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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.”
