‘You cannot marry him,’ he said, those dark green eyes so fierce, his face so hard.

It took her longer than it should have to clear her head, to hear him. To hear an insult no engaged woman should tolerate. It was that part that penetrated, finally. That made her fully comprehend the depths of her betrayal.

‘Who are you?’ she demanded. But she still let him hold her in his arms, like she was something precious to him. Or like she wished she was. ‘What makes you think you can say something like that to me?’

‘I am Alessandro Corretti,’ he bit out. She stiffened and his voice dropped to an urgent, insistent growl. ‘And you know why I can say that. You feel this, too.’

‘Corretti …’ she breathed, the reality of what she was doing, the scope of her treachery, like concrete blocks falling through her one after the next.

He saw it, reading her too easily. His dark eyes flashed.

‘You cannot marry him,’ he said again, some kind of desperation beneath the autocratic demand in his voice. As if he knew her. As if he had the right. ‘He’ll ruin you.’

About the Author

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle-school social life. And so began her lifelong love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek islands, Rome, Venice and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

A Scandal in the Headlines
Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

“WHAT THE HELL are you doing on my boat?”

Elena Calderon froze in the act of polishing the luxurious teak bar in the yacht’s upper lounge. The low growl of the male voice from across the room was laced with a stark and absolute authority that demanded instant obedience. And she knew exactly who he was without looking up. She knew.

She felt it slam into her, through her, like a sledgehammer.

Alessandro Corretti.

He wasn’t supposed to be here, she thought wildly. He hadn’t used this boat in over a year! He usually rented it out to wealthy foreigners instead!

“I’m polishing the bar,” she managed to say. She kept her tone even because that was how a stewardess on a luxury yacht spoke to the guests. To say nothing of the owner himself. But she still couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

He let out harsh kind of laugh. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“It’s no joke.” She tapped her fingers on the bar before her. “It’s teak and holly, according to the chief steward.”

She’d told herself repeatedly that what had happened during that one mad dance six months ago had been a fluke. More to do with the wine and the music and the romantic ballroom setting than the man—

But she didn’t quite believe it. Warily, she looked up.

He was half-hidden in the shadows of the lounge’s entryway, with all of that bright Sicilian sun blazing behind him—but she recognized him. A bolt of sensation sizzled over her skin, then beneath it, stealing her breath and setting off a hum deep and low inside.

Alessandro Corretti. The man who had blown her life to bits with one single dance. The man she knew was bad no matter how intensely attractive he was and no matter how drawn she was to him, against her will. The man who was even worse than her lying, violent, criminally inclined ex-fiancé, Niccolo.

Elena hadn’t dared go to the polizia when she’d fled from Niccolo, fearing his family’s connections. Alessandro’s family, however, made those connections seem insubstantial, silly. They were the Correttis. They were above the law.

And yet when Alessandro stepped farther into the lounge, out of the shadows, Elena’s chest tightened in immediate, helpless reaction—and none of it terror. Her breath caught. Her heart sped up. She yearned, just as she had six months ago, as if her body believed he was good. Safe.

“Was that an attempt at levity?” There was nothing in the least bit safe about his hard voice, or that look in his eyes. “Hilarious, I’m sure. But you still haven’t answered my question, Elena.”

Today the usually breathtakingly sophisticated eldest heir to and current CEO of Corretti Media and its vast empire looked … rumpled. Uncharacteristically disheveled, from his thick, messy dark hair to his scuffed shoes. His tall, muscled strength was contained in a morning suit with the torn jacket hanging open over his lean, hard chest. He had a black eye, scrapes and cuts that only accentuated his aristocratic cheekbones, a slightly puffy lip, even scraped knuckles. And that famous, cynical mouth of his was set in a grim line while his too-dark green eyes were ferociously narrowed. Directly at her.

What was truly hilarious, Elena thought then, was that she’d actually convinced herself he wouldn’t recognize her in the unlikely event that they ran into each other on this yacht she’d been repeatedly assured he hardly used. She’d told herself that he had world-altering interactions like the one she wanted to forget with every woman he’d ever clapped eyes on. That it was simply what he did.

And if some intuitive, purely feminine part of her had whispered otherwise, she’d ignored it.

“I’m not trespassing,” she said with a calm she wished she felt. “I work here.”

“Like hell you do.”

“And yet here I am.” With a wave of her hand she indicated the smart tan-colored skirt she wore, the pristine black T-shirt tucked in at the waist, the sensible boat shoes. “Uniform and all.”

His dark eyes were trained on her, hard and cold. She remembered the fire in them that night six months ago, the impossible longing, and felt the lack of both as a loss.

“You are … what, exactly? A maid?” His voice managed to be both incredulous and fierce at once, and she ordered herself not to react as he began to walk toward her, all impeccable male lines and sheer masculine poetry despite the beating he’d obviously taken.

Damn him. How could he still affect her like this? It disgusted her. She told herself what she felt now was disgust.

“I’m a stewardess. Cleaning is only one of my duties.”

“Of course. And when you found yourself possessed of the urge to trade in designer gowns and luxury cars for actual labor, I imagine it was pure coincidence that made you choose this particular yacht—my yacht—on which to begin your social experiment?”

“I didn’t know it was yours.” Not when she’d answered the original advert, when she’d decided waitressing at the tourist restaurants along the stunning Sicilian coast was too risky for someone who didn’t want to be found. And now she wished she’d heeded her impulse to keep running when she’d discovered the truth. Why hadn’t she? “When I found out, I’d already been working here a week. I was told you rarely, if ever, used it.”

If she was honest, she’d also thought he owed her, somehow. She’d liked the idea that Alessandro had been paying her, however indirectly. That he was affected in some way by what that dance had put into motion, no matter if he never knew it. It had felt like a kind of power, and she needed every hint of that she could find.

“What a curious risk to take for so menial a position,” he murmured.

He was even closer now, right there on the other side of the bar, and Elena swallowed hard when he put his hands down on the gleaming surface with the faintest hint of a sensual menace she didn’t want to acknowledge. If she’d been on the same side he was, he would have been caging her between them. She couldn’t seem to shake the image—or perhaps it was that the barrier seemed flimsy indeed when the way he was looking at her made something coil inside of her and pull taut.

“It’s an honest job.”

“Yes.” His dark green gaze was laced through with something she might have called grief, were he anyone else. “But you are not an honest woman, are you?”

