccolo. She chanted it at herself. You might not be able to see it, but it’s there. It has to be there.
Because if he wasn’t like Niccolo, if she’d been that terribly wrong about him, then she had no reason not to trust him the way she wished she could. She might feel oddly safe with him, still. He might thrill her in ways she was afraid to admit to herself. But she’d been running for too long, and there was as much to lose now as there had been when she’d started.
More, perhaps, if she counted her foolish heart, and the way it beat for him.
“What’s the matter?” he asked from behind her, that combination of perception and kindness in his tone that was uniquely his. It undid her.
But she couldn’t cry. She couldn’t betray herself like this, when she’d come so far and given up so much.
Elena turned to face him. She met his dark gaze, saw the concern there that she couldn’t acknowledge, that she couldn’t let herself accept. Alessandro’s mouth crooked in one corner, and that was all it took for her to melt. To want. To topple over into that stark, demanding need.
“Come here,” she said, her voice husky with the things she couldn’t say, the truths she couldn’t tell.
And he obeyed, this fierce predator of a man, his dark eyes bright and fixed on her with that same hunger. She waited until he was close and then she dropped the towel, and he laughed.
“You’ll be the death of me,” he said in that low voice that made her skin prickle, and then his hands were on her skin, lifting her and pushing her back onto the bed, coming down on top of her with that delicious weight of his, smooth muscle and dangerous man.
“I’ll sing the elegy at your funeral,” she promised him, and his smile deepened in a way that made her ache everywhere, hot and greedy for him.
“I won’t die alone.” He buried his hands in her wet hair, pulling her mouth to within a breath of his. “I promise you that.”
Their gazes tangled, held, as she reached between them and pulled him free from his running shorts. As she reached for the side table, then rolled protection down over the hard, smooth length of him. As she guided him to her entrance.
“Elena,” he whispered. “I—”
But words were even more dangerous than he was. She couldn’t have it. She couldn’t risk it. She moved her hips against him, inviting him in. Making him groan. Keeping him quiet.
Being the whore he thought she was, or she thought she was, or this situation had made her. She told herself it didn’t matter anymore. She only knew she had to see it through.
He pushed inside of her, and they both sighed. That perfect, impossible fit. That slick, wild fire. That coil of desire, tight and hot, that only seemed stronger every time.
This was killing them, she thought then, her gaze locked to his, lost in his, truths shimmering between them that she refused to voice. He knew things he shouldn’t know, the way he always had, and they might as well be dancing still, around and around, as familiar and as lost to each other as ever.
But he moved in her then, commanding and powerful and hers—hers despite everything as he had been from that first glance, that very first touch of their hands—and she forgot again, the way she always did.
For a little while.
Alessandro stalked out of the house.
He moved across the terrace toward the pool, where Elena sat on one of the loungers, whiling away another summer morning. She looked perfectly at ease, while he was still boiling over with all the frustration he’d unloaded on his assistant over the past few hours. He made a mental note to increase the man’s annual bonus.
“One more week, Giovanni,” he’d snapped when yet another Corretti family crisis had been trotted out as if it was a critical business issue that required his immediate attention. Because Alessandro was expected to care, to be responsible. To handle everyone else’s mess. “I’m on holiday. Tell them to sort it out themselves, or wait.”
“But, sir …” His assistant had cleared his throat. “They grow more insistent by the hour!”
“Then I suggest you earn your outrageous salary,” Alessandro had growled, ending the call. But it hadn’t done much for the restless agitation that still coursed through him, making him feel edgy.
He slowed as he drew closer to Elena, tucked up in the shade of an umbrella, paging through foreign magazines with every outward appearance of lazy contentment. For some reason, that flipped a kind of switch in him.
One more week to forty days. One more week until he and Elena were finished—or bound together in a way he’d tried not to think about too closely. One more week, and he wasn’t ready.
He didn’t want the life he’d left behind when he’d fled Sicily a month ago. He didn’t want to slip back into that same old role that had brought him nothing but grief for the whole of his adult life. He didn’t want to dance to the tune of a dead man, or fight these losing battles against his family’s bad reputation. He was as tired of it as he’d been the day he’d left.
Just as he was fed up with Elena’s stubborn determination to keep him at arm’s length.
He knew what she was doing, with her mysterious smiles and the sex she doled out as if she was nothing more than a sensual buffet and he a mindless glutton. She was giving him what she thought he wanted. Soothing the savage beast.
But he knew there was more to her, and he wanted it. He was so damned tired of half measures, of almost. He wanted everything she had. Every last secret. He wanted to know her better than he knew himself.
He wanted her.
Alessandro was sick and tired of settling for less.
“It’s been thirty-three days, Elena,” he said when he reached her side. He waited until she looked up from her magazine, and then smiled. “Does that mean we already have our answer?”
“Good morning to you, too,” she said in her usual way, arch and arid, but this time he sensed her temper beneath it. And he couldn’t have said why he wanted to see it so much, so badly. “And no. There are a few days left before I’d jump to any conclusions.”
For a moment, they only gazed at each other, and he could feel what flowed between them. That wild electricity, as always, but there was something else beneath it. Something real. He was sure of it.
She shifted position, and smiled in a way she knew by now was guaranteed to poke at his hunger. Her fingers plucked at the ragged hem of the denim shorts she wore beneath an open-necked, nearly sheer shirt that flowed all around her in bright reds and deep blues, hinting at the delectable curves beneath. Her smooth legs went on forever, sun-kissed and shaped so beautifully. She patted the lounger beside her, and it caused him physical pain not to put his hands on her. Not to wrap those legs around his waist, throw them over his shoulders, revel in all the ways he wanted her.
