A Scandal in the Headlines - By Caitlin Crews Page 0,37

watched her struggle, one emotion after the next moving across her face, and he knew he was right. She shook her head, her blue eyes cloudy.

“What do you care?” she asked quietly. “You have what you want.”

“I want everything,” he said, raw and intense, and smiled when she jerked back against the lounger.

And everything might not be enough, a voice whispered deep inside of him. He might have been a ruined thing, twisted and dark all the way through, but he needed this. He needed her. He didn’t care why. He only knew he did.

He watched her pull in a breath, then another, and she curled her hands into tight fists on her thighs. He forced himself to wait. She looked away for a long, tense moment, and when her eyes met his again, he saw her. Her.

At last.

“I knew it,” he said with deep satisfaction. “I knew you were right there, simmering beneath the surface.”

“What do you want, Alessandro?” she asked, and her voice was neither cool nor amused, for the first time in a very long while. “We only have a few days left here. Why ruin them with this?”

“I want the woman I met in Rome,” he told her. “I don’t want a damned sex toy.”

She let out a short, derisive laugh. “Of course you do. Men like you always do.”

He felt that same familiar darkness in him expanding, rising, sweeping through him, reminding him how ruined and twisted he was and always had been, since the day he was born. Men like you. Would he never escape his name? Was he doomed to be exactly like his father, no matter how hard he’d struggled against it?

“I don’t care if you hate me, Elena,” he gritted out. “But whatever else this is, whatever happens, I want it to be real.”

Because one thing in his life had to be. Just one thing.

“‘Real,’” she repeated in a flat tone. “You. That’s almost funny. What do you know about real?” Her face heated as she spoke, her temper flooding in like a rising tide and as beautiful to him, however perverse that was. “You almost married a woman for what? A business expense?”

“Duty,” Alessandro corrected her, and she laughed. She laughed.

“The reality, Alessandro, is that you are not a good man,” she said with an awful, deliberate finality, staring straight at him, deliberate and pointed. “How could you be? You’re a Corretti.”

Condemnation and curse, all wrapped up in his name. His damned name. She said it as if it was the vilest word imaginable. As if the very saying of it blackened her tongue. He felt something crack open inside of him.

Because, of course, he wasn’t simply a Corretti. He was the one his family was happy to sacrifice to serve their own ends. He was the one who was expected to do his duty, because he always had. His own parents had used him as a pawn. His grandfather had manipulated him. His “business expense” had walked out on him. Then Elena had crashed into his life like a lightning bolt, illuminating all of his darkest corners in that single, searing, impossible dance, but she hated him—he’d made sure of it. He had never been anything but a dark, ruined thing, masquerading as a man.

“Your conscience will be your undoing, boy,” Carlo had jeered at him more than once. “It makes you weak.”

As long as it didn’t make him Carlo, he thought now, bitterly. Perhaps that was the most he could hope for.

Elena had no clue what she was dealing with. No possible clue what he held in check. “You don’t have the slightest idea who I am.”

“The entire world knows who you are,” she retorted, glaring at him as if he’d never been anything but a monster, and he couldn’t stand it. Not any longer. Not from her. “You’re—”

“I am so tired of paying for the sins of others,” he gritted out. He slashed a hand through the air when she opened her mouth and she shut it again, sinking back against the lounger, her hands in fists at her sides. “I’ve spent my life doing nothing but the right thing, and it still doesn’t matter. Yes, I was going to marry that girl.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Because it was my grandfather’s dying wish and I am many things, Elena, none of them as polluted or as vile as you seem to believe, but I could not defy my own grandfather.”

“Your grandfather—” she began,