chapter SEVEN
NICCOLO FALCO. AGAIN. Always.
“Your beloved Niccolo is a liar and a crook,” Alessandro said through his teeth. “He wouldn’t know the right thing to do if it attacked him on the streets of Naples, and he certainly wouldn’t do it. Don’t kid yourself.”
She got to her feet then, stiff and jerky, as if she thought she might break apart where she stood. “I would never lower myself to a Corretti scum like you,” she’d hissed at him on that dance floor, and he’d believed her then.
He didn’t know why he wanted so badly not to believe her now.
“Is this what you meant by real, Alessandro?” she asked in a harsh whisper, her bright eyes ablaze. “Are you satisfied?”
“It would be so much easier to simply give in,” he threw at her, his voice unsteady. As if he’d lost control of himself, which was unacceptable, but he couldn’t stop. “To simply be the man everyone thinks I am, anyway, no matter what I do. Even you, who shouldn’t dare to throw a single stone my way for fear of what I could throw back at you. Even you.”
She sucked in a breath, as if he really had thrown something at her.
“Because there could be no one lower in all of Italy.” Something in the way she said it ripped at him, or maybe that was the way she looked at him, as if he’d finally managed to crush her—and he detested himself anew. “Not one person lower than me. Yet you can’t keep your hands off me, can you?”
“You know exactly what kind of man Niccolo is,” he said then, because he couldn’t handle what her voice did to him. What that look in her eyes made him feel. “You’re here at his bidding, to do whatever dirty work he requires. And it’s certainly been dirty, hasn’t it? But you sneer at my name?”
“I am here,” she threw back at him, her voice still so ragged and her eyes so dark, too dark, “until we discover whether or not our recklessness results in a pregnancy neither one of us wants. We risked bringing a brand-new life into all of this bitterness and hate. That’s the kind of people we are, Alessandro.”
“Why don’t you teach me,” he said then, his gaze on hers, hot and hurt and too many other things he couldn’t define and wasn’t sure he wanted to know, though he could feel them all battering at him.
“Teach you what? Manners? I think we’re past that.”
“You’re the expert on men like me,” he said, fascinated despite himself when she blanched at the way he said that. “You know all about it, apparently. Teach me what that means. Show me. Help me be as bad as you think I am already.”
Something shifted in the air between them. In her gaze. The way her blue eyes shone with unshed misery, and the way she suddenly looked so small then, so vulnerable. So shattered.
And all he felt was … raw. Raw and ruined, all the way through to his bones.
Or maybe that was the way she looked at him.
“Let me guess what makes me the perfect teacher,” she said, her voice cracking.
“You tell me, Elena,” he said, his own voice a low, dark growl. “You’re the one in bed with the enemy.”
And she swayed then, as if he’d punched her hard in the gut. He felt as if he had, a kind of hot, bitter shame pouring over him, almost drowning him. But she steadied herself, and one hand crept over her heart, as if, he realized dimly, it ached. As if it ached straight up through her ribs, enough for her to press against it from above.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Her voice was thick and unsteady, and he had the impression she didn’t see him at all, though she stared right at him. Her eyes were wide and slicked with pain, and he watched in a kind of helpless horror as they finally overflowed.
“I don’t …” She shook, and she wept, and it tore him apart. And then her uneven whisper smashed all the pieces. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
Alessandro reached for her then because he didn’t know what else to do. Elena threw her free hand out to stop him, to warn him. Maybe even to hit him, he thought—and he’d deserve it if she did. He did yet another thing he couldn’t understand, reaching out and lacing his fingers through hers, the way he had on that dance floor long ago. She shuddered, then drew in a harsh breath.
But she didn’t pull away, and something in him, hard and desperate, eased.