Elena couldn’t hide the way she flinched at that, and she wasn’t sure what she hated more—that he saw it, or that she obviously cared what this man thought about her. When he didn’t know anything about her. When all he’d ever known about her was that shocking, overwhelming explosion of awareness between them at that long-ago charity ball.

He couldn’t know how bitterly she regretted her own complicity in what had happened that night, how her reaction to him still shamed her. He couldn’t know what Niccolo had planned, what she’d very nearly helped him do. He knew how blind she’d been, sadly, but he couldn’t know the truth….

But Alessandro was just like Niccolo, she reminded herself harshly then, no matter her physical reaction to him. Same kind of man, same kind of “family business,” same kind of brutal exploitation of whoever and whatever he could use. She’d had a lot of time to read about Alessandro Corretti and the infamous Corretti family in her six months on the run. There was no telling what he might know about his rival Niccolo Falco’s broken engagement and missing fiancée, or how he might use that information.

She had to be careful.

“I already know what you think of me,” she said, keeping her voice cool. Unbothered. “And anyway, people change.”

“Circumstances change.” There was no denying the bitterness in his voice then, or stamped all over that battered, arrogant face. She told herself it didn’t move her at all, that she didn’t feel the insane, hastily checked urge to reach over and cover his hand with hers. “People never do.”

Sadly, she knew he was right. Because if she’d changed at all—if she’d learned anything from these months of running and hiding—she wouldn’t have found this man compelling in the least. She would have run screaming in the opposite direction, flung herself from the side of the boat and swum for the Palermo shoreline they’d left more than ninety minutes ago.

“If you don’t want me here—”

“I don’t.”

She swallowed, fighting to remain calm. She couldn’t afford to lose her temper, not when he could ruin everything with a single telephone call. It would take no more than that to summon Niccolo from that villa of his she’d nearly moved into outside of Naples. Alessandro would probably even enjoy throwing her back into that particular fire. Why not? The Correttis had been at bitter odds with Niccolo’s family for generations. What was one more bit of collateral damage?

Especially when Alessandro already thought she was the sort of woman who aspired to be a pawn in the kind of games men like him played.

Think, she ordered herself. Stop reacting to him and think about how best to play this!

“Then I’ll go, of course.” Given what she knew he believed about her, he must imagine she’d be impervious to threats. Which meant she had to be exactly that. She smiled coolly. “But we’re out at sea.”

He shifted then, only slightly, and yet a new kind of danger seemed to shimmer in the air of the lounge, making Elena’s pulse heat up and beat thick and wild beneath her skin. His dark green eyes gleamed.

“Then I certainly hope you can swim.”

“I never learned,” she lied. She tilted her head, let her smile flirt with him. “Are you offering me a lesson?”

“I suppose I can spare a lifeboat,” he mused, that gleam in his eyes intensifying. “You’ll wash up somewhere soon enough, I’m sure. The Mediterranean is a small sea.” One corner of his battered mouth quirked up. “Relatively speaking.”

She didn’t understand how she could still find this man so beautiful, like one of the old gods sent down to earth again. Savage and seductive, even as he threatened to set her adrift. But she knew better than to believe her eyes, her traitorous body, that awful yearning that moved in her like white noise, louder by the second…. She knew what and who he was.

She shouldn’t have had to keep reminding herself of that. But then, she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t afraid of him the way she’d come to be afraid of Niccolo, when she also knew Alessandro was far more dangerous than Niccolo could ever be.

“You’re not going to toss me overboard,” she said with quiet certainty.

A different kind of awareness tightened the air between them, reminding her again of that fateful dance. The way he’d held her so close, the things she’d simply known when she’d looked at him. That curve in his hard mouth deepened, as if he felt it, too. She knew he did, the way she’d known it then.

“Of course not,” he said, those dark eyes much too hot, something far more alarming than temper in them now. Memories. That old longing. She had to be careful. “I have staff for that.”

“Alternatively,” she said, summoning up that smile again, forcing herself to stand there so calmly, so carelessly, “though less dramatically, I admit—you could simply let me go when we arrive at the next port.”

He laughed then, and rubbed his hands over his bruised face. He winced slightly, as if he’d forgotten he was hurt.

“Maybe I’m not making myself clear.” When he lowered his hands his gaze burned fierce and hot. She remembered that, too. And it swept through her in exactly the same way it had before, consuming her. Scalding her. “Niccolo Falco’s woman is not welcome here. Not on this boat, not on my island, not anywhere near me. So you swim or you float. Your choice.”

“I understand,” she said after a moment, making it sound as if he bored her. She should have been racked with panic. She should have been terrified. Instead, she shrugged. “You must have your little revenge. I rejected you, therefore you have to overreact and throw me off the side of a yacht.” She rolled her eyes. “I understand that’s how it works for men like you.”

“Men like me,” he repeated quietly, as if she’d cursed at him. He sounded tired when he spoke again, and it made something turn over inside of her. But she kept on.

“You’re a Corretti,” she said. “We both know what that means.”

“Petty acts of revenge and the possibility of swimming lessons?” he asked dryly, but there were shadows in that dark gaze, shadows she couldn’t let herself worry about, no matter that strange sensation inside of her.

“It also means you are well known to be as cruel and occasionally vicious as the rest of the crime syndicate you call your family.” Her smile was brittle. “How lucky for me that I’ve encountered you on two such occasions.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, his dark gaze hard as his cynical mouth curved again, and something about that made her legs feel weak beneath her. “I remember this part. The personal attacks, the insulting comments about my family. You need a new topic of conversation, Elena.”

He didn’t move but, even so, she felt as if he loomed over her, around her, and she knew he was remembering it even as she did—those harsh words they’d thrown at each other in the middle of a ballroom in Rome, the wild flush she’d felt taking over her whole body, the way he’d only looked at her and sent that impossible, terrifying fire roaring through her. She felt it again now. Just as hot. Just as bright.

And just like then, it was much too tempting. She wanted to leap right into the heart of it, burn herself alive—

She shoved it aside, all of it, her heart pounding far too hard against her ribs. There was so much to lose if she didn’t handle this situation correctly—if Niccolo found her. If she forgot what she was doing, and why. If she lost herself in Alessandro Corretti’s dark, wild fire the way she still wanted to do, all these months later, despite what had happened since then.

