chapter NINE
HER HEART STOPPED in her chest.
Elena stared at him. She couldn’t move. She certainly couldn’t speak.
Alessandro shrugged, as if what he’d said was as casual as an invitation to coffee, though his dark green eyes were shrewd. They didn’t leave her face.
“It’s the only way to beat Niccolo at his own game,” he said. So matter-of-fact. So calm, so controlled. As if this was nothing but one more contract that required his signature, and not one he needed to read all that closely. “Running from him hasn’t worked. How else can this end?”
“It will end when my father dies,” she said, though her tongue felt as numb as the rest of her. She was dimly surprised it worked at all. “I’m the executor of the trust. Obviously, he won’t be able to manipulate me the way he’s manipulated my father.”
“He told you he would put you in a wheelchair if necessary,” Alessandro reminded her with an edge in his voice and too much dark in his eyes. “He’s not going to stop. In fact, he’s likely to club you over the head and marry you while you’re in a coma.”
Elena couldn’t think. The room had started revolving around her, whirling in lopsided, drunken circles. She was afraid she might fall over. She ignored the kick of hard, fierce joy inside her, because this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. And if it was? Then it was simply one more game. It wasn’t something she should be joyful about.
But it only kicked harder.
“I don’t think the solution is to marry you instead,” she managed to say.
“Yes, of course,” he said then with definite edge that time. “Because you are opposed to marrying for practical reasons, if memory serves. Or is it that you’d prefer to be dragged to the altar by your hair, to the delightful wedding music of Niccolo’s abusive threats?”
“This isn’t practical” was all she could think of to say.
“He won’t touch you if you’re my wife,” Alessandro replied, steel and fire in his gaze. “The impetus to do so would disappear the moment we said our vows. If you’re married, the land is no longer in any dispute. It becomes mine, and your problem is solved.”
“On our wedding day,” Elena heard herself say from somewhere far away. She couldn’t make sense of the words. Or anything else.
His dark eyes gleamed. Something male and primitive moved over his face, then was gone. Hidden, something inside of her whispered, but what could he have to hide? He shrugged again, then reached beside him for the tablet, dismissing her.
As if none of this mattered to him, either way. As if this was a minor favor he’d thought he might do her, nothing more.
“Do you really think I’ll let you go like this?” he’d asked a week ago on the island, so fiercely. “Wash my hands of you?”
She’d wanted to believe that he wouldn’t—that he couldn’t. She still did.
“Your choice, Elena.”
He wasn’t even looking at her. As if this conversation, his proposal of marriage, hardly maintained his interest. But she didn’t believe that, either. He was not a man who begged, and yet he had. Surely that meant something. Didn’t it have to mean something?
“I know you have strong feelings about the Corretti name,” he said in the same offhanded way, “but all you have to do is take it and this insanity ends. It’s simple.”
It wasn’t simple, she thought in a wash of something like anguish. It was anything but simple.
But even as she opened her mouth to refuse him—to do the sane thing and leave him, leave Sicily, save herself the only way she knew how—Elena knew she wouldn’t do it. She would take him any way she could have him, even marry him under these questionable circumstances, knowing he would never feel the way she felt.
Nothing had changed. She was the same selfish, foolish girl she’d ever been. She wanted yet another man to love her when she knew that no matter what she’d thought she glimpsed in him now and again, this was nothing more than a game to him, and she no more than another piece on a chessboard he controlled. Eventually, he would grow tired of her. He would leave her.
And yet some part of her was still vain enough to think he might change his mind, that she might change it. Still silly enough to risk everything on that slim, unlikely chance.
She hadn’t learned a thing in all this time.
“By all means,” he said then, languidly scrolling down a page on his tablet, “take your time agonizing over the only reasonable choice available to you. I’m happy to wait.”
Could she do it? Could she surrender the most important thing of all—the one thing even Niccolo had never got his hands on? The entire future of her village. Her family’s heritage. The land. All because she so desperately hoped that Alessandro was different. That he really would do the right thing.
Because she loved him.
Idiot. The voice in her head was scathing.