“I can’t breathe anymore,” she whispered, those tears tracking down her soft cheeks. He felt the tremor in her hand, saw it shiver over her skin. “I can’t breathe—”
He pulled her to him, cradling her against his chest as if she was made of glass, the need to hold her roaring in him, loud and imperative and impossible to ignore. She bowed her head into him and he felt the hand she’d held against her own heart ball into a fist against the wall of his chest.
He ran his free hand down the length of her spine and then back up. Again and again. He found himself murmuring words he didn’t entirely comprehend, half-remembered words from the long-ago nannies who had soothed his nightmares and bandaged his scrapes as a boy. He bent his head down close to hers and rested his cheek on top of her head.
She shook against him, silent sobs rolling hard through her slender body, and he held her. He didn’t think about how little sense this made. He didn’t think about what this told him about himself, or how terrified he should be of this woman and the things she made him feel. And do. He simply held her.
And when she stopped crying and stirred against him, it was much, much harder than it should have been to let her pull away. She stepped out of his arms and dropped his hand, then scrubbed her palms over her face. And then she looked up at him, tearstained and wary with a certain resolve in her brilliant blue eyes, and something flipped over in his chest.
“I’m not a whore,” she said, something naked and urgent moving over her face and through her remarkable eyes as they met his. “I’m not engaged to Niccolo. I ran out on him six months ago after he hit me, and I’ve been hiding from him ever since.”
He only stared at her. The world, this island, his house, even he seemed to explode, devastating and silent, leaving nothing but Elena and the way she looked at him, the faint dampness against his chest where she’d sobbed against him and what she’d said. What it meant.
She was not engaged. She was not a whore. She wasn’t a spy.
It beat in him, louder and louder, drowning out his own heartbeat.
“I’m risking everything I care about to tell you this,” she continued, and he heard the catch in her voice, the tightness. The fear, he thought. She’s afraid. Of me. “The only things I have left. So please …” She choked back a sob and it made him ache. It made him loathe himself anew. “Please, Alessandro. Prove you’re who you say you are.”
“A Corretti?” He hardly recognized his own voice, scratchy and rough, pulled from somewhere so deep in him he hadn’t known he meant to speak.
She crossed her arms, more to hold herself than to hold him off, he thought. She took a deep breath. Then her chin lifted and her blue eyes were brave and somber as they held his, and he felt everything inside of him shift. Then roll.
“Be the man who does the right thing,” she said, her voice quiet. And still it rang in him, through him, like a bell. Like a benediction he couldn’t possibly deserve. “Who does his duty and would again. If that’s who you are, please. Be you.”
“Come,” Alessandro said in a hushed voice Elena had never heard before.
She was so dazed, so hollowed out by what had happened, what she’d done, that she simply followed where he led. He ushered her out onto a small nook of a terrace that jutted out over the water, settling her into the wide, swinging chair that hung there, swaying slightly in the soft breeze.
“Wait here,” he told her, and then walked away.
She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to, she realized. She drew her knees up onto the bright white seat and leaned back. The chair swung, gently. Rocking her. Soothing her the way his hand had, warm and reassuring along her back as she’d cried. Down below, the rocky cliff fell steeply into the jagged rocks, and the sea sparkled and danced in the afternoon sun, as if everything was perfectly fine. As if none of this mattered, not really.
But Elena knew better.
She’d betrayed her family and her village and every last thing she’d clung to across all of these months, and yet somehow she couldn’t seem to do anything but breathe in the crisp air, the scent of sweet flowers and cut grass in the breeze.
Almost as if she really believed she was safe. Almost as if she thought he was, the way she always had. When she suspected the truth was that she was simply broken beyond repair.
Alessandro returned with a damp cloth in his hand and when he squatted down before her his hard face was so serious that it made her chest feel tight. She leaned forward and let him wash the tears from her face. He was extraordinarily gentle, and it swelled in her like pain.
He pulled the cloth away and didn’t move for a moment. He only looked up at her, searching her face. She had no idea what he saw.
“Tell me,” he said.
