A Scandal in the Headlines (10 page)

“If you want me to sign those papers,” Alessandro continued in an impatient tone, stalking across the rooftop toward the entrance to the building, “I suggest you do it in the elevator. Quietly.”

Elena walked faster as Alessandro’s assistant got on his mobile, ordering the car brought around and demanding that someone make sure that Alessandro’s favorite table was waiting for him. She reminded herself to breathe as she stepped into the shiny, gold-plated
elevator where Alessandro waited, looking for all the world like a surly, caged animal. Dangerous and unpredictable.

The elevator started its descent. Alessandro signed the papers his assistant handed him on a hardbacked folder, one after the next. Without bothering to read them, Elena thought in some surprise—but then he scowled down at one of them.

“These terms are unacceptable. As both you and Di Rossi are well aware.”

“He insisted that you had caved,” his assistant said mildly, as if he heard that tone from Alessandro every day.

“Send it back,” Alessandro ordered. “If he has a problem with it, tell him he can take it up with me personally.”

His assistant’s brows rose. That was obviously a threat.

The elevator stopped smoothly, discharging Alessandro’s assistant on one of the higher floors, and then the doors swished shut and they were alone again. Elena told herself there was no reason at all to be so nervous. Alessandro lounged against the far wall of the car, looking deceptively languid in what was clearly a bespoke suit, the way it marveled over every fine line of his physique. The bright golden walls seemed to
shrink into her as the car kept moving. His dark green eyes found hers, and Elena’s heart picked up speed.

“Second thoughts?” he asked softly. A challenge.

“You’re a very formidable man,” she said. “Do you enjoy it?”

He only watched her, that arrogant face a study in careless, encompassing masculine power. His dark brows rose in query.

“Wielding that kind of authority like that,” she said. “Making that poor man jump through your hoops without even the faintest pretense of politeness.”

Dark green eyes lit with amusement. “Are you calling me rude, Elena? Or just a bad boss?”

“If that’s how you treat your employees, I shudder to think how you treat your enemies.” She smiled coolly. “Oh, but wait. I already know.”

Alessandro’s mouth crooked. “Point taken,” he said gruffly, surprising her. “I apologize.”

“Your assistant is very likely weeping in the toilet,” she continued, her tone dry, burying her confusion. Alessandro? Apologizing? “Don’t feel you have to apologize to
me
.”

“For the record,” he said, laughter in his voice, “‘that poor man’ comforts himself with a new Maserati every fiscal year. He’s certainly not weeping as he cashes his paycheck.”

“If you say so.”

“Come here.” His voice dropped, became something else. Something that wound through her like honey, golden and slow, making it hard to remember that he even had an assistant, or why on earth she cared.

“You’re at your place of business,” she said primly, but she went to him, anyway. “Smiting down every assistant in your path, apparently. All in a day’s work, no doubt.”

He slid a hand around to the back of her neck and then tugged her off balance so she sprawled against his chest.

This was familiar, finally. His scent, his heat. That gleam in his eyes. Her immediate reaction, molten and hot. And only as it washed through her did she understand how much she’d needed the reminder. That it didn’t matter how formidable he might seem here. How distant. That this was still theirs, this electric current. This need.

It was why she was here.

“Ah, Elena,” he murmured, simply holding her there against the wall of his chest, his thumb moving against her nape, his expression so intent it made her knees feel like water. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Do you mean in general or in this elevator?” she asked, aware of the breathlessness in her voice, the pounding desire that she had no doubt he could see all over her, the way he always did.

His mouth curved. “I already know what I’m going to do to you in this elevator,” he told her, his other hand wrapping around her hip and pulling her against him, letting her feel how much he wanted her. His voice lowered to that sexy growl that lit her up, heating her blood, making her melt. “It might be acrobatic, but I think you can handle it.”

Elena heard the
ping
that announced they’d arrived at the ground floor, but Alessandro didn’t move. Her hands were pressed against the fascinating muscles of his perfect torso as she arched into him. It wasn’t enough, and she didn’t care where she was. This was his company—let him care. She lifted herself up on her toes and moved her mouth so close to his that if she licked her lips, she’d taste him.

“Go ahead, then,” she whispered, daring him. “Show me some acrobatics.”

On some level she was vaguely aware of the elevator doors sliding open, but all that mattered was Alessandro. That dark, consuming green gaze. That familiar fire, still so devastating and far too hot. As if he blacked out everything else.

He laughed, sex and heat and delicious challenge, and she shivered in anticipation, because she knew that sound, she knew its sensual promise—

And everything exploded.

Flashing lights, shouting. The press of too many bodies, the harsh slap of all that noise—

It took her too long to make sense of it—to understand that a scrum of paparazzi crowded into the open elevator door, cameras snapping and tape rolling, while Elena was still plastered against Alessandro’s chest, clinging to him, announcing their relationship in stark, unmistakable terms.

But then she understood, and that was worse.

It was the end of the world as she knew it, right there and then.

Elena couldn’t stop pacing.

Alessandro’s penthouse spread out over the top of the Corretti Media tower, three stories in all. It was magnificent. Glass, steel and granite, yet decorated with a deep appreciation of color and comfort. Lush Persian carpets stretched in front of fireplaces and brightened halls. Stunning, impressive art hung on the high walls, all bold colors and graceful lines. He favored deep chairs, dark woods, and all of it somehow elegant and male. Uniquely him.