“Far be it from me to stand in the way of your pettiness,” she said, jerking her gaze from his and moving out from behind the bar. She headed for the doorway to the deck and the sunshine that beckoned, bright and clear. “It’s a beautiful day for a swim, isn’t it? Quite summery, really, for May. I’m sure I won’t drown in such a small sea.”

“Elena. Stop.”

She ignored him and kept moving.

“Don’t make me put my hands on you,” he said then, almost conversationally, but the dark heat in it, the frank sensual promise, almost made her stumble. And, to her eternal shame, stop walking. “Who knows where that might lead? There are no chaperones here. No avid eyes to record our every move. No fiancé to watch jealously from the side of the dance floor. Which reminds me, are congratulations in order? Are you Signora Falco at last?”

Elena fought to breathe, to keep standing. To keep herself from telling this man—this dangerous, ruinous man—the truth the way every part of her screamed she should. She hardly knew him. She couldn’t trust him. She didn’t know what made her persist in thinking she could.

She thought of her parents—her loving mother and her poor, sick father—and what they must believe about her now, what Niccolo must have told them. The pain of that shot through her, taking her breath. And on some level, she knew, she deserved it. She thought about the unspoiled little village she’d come from, nestled on a rocky hill that ran along the sea, looking very much the same as it had hundreds of years ago. She needed to protect it. Because she was the only one who could. Because her foolishness, her selfishness and her vanity, had caused the problem in the first place.

She’d chosen this course 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 be calm, 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 happen when 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 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, beautiful expanse 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 when his 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 determined to ignore.

Did you know your fiancée was sleeping with your cousin? Your bitter rival?

Can the Corretti family weather yet another scandal?

How do the Corretti Media stockholders feel about your very public embarrassment—or your night in jail?

He wanted to forget. All of it. Because he didn’t want to think about what a mess his deceitful would-be bride and scheming cousin had left behind. Or how he was ever going to clean it up.

And then there was Elena.

Those thoughtful blue eyes, the precise shade of a perfect Sicilian summer afternoon. The blond hair that he’d first seen swept up behind her to tumble down her back, that she’d worn today in a shorter tail at the nape of her neck. Her elegant body, slender and sleek, as enchanting in that absurd yachting uniform as when he’d first found himself poleaxed by the sight of her in that ballroom six months ago.

Then, she’d worn a stunning gown that had left her astonishingly naked from the nape of her neck to scant millimeters above the swell of her bottom. All of that silken skin just there.

His throat went dry at the memory, while the rest of his body hardened as it had the moment he’d laid eyes on her at that charity benefit in Rome. He didn’t remember which charity it had been or why he’d attended it in the first place; he only remembered Elena.

“Careful,” Santo had said with a laugh, seconds after Alessandro had caught sight of her standing only a few feet away in the crush of the European elite. “Don’t you know who she is?”

“Mine,” Alessandro had muttered, unable to pull his gaze away from her. Unable to get his bearings at all, as if the world had shuddered to a halt—and then she’d turned. She’d looked around as if she’d been able to feel the heat of his gaze on her, and then her eyes had met his.

Alessandro had felt it like a hard punch in the gut. Hard, electric, almost incapacitating. He’d felt it—her—everywhere.

His.

She was supposed to be his.

He hadn’t had the smallest doubt. And the fact that he’d acquiesced to his grandfather’s wishes and agreed to a strategic, business-oriented marriage some two months before had not crossed his mind at all. Why should it have? The woman he was engaged to was as mindful of her duty and the benefits of their arrangement as he was. This, though—this was something else entirely.

And then he’d seen the man standing next to her, a possessive hand at her waist.

Niccolo Falco, of the arrogant Falco family that had given Alessandro’s grandfather trouble in Naples many years before. Niccolo, who fancied himself some kind of player when he was really no more than the kind of petty criminal Alessandro most despised. Alessandro had hated him for years.

It was impossible that this woman—his woman—could have anything to do with scum like Niccolo.

“The rumor is her father has some untouched land on the Lazio coast north of Gaeta,” Santo had said into his ear, seemingly unaware of the war Alessandro was fighting on the inside. “He is also quite ill. Niccolo thinks he’s struck gold. Romance the daughter, marry her, then develop the land. As you do.”

“Why am I not surprised that a pig like Niccolo would have to leverage a woman into marrying him?” Alessandro had snarled, jerking a drink from a passing waiter’s tray and draining it in one gulp. He hadn’t even tasted it. He’d seen only her. Wanted only her.

“Apparently that’s going around,” Santo had muttered.

Alessandro had only glared at him.

“Are you really going to marry that Battaglia girl in cold blood?” Santo had asked then, frowning, his dark green eyes so much like Alessandro’s own. “Sacrifice yourself to one of the old man’s plots?”

Santo was the only person alive who could speak to him like that. But Alessandro was a Corretti first, like it or not. Marrying a Battaglia was a part of that. It made sense for the family. It was his responsibility. He would marry for duty, not out of deceit.

Alessandro was not Niccolo Falco.

“I will do my duty,” he had said. He’d tapped his empty glass to his brother’s chest, smiling slightly when Santo took it from him. “A concept you should think about yourself, one of these days.”

“Heaven forbid,” Santo had replied, grinning.

The orchestra had started playing then, and Alessandro had ordered himself to walk away from the strange woman—Niccolo Falco’s woman—no matter how bright her eyes were or how that simple fact made his chest ache. There was no possibility that he could start anything with a woman who was embroiled with the Falcos. It would ignite tempers, incite violence, call more attention to the dirty past Alessandro had been working so hard to put behind him.

Walking away had been the right thing to do. The only reasonable option.

But instead, he’d danced with her, and sealed his fate.

CHAPTER TWO

AND NOW SHE was here.

Alessandro had thought he was hallucinating when he’d first seen her on the yacht. He’d thought the stress was finally getting to him—that or the blows to his head. You’ve finally snapped, he’d told himself.

But his body had known better. It knew her.

He could still feel the heat of her when he’d touched her all those months ago, when he’d pulled her close to dance with her, when his fingers had skimmed that tempting hollow in the small of her back and made her breath come too fast. He still remembered her sweet, light scent, and how it had made him hunger to taste her, everywhere.