It was an order as much as it was a request, and she knew she shouldn’t. Her mind raced, turning over possibilities like tavola reale game pieces, looking for some way out of this, some way to fix what she’d done, what she’d said, what she’d confessed….
But it was too late for that.
This was the price of her foolishness, her selfishness. First Niccolo had tricked her, and then this man had hurt her feelings, and she was too weak to withstand either. Now that her tears were dry, now that she could breathe, she could see it all with perfect, horrifying clarity. She hadn’t kept her village or her family’s legacy safe the first time, and given the opportunity to fix that, she’d failed.
Because he thought too little of her, and she couldn’t stand it.
She was more than broken, she thought then. She was a disgrace.
“Tell me what happened to you,” he said then, carefully, again so very gentle that her throat constricted. “Tell me what he did.”
He rose and then settled himself on the other end of the swinging chair, one leg drawn up and the other anchoring them to the floor. His hard mouth was in a firm line as he gazed at her, his dark green eyes grave. For a moment she was thrown back to that ballroom in Rome, when she’d looked up to see a stranger looking at her, exactly like this. As if the whole world hinged on what might happen next.
Which she supposed it had then. Why not again?
“I’m from a long line of very simple fishermen,” she said, pushing past the lump in her throat, concentrating on her hands instead of him. “But my great-grandfather eloped with the daughter of a rich man from Fondi. Her parents begged her to reconsider, but she refused, and they decided it was better their daughter live as a rich fisherman’s wife than a poor one’s. They gave my great-grandfather her dowry. It was substantial.”
She pulled up her knees, then wrapped her arms around her legs, fully aware that this was as close to the fetal position as she could get while sitting up. And she fought off her sense of disloyalty, the fact that she should be protecting this legacy, not handing it over to man who was perfectly capable of destroying it. On a whim.
But she didn’t know what else to do.
“He was a proud man and he didn’t want their money,” she continued, swallowing back the self-recrimination. “But my great-grandmother convinced him to put it toward a big stretch of land along the coast, so her family need not be as dependent on the whims of the sea as the rest of the village. And the land has been handed down ever since, from eldest son to eldest son.”
She looked past him then, out toward the water, as if she could squint hard and see all the way across the waves to the remote little village she was from, tucked up in its rocky hills so far away. She could imagine every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, as if she was standing there now. She knew every house that clung to the hillside, every boat in the harbor. And most of the faces, too.
“It must,” Alessandro said quietly, “be worth a great deal more now than it was then.”
Elena should have thanked him, she thought, her eyes snapping back to his, for reminding her where she was. And who he was. She wasn’t sharing this story with him—she was gambling everything on the slim possibility he was a better man than she thought he was. She nodded.
“It is,” she said. “And my parents had only me.”
“So the land is yours?” he asked, his brows lifting.
“My father is a traditional man,” Elena said, looking down the sweep of her legs, staring at her feet against the bright white cushions. Anywhere but at Alessandro. “When he dies, if I’m not married, the land will be held in trust. Once I marry it will transfer to my husband. If I’m already married when he dies, my husband will get the land on our wedding day.”
“Ah,” Alessandro said, a cynical twist to his lips when she looked at him again. “You must have been Niccolo’s dream come true.”
“Last summer my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor,” she told him, pushing forward because she couldn’t stop now. “There was no possible way to operate.” So matter-of-fact, so clinical. When it had cast her whole world into shadow. It still did. “The doctors said he had a year to live, if he was lucky.”
“A year?” His dark green gaze felt like a touch. The long arm he’d stretched out along the back of the seat moved slightly, as if he meant to reach for her but thought better of it. That shouldn’t have warmed her. “It’s nearly July.”
She hugged herself tighter, guilt and shame and that terrible grief flattening her, making it hard to breathe.
“About a month after we got the news, I was walking home one evening when a handsome stranger approached me, right there in the street,” she said softly.