Elena jerked herself around and stared out his impressive windows at the lights of the city spread out before her, but what she saw were her parents’ faces. Her poor parents. They deserved so much better than this. Than her.
“What a romantic proposal.” She shut her eyes. She hated herself. But she couldn’t seem to stop the inevitable. She was as incapable of saving herself now as she’d been on that dance floor. And as guilty. “How can I possibly refuse?”
Late that night, Alessandro stood in the door of his bedroom and watched Elena sleep. She was curled up in his bed, and the sight of her there made the savage creature in him want to shout out his triumph to the moon. He almost did. He felt starkly possessive. Wildly victorious.
He could wake her, he knew. She would turn to him eagerly—soft and warm from sleep, and take him inside of her without a word. She would sigh slightly, sweetly, and wrap herself around him, then bury her face in his neck as he moved in her.
She’d done it so many times before.
But tonight was different. Tonight she’d agreed to become his wife.
His wife.
He hadn’t known he’d meant to offer marriage until he had. And once he had, he’d understood that there was no other acceptable outcome to this situation. No alternative. She needed to be his, without reservation or impediment. It had to be legal. It had to last. He didn’t care what trouble that might cause.
There were words for what was happening to him, Alessandro knew, but he wasn’t ready to think about that. Not until he’d secured her, made her his. He turned away from the bed and forced himself to head down the stairs.
Down in his home office, he sat at his wide, imposing desk and frowned down at all of the work Giovanni had prepared for his review. But he didn’t flip open the top report and start reading. He found himself staring at the photo that sat on the corner of his desk instead.
It was a family shot he’d meant to get rid of ever since his grandmother had given it to him years ago. All of the Correttis were gathered around his grandmother, Teresa, at her birthday celebration eight years ago. Canny old Salvatore was smirking at the camera, holding one of Teresa’s hands in his, looking just as Alessandro remembered him—as if death would never dare take him.
Alessandro’s father and uncle, alive and at war with each other, stood with their wives and children on either side of Teresa, who had long been the single unifying force in the family. Her birthday, at her insistence, was the one day of the year the Correttis came together, breathed the same air, refrained from spilling blood or hideous secrets and pretended they were a real family.
Alessandro sighed, and reached over to pick up the photograph. His uncle and four cousins looked like some kind of near mirror image of his own side of the family, faces frozen into varying degrees of mutiny and forced smiles, all stiffly acquiescing to the annual charade. They were all the same, in the end. All of them locked into this family, their seedy history, this bitter, futile fight. Sometimes he found himself envious of Angelo, the only family member missing from the picture, because at least he’d been spared the worst of it.
His sister, Rosa—because he couldn’t think of her any other way, he didn’t care who her father was—smiled genuinely. Alessandro and Santo stood close together, looking as if they were biting back laughter, though Alessandro could no longer remember what about. His father glared, as haughty and arrogant as he’d been to his grave. And his mother looked as she always did: ageless and angry. Always so very, very angry.
“You should never have stayed away so long,” she’d seethed at him earlier today. “It looks like weakness. As if you’ve been off licking your wounds while your cousin has stolen your bride and made our side of the family the butt of every joke in Palermo!”
“Let him,” Alessandro had retorted.
“Surely you don’t plan to let the insult stand?” Carmela Corretti had gasped. “Our family’s honor demands—”
“Honor?” Alessandro had interrupted her icily. “Not the word I’d choose, Mother. And certainly not if I were you.”
She’d sucked in a breath, as if he’d wounded her.
But Alessandro knew the woman who’d raised him. He knew her with every hollow, bitter, blackened part of his Corretti soul. She was immune to hurt. And she always returned a slap with cannon fire.
“You’re just like your father,” she’d said viciously. And it had speared straight through him, hitting its mark. “All of that polish and pretense on the surface, and rotten to the core within. And we know where that leads, don’t we?”