He still did. Even though there was no possible way that he could have ignored his responsibilities back then and pursued her, even if she hadn’t been neck-deep in a rival family, engaged to one of the enemies of the Corretti empire. He’d told himself that all he’d wanted after that charity ball was to forget her, and he’d tried. God help him, but he’d tried. And there’d certainly been more than enough to occupy him.

There’d been the pressure of managing his grandfather’s schemes, the high-profile wedding and the docklands regeneration project the old man had been so determined would unite the warring factions of the Corretti family.

“You will put an end to this damned feud,” Salvatore had told him. “Brother against brother, cousins at war with one another. It’s gone too far. It’s no good.”

It was still so hard to believe that he’d died only a few weeks ago, when Alessandro had always believed that crafty old Salvatore Corretti would live forever, somehow. But then again, it was just as well he’d missed that circus of a wedding yesterday.

And if Alessandro had woken from a dream or two over the past few months, haunted by clever eyes as blue as the sky, he’d ignored it. What he’d felt on that dance floor was impossible, insane.

The truth was, he’d never wanted that kind of mess in his life.

His late father, Carlo, had always claimed it was his intensity of emotion that made him do the terrible things he’d done—the other women, the shady dealings and violently corrupt solutions. Just as his mother, Carmela, had excused her own heinous acts—like the affair she’d confessed to yesterday that made Alessandro’s adored sister, Rosa, his uncle’s daughter—by blaming it on the hurt feelings Carlo’s extramarital adventures had caused her.

Alessandro wanted no part of it.

He’d viewed his calm, dutiful marriage as a kind of relief. An escape from generations of misery. He was furious enough that Alessia Battaglia had left him at the altar—what would he have done if he had felt for her?

He’d felt far too much on a dance floor for a woman he couldn’t respect. Far more than he’d believed he could. Far more than he should have. It still shook him.

Alessandro turned the water off and reached for a towel, letting the bright sun play over his body as he walked into his rooms. He didn’t want to think about the wedding-that-wasn’t. He didn’t want to think about the things Santo had told him this morning en route to the marina—all the business implications of losing that connection with Alessia’s father, the slimy politician who held the Corretti family’s future in his greedy hands. He didn’t want to think at all. He didn’t want to feel those things that hovered there, right below the surface—his profound sense of personal failure chief among them.

And luckily, he didn’t have to. Because Elena Calderon had delivered herself directly into his hands, the perfect distraction from all of his troubles.

He didn’t care that she was almost certainly on some kind of pathetic mission from Niccolo and the Falco family, who had been openly jealous of the Corretti empire for decades. He didn’t care why she was here. Only that she was when he’d thought her lost to him forever.

And he still wanted her, with that same wild ferocity that had haunted him all this time.

He’d had every intention of doing his duty to his family, to his grandfather’s final wishes, and it had exploded in his face. Maybe it was time to think about what he wanted instead.

Maybe it was time to stop worrying about the consequences.

He found her in one of the many shaded, open areas that flowed seamlessly from inside to outside, making the whole house seem a part of the sea and the sky above. She was frowning out at the stretch of deep blue water as if she could call back the yacht he’d sent on its way with the force of her thoughts alone. He’d pulled on a pair of linen trousers and a soft white T-shirt, and he ran his fingers through his damp hair as she turned to him.

That same kick, hard to the gut and low. That same wildfire, that same storm.

His.

She looked almost vulnerable for a moment. Something about the softness of her full mouth, the shadows in her beautiful eyes. The urge to protect her roared through him, warring with the equally strong impulse to tear her open, learn her secrets—to figure out how she could want that jackass Niccolo, to start, and fail to see what kind of scum he was. How she could have felt what Alessandro had felt on that dance floor and turned her back on it the way she had.

How she did this to him when no other woman had ever got beneath his skin at all.

And there were no prying eyes here on his island. No whispers, no gossip. No one had to know she’d ever been here. There would be no business ramifications if he finally put his mouth on her. No ancient feuds to navigate, no humiliating scenes in public with his shareholders and the world looking on. Whatever game she and Niccolo were playing, it wouldn’t affect Alessandro at all if he didn’t let it.

No consequences. No problems. No reason at all not to do exactly as he wished.

At last.

“I told you to change into something more comfortable,” he said, jerking his chin at that dowdy little uniform she still wore, not that it concealed her beauty in the least. Not that anything could. “Why didn’t you?”

Clear blue eyes met his, and God, he wanted her. That same old fist of desire closed hard around him, then squeezed tight.

“I don’t want to change.”

“Is that an invitation?” he asked silkily, enjoying the way her cheeks flushed with the same heat he could feel climb in him. “Don’t be coy, Elena. If you want me to take off your clothes, you need only ask.”

His mocking words scalded her, then shamed her.

Because some terrible part of her wanted him to do it—wanted him to strip her right here in the sea air and who cared what came afterward? Some part of her had always wanted that, she acknowledged then. From the first moment their eyes had met.

Elena remembered what it had been like to touch this man, to feel his breath against her cheek, to feel the agonizingly sweet sweep of his hand over the bared skin of her back. She remembered the heat of him, the dizzying expanse of those shoulders in his gorgeous clothes, the impossible beauty of that hard mouth so close to hers.

It lived in her like an open flame. Like need.

She remembered what it had been like between them. For those few stolen moments, the music swelling all around them, making it seem preordained somehow. Huge and undeniable. Fated.

But look where it had led, that careless dance she knew even then she should have refused. Look what had come of it.

“No?” Alessandro looked amused. That sensual gleam in his dark green gaze tugged at her. Hard. “Are you sure?” His amusement deepened into something sardonic, and it didn’t help that he looked sleek and dark and dangerous now, the pale colors he wore accentuating his rich olive skin and the taut, ridged wonder of his torso. “You look—”

“Thank you,” she said, cutting him off almost primly. “I’m sure.”

He really did smile then.

Alessandro sauntered toward her with all the arrogant confidence and ease that made him who he was, and that smile of his made it worse. It made him lethal. His shower had turned the evidence of his misspent night, all those cuts and bruises, into something very nearly rakish. Almost charming.

No one man should be this tempting. No other man ever was.

She had to pull herself together. The reality that she was trapped here, with Alessandro of all people, on this tiny island in the middle of the sea, had chipped a layer or two off the tough veneer she’d developed over the past few months. She was having trouble regaining her balance, remembering the role she knew she had to play to make it through this.