Alessandro’s lips thinned, and he muttered something guttural and fierce in Sicilian. He looked furious again, dark and powerful, like some kind of vengeful god only pretending to sit there so civilly. Only waiting.
“Do you want to hear this?” she asked then, lifting a hand to rub at the pressure behind her temple and only then realizing that she was shaking. “All of it?”
“I told you,” he said, a kind of ferocity in his voice, all that ruthlessness and demand gleaming in his dark green eyes. He touched her then, reaching over to tuck a wayward strand of her hair behind her ear, that hard mouth curving when goose bumps rose along her neck, her shoulder. “I want everything.”
And Elena understood then that she was open and vulnerable to this man in ways she’d never been before. This really was everything. This was all she had left inside of her, all she’d had left to hold, laid out before him because she’d finally given in. She’d finally let go. This was everything lost, her whole world ruined, and nothing left to hope for but the possibility of his mercy.
This was surrender. Everything else had been games.
“I didn’t think I was particularly naive,” she said then, because he was looking at her in that too-incisive way of his, and she was afraid of what he might see. And of what he might do when she was finished. “I’d been to university. I have a law degree. I was starting to take on all the duties and responsibilities of the family business. The land. The money. The constant development proposals.” She shook her head, scowling at her own memories. Her own stupidity. “I wasn’t just some silly village girl.”
And that was the crux of it. She felt new tears prick at the backs of her eyes, and hurriedly blinked them back. She’d thought she was better than where she came from. She’d thought very highly of herself indeed. She’d been certain she deserved the handsome, wealthy stranger who had appeared like magic to sweep her off her feet.
Such vanity.
She only realized she’d said it out loud when Alessandro said something else in his brash Sicilian, so little of which she understood even after her time there. He shifted in his seat, making it swing with him as he did.
“I told you before,” he said. “It was a con.”
“I believed him,” Elena said simply, shame and regret in her voice, moving in her veins like sludge. She felt it all over her face, and had to stop looking at him before she saw it on his, too. “I believed every single thing he told me. All of his big dreams. All of his plans. That he and I were a team.” Her voice cracked, but she kept going. “That he loved me. I believed every word.”
“Elena,” he said in a voice she’d never heard him use before. She had to close her eyes briefly against it. As if her name was an endearment she couldn’t believe a man so hard even knew. “You were supposed to believe him. He set you up.”
She didn’t know why she wanted to weep then, again.
“I knew you were lying to me in Rome,” she said fiercely, hugging her knees tight, keeping her eyes trained on the sea, determined to hold the tears back. “About everything. You had to be lying, because Niccolo couldn’t possibly be the man you described, and because, of course, you were a Corretti.”
“Of course.” His tone made her wince. She didn’t dare look at his expression.
“I went looking for things to prove you were a liar. One night while Niccolo slept, I got up and decided to search the laptop he took everywhere with him.”
She heard Alessandro’s release of breath, short and sharp, but she still couldn’t look at him. Especially not now.
“He caught me, of course, but not until after I read far too many emails that explained in detail his plans for my family’s land.” She frowned, as horrified now as she had been then. “He wanted to build a luxury hotel, which would transform my forgotten village into a major tourist destination. We’re fishermen, first and foremost. We don’t even have a decent beach. We like to visit Amalfi, but we don’t want to compete with it.”
She shook her head, remembering that night in such stark detail. She’d only thrown on a shirt of Niccolo’s and a pair of socks, and had snuck down to the kitchen to snoop on his computer while he snored. It had been cold in his villa, and she remembered shivering as she sat on one of the stools, her legs growing chillier the longer she sat there.
And she remembered the way her stomach had lurched when she’d looked up to see him in the doorway.
He hadn’t asked her what she was doing. He’d only stared at her, his black eyes flat and mean, and for a terrifying moment Elena hadn’t recognized him.
