A Scandal in the Headlines (6 page)

He smoothed his hands down her back, the sensual shape of her making him harder, making him desperate. But he didn’t rush. He reached around beneath her to flatten his hands against the delectable curve of her belly.

He held his hands there for a moment, savoring the fine, low tremor that shuddered through her. Letting her absorb the heat of his hands. And then he moved lower, pulling open the button fly of her trousers with one hand as the other slid inside to cup her scalding heat in his palm.

She was panting now, leaning her forehead against the table, and he held her femininity in his hand, hot and damp and swollen with desire. And then he squeezed.

Elena bucked against him, against the table, and he did it again. Then again.

Slowly, deliberately, he built up a rhythm. Teasing her. Seducing her. Pressing against her urgent center with every stroke. Her breath grew ragged, her heat bloomed into his hand, and only then—only when she was mindless before him, stretched out breathless and boneless and his to command—did he pull his hand away.

Leaving her trembling right there on the edge.

She sobbed something incoherent into the arm she had thrown up near her head and then let out a moan as Alessandro tugged on her trousers, peeling them over her hips and shoving them down her legs to her knees. He left her panties where they were, an electric blue thong that beautifully framed then disappeared between the perfect twin curves of her pert bottom.

She was restless, shifting her weight from one foot in its high wedged sandal to the other, her hips swaying in an age-old invitation that speared into him like a new heat, mesmerizing him for a moment. Her shoes lifted her to him, making her arch her back slightly as
she sprawled there before him, mindless and moaning. His in every way.

He loved it. He thought he could die in this moment a happy man at last, this woman his own, perfectly crafted feast—and he intended to eat every bite. He traced over her thong with a lazy finger, then ran his hands over her bottom, vowing that one day he would learn every millimeter of her with his mouth. Every hollow. Every mark. With his teeth. His tongue.

But not now. His need was like a wild storm in him, pounding in his blood, making his chest tight and his vision narrow.

He freed himself from his trousers and quickly rolled on the protection he’d carried in his pocket, then bent over her, shoving her thong down and out of his way. She was still trembling, still breathing hard and fast, and her eyes were shut tight. He braced himself on one arm, his hand flat against the table near her shoulder.

“Alessandro,” she said again, her voice strangled, but she lifted her hips when he slid a hand beneath her, pressing her face against the table as if it was a pillow.

He reached down and pressed hard against her center even as he shifted his position and drove straight into her.

She came apart beneath him, sobbing and wild.

He had to grit his teeth as she shuddered, as her
fingers pressed into the table’s hard surface as if she could find some hold. He let her ride it out, waiting hot and hard and deep inside of her, her perfect bottom snug against him, almost more enticement than he could bear.

When she started to come back to him, he began to move.

He wasn’t gentle. She made that small, highly aroused noise in the back of her throat, the sweetest sound he’d ever heard, and met him, thrust for thrust. She was sinuous and lithe, arched there before him with her black top flowing all around her as she moved with him, like some kind of erotic dance.

It was almost too much for him. He reached out and held the nape of her neck in his hand, making her shudder, then keeping her still.

And then he simply took her.

He ravaged. He savored.
He took
.

And all the while she cried out her pleasure, her hips wild against his, her eyes shut tight and her cheeks stained red with all of that desperate, delicious heat.

It was perfect. She was perfect.

“You are mine,” he ground out from between his teeth, his hips hard against hers, riding her, devouring her.
“Mine.”

When he couldn’t hold on any longer he slid a hand beneath her once more, finding the heart of her
hunger and rubbing hard against it, making her jerk against him.

“Again,” he ordered her, his voice so deep, so guttural, he hardly recognized it. And he didn’t care, his own climax roaring toward him. “Now.”

She obeyed him with a beautiful scream, her feet leaving the ground as she shattered into a flare of white hot heat around him, catapulting over that edge once more.

And finally,
finally
, he followed.

Alessandro didn’t know how long it was before he caught his breath. Before he was himself again, and not just a handful of scattered fragments thrown to every corner of this island. Of the globe.

Elena still lay beneath him, her cheek pressed against the tabletop, and he could feel every breath she took. He angled himself back and off her, regretting that he had to pull out of her soft heat.

She didn’t move, or open her eyes. Alessandro rid himself of the protection he’d used, fastened his trousers, and still she lay there. Making a perfectly debauched, impossibly lovely picture. Her trousers and thong were a tangle at her knees, her sweet bottom and the feminine secrets beneath on display as she bent there over his table so obediently, her mouth slightly
ajar as she breathed and her slender arms thrown out before her as if in total surrender.

Desire coiled within him again, and he rubbed his hands over his face as if that might make sense of this hunger. Nothing eased it. Not even the one thing that should have.

He wondered, then, if it would ever leave him. If he would ever be free of it. Of her.

Is that what you want?
a voice queried from a place inside of him he preferred to ignore, and he shoved it away.

“Elena.”

She stirred then, her eyes fluttering open, and Alessandro watched as she slowly peeled herself up from the table, then reached down to pull her panties and her trousers into place, all without looking his way. All a bit shaky, a bit too careful, as if she wasn’t sure her legs would hold beneath her. Her hair was a wanton tangle around her face but she ignored it, not even pushing it out of her way as she buttoned up her denim trousers.

So he did it for her, tucking a silken blond sheaf behind one ear.

“Are you all right?”

Her gaze flicked to his, then away.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was rough and she coughed. “Of course.”

