A Scandal in the Headlines - By Caitlin Crews Page 0,8

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