She’d told herself she was only being fanciful. It had been well after midnight and she hadn’t heard him approach. But he was still her Niccolo, she’d assured herself. He was in love with her, he was going to marry her, and while they were probably going to fight about his privacy and all these emails she couldn’t understand, it would all be fine.
She’d been so sure.
“I asked him what it meant, because I was certain there had to be a reasonable explanation.” She let out a hollow laugh. “He knew we wanted to conserve the land, protect the village. He’d spent hours talking to my father about it. He’d promised.”
“I imagine he did not have a satisfying explanation,” Alessandro said darkly.
“He slapped me.” Such a funny, improbable word to describe it. The shock of the impact first, then the burst of pain. Then she’d hit the cold stone floor, and that had hurt even more.
Alessandro went frighteningly still.
Elena’s heart raced, and she felt sick. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her own legs, and she still wanted to curl up further, disappear. But it didn’t matter if he believed her, she told herself staunchly. Her own parents hadn’t believed her. It only mattered that she told this truth, no matter what he thought of it.
“He slapped me so hard he knocked me down. Off my stool. To the floor.” She made herself look at Alessandro then, burning there in his quiet fury, his dark green eyes brilliant with rage.
Directed at Niccolo, she understood. Not at her. And maybe that was why she told him something she’d never told anyone else. Something she’d never said out loud before.
“He called me a whore,” she told him quietly. “Your whore, in fact.”
Alessandro swore, and his hand twitched along the back of the swing as if he wanted to reach through her memories, through her story, and respond to Niccolo in kind.
“When was this?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“A few days after the ball,” she said. “After …”
“Yes,” he said in a low voice with too many deep currents. “After.”
She let go of her iron grip on her legs before her hands went numb, and used them, shaky and cold, to scrape her hair back from her face.
“He said it was bad enough he had to marry me to get the land, but now he had to do it after I’d made him a laughingstock with his sworn enemy?” She didn’t see the sea in front of her then. She only saw Niccolo’s face, twisted in a rage. She saw the way he’d stood over her, so cruel, so cold, while she lay there too stunned to cry. “He told me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d shut my mouth and be thankful the land was worth more than I was. And then he walked out of the villa and left me there on the floor.”
“Elena.”
But she had to finish. She had to get it out or she never would, and she didn’t want to think about why it was suddenly so important to her that the man she’d never thought she’d see again know every last detail. Every last way she’d made such a fool of herself.
“I left, of course,” she said, ignoring the wobble in her voice and the constriction in her throat. And all of his heat and power beside her. “But I didn’t really mean it. I thought there was some kind of misunderstanding. He couldn’t have meant to hit me, to say those things to me. Maybe he’d been drinking. I went home to my parents, as I always did.” She swallowed, hard. “And they hugged me, and told me that they loved me, and then they told me they blamed themselves that I’d turned out so spoiled, so high-strung. So selfish.”
She shook her head when he started to speak and he stilled, frowning.
“They were so kind. Niccolo was going to be my husband, they told me, and marriages took work. Commitment. I was going to have to grow up and stop telling terrible stories when I didn’t get my way.” She laughed again, and it sounded broken to her own ears. “Niccolo was a good man, they said, and I believed them. I wanted to believe them. It was easier to believe that I’d made up the whole thing than that he was the person I’d seen that night.”
Alessandro shifted, and put his arm around her, then gathered her close to his side. Holding her again. Holding her close, as if he could fight off all her demons that easily. She wondered if he could, if he even wanted to bother, and her eyes slicked over with a glaze of heat.
“He laughed when I rang him,” she whispered. “He told me that I was a stupid bitch. A whore. He told me I had twenty-four hours to get back to the villa and if I didn’t he’d come get me himself, and I would really, truly regret it. That he didn’t care if he had to marry me in a wheelchair.”
Alessandro’s arm tightened around her, and she allowed herself the comfort of his heat, his strength, even though she knew it was fleeting at best. That it wasn’t hers, no matter how much it felt as if it was. That he was far more dangerous to her now, armed with all of the knowledge she’d given him, even if he really was the man he claimed he was.