He was so tired of this, he thought now. Of this feud that rolled on and on and did nothing but tear them all apart. Of the vitriol that passed for family communication, the inevitability of the next fight. Would they all end up like his father and uncle, burned on their mysterious funeral pyre, while the whole world looked on sagely and observed that they’d brought it upon themselves? Violent lives, desperate acts—it all led to a terrible end. The cycle went on and on and on.
And was Alessandro really any different? Carlo Corretti had never met a person he wouldn’t exploit for his own purposes. He’d never been honest when he could cheat, had never used persuasion when violence worked instead, and he’d never cared in the least that his hands were covered in blood.
“Right and wrong are what I say they are,” he’d told Alessandro once, after ten-year-old Alessandro had walked in on him with one of his mistresses. There hadn’t been the slightest hint of conscience in his gaze as he’d sprawled there in the bed he shared with Carmela. Right there in the family home. “Are you going to tell me any different, boy?”
Alessandro had hated him. God, how he’d hated him.
He looked up as if he could see Elena through the floors that separated them. She deserved better than this, and he knew it. She wasn’t the Battaglia girl, auctioned off by her father to the highest bidder and fully aware of what joining the Corretti family meant—even if, as it turned out, she’d preferred a different Corretti. Elena had already escaped Niccolo Falco and whatever grim fate he’d had in store for her.
If he was any kind of man, if he was truly not like his viciously conniving father, he would set her free immediately.
Instead, he’d manipulated her, and he’d done it deliberately. She didn’t have to marry him to be safe; he had teams of lawyers who could help her and her village. Who could deal with the likes of Niccolo Falco in the course of a single morning.
His mother was right. He was following in his father’s footsteps. He couldn’t pretend any differently. But in the end, even that didn’t matter. He wanted her too much, too badly, to do what he knew was right.
He would do his penance instead, as small as it was in the grand scheme of things. He would keep his hands off her until he married her. He would torture himself, and pretend that made this all right. That it made him something other than what he was: his father’s son.
Alessandro simply didn’t have it in him to let her go.
Four days later, by a special license she hadn’t asked how he’d managed to obtain, Elena married Alessandro Corretti in a small civil ceremony. It was 10:35 in the morning, in a small village outside of Palermo that Elena had never heard of before. But then, she didn’t know the name of the man who married them, either, though he had introduced himself as the local mayor. Nor did she know either of the two witnesses who stood with them, both happy to take handfuls of Alessandro’s euros for so little of their time.
It took all of twenty minutes.
In the private antechamber even more of Alessandro’s money had secured for them, Elena stared at herself in the room’s small mirror and ran her fingers down the front of the dress she wore. It was a rich, deep cream. It had delicate sleeves and fell from a pretty scooped neck into a flattering A-line that ended at her knees. Her hair was twisted back into a sophisticated chignon, and she wore a single strand of stunning pearls around her throat to match the diamond-and-pearl clusters at her ears. She looked elegant and chic. Polished. Smart.
She looked nothing at all like herself.
And why should you? a caustic voice inside her demanded. Elena Calderon was no more. She was Alessandro’s wife now. Signora Elena Corretti.
She swallowed against the tide of emotion she didn’t dare examine here, and chanced a look in Alessandro’s direction. He was her husband. Her husband.
But he didn’t love her.
Better to deal with the repercussions of that sooner rather than later, she thought, bracing herself. Better to ensure she didn’t fall prey to her own imagination, her own precarious hopes. And what better place to make everything between them perfectly clear than the lounge of a town hall in a sleepy village, fitted with two ugly chairs and a desperate-looking sofa arranged around a cracked wood floor?
Congratulations on your hasty and secretive wedding, Signora Corretti, she mocked herself. No expense or luxury was spared for your happy day!
Alessandro stood near the closed door, on his mobile. The phone had beeped some thirty seconds after they’d signed the register. He’d announced he needed to take the call, and had waved her back into the antechamber she’d used before the ceremony.
She was almost positive she’d seen pity on the mayor’s face before Alessandro had closed the door behind them.