You will lose everything that matters to you if you don’t snap out of this, she reminded herself harshly. Everything that matters to the people you love. Is that what you want?

He stopped when he stood next to her at the finely wrought rail that separated them from the cliff and the sea below. He was much too close. He smelled crisp and clean, and powerfully male. Elena could feel the connection between them, magnetic and insistent, surrounding them in its taut, mesmerizing pull.

And she had no doubt that Alessandro would use it against her if he could, this raging attraction. That was the kind of thing men like him did without blinking, and she needed to do the same. It didn’t matter who she really was, how insane and unlike her this reaction to him had been from the start. It didn’t matter what he would think of her—what he already did think of her. What so many others thought of her, too, in fact, or what she thought of herself. And while all of that was like a deep, black hole inside of her, yawning wider even now, she had to find a way to do this, anyway. All that mattered was saving her village, preserving forever what she’d put at risk in the first place.

What was her self-respect next to that? She’d given up her right to it when she’d been silly and flattered and vain enough to believe Niccolo’s lies. There were consequences to bad choices, and this was hers.

“I should tell you,” he said casually, as if he was commenting on the weather. The temperature. “I have no intention of letting you go this time. Not without a taste.”

That was not anticipation that flooded through her then. And certainly not a knife-edge excitement that made her pulse flutter wildly in response. She wouldn’t allow it.

“Is that an order?” she asked, her voice cool, as if he didn’t get to her at all.

“If you like.” He laughed. So arrogant, she thought. So sure of her. Of this. “If that’s what gets you off.”

“Because most people consider a boss ordering his employee to ‘give him a taste’ a bit unprofessional.” She smiled pure ice at him. She did not think about what got her off. “There are other terms for it, of course. Legal ones.”

He angled himself so he was leaning one hip against the rail, looking down at her. A faintly mocking curve to his mouth. Bruised and bad, head to foot. And yet still so terribly compelling. Why couldn’t what she knew rid her of what she felt?

“Are we still maintaining that little bit of fiction?” He shrugged carelessly, though his gaze was hot. “Then consider yourself fired. Someone will find another stewardess for my yacht. You, however.” His smile then made her blood heat, her traitorous body flush. “You, I think, have a different purpose here altogether.”

Elena had to fight herself to focus, to remember. Alessandro Corretti was one of the notorious Sicilian Correttis. More than that, he was the oldest son of his generation, the heir to the legend, no matter how they’d split up the family fortune or the interfamily wars the press reported on so breathlessly. He was who Niccolo aspired to become—the real, genuine article. Corrupt and wicked to the marrow of his bones, by virtue of his blood alone.

He should have disgusted her to the core. He should have terrified her. It appalled her that he didn’t. That nothing could break this hold he had on her. That she still felt this odd sense of safety when she was near him, despite all evidence to the contrary.

“Oh, right,” she said now. “I forgot.” She sighed, though her mind raced as she tried to think of what she would do if she really was the woman he thought she was. If she was that conniving, that amoral. “You think I’m a spy.”

“I do.”

No man, she thought unsteadily, should look that much like a wolf, or have dark green eyes that blazed when he looked at her that way. It turned her molten, all the way through.

“And what do you think spying on you would get me?”

“I know it will get you nothing. But I doubt you know that. And I’m sure your lover doesn’t.”

That he called Niccolo her lover made her skin crawl. That she’d had every intention of marrying Niccolo—and probably would have, had fate and this man and Niccolo’s own temper not intervened—made her want to curl up into a ball and wail. Or tear off her own skin. But she tacked on a little smile instead, and pretended.

She got better at it all the time.

“You’ve caught me,” she said. “You’ve unveiled my cunning master plan.” She lifted her eyes heavenward. “I’m a spy. And I let myself be caught in the act of … stewardessing. Also part of my devious mission! What could I possibly want next?”

He looked amused again, which only made the ferocity he wore like a shield around him seem that much more pronounced.

“Access,” he said easily. “Though I should warn you now, my computers require several layers of security, and if I catch you anywhere near them or near me when I’m having a private conversation, I’ll lock you in a closet. Believe that, Elena, if nothing else.”

He said that so casually, almost offhandedly, that smile playing around his gorgeous, battered mouth—but she believed him.

“You’ve clearly given my imaginary career in espionage a great deal of thought,” she said carefully, as if she was appeasing a raving lunatic. “But ask yourself, why would I risk this? Or imagine you’d let me?”

His expression of amusement edged over into something else, something voracious and dark, and her pulse jumped beneath her skin.

“Your fiancé was not blind, all those months ago,” he said softly. She felt him everywhere, again, as if he was touching her the way she knew he wanted to do. The way she couldn’t help but wish he would. “Nor was I.”

For a moment, she forgot herself. His dark green eyes were so fierce on hers then, searing into her. Challenging her. The world fell away and there was nothing but him and all the things she couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell him. All the things she shouldn’t want.

And despite herself, she remembered.

Six months ago …

“Tell me your name,” he demanded, sweeping her into his arms without even asking her if she’d like to dance with him.

Elena had seen the way he looked at her. She’d felt it, like a brand, a claim, from halfway across the room. She told herself that Niccolo, who had gone to fetch her a drink, wouldn’t mind one dance. They were in full view of half of Rome. It was all perfectly innocent.

She knew she was lying. And yet, somehow, she didn’t care.

He was stunning. Overwhelmingly masculine, impossibly attractive and, she thought with a kind of dazed amazement, hers. Somehow hers. He looked at her and set her alight. He touched her, and her whole body burst into a hectic storm of sensation, like being dropped headfirst into freezing cold water at the height of summer.

“Your name,” he urged her. His hands were on her, hard and hot, making her shiver uncontrollably. His dark head was bent to hers, putting that mesmerizing mouth of his much too close. Tempting her almost past endurance.

“Elena,” she whispered. “Elena Calderon.”

He repeated it, and made it into something else. A kind of song. It swelled in her, changing her. It hung there between them, like a vow.

“I am Alessandro,” he said, and then they’d danced.

He swept her along, every step perfect, his attention on Elena as if she was the only woman in the room. The only woman alive. Lightning struck everywhere they touched, and everywhere they did not, and some shameless, heedless part of her gloried in it, as if she’d been made for this. For only this. For him.