Neither one of them spoke for a long while. His hand moved over her hair, stroking her as if she was something precious to him. She accepted that she wished she was. That she always had. That she’d wanted too much from him from the start, and had been paying for it ever since.
“And that time,” she said when she could speak again, giving him everything he’d asked for, everything she’d been hiding, everything, “I believed him.”
Alessandro stood on the balcony outside his bedroom long after midnight, staring out into the dark.
He couldn’t sleep. He could hardly think straight. Once again, she’d shoved his world off its axis, and he was still reeling.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he’d asked her as the light began to change, still holding her on the swinging chair, pulling her closer as the wind picked up.
“You would never have believed me.”
“Perhaps,” he’d said, but she’d only smiled. “Perhaps, in time, I might have.”
But she’d been right. He would have thought it was another game. He would have laughed at her. Hated her all the more. He would have treated her exactly the same—worse, even. He couldn’t pretend otherwise.
He balled his hands into fists against the rail now, scowling.
He should have known. He had been too busy concentrating on the darkness in him, too busy nursing his wounded pride. The truth had always been there, staring him in the face. In every kiss, every touch. In the way she’d given herself to him so unreservedly.
In what he’d known about her the moment he’d seen her in Rome.
He should have tried to reach her then. Instead, he’d stormed off that dance floor and left her to be brutalized. He’d put her through hell all on his own. And he couldn’t blame his family for that. That had been all him.
He was no different from them at all. He couldn’t imagine how he’d ever believed otherwise.
He sensed her behind him a moment before she stepped to the rail beside him, hugging herself against the cool night air.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.
She smiled, but she didn’t look at him. “You didn’t.”
He watched her, feeling something work through him, something powerful and new and all about that tilt to her jaw, that perfect curve of her hip, the way she squared her shoulders as she stood there. Her lovely strength. Her courage.
He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with any of it. Or with her.
Alessandro couldn’t help but touch her then, his hands curving over her bare shoulders and turning her to face him. She was as beautiful in the shadows as she was in the light, though the wariness in her gaze made his chest ache. He wanted to protect her, to keep her safe. From Niccolo. From the world.
Even from himself.
He stroked his fingers down her lovely face, and felt the way she shivered, heard the way she sighed. He thought of that first touch, so long ago now, that glorious heat. He thought of that marvelous glow between them. That easy, instant perfection.
And all of it was true.
Everything he’d felt. Everything he’d imagined. Everything he’d wanted then, and thought impossible.
“What happens now?” she asked softly, her eyes searching his.
He smiled then, over the rawness inside of him, the dangerous, insidious hope.
“Now?” he asked, his voice gruff. As uneven as he felt. “I apologize.”
And then he kissed her, gently, and she melted into him. Like the first time all over again. Better.
Real.
Elena woke in his wide bed, safe and warm.
She lay on her side and gazed out at the morning light, the blue sky, and the previous afternoon came back to her slowly, drip by drip. Then the night. The way he’d picked her up so gently and carried her back to bed. The way he’d moved over her, worshipping every part of her, taking his time and driving her into a sweet, wild oblivion, before curling around her and holding her close as they fell asleep together.
It had been so different, Elena thought now. She smiled to herself. It had felt like—
But she pushed that thought away, afraid to look at it too closely. Her stomach began to ache, and she cursed herself. Things were precarious enough already. There were any number of ways Alessandro could use what she’d told him against her. No need to tangle her emotions any further. No need to make it that much worse.
No need to walk straight into another disaster as blindly as she had the first.
