A Scandal in the Headlines

by Crews Caitlin

  “Right and wrong are what I say they are,” he’d told Alessandro once, after ten-year-old Alessandro had walked in on him with one of his mistresses. There hadn’t been the slightest hint of conscience in his gaze as he’d sprawled there in the bed he shared with Carmela. Right there in the family home. “Are you going to tell me any different, boy?”

  Alessandro had hated him. God, how he’d hated him.

  He looked up as if he could see Elena through the floors that separated them. She deserved better than this, and he knew it. She wasn’t the Battaglia girl, auctioned off by her father to the highest bidder and fully aware of what joining the Corretti family meant—even if, as it turned out, she’d preferred a different Corretti. Elena had already escaped Niccolo Falco and whatever grim fate he’d had in store for her.

  If he was any kind of man, if he was truly not like his viciously conniving father, he would set her free immediately.

  Instead, he’d manipulated her, and he’d done it deliberately. She didn’t have to marry him to be safe; he had teams of lawyers who could help her and her village. Who could deal with the likes of Niccolo Falco in the course of a single morning.

  His mother was right. He was following in his father’s footsteps. He couldn’t pretend any differently. But in the end, even that didn’t matter. He wanted her too much, too badly, to do what he knew was right.

  He would do his penance instead, as small as it was in the grand scheme of things. He would keep his hands off her until he married her. He would torture himself, and pretend that made this all right. That it made him something other than what he was: his father’s son.

  Alessandro simply didn’t have it in him to let her go.

  Four days later, by a special license she hadn’t asked how he’d managed to obtain, Elena married Alessandro Corretti in a small civil ceremony. It was 10:35 in the morning, in a small village outside of Palermo that Elena had never heard of before. But then, she didn’t know the name of the man who married them, either, though he had introduced himself as the local mayor. Nor did she know either of the two witnesses who stood with them, both happy to take handfuls of Alessandro’s euros for so little of their time.

  It took all of twenty minutes.

  In the private antechamber even more of Alessandro’s money had secured for them, Elena stared at herself in the room’s small mirror and ran her fingers down the front of the dress she wore. It was a rich, deep cream. It had delicate sleeves and fell from a pretty scooped neck into a flattering A-line that ended at her knees. Her hair was twisted back into a sophisticated chignon, and she wore a single strand of stunning pearls around her throat to match the diamond-and-pearl clusters at her ears. She looked elegant and chic. Polished. Smart.

  She looked nothing at all like herself.

  And why should you? a caustic voice inside her demanded. Elena Calderon was no more. She was Alessandro’s wife now. Signora Elena Corretti.

  She swallowed against the tide of emotion she didn’t dare examine here, and chanced a look in Alessandro’s direction. He was her husband. Her husband.

  But he didn’t love her.

  Better to deal with the repercussions of that sooner rather than later, she thought, bracing herself. Better to ensure she didn’t fall prey to her own imagination, her own precarious hopes. And what better place to make everything between them perfectly clear than the lounge of a town hall in a sleepy village, fitted with two ugly chairs and a desperate-looking sofa arranged around a cracked wood floor?

  Congratulations on your hasty and secretive wedding, Signora Corretti, she mocked herself. No expense or luxury was spared for your happy day!

  Alessandro stood near the closed door, on his mobile. The phone had beeped some thirty seconds after they’d signed the register. He’d announced he needed to take the call, and had waved her back into the antechamber she’d used before the ceremony.

  She was almost positive she’d seen pity on the mayor’s face before Alessandro had closed the door behind them.

  “When do you think we should divorce?” she asked briskly when he ended his call, looking out through the small windows at the Sicilian countryside. Proud mountains with vineyards etched into the lower slopes. Red-roofed houses clinging to green hillsides. Olive groves and ancient ruins. All of it piercingly, hauntingly lovely. There was no reason at all it should have made her chest ache. “Did you have a particular time frame in mind?”