She felt him in the treacherous ache of her breasts, the unmistakable hunger low in her belly and the glazed heat that held her in its relentless grip as surely as he did. She felt him—and understood that what she was doing was wrong. Utterly, indisputably wrong.

She understood that she would have to live with this. That this was a defining moment. That her life would be divided into before and after this scorching hot dance, and that she would never again be the person she’d believed she was before this stranger pulled her against him. But his eyes were locked to hers, filled with wonder and fire, and she didn’t pull away. She didn’t even try—and she understood she’d have to live with that, too.

And then he made it all so much worse.

“You cannot marry him,” he said, those dark green eyes so fierce, his face so hard.

It took her longer than it should have to clear her head, to hear him. To hear an insult no engaged woman should tolerate. It was that part that penetrated, finally. That made her fully comprehend the depths of her betrayal.

“Who are you?” she demanded. But she still let him hold her in his arms, like she was something precious to him. Or like she wished she was. “What makes you think you can say something like that to me?”

“I am Alessandro Corretti,” he bit out. She stiffened, and his voice dropped to an urgent, insistent growl. “And you know why I can say that. You feel this, too.”

“Corretti …” she breathed, the reality of what she was doing, the scope of her treachery, like concrete blocks falling through her one after the next.

He saw it, reading her too easily. His dark eyes flashed.

“You cannot marry him,” he said again, some kind of desperation beneath the autocratic demand in his voice. As if he knew her. As if he had the right. “He’ll ruin you.”

Elena would never know what might have happened then, had she not jerked her gaze away from Alessandro’s in confusion—and seen Niccolo there at the side of the dance floor, glaring at the two of them with murder in his black eyes.

Elena was amazed that it was possible to hate herself so much, so fully. And that the shame didn’t kill her where she stood.

“How dare you?” she ground out, all her horror at her own appalling actions in her voice. “I know who you are. I know what you are.”

“What I am?” As if she’d stabbed him.

“Niccolo’s told me all about you, and your family.”

Something like a laugh. “Of course he has.”

“The Correttis are nothing but a pack of violent thugs,” she threw at him desperately, quoting Niccolo. “Criminals. One more stain on our country’s honor.”

“And Niccolo is the expert on honor, I suppose?” His face went thunderous, but his voice stayed cool. Quiet. Somehow, it made him that much more formidable. And it ripped into her like a knife.

“Do you think this will work?” she demanded, furious, and she convinced herself it was all directed at him. All because of him. “Do you really think you’ll argue me into agreeing with you that my fiancé, the man I love, is some kind of—”

“You don’t strike me as naive,” he interrupted her, that fierce, dark edge in his voice, his gaze, even in his hands as he held her. “You must know better. You must.”

He shook his head then, and she watched as bitter disappointment washed over him, turning his dark green eyes black. Making that fascinating mouth hard, nearly cruel. Making him look at her as if there had never been that fire between them, as if she couldn’t still feel the flames, licking over her skin.

And she would never forgive herself, but she ached. She ached.

“Unless you like the money, the cars, the houses and the jewelry.” His gaze was a jagged blade as it raked over her, and she bled. “The fancy dresses. Why ask where any of it comes from? Why face so many unpleasant truths?”

“Stop it!” she hissed at him.

“Ignorance is the best defense, I’m sure,” he continued in that withering tone. “You can’t be a stain on Italy’s honor if you’re careful not to know any of the sordid details, can you?”

None of this should be possible. A look, a dance, a few words with a total stranger—how could it hurt? How could she feel as if her whole world was ripping apart?

“You don’t know what kind of woman I am,” she told him, desperate to reclaim herself. To fix this. “And you never will. I have standards. I can’t wait for Niccolo to do me the great honor of marrying me—to make me a Falco, too. I would never lower myself to Corretti scum like you. Never.”

He looked shattered for a moment, but only a moment. Then contempt moved over his fine, arrogant face, and made her stomach twist in an agony she shouldn’t feel. He led her to the edge of the floor, gazed at her for one last, searing moment and then walked off into the crowd.

Elena told herself that wasn’t grief she felt then, because it couldn’t be. Not for a stranger. Not for a dance.

Not for a man she’d been so sure she’d never see again.

“I don’t really remember,” Elena said now in desperation, standing out on his terrace with only the sea to hear her lies. “It was a long time ago.”

Alessandro only watched her, that wolf’s smile sharp-edged, digging deep into her and leaving marks. He was much too close, and she hadn’t forgotten a thing. Not a single thing.

“Then why are you blushing?” he asked, a knowing look on that battered, somehow even more attractive face—and her heart kicked hard against her ribs.

“I’m not spying on you,” she gritted out, trying to break through the tension that gripped her. Trying to pretend he couldn’t see into her so easily. “And if you really think I am, you should have let me leave with the boat.”

But something had changed. His dark eyes burned. She felt the flames licking at her, seducing her and scaring her in equal measure.

“Alessandro.” Saying his name was a mistake. She saw him react to it as if it was a caress, saw his intense focus on her sharpen, and it stole her breath away. “My being on your boat was a coincidence.”

“Liar.” Implacable. Fierce.

Elena’s stomach knotted. She felt a deep kind of itch work through her, from her neck to her breasts to her core, and she felt a terrible panic bite at her then, as if she was in danger of losing herself completely.

You’re supposed to be beating him at his own game! some last remnant of her self-control cried out inside her head.

“You can call me any names you like,” she threw at him, desperate to find her balance again—to claw her way back to solid ground. “It won’t change a thing. I met you once a long time ago. It wasn’t particularly memorable.”

That ruthless, cynical mouth kicked up in the corner, and his gaze turned jet black. It rolled through her, too hot to bear, shaking her apart from the inside out. Until there was nothing at all but this moment.

This. Him. Now.

“Such a liar,” he whispered.

He reached out as if to touch her, but she knew she couldn’t let that happen—she couldn’t—so she threw out her own hand to catch his.

Skin against skin, after all this time. The same way their hands had touched once before, on that glimmering dance floor far away.

And they both caught fire.

The sea and the sun and the whole bright world disappeared into the blaze of it. There was only this man, who she should have run from the moment she’d seen him six months ago. This man, who had eyes like thunder and saw straight through into the heart of her. This man, who had claimed her from across a crowded room with a single, searing glance.

There was only the riot inside of her, the electricity that roared between them. Skin to skin. At last.

