want to do.”
She could almost hear the music they’d danced to, lilting somewhere inside of her. Back when he had looked at her as if she was miraculous, not a battle to be won. Back when he had held her close for such a little while and made her name into a song.
“Fine,” she said. Anything to stop the memories, the emotions, that threatened to break her. The lump in her throat returned, and she had to breathe past it. “What do you want to know?”
“The man is a toad.” Flat. Certain. Daring her to argue with his characterization. She didn’t. “Less than a toad. Yet you agreed to marry him, and for all your faults of character, you don’t strike me as the kind of woman you would have to be to overlook such things.” Alessandro shifted in his chair, looking even more relaxed, but Elena knew better. She could sense what roared there beneath his skin, powerful and predatory. She could feel it. “Why did you?”
“Because I love—” She caught herself. Barely. She’d almost said loved. “I love him.” She watched his eyes flash, and enjoyed the fact he didn’t like hearing that any more than she liked saying it. “And not because he drove a pretty car or promised me a villa somewhere.” She held his gaze, and told the truth. “He was sweet.”
“Sweet.” Alessandro looked appalled.
“He told me that once he’d seen me, his life could never be the same,” she said, letting herself remember when Niccolo had been no more than a handsome, smiling stranger on an otherwise wholly familiar street. “He brought me flowers he picked himself from the hills above the village. He begged me to let him take me to dinner, or even simply take a walk with him near the water. It was the easiest thing in the world to fall for him. He was— He’s the most romantic man I’ve ever met.”
“It sounds like a con.”
It wasn’t as if she didn’t agree, but she couldn’t show him that. Or admit how ashamed she was of herself for falling for it, head over heels, so easily. Like the little fish she supposed she had been, reeled right into Niccolo’s net.
She sniffed. “Says the man who thinks a chilly business contract is a solid basis for a marriage.”
“But I am not a toad,” he pointed out, dark amusement lurking in his gaze, in the corner of his mouth. “And she did not agree to marry me because I was sweet. She agreed to marry me because her father wished it, and because the life I would have given her was generous and comfortable.” Again, a lift of those sardonic brows. “That is called practicality. Our situations are not at all similar.”
“True.” She aimed her smile at him. “But I don’t expect Niccolo will leave me at the altar, either.”
He stared at her for a long moment, that dark gaze baleful. She shivered, the intensity emanating from him sliding over her skin like a kind of breeze, kicking up goose bumps, though she tried to hide it. Then, not taking his eyes from hers, he threw his napkin on the table and rose.
Liquid and graceful. Powerful and male.
Elena ordered herself to run. But she couldn’t seem to move.
Alessandro rounded the table, and then he was behind her, and she thought the heat that exploded through her then might kill her. It hurt when she breathed. It hurt when she held it instead. His hands came down to rest on her shoulders, light and something like innocuous, so nearly polite, and yet she was sure that he could feel the heat of her skin. The bright hot flame she became whenever he touched her.
Remember— an urgent voice cried, deep inside her. Remember—
But he was touching her again, he was finally touching her, and she couldn’t hold on to a single thought but that.
“Fall for me, then,” he said, bending down to speak softly into her ear, his breath tickling her even as it triggered that volcanic need she’d tried too hard to deny. “I’ll pick you flowers from the meadow if that’s all it takes.”
“Stop it,” she said, but her voice was so insubstantial. Little more than a whisper, and she knew it told him exactly how affected she was. How little resistance she had left.
“I’ll lay you down beneath the moon,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, one clever hand moving beneath her hair to caress the sensitive skin at her nape,