A Scandal in the Headlines Read Free Page A

to intensify the longer she was in his presence.
    It did neither.
    He stopped when he was much too close, that marvelous chest of his near enough that if she’d dared—if she’d taken leave of her senses entirely, if she’d lost what small grip she had left on what remained of her life—she could have tipped her head forward and pressed her mouth against that hard, beautifulexpanse that she shouldn’t have let herself notice in the first place.
    “Tell me why you’re here,” he said in a deceptively quiet voice that made her knees feel like water. “And spare me the lies about gap-year adventures. I know exactly what kind of woman you are, Elena. Don’t forget that. I never have.”
    There was no reason why that comment should have felt like he’d slapped her, when she already knew what he thought of her. When she was banking on it.
    “You’re hardly one to talk, are you? Remember that I know who you are, too.”
    “Wrong answer.”
    Elena sighed. “You were never meant to know I was here. Let me off when we reach port—any port—and it will be like I was never on this boat at all.”
    And for a moment, she almost believed he would do it.
    That he would simply let it drop, this destructive awareness that hummed between them and the fact she’d turned up on his property. That he would shrug it off. But Alessandro’s mouth curved again, slightly swollen and still so cynical, his eyes flashed cold, and she knew better.
    “I don’t think so,” he said, his gaze moving from hers to trace her lips.
    “Alessandro—” she began, but cut herself off whenhis gaze slammed back into hers. She jumped slightly, as if he’d touched her. She felt burned straight through to the core, as if he really had.
    “I’ve never had someone try to spy on me so ineptly before,” he told her in a whisper that still managed to convey all of that wild heat, all of that lush
want
, that she felt crackling between them and that would, she knew, be the end of her if she let it. The end of everything. “Congratulations, Elena. It’s another first.”
    “Spy?” She made herself laugh. “Why would I spy on you?”
    “Why would you want to marry an animal like Niccolo Falco?” He shrugged expansively, every inch an Italian male, but Elena wasn’t fooled. She could see the steel in his gaze, that ruthlessness she knew was so much a part of him. Something else that reminded her of that dance. “You are a woman of mystery, made entirely of unknowables and impossibilities. But you can rest easy. I have no intention of letting you out of my sight.”
    He smiled then, not at all nicely, and Elena’s heart plummeted straight down to her feet and crashed into the floor.
    She was in serious trouble.
    With Alessandro Corretti.
    Again.
    It was not until he propped himself up in the decadent outdoor shower off his vast master suite that Alessandro allowed himself to relax. To breathe.
    The sprawling island house he’d built here on the small little spit of land, closer to the coast of Sicily than to Sardinia, was the only place he considered his true home. The only place the curse of being a Corretti couldn’t touch him.
    He shut his eyes and waited for the hot water to make him feel like himself again.
    He wanted to forget. That joke of a wedding and Alessia Battaglia’s betrayal of the deal they’d made to merge their high-profile families—and, of course, of him. To say nothing of his estranged cousin Matteo, her apparent lover. Then the drunken, angry night he hardly remembered, though the state of his face—and the snide commentary from the
polizia
this morning when he’d woken in a jail cell, hardly the image he liked to portray as the CEO of Corretti Media—told the tale eloquently.
    His head still echoed with the nasty, insinuating questions from the paparazzi surrounding his building in Palermo when his brother, Santo, had taken him there this morning, merging with his leftover headache and all various agonies he was