  When he didn’t respond, Elena turned away from the window—

  And found him staring at her in amazement.

  “We have been married for ten minutes, Elena,” he said in a voice that made her skin pull tight. “Possibly fifteen. This conversation seems a trifle premature.”

  “This was the only reasonable choice I had, as you pointed out, and a convenient way to fix the Niccolo problem.” She was suddenly too aware of the rings he’d slid onto her finger—a trio of flawless diamonds set in platinum on the drive over, and a diamond-studded platinum band during the ceremony, such as it was. It occurred to her that she was, in fact, deeply furious with him. She’d wanted this to mean something. She’d wanted it to matter. She was an idiot. “Nothing more than that. What does it matter if we discuss it now?”

  He went incandescent. She actually saw him catch fire. His dark eyes were ferocious, his mouth flattened, and she was certain she could hear his skin sizzle with the burn of his temper from across the tiny room.

  And it didn’t scare her. She welcomed it. It was a happy alternative to the icy cold CEO who’d taken Alessandro’s place since they’d returned to Sicily. Since the paparazzi had found them and plastered their faces across every gossip magazine and website in Europe. Since he’d shocked her with his proposal. He’d been distant. Controlled. He hadn’t laid a finger on her, and there’d been nothing but winter in his dark green eyes.

  She preferred this Alessandro. She knew this Alessandro.

  No matter how tight and close it felt suddenly, in such a small room, with him blocking the only exit.

  “I suggest you drop this subject,” he advised her, hoarse with the force of his temper. There was that glitter of high passion, furious desire, in his too-dark eyes, and she exulted in it. She needed it.

  “Oh,” she said brightly, unable to help herself. “Were you thinking an annulment would work better?”

  He laughed. It was a hard, male sound, primitive and stirring. It coursed through her, made her shiver with the heat of it. Made her ache. And the look he turned on her then melted her bones.

  “I did warn you,” he said.

  He reached behind him and locked the door, and Elena felt it like a bullet. Hard and true, straight into her core. He crossed the room in a single stride, hauled her to him and then pulled her down with him as he sat on the sad, old sofa. Then he simply lifted her over his lap.

  He hiked her dress up over her hips, ripped her panties out of his way with a casual ferocity that made her deliciously weak, then stroked two long fingers into the melting furnace of her core. Elena gasped his name. He laughed again at the evidence of how much she wanted him, all of her molten desire in his hand. She braced her hands on the smooth lapels of his wedding suit, another stunning work of art in black, and not half as beautiful as that mad hunger that changed his face, made him that much starker. Fiercer.

  Hers.

  Alessandro didn’t look away from her as he reached between them and freed himself. He didn’t look away as he ripped open a foil packet with his teeth and rolled protection on with one hand. And he didn’t look away as he thrust hard into her, pulling her knees astride him, gripping her bottom in his hard hands to move her as he liked.

  “An annulment is out of the question,” he told her, his voice like fire, roaring through her. “And in case you’re confused, this is called consummation.”

  Elena’s head fell back as she met his thrusts, rode him, met his passion with every roll of her hips. She felt taken and glorious and his.

  Completely his.


  He changed the angle of her hips, moving her against him in a wicked rhythm, and she felt herself start to slip toward that edge. That easily. That quickly. Still fully dressed. Still wearing her wedding shoes and the pearls he’d presented her this morning. Still madly in love with this hard, dangerous man who was deep inside of her and knew exactly how to make her blind with desire. This man who was somehow her husband.

  Whatever that meant. However long it lasted. Right then, she didn’t care.

  “You are mine, Elena,” he whispered fiercely, his voice dark and sinful, lighting her up like a new blaze. “You are my wife.”

  It was that word that hurled her over, sent her flying apart in his arms, forced to muffle her cries with her own hand as he muttered something hot and dark and then followed right behind her.

  When she came back to herself, he was watching her face, and she wondered in a surge of panic what he might have seen there. What she might have revealed.

