A Scandal in the Headlines by Caitlin Crews Page B

made her shiver with need, no matter what price she’d end up paying.
    She walked toward him, holding his gaze. Letting her hips sway beneath the silken embrace of the fabric that clung to her. Letting him watch, wait. She could see the stamp of hunger across his face. She could see the blaze of it in his eyes.
    And felt more powerful in this moment than she had in a very long time. Since she’d looked up from her life to find a shockingly beautiful man watching her as if she was a goddess come down to earth. She felt it hum in her like an electrical current.
    She stopped when she was no more than a breath away and stood there. She waited. He tensed, but hedidn’t move. His hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his loose black trousers as if he was perfectly at ease, but she knew better.
    “Do you think this will work, Elena?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “This suspicious capitulation, this attempt at seduction, coming so soon on the heels of your deep concerns about respect?”
    “You should ask yourself,” she said, her tone light, though her gaze was hard on his, “why even when I do what you say you want, you accuse me of something. Anything.”
    “Because it won’t,” he said, answering his own question. His mouth twisted. “Not the way you imagine. I don’t care how you come to me. I don’t care how I have you. I don’t care at all, so long as I do. Are you prepared for that?”
    “I told you,” she said softly. “You win.” She held out her arms like some kind of supplicant, but she smiled like a queen. “To the victor go the spoils—isn’t that what they say?”
    “They do.”
    He reached over and traced a deceptively lazy trail from the wildly fluttering pulse in her throat to the hollow between her breasts. All of his ruthlessness, all of his simmering power, in that one fingertip.
    “You should be afraid of me,” he told her then, and his voice moved in her, threat and promise, sex anddemand, and something even darker in his eyes. “Why aren’t you?”
    “I’m terrified,” she whispered, but she wasn’t. And she could see he knew it.
    “I wish I knew which one of us is the greater fool,” he replied in the same harsh whisper, and it made her throat constrict.
    “Someone once told me you should be careful what you wish for, Alessandro,” she said, because it was better to taunt him. It was better to push. Safer. “You just might get it, and then what will you do?”
    Her heart beat like a hammer in her chest, in her breasts, between her legs, and she could swear he heard it, too, because his hard mouth curved, not a trace of cynicism to be seen. Only desire.
    And that was all the warning she got.
    He hauled her up into the air, then threw her over one shoulder like she weighed nothing at all. Like the warrior king she’d imagined him. Claiming her that easily—that completely.
    She gasped—but his hand came down on her bottom, his big, hard palm holding her fast and warning her, and she gulped her own words down.
    His shoulder was wide and hard against her belly as he moved through the house; his hand was a hot brand of fire against the exposed skin of her behind, the backs of her thighs. She caught a glimpse of herselfas they passed a mirror, hanging down his strong back, her hair wild and her face flushed, and it made her breath go shallow. She couldn’t stop trembling, and it still wasn’t fear.
    Surrender
, she told herself.
It’s the only way to save everything else that matters
. But what scared her wasn’t the act of surrendering to him. It was that it was so easy. That it felt so good.
    Alessandro tossed her down in the center of his bed, and she had only a quick impression of bold colors, dark woods and arching windows wide open to let the night inside. Then her gaze fixed on him, and stayed put. He stood by the side of the wide bed for a moment, looking down at her as she sprawled there, and she couldn’t quite read the intense look in his eyes, on his hard