A Scandal in the Headlines Read Free

when she’d run from Niccolo. She couldn’t change it now. She didn’t know what it was about Alessandro, even as surly and forbidding as he was today, that made her want to abandon everything, put herself in his hands, bask in that intense ruthlessness of his as if it could save her.
    As if he could. Or would.
    “No,” she said. She cleared her throat. She had to becalm, cool. The woman he thought she was, unbothered by emotion, unaffected by sentiment. “Not yet.”
    “You’ve not yet had that
great honor
, then?”
    She didn’t know what demon possessed her then, but she looked back over her shoulder at him as if his words didn’t sting. He was lounging back against the bar, gazing at her, and she knew what that fire in his eyes meant. She’d known in Rome, too. She felt the answering kick of heat deep in her core.
    “I can’t think of a greater one,” she said. Lying through her teeth.
    He watched her for a long, simmering moment, his gaze considering.
    “And because you feel so honored you have decided to take a brief sabbatical from your engagement to tour the world as a stewardess on a yacht? My yacht, no less? When Europe is overrun by yachts this time of year, swarming like ants in every harbor, and only one of them belongs to me?”
    “I always wished I’d taken a gap year before university,” she said airily. Careless and offhanded. “This is my chance to remedy that.”
    “And tell me, Elena,” he said, his voice curling all around her, tangling inside of her, making her despair of herself for all the ways he made her weak when she should have been completely immune to him, when she
wanted
to be immune to him, “what will happenwhen this little journey is complete? Will you race back into the
great honor
of your terrible marriage, grateful for the brief holiday? Docile and meek, as a pissant like Niccolo no doubt prefers?”
    She didn’t want to hear him talk about Niccolo. About the marriage he’d warned her against in such stark terms six months ago. It made something shudder deep inside of her, then begin to ache, and she didn’t want to explore why that was. She never had.
    This is not about you
, she snapped at herself then, reminding herself how much more she had to lose this time.
And it’s certainly not about him
.
    “Of course,” she said with an air of surprise, as if he really might believe that Niccolo Falco’s fiancée was acting as a stewardess on a yacht simply to broaden her horizons before her marriage. As if she did. “I think that’s the whole point.”
    “I’ve witnessed more than my share of terrible marriages,” he said then, a bleakness beneath his voice and moving in his too-dark eyes as he regarded her. It made her shiver, though she tried to hide it. “I was only yesterday jilted at the start of one myself, as a matter of fact. My blushing bride was halfway down the aisle when she thought better of it.” His mouth curved, cynical and hard. “And yet yours, I guarantee you, will be worse. Much worse.”
    She didn’t want to think about Alessandro’s wedding,jilted groom or not. Much less her own. Once again, she fought back the strangest urge to explain, to tell him the truth about Niccolo, about her broken engagement. But he was not her friend. He was not a safe harbor. If anything, he was worse than Niccolo. Why was that so hard to keep in mind?
    “I’m sorry about your wedding.” It was the best she could do, and she was painfully aware that it wasn’t even true.
    “I’m not,” he said, and she understood the tone he used then, at last, because she recognized it.
Self-loathing
. She blinked in surprise. “Not as sorry as I should be, and certainly not for the right reasons.”
    Alessandro straightened then, pushing away from the bar. He moved toward her—stalked toward her, if she was precise—and she turned all the way around to face him fully. As if that might dull the sheer force of him. Or her wild, helpless reaction to him that seemed