  “Don’t talk to me about divorce,” he said in a low voice, his dark green eyes hot. “Not today.”

  He shifted forward, setting her on her feet before him. She felt unsteady. Utterly wrecked, yet a glance in the mirror showed he hadn’t disturbed a single hair on her perfectly coiffed head. She smoothed her dress back down into place, her hands trembling slightly. Alessandro tucked himself back into his trousers and then reached down to scoop up the lace panties he’d torn off her.

  Because he’d been too desperate, too determined to get inside her, to wait another instant. She didn’t know why that should make her feel more cherished, more precious to him, than all twenty strange minutes of their wedding ceremony.

  She held out her hand to take the panties back. His hard mouth curved, his dark eyes a sensual challenge and something far more intense, and then he tucked them in his pocket.

  “A memento of our wedding day,” he said, mocking her, she was sure. “I’ll treasure it.”

  She smiled back at him, cool and sharp.

  “An annulment it is, then,” she said. “This has been such a useful, rational discussion, Alessandro. Thank you.”

  He laughed again then, almost beneath his breath, and then he was on his feet and striding for the door, as if he didn’t trust himself to stay locked in this room with her a moment longer. She allowed herself a small, satisfied smile.

  “We can argue about this in the car,” he said over his shoulder. “I have a one o’clock meeting I can’t miss.”

  Because, of course, the CEO of Corretti Media didn’t stop doing business on his wedding day, not when the wedding meant so little to him. Her smile vanished. It was a brutal reminder of reality. Of her place. It didn’t matter how hot they burned. It didn’t matter how desperate he’d been. Elena clenched her hands into fists and felt the bite of the unfamiliar bands around her finger like one more slap.

  And then followed him, anyway.

  His mobile beeped again as they walked. He answered it, slowing down as he talked. Elena heard the words docklands, cousin and Battaglia. Alessandro pushed open the glass doors at the entrance of the village hall, and nodded her through, almost as if he had a chivalrous bone in that powerful body of his.

  “Wait for me in the car,” he said, and then turned back toward the interior of the hall. Dismissing her.

  The door swished shut behind her as she stepped through it, and Elena pulled in a long, deep breath. The morning was still as bright and cheerful as it had been when she’d walked inside. A lovely July day in the rolling hills of Sicily. The perfect day for a wedding.

  She had to figure out how to handle this, to enjoy it while it lasted, or she’d never survive it. And she had to do it fast.

  Elena kept her eyes on the stairs below her as she climbed down the hall’s steps, her legs still so shaky and the heels she wore no help at all, so she had to hold tight to the bannister as she went. Cracking her head open on the pavement would hardly improve matters.

  She made it to the bottom step in one piece, and started to walk around the man who stood there, his back to the hall. Alessandro’s sleek black sports car was parked near the fountain in the center of the pretty village square, the convertible top pulled back, reminding her of how silly she’d been on the drive over—glancing at the way the ring sparkled on her hand, allowing herself to yearn for impossibilities.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured absently as she navigated her way around the man, glancing at him to smile politely—

  But it was Niccolo.

  All of the blood drained out of her head. Her stomach contracted in a sickening lurch, and she was sure her heart dropped out of her body and lay at her feet on the pavement.

  “Niccolo …” she whispered in disbelief.

  Niccolo, like all of the nightmares that had kept her awake these past months. Niccolo, his arms folded over his chest and his black eyes burning mean and cold as he soaked in her reaction.

  Niccolo, who she’d thought she loved until Alessandro had walked into her life and showed her how pale that love was, how small. Niccolo, who she’d trusted. Who she’d laughed with, thinking they were laughing together. Who she’d dreamed with, thinking they were planning a shared future. Niccolo, who had hunted her across all these months and the span of Italy, and was looking at her now as if that slap in his villa was only the very beginning of what he’d like to do to her.

  She couldn’t believe this was happening. Today. Here. Now.