But there was a defenseless cast to her jaw as she said it, and he reached over to tilt up her chin, forcing her to look at him. Her blue eyes were stormy, and there was something somehow bruised about the way she stared back at him. He felt cold.

“Are you?” he asked again, his tone serious. Gruff.

She knocked his hand away. He let her.

“Please don’t patronize me.” She looked around as if in search of something, but only hugged herself instead. As if, he thought, she was very small. The cold in him grew wider, deeper. “I said I was fine.”

He studied her, battling the strangest urge to pull her into his arms, to hold her against him. To warm them both. It was ridiculous.

And then he did it anyway, not understanding himself at all.

She fit beneath his chin and securely against his chest, and he couldn’t have said what he felt then. It didn’t make sense. He didn’t recognize it—or himself. And yet he held her, he listened to her breathe, and he hated it when she pulled away from him.

“Stop this,” she said in a low voice, her gaze dark and troubled. “I don’t need your backhanded form of comfort.”

He didn’t understand any of this. Why was he having this conversation in the first place? He didn’t tolerate scenes like this. He avoided even the faintest hint
of what he saw swimming there in all of that summer blue. So why was he still standing here?

“Elena,” he began.

She blew out a breath. “I asked you to stop,” she whispered.

Alessandro felt profoundly off balance. Uneven down into his soul. He scowled.

“So I can take you any way I please,” he said in a less pleasant voice than he might have, had he been able to make this strange feeling disappear. Had any of this made sense to him. “I can bend you over a table and make you scream and shake, and you’ll submit to that happily. Greedily.”

Her face paled, but that didn’t stop him. And whatever was happening inside of him shifted, turned furious. At himself, at her—he couldn’t tell the difference. He just needed this feeling to stop. Now.

“There is nothing I couldn’t make you beg me to do to you, is there?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Nothing at all.”

“Does this make you feel better?” she asked, lifting her head, her eyes flashing.

“I’m not the one who has convenient pretensions of modesty, Elena,” he bit out. “But only when it suits.”

He watched her shake that off, a quick jerk of her smooth shoulders, and wondered that it even hurt her.

“I know you don’t respect me, Alessandro,” she said,
and her voice wasn’t angry. It was something else. Something that worked in him like shame, oily and thick. “I know exactly what you think of me. You’ve told me repeatedly. You don’t have to act it out again now.”

“You don’t respect yourself!” he threw at her. How did she dare?

“But you should.” She shook her head, then he saw to his horror that her eyes were full. Though she didn’t cry. She only looked at him with tears bright in her gaze and he felt small. Mean. “Shouldn’t you? What kind of man does the things you do with me, revels in them, and yet has no respect for me at all?”

“Elena,” he began, but there was too much inside of him. It was too big and too dangerously unwieldy, and it had something to do with that way she looked at him. As if she thought he was a better man. That he ought at least to try. And that vulnerability in the way she held herself, as if she knew what he’d long suspected—that, deep down, he wasn’t. And never had been.

“You call me a whore and then you call me yours,” she said quietly. “Am I the one who doesn’t respect myself or is that you?”

He felt buffeted by wild, treacherous storms—but yet he stood still, and there was only that way she gazed at him, as if she saw through all of his darkness
and saw what lay there on the other side of it. Something he refused to name.

Something that could not exist. He wouldn’t allow it.

“It’s like you’re two different women,” he told her when he was sure he could keep his balance. When he’d beat back the storms as best he could. “One I know all too well. One who would marry a man like Niccolo Falco and defend that choice, call it romantic.”

She looked away from him then. In shame? In some kind of triumph that he cared this much, so much more than he should, than he even admitted to himself?

How could he still not know?

“But the other, Elena.” He dropped his voice, and saw her eyes close against it, as if it tempted her beyond endurance, or hurt her. As if he did. “The other …”

Was the woman he’d imagined she was when he’d met her. The woman he’d wanted so desperately he’d ignored her association with Niccolo to dance with her, to hold her. The woman he’d called his before he knew her name. The woman he sometimes saw in her still—like now….

That woman doesn’t exist
, he reminded himself harshly. She hadn’t then and she never would.

“People are complicated,” she said after a moment, a bleakness making her blue gaze gray when she looked
at him again. “You can’t shove them into little boxes. And you can’t really know them unless they let you.”

“Or they show you,” he agreed. “As you have.”

She swallowed, and then her head bowed forward, only slightly, but Alessandro saw it. He knew defeat when it stood before him. That should mean he’d won, that he was victorious in this—whatever this was. It should mean he felt triumph at the very least. And instead what he felt was empty.

“The show’s over, Alessandro,” she whispered, and he couldn’t make sense of what he saw on her face then.

Perhaps because he couldn’t, he didn’t stop her when she turned and walked away from him, again, leaving him there alone in the quiet room, the echoes of the passion they’d shared seeming to cling to the walls like rich, wild tapestries.

And still he tried to work out what he’d seen on her elegant features before she’d left. Temper, certainly. The lingering trace of that powerful desire that, it seemed, never truly left either one of them. A kind of weary resignation.

And sadness.

It was like a punch to the gut.

Elena was sad. And he’d made her that way.

She had looked at him like he was a monster. Worse, as if she knew he’d chosen to become exactly that. As
if she knew he’d vowed he would never become this kind of man—a man of cruelty and dark impulse like his father—no matter the provocation, and then had gone ahead and done it, anyway.

As if she knew
.

He wasn’t sure he could live with it. He wasn’t sure he could bear being this much of a disappointment to himself, this much of a bastard.

But he didn’t know how to stop.

“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.