Neither one of them moved. Elena wasn’t sure she breathed. This disastrous, unquenchable attraction seemed to swell and grow, radiating from his hand to hers, a hard, gnawing ache that every heartbeat only made worse. It penetrated every part of her, and made her want. Crave. Need.

“It haunts you,” he said, a dark, male hunger stamped across his face. “I haunt you. Believe me, Elena. I know.”

She jerked her hand from his. But as she did, she had a searing burst of clarity.

She wanted him. She always had. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense, that a single dance should never have affected her so much. It had. He had. And that wanting had ripped apart her world, changed everything. She’d been paying for it for six long months, in isolation and often in fear, moving from odd job to odd job across the whole of Italy, trying to keep herself out of sight and away from Niccolo.

All because of this. All because of Alessandro.

She had already been crucified for this crime. She paid for it every day. Why not commit it?

And if there was a part of her that knew that this was also the best way to prove to Alessandro that she was exactly the kind of woman he believed her to be, that this would cement his opinion of her, she told herself that only made the decision easier.

“This isn’t a haunting,” she whispered, watching the thunder roll through his eyes. “Neither one of us is a ghost.” She smiled then. “I can prove it.”

And then she indulged the roaring inside of her, that terrible hunger, and put her hands on him.

Not a light touch on his shoulder as she had when they’d danced, polite and appropriate. She slid her palms over the whisper-soft cotton that strained against his marvelous torso, and felt the pure, raw heat of him. The iron strength. Her head spun, dizzy and delicious.

Alessandro let out a sound that was almost a laugh, and then he tugged her closer, lifting her up against him. Her aching breasts pressed hard against his beautiful chest, sending a frantic shiver through her, and he muttered a curse. He settled her on the rail, his arms strong and hard and exquisite as they held her fast. She heard her boat shoes fall off, two loud slaps against the stone floor, and then she forgot them.

Alessandro stepped between her legs, and it wasn’t enough. Her skirt kept him from pressing against her, into her, even as he leaned into the palms she’d flattened against him. She was surprised to see her hands were shaking. She was shaking. Or maybe the world was, all around them, and she didn’t care.

This was finally happening. Finally.

He held her with one hand in the small of her back, hot and hard and his, while his other hand moved to her neck, her jaw, tracing patterns. Igniting her. And it wasn’t enough—

“Look at me,” he commanded her, that low voice of his snaking through her like a brushfire, making her skin seem to pull tight over her bones, and she would do anything. Anything he wanted. Anything at all.

Anything to keep them both burning like this.

His dark green eyes flashed, triumph and fire, and that wonder she knew was only theirs. Only this. His mouth looked nearly grim with need, and she knew she should be afraid. Of him. Of what was about to happen—what had always been going to happen, sooner or later.

But again, she felt only that wild passion. That desire. And that conviction that she was safer now, in his clever, dangerous hands, than she had been in months.

“Inevitable,” she whispered before she knew she meant to speak, and the faintest hint of a smile moved across his mouth, then was gone.

“Hold on,” he ordered her with a gruff intent that made her core seem to glow.

He moved his hands to cradle her face between them, and she grabbed his shirt in greedy fists.

At last, that voice chanted inside of her, again and again. At last.

And then he took her mouth with all of that ruthlessness and command, and Elena lost her mind.

CHAPTER THREE

HOT. WILD.

She was his.

And she kissed him back as if she wanted to devour him, too.

As if he’d set her on fire and this was how they’d burn, together, in this tumult of heat and glory, and her perfect mouth he couldn’t taste enough.

She was better—this was better—than Alessandro had dared imagine in the middle of a hundred nights, when he’d pictured this in stark detail. When the dark fury that she could bewitch him as she had and be so much less of a person than he’d hoped didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter now, either. Need stormed through him, making him closer to desperate than he’d ever been before.

He wanted her skin against his, slick and sweet. He wanted his hands on those tempting breasts, her enchanting curves. He wanted to lick between her legs and stay there until she screamed. He wanted deep inside of her. He wanted. And every kiss, every taste, every little way she moved against him, only drove him higher.

“More,” he said, and he picked her up again, yanking that damned skirt up and over her hips.

Deep masculine elation pounded through him when she lifted her legs and wrapped herself around him. And then he was there. Hard and hot against her melting heat, separated only by his trousers and the slightest wisp of material she wore. A delicate shudder moved through her, and for a moment he thought he might lose control.

But Alessandro wanted her too much, and had for too long. He took her mouth again, thrilled when she met him with a passion he could taste. She arched against him, her arms wrapped around his neck, and it wasn’t enough.

It would never be enough.

He carried her to one of the loungers scattered about the terrace, then set her down. She was unsteady on her feet, her blue eyes wide and dazed, bright with need, and he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anyone else. More than he’d imagined it was possible to want.

“Please,” Elena said, her voice ragged with desire. The most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. “Don’t stop.”

Her hands were still on his chest, and he could feel each touch, each caress, directly in his sex. He kissed her again, deep and demanding, ravaging her mouth, and she thrilled him by returning it in kind.

Out of control. So good it hurt. Again. And again.

“These clothes need to come off,” he muttered, pulling his mouth away from hers.

Alessandro moved to tug her T-shirt over her head, then hissed out a breath when he threw it aside and she stood there before him, bared to the waist. No bra to block him from her perfect breasts, small and round, with nipples like hard, ripe points. Lovely beyond reason. He nearly shook as his hands went to her skirt, working the zipper and then grabbing on to her panties as he tugged all of it down over her hips and out of his way.

And then Elena was naked. Gloriously, beautifully naked, and she was real and here and his. Finally his.

For a moment he only stared at her, a kind of awe sweeping through him as his body went wild, so desperate for her he could hardly bear it. He swept her up and then took her down with him, splaying her out above him as he lay back on the chaise.

Elena twisted against him, and then her frantic hands were on the hem of his T-shirt and he sat up slightly to peel it off. He brushed her hands out of the way to rid himself of his trousers, kicking them aside. And when he pulled her back into place they both sighed in something like reverence. And then she was like silk against him, all over him, soft and naked and hot.

Finally.

Alessandro’s heart pounded. He was so hard it bordered on the painful, and then she rolled her hips and moved all of that slick, wet heat against the length of him, and he groaned. He traced the line of her spine down to her bottom, and then bent to take one of those achingly perfect nipples into his mouth. She made a wild, greedy sort of noise, and he couldn’t wait. He couldn’t take another moment of this magnificent torture.