And she couldn’t enjoy any part of it. She could hardly see it through her panic.

“Of course he’ll see the pictures,” she said, not for the first time, worrying her lower lip with her fingers
as she stared out the great windows. “You can count on it.”

Alessandro was sprawled on one of his couches, a tablet computer in his hand. He shot a dark, unreadable look in her direction, but he didn’t answer. But then, Elena was really only talking to herself.

He’d dealt with the paparazzi as best he could. He’d stepped in front of her, concealing her from view. He’d alerted his security, then whisked her up to his penthouse and hidden her away from any more cameras.

“Jackals,” he’d snarled when the elevator doors finally closed again, leaving them in peace once more. “Nothing but scavengers.”

But it was too late. The damage was already done.

Elena’s head had spun wildly. She’d let him lead her out of the elevator bank and into his opulent home, and as soon as he’d closed that heavy penthouse door behind them she’d grabbed hold of the nearest wall and sunk down to the floor. Six months of fear and adrenaline and grief had coalesced inside of her and then simply … broken open. Flooding her.

“Don’t you understand?” she’d cried. “Niccolo will see those pictures! He’ll know exactly where I am! It will take him, what? A matter of
hours
to get to Palermo?”

Alessandro had gazed down at her, an enigmatic expression on his hard face.

“He won’t go through me to get at you,” he’d said. “He’s a coward.”

“I’m thrilled for you that you don’t have to take him seriously,” she’d thrown at him. “But I do. Believe me, Alessandro.
I do
.”

“Elena.”

She’d hated the way he said her name then, the way it coiled in her, urging her to trust he’d somehow make this go away. To
have faith
.

“You can’t make this disappear simply because you command it,” she’d told him, caught between weariness and despair. “You have no idea how devious he is, or how determined.”

“If you must insult me,” Alessandro had said then, “please spare my security detail. Aside from today’s disaster, they’re very good at their jobs.”

“For how long?” she’d demanded. “A week or two? Another forty days? When will you tire of this—of me?” She’d stared up at him, daring him to contradict her. Daring him to argue. “Because when that day comes, as we both know it will, Niccolo will be waiting. If I have faith in anything, it’s that.”

Alessandro’s expression had shuttered, but he’d only held her gaze for a strained moment before turning on his heel, murmuring something about unavoidable paperwork and walking out. Leaving her there on his
floor to drive herself out of her head with worry and the cold, hard fear that had spurred her on all this time.

The fear she’d set aside when she’d been on Alessandro’s island. When she’d been safe.

She had to leave, she thought now, frowning out the towering windows at the coming dark. She had to run while she still could. That was the obvious conclusion she’d been circling around and around, not wanting to admit it was the only thing that made sense.

Because he’d been right. She didn’t want to leave him. She loved him. It was that simple and that complicated. It always had been.

She turned to look at him then. He was so impossibly, powerfully beautiful. He’d stunned her from the start. And now she knew how that proud jaw tasted. She could lose herself for hours in his hard, cynical mouth. She knew what he could do with those elegant hands of his, with every part of his lean, hard frame. She knew that he felt deeply, and darkly, and that there were mysteries in him she desperately wanted to solve. She knew he’d comforted her, soothing something in her she’d thought ripped forever raw. She knew what it was like when he laughed, when he teased her, when he told her stories. She wanted all of this to be real, for him to be the man she so desperately wanted to believe he was.

She wanted to have faith. She wanted to stay.

God, how she wanted to stay.

He’d thrown off his jacket when he’d returned to the penthouse, lost his tie and loosened the top buttons of his shirt. He looked like what he was. The infinitely dangerous, ruthless and clever CEO of Corretti Media. A man of great wealth and even greater reach. The man who’d taken her body, her painful history, her heart and even her soul. And would take much more than that, she had no doubt. If she let him. If she stayed.

But he didn’t love her. She didn’t kid herself that he ever would. He spoke only of
want
.

This was sex. Need. A shockingly intense connection mixed with explosive chemistry. Clear all of that away and Elena was as on her own as the day she’d realized even her parents’ home wasn’t safe for her, and had gone on the run. The past forty days had been nothing but consuming lust, blinding fireworks, and all of it a distraction from that ugly little truth.

He looked up then, his dark green eyes searing and too incisive.

“They’ve been posted,” he said without inflection. That was it, then. The paparazzi pictures were online. The clock had started ticking. She had to assume Niccolo was on his way even now. Which meant she was standing here on borrowed time.

“I have to go,” she said, quick and fierce, before she
could talk herself out of it. Before he could. “I have to leave immediately.”

“And may I ask where you plan to go?” That cool CEO’s voice. It felt like nails against her skin. “Do you have a plan or are you simply … running away? Again?”

“It doesn’t matter where I go,” she said, trying so hard to keep all of her feelings out of this. They could only hurt her—and so could Niccolo. It was better to think of him, and run. “So long as it’s far from here.”

Alessandro tossed his tablet to one side. He gazed at her for a long while, as if he’d never seen her before. As if he saw too much.

Elena repressed an involuntary shiver, and found she couldn’t breathe.

“I think you should marry me,” he said.

H
ER 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.