  “Elena,” he said, his voice almost friendly, but she could see that nasty gleam in his eyes. She could see exactly who he was. “At last.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  ELENA NEEDED TO say something, do something.

  Scream for help, at the very least. Kick off her shoes and run. She needed to get as far away from Niccolo as possible, to distance herself from that vicious retribution she saw shining in his black eyes and all across his boyishly handsome face.

  But she couldn’t seem to move a single muscle.

  His lip curled. “Did you really think you could outrun me forever?”

  She threw a panicked glance back up the stairs. Alessandro was still there, on the far side of the glass door, but he had his back turned to the square. To what was happening. To her.

  Elena didn’t know why she’d believed he could save her from this, even for an instant. Hadn’t she always known she would have to handle it herself?

  Niccolo looked up at Alessandro, then back at her, and his expression grew uglier.

  “You’ve never been anything but a useless little whore, Elena,” he said, his black eyes bright with malevolence. “I took you out of that fishing boat you grew up in. I made something out of you. And this is how you repay me?”

  Elena straightened. Pulled in a breath. He was shorter than she remembered. Thicker and more florid. The observation gave her a burst of strength, because it meant things had changed—she had changed.

  “You didn’t do any of that for my benefit,” she said, finding steel inside her, somewhere. “You did it because you wanted the land. And then you hit me.”

  “You owed me that land,” he snarled at her. “I dressed you up, took the stink of fish out of your skin. And then you let a Corretti steal it.”

  “He didn’t steal anything,” she told him, keeping her gaze steady on his. “And he hasn’t hit me, either.”

  “Just how long were you sleeping with him?” Niccolo demanded. “I know you lied to me. There’s no way that night was the first time you met him. How long were you stringing me along?”

  “You hit me, Niccolo,” she said fiercely. “You threatened me. You lied to my family. You—”

  “I let you off easy,” he interrupted her, and the names he called her then, one after the next, were vile. They made her feel sick—and sicker still that she had ever loved this man, that she’d touched him, that she’d failed to see what he really was. “What I want to know is how Corretti feels every time he takes a piece of my leavings.”

  His hand flashed out and he grabbed her arm
in a painful grip, but she didn’t make a sound. She didn’t even flinch. She refused to give him the satisfaction of thinking he’d hurt her again.

  “Does he know, Elena?” he snarled. “Does he know I’ve already been there?” He smirked, smug and mean. “He’s not the kind of man who likes to share.”

  Something in her changed then. She felt it shift. Elena didn’t care that his fingers around her arm hurt. She didn’t care that the look on his face would have frightened her once.

  She didn’t have to be afraid of him any longer. She didn’t have to run. Alessandro had given her that much. As she looked up at Niccolo now, Elena finally accepted that even if Niccolo had been who he’d pretended to be, it still would have been over between them.

  It had been over the moment she’d met Alessandro.

  Even if she’d never seen him again after that night in Rome, she would have known the truth: that she’d loved a stranger for the duration of a dance far more than she’d loved her fiancé. It would have ended her engagement one way or another. Maybe, she thought then, she’d actually been lucky that dance had forced Niccolo to reveal himself. It would have been much, much harder to leave the man she’d thought he was.

  “But then,” Niccolo was saying, “he doesn’t care about you, does he? He wants the land. Do you think he would trouble himself to marry you otherwise?”

  He shook her, and that hurt, too, but she didn’t try to pull away. She didn’t defend Alessandro’s motives or worry that she didn’t know what they were. She didn’t cry or protest. She stared at him, memorizing this, so she would never forget what it felt like the moment she’d not only stopped being afraid of Niccolo Falco, but stopped feeling guilty about how this had all happened in the first place.

  Inevitable, something whispered inside of her. This was all inevitable.

  “I never would have married you,” she said then, her voice smooth and strong. “Alessandro only expedited things. You would have shown your true face sooner or later. And I would have left you the moment I saw it.”