Million Dollar Christmas Proposal

“Men like me,” he repeated quietly, as if she’d cursed at him. He sounded tired when he spoke again, and it made something turn over inside of her. But she kept on.

“You’re a Corretti,” she said. “We both know what that means.”

“Petty acts of revenge and the possibility of swimming lessons?” he asked dryly, but there were shadows in that dark gaze, shadows she couldn’t let herself worry about, no matter that strange sensation inside of her.

“It also means you are well known to be as cruel and occasionally vicious as the rest of the crime syndicate you call your family.” Her smile was brittle. “How lucky for me that I’ve encountered you on two such occasions.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, his dark gaze hard as his cynical mouth curved again, and something about that made her legs feel weak beneath her. “I remember this part. The personal attacks, the insulting comments about my family. You need a new topic of conversation, Elena.”

He didn’t