It had been too long already. It had been forever.

He sat up, holding her against him, her soft thighs falling on either side of his. She knelt astride him, her hands moving from his chest to his shoulders, then burying themselves in his hair. Alessandro reached down between them, sinking his fingers deep inside the molten core of her.

She cried out, and he loved it. He tested her slickness, learned her lush shape, his palm hard against the center of her need. He watched her pretty face flush, felt her hips buck against his hand, and he returned to her breasts, sucking a taut nipple into his mouth and then biting down. Just hard enough.

She broke apart in his arms with a wordless cry, hot and wet in his hand, her head falling forward until her face was pressed into his neck. He lifted her in his arms while she still shook and shuddered, and then he thrust hard and deep inside her.

At last.

She was scalding hot, so deliciously soft, and still in the grips of her climax when he began to move. Alessandro held her hips in his hands and guided her into the rhythm he wanted. Slow, but demanding, catching the fire that was tearing her apart and building it up again with every stroke.

Higher. Hotter. Hungrier.

He heard her breath catch again, felt her stiffen, heard the shocked sound she made in his ear. She gripped his shoulders tight and shook all around him again, just as he wanted. He watched her arch back into the sunlight—so painfully, perfectly beautiful. This woman, his woman, lost to her pleasure, mindless and writhing against him, while he moved hard and deep inside of her.

He rolled them over on the lounger, coming on top of her and deeper into her. Alessandro let his head drop down next to hers, and then her arms wrapped around him, her hips meeting his in a wild, uncontrollable dance.

He felt her move beneath him, heard her gasp anew, and each hitch in her breath, each mindless cry, made him want her more. He was so deep inside of her, and they moved together like a dream—like a dream he’d had a thousand times, only much slicker, much hotter, much better.

And this time, when she began to break apart around him, when she threw her head back once more and arched up against him, Alessandro called out her name like the incantation it was and fell right along with her.

Elena came back to herself slowly. Painfully.

She was tucked up against Alessandro’s side. He was sprawled out on the lounger beside her, one arm thrown over his head, looking for all the world like some kind of lazy, sated god. There was no reason he should be so appealing, even now, with his dark lashes closed, his arrogant features with the marks of the previous night’s violence stamped into his skin. And yet …

She sat up gingerly, surprised her body still felt at all like her own when he’d made it his—made her his—with such devastating completeness. Her body still hummed with pleasure. So much pleasure Elena could hardly believe she’d survived it, that she was still in one piece.

Then again, perhaps she wasn’t.

He shifted, and she felt his hand on her back, smoothing its way down to curl possessively over her hip. Impossibly, she felt something in her catch anew. A spark where there should have been nothing but ash and burned-out embers.

Surely this was the end of it. Succumbing to what had burned so bright between them had to have destroyed it, didn’t it? But his fingers traced a lazy alphabet across her skin, spreading that fierce glow deep into her all over again, making her realize this wasn’t over at all.

Elena had made a terrible mistake, she understood then. There were many ways to pay, and she’d just discovered a brand-new one. Perhaps, on some level, she’d held out the hope that what had surged between them was all smoke, no fire. That indulging it would defeat it.

Now she knew better. Now she knew exactly how hot they burned. She would have to live with that, too.

“Come here,” he said, and she felt his voice move in her like magic, making her chest feel tight.

Despite herself, she turned. She looked down at him, bracing herself for a smug expression, a cocky smile—but that hard gaze of his was serious when it met hers. Almost contemplative. And that was worse, because she had no defense against it.

He reached up and traced a lazy line from her collarbone down over the upper swell of her breasts, and there was a dangerous gleam in his eyes when she caught his hand in hers and stopped him.

“Alessandro …” she began, but she didn’t know what to say.

He didn’t respond. Instead, he tugged her back down beside him, surrounding her once again with all that warm male strength. As if she were safe, she thought in a kind of despair. As if she’d finally come home.

When she knew perfectly well neither one of those things were true.

His gaze darkened as he watched her. He slid a hand around to the nape of her neck, but she was the one who closed the distance between them, pressing her mouth to his, spurred on by a great wealth of emotion she didn’t want to understand.

This time, there should have been no wild explosion, no impossible heat. This time, she should have been more in control of herself, of all these things she didn’t want to feel.

But his mouth moved on hers and something incandescent poured through her, lighting her up all over again. She felt that spark ignite, felt that same fire grow again inside of her. His kiss was tender, something like loving, and it ripped her into pieces.

She kissed him back, desperately, letting her hands learn his fascinating body all over again, letting herself disappear into this madness that she knew perfectly well would destroy her. It was only a matter of time.

And this time when he slid into her it was a different kind of fire. Slow, deliberate. It stripped her bare, made her eyes fill with tears, battered what was left of her defenses, her carefully constructed veneers. He gazed down at her as he moved inside of her, his dark eyes grave and something more she didn’t want to name, as he spun this wicked fire around them.

As he wrecked her totally, inside and out, and she loved every second of it.

And then he pushed them both straight over the edge of the world.

When she woke a second time, the sun was beginning to sink toward the sea, bathing the sky in peaches and golds, and Alessandro wasn’t next to her. Elena sat up in confusion, only realizing as she almost let it slide from her that she was draped in something deliciously silky. A robe, she discovered when she frowned down at it.

She pulled it on as she stood, belting it around her waist, and when she looked up she saw him.

He sat at a nearby table in the gathering dusk, a wineglass in one hand, his gaze trained on her. He hadn’t bothered with his shirt. A quick glance assured her he was wearing those loose, soft trousers, low on his narrow hips. That lean, smoothly muscled body was even more beautiful from a distance and now, of course, she knew what he could do with it. She knew. She snapped her attention back to his face—and went still.

He was watching her with an expression that made her breath catch in her throat. She recognized that look. This was the Alessandro Corretti she remembered, brooding and dark.

And it seemed he’d remembered that he hated her.

Elena steeled herself. It was better this way. This was what she’d wanted. She ran her hands down the front of the silk robe, but then stopped, not wanting him to see any hint of her agitation.

“Sit down,” he said, indicating the table before him and the selection of platters spread out across its inlaid mosaic surface. His voice was cold. Impersonal. A slap after what they’d shared, and she was sure he knew it. “You must be hungry.”

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