“When do you think we should divorce?” she asked briskly when he ended his call, looking out through the small windows at the Sicilian countryside. Proud mountains with vineyards etched into the lower slopes. Red-roofed houses clinging to green hillsides. Olive groves and ancient ruins. All of it piercingly, hauntingly lovely. There was no reason at all it should have made her chest ache. “Did you have a particular time frame in mind?”
When he didn’t respond, Elena turned away from the window—
And found him staring at her in amazement.
“We have been married for ten minutes, Elena,” he said in a voice that made her skin pull tight. “Possibly fifteen. This conversation seems a trifle premature.”
“This was the only reasonable choice I had, as you pointed out, and a convenient way to fix the Niccolo problem.” She was suddenly too aware of the rings he’d slid onto her finger—a trio of flawless diamonds set in platinum on the drive over, and a diamond-studded platinum band during the ceremony, such as it was. It occurred to her that she was, in fact, deeply furious with him. She’d wanted this to mean something. She’d wanted it to matter. She was an idiot. “Nothing more than that. What does it matter if we discuss it now?”
He went incandescent. She actually saw him catch fire. His dark eyes were ferocious, his mouth flattened, and she was certain she could hear his skin sizzle with the burn of his temper from across the tiny room.
And it didn’t scare her. She welcomed it. It was a happy alternative to the icy cold CEO who’d taken Alessandro’s place since they’d returned to Sicily. Since the paparazzi had found them and plastered their faces across every gossip magazine and website in Europe. Since he’d shocked her with his proposal. He’d been distant. Controlled. He hadn’t laid a finger on her, and there’d been nothing but winter in his dark green eyes.
She preferred this Alessandro. She knew this Alessandro.
No matter how tight and close it felt suddenly, in such a small room, with him blocking the only exit.
“I suggest you drop this subject,” he advised her, hoarse with the force of his temper. There was that glitter of high passion, furious desire, in his too-dark eyes, and she exulted in it. She needed it.
“Oh,” she said brightly, unable to help herself. “Were you thinking an annulment would work better?”
He laughed. It was a hard, male sound, primitive and stirring. It coursed through her, made her shiver with the heat of it. Made her ache. And the look he turned on her then melted her bones.
“I did warn you,” he said.
He reached behind him and locked the door, and Elena felt it like a bullet. Hard and true, straight into her core. He crossed the room in a single stride, hauled her to him and then pulled her down with him as he sat on the sad, old sofa. Then he simply lifted her over his lap.
He hiked her dress up over her hips, ripped her panties out of his way with a casual ferocity that made her deliciously weak, then stroked two long fingers into the melting furnace of her core. Elena gasped his name. He laughed again at the evidence of how much she wanted him, all of her molten desire in his hand. She braced her hands on the smooth lapels of his wedding suit, another stunning work of art in black, and not half as beautiful as that mad hunger that changed his face, made him that much starker. Fiercer.
Hers.
Alessandro didn’t look away from her as he reached between them and freed himself. He didn’t look away as he ripped open a foil packet with his teeth and rolled protection on with one hand. And he didn’t look away as he thrust hard into her, pulling her knees astride him, gripping her bottom in his hard hands to move her as he liked.
“An annulment is out of the question,” he told her, his voice like fire, roaring through her. “And in case you’re confused, this is called consummation.”
Elena’s head fell back as she met his thrusts, rode him, met his passion with every roll of her hips. She felt taken and glorious and his.
Completely his.
He changed the angle of her hips, moving her against him in a wicked rhythm, and she felt herself start to slip toward that edge. That easily. That quickly. Still fully dressed. Still wearing her wedding shoes and the pearls he’d presented her this morning. Still madly in love with this hard, dangerous man who was deep inside of her and knew exactly how to make her blind with desire. This man who was somehow her husband.
Whatever that meant. However long it lasted. Right then, she didn’t care.
“You are mine, Elena,” he whispered fiercely, his voice dark and sinful, lighting her up like a new blaze. “You are my wife.”
It was that word that hurled her over, sent her flying apart in his arms, forced to muffle her cries with her own hand as he muttered something hot and dark and then followed right behind her.
When she came back to herself, he was watching her face, and she wondered in a surge of panic what he might have seen there. What she might have revealed.