She climbed from the bed and started for the bathroom, aware with each step that she didn’t feel well—as if her body was finally taking all of the past weeks’ excesses out on her. As if it was punishing her. She had a slight headache. Her stomach hurt. Even her breasts ached. And she felt heavy, all the way through. Almost as if—
She stopped in her tracks and, for a moment, was nothing at all but numb. Then she walked into the bathroom, confirmed her suspicion and had only just come back out again and pulled on the first thing she could find—the long-sleeved shirt he’d been wearing the night before, as it happened—when Alessandro walked through the bedroom door.
He had his mobile phone clamped to his ear, a fierce scowl on his beautiful face, and Elena simply stood there, helplessly, and stared. Everything had changed. Again. She didn’t have any idea how this would go, or what might happen next.
And he still made her heart beat faster when he walked into a room. He still made her knees feel weak. All this time, and she hadn’t grown used to him at all. All of these weeks, and if anything, she was even more susceptible to him than she had been at the start.
She didn’t dare think about what that meant, either. She was terribly afraid she already knew.
“I don’t care,” he growled into the phone. He raked an impatient hand through his hair. “I’m running out of ways to tell you that, Mother, and I ran out of patience ten minutes ago. None of this has anything to do with me.”
He hung up, then tossed the phone on the bed. His dark green eyes narrowed when they found hers. He stilled, that restlessness she could see written all over him fading.
“Has something happened?” Elena asked, and she could hear the nerves in her voice. The panic. His gaze sharpened, telling her he did, too.
“Just one more scandal linked to the Corretti name, though this time, happily, not mine,” he said. “Or not entirely mine, though it gives rise to all sorts of speculation I should probably care about.” His focus was on Elena, his dark green eyes speculative as they swept over her face. “Alessia Battaglia is pregnant.”
Elena swallowed. “Oh,” she said.
She wished she wasn’t wearing only his shirt. It was like déjà vu. The last time she’d worn a man’s shirt—But she couldn’t let herself think that way. It would only make this harder.
“Well,” she said lamely. She had to clear her throat. “I … am not.”
For a long moment, there was only the sound of her heartbeat, loud in her ears. And the way he looked at her across the expanse of his bed, that fierce and arrogant face of his unreadable.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
Her throat was dry. “I am.”
She didn’t know what she expected. But it wasn’t the way his face changed, the way his eyes darkened—a brief, searing flash. It wasn’t the way that pierced her, straight to the bone.
Regret.
That was what she saw on his face, in his dark gaze. For a dizzying moment, she couldn’t breathe.
Because she felt it, too, like a newer, deeper ache. As if they’d lost something today. As if they should grieve this instead of celebrate it, and that didn’t make any kind of sense at all.
“All right,” he said then. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”
She nodded, because she didn’t trust her voice.
“We must be lucky,” he said quietly. But his smile was like a ghost, and it hurt her.
It all hurt.
And she knew why, she thought then, in dawning understanding and a surge of fear. This hadn’t been about the games they played, or any of the things she’d been telling herself so fiercely for so long. The lust and the hurt and the wild, uncontrollable passion had been no more than window dressing, and she’d been desperately ignoring what lay beyond all of that since the moment she’d laid eyes on this man in Rome.
Because it shouldn’t have happened like that. It shouldn’t have happened at all. Love at first sight was nonsense; it belonged in poems, songs. Sentimental films. Real people made choices, they didn’t take one look at a stranger on a dance floor and feel the world shift around them, a key turning in a lock.
Elena had been telling herself that for months, and here she was anyway, not carrying his child and as absurdly upset about it as if they’d been trying to get pregnant instead of simply unpardonably reckless.
She was in love with him, God help her. She was in love with him.
It rang in her, long and low and deep. And it wasn’t new. It had been there from that very first glance. It had happened that fast, that irrevocably, and she simply hadn’t wanted to accept that it could be true. But it was.
And now she simply had to figure out how to survive the end of her time with him, the end of these months that had changed her life forever, without giving him that last, worst weapon to use against her.
“Yes,” she agreed, aware he was watching her with those clever eyes of his and she knew he saw too much, the way he always did. “Very lucky.”