But it wasn’t enough, and he didn’t care that she wanted it that way. That she was using their explosive chemistry to hide in. He couldn’t allow it any longer.
“I wonder what would happen if we kept our clothes on,” he said then, quietly, and her eyes widened. “What then, Elena? What do you think we’d discover?”
“That we are perfect strangers,” she replied coolly, but her clear eyes darkened. “Who never should have met in the first place.”
“I’m not convinced.” He held her gaze, saw the hint of panic in hers. “What are you hiding?”
He was sure he saw her flinch, then control it. Almost too fast to track.
“What could I possibly be hiding?” she retorted. “You’ve taken everything. You know everything. There’s nothing left.”
“I’ve taken your body, yes,” he agreed. “I know it very well, just as you intended. But what about the rest of you?”
He watched her struggle, one emotion after the next moving across her face, and he knew he was right. She shook her head, her blue eyes cloudy.
“What do you care?” she asked quietly. “You have what you want.”
“I want everything,” he said, raw and intense, and smiled when she jerked back against the lounger.
And everything might not be enough, a voice whispered deep inside of him. He might have been a ruined thing, twisted and dark all the way through, but he needed this. He needed her. He didn’t care why. He only knew he did.
He watched her pull in a breath, then another, and she curled her hands into tight fists on her thighs. He forced himself to wait. She looked away for a long, tense moment, and when her eyes met his again, he saw her. Her.
At last.
“I knew it,” he said with deep satisfaction. “I knew you were right there, simmering beneath the surface.”
“What do you want, Alessandro?” she asked, and her voice was neither cool nor amused, for the first time in a very long while. “We only have a few days left here. Why ruin them with this?”
“I want the woman I met in Rome,” he told her. “I don’t want a damned sex toy.”
She let out a short, derisive laugh. “Of course you do. Men like you always do.”
He felt that same familiar darkness in him expanding, rising, sweeping through him, reminding him how ruined and twisted he was and always had been, since the day he was born. Men like you. Would he never escape his name? Was he doomed to be exactly like his father, no matter how hard he’d struggled against it?
“I don’t care if you hate me, Elena,” he gritted out. “But whatever else this is, whatever happens, I want it to be real.”
Because one thing in his life had to be. Just one thing.
“‘Real,’” she repeated in a flat tone. “You. That’s almost funny. What do you know about real?” Her face heated as she spoke, her temper flooding in like a rising tide and as beautiful to him, however perverse that was. “You almost married a woman for what? A business expense?”
“Duty,” Alessandro corrected her, and she laughed. She laughed.
“The reality, Alessandro, is that you are not a good man,” she said with an awful, deliberate finality, staring straight at him, deliberate and pointed. “How could you be? You’re a Corretti.”
Condemnation and curse, all wrapped up in his name. His damned name. She said it as if it was the vilest word imaginable. As if the very saying of it blackened her tongue. He felt something crack open inside of him.
Because, of course, he wasn’t simply a Corretti. He was the one his family was happy to sacrifice to serve their own ends. He was the one who was expected to do his duty, because he always had. His own parents had used him as a pawn. His grandfather had manipulated him. His “business expense” had walked out on him. Then Elena had crashed into his life like a lightning bolt, illuminating all of his darkest corners in that single, searing, impossible dance, but she hated him—he’d made sure of it. He had never been anything but a dark, ruined thing, masquerading as a man.
“Your conscience will be your undoing, boy,” Carlo had jeered at him more than once. “It makes you weak.”
As long as it didn’t make him Carlo, he thought now, bitterly. Perhaps that was the most he could hope for.
Elena had no clue what she was dealing with. No possible clue what he held in check. “You don’t have the slightest idea who I am.”
“The entire world knows who you are,” she retorted, glaring at him as if he’d never been anything but a monster, and he couldn’t stand it. Not any longer. Not from her. “You’re—”
“I am so tired of paying for the sins of others,” he gritted out. He slashed a hand through the air when she opened her mouth and she shut it again, sinking back against the lounger, her hands in fists at her sides. “I’ve spent my life doing nothing but the right thing, and it still doesn’t matter. Yes, I was going to marry that girl.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Because it was my grandfather’s dying wish and I am many things, Elena, none of them as polluted or as vile as you seem to believe, but I could not defy my own grandfather.”
“Your grandfather—” she began, her eyes flashing, and he knew what she was about to say. The stories she was about to tell. His twisted family history in all its corrupt glory.
“Was no saint,” he interrupted her. “I know. But he was my grandfather, Elena, and whatever else I might think of the way he lived his life, I have him to thank for mine. How do you repay that kind of debt?”
“Selling yourself off to the highest bidder is an interesting answer to that question.”
“You’re one to talk,” he retorted, and she sucked in a breath, her face going white, then flushing deep red.
He hated himself for that, but that was nothing new, so he kept going—as if he could explain himself to her. As if she might understand him, somehow. How sad was that? How delusional? But he couldn’t seem to stop.
“The docklands project that the wedding was supposed to secure would have done what years of struggle on my part couldn’t—assure the Corretti family’s legacy into the future, legitimately. Bring all the warring factions of the family together.” He searched her face. “How could I refuse to do something so important? Why would I? I was prepared to do my duty to my family, and I can’t say I wouldn’t do it again.”
But she was shaking her head, and she even let out another laugh that seemed to pierce him through the chest, leaving only an icy chill in its wake.
“I’ve heard all of this before,” she said, shrugging. “The struggle to be a good man, the weight of the family name, the call to duty. It’s like a song and I know all the words.” Her gaze slammed into his, and he was amazed to find it felt as if she’d used a fist instead. “But when Niccolo said it, I believed him.”