“Don’t talk to me about divorce,” he said in a low voice, his dark green eyes hot. “Not today.”
He shifted forward, setting her on her feet before him. She felt unsteady. Utterly wrecked, yet a glance in the mirror showed he hadn’t disturbed a single hair on her perfectly coiffed head. She smoothed her dress back down into place, her hands trembling slightly. Alessandro tucked himself back into his trousers and then reached down to scoop up the lace panties he’d torn off her.
Because he’d been too desperate, too determined to get inside her, to wait another instant. She didn’t know why that should make her feel more cherished, more precious to him, than all twenty strange minutes of their wedding ceremony.
She held out her hand to take the panties back. His hard mouth curved, his dark eyes a sensual challenge and something far more intense, and then he tucked them in his pocket.
“A memento of our wedding day,” he said, mocking her, she was sure. “I’ll treasure it.”
She smiled back at him, cool and sharp.
“An annulment it is, then,” she said. “This has been such a useful, rational discussion, Alessandro. Thank you.”
He laughed again then, almost beneath his breath, and then he was on his feet and striding for the door, as if he didn’t trust himself to stay locked in this room with her a moment longer. She allowed herself a small, satisfied smile.
“We can argue about this in the car,” he said over his shoulder. “I have a one o’clock meeting I can’t miss.”
Because, of course, the CEO of Corretti Media didn’t stop doing business on his wedding day, not when the wedding meant so little to him. Her smile vanished. It was a brutal reminder of reality. Of her place. It didn’t matter how hot they burned. It didn’t matter how desperate he’d been. Elena clenched her hands into fists and felt the bite of the unfamiliar bands around her finger like one more slap.
And then followed him, anyway.
His mobile beeped again as they walked. He answered it, slowing down as he talked. Elena heard the words docklands, cousin and Battaglia. Alessandro pushed open the glass doors at the entrance of the village hall, and nodded her through, almost as if he had a chivalrous bone in that powerful body of his.
“Wait for me in the car,” he said, and then turned back toward the interior of the hall. Dismissing her.
The door swished shut behind her as she stepped through it, and Elena pulled in a long, deep breath. The morning was still as bright and cheerful as it had been when she’d walked inside. A lovely July day in the rolling hills of Sicily. The perfect day for a wedding.
She had to figure out how to handle this, to enjoy it while it lasted, or she’d never survive it. And she had to do it fast.
Elena kept her eyes on the stairs below her as she climbed down the hall’s steps, her legs still so shaky and the heels she wore no help at all, so she had to hold tight to the bannister as she went. Cracking her head open on the pavement would hardly improve matters.
She made it to the bottom step in one piece, and started to walk around the man who stood there, his back to the hall. Alessandro’s sleek black sports car was parked near the fountain in the center of the pretty village square, the convertible top pulled back, reminding her of how silly she’d been on the drive over—glancing at the way the ring sparkled on her hand, allowing herself to yearn for impossibilities.
“Excuse me,” she murmured absently as she navigated her way around the man, glancing at him to smile politely—
But it was Niccolo.
All of the blood drained out of her head. Her stomach contracted in a sickening lurch, and she was sure her heart dropped out of her body and lay at her feet on the pavement.
“Niccolo …” she whispered in disbelief.
Niccolo, like all of the nightmares that had kept her awake these past months. Niccolo, his arms folded over his chest and his black eyes burning mean and cold as he soaked in her reaction.
Niccolo, who she’d thought she loved until Alessandro had walked into her life and showed her how pale that love was, how small. Niccolo, who she’d trusted. Who she’d laughed with, thinking they were laughing together. Who she’d dreamed with, thinking they were planning a shared future. Niccolo, who had hunted her across all these months and the span of Italy, and was looking at her now as if that slap in his villa was only the very beginning of what he’d like to do to her.
She couldn’t believe this was happening. Today. Here. Now.
“Elena,” he said, his voice almost friendly, but she could see that nasty gleam in his eyes. She could see exactly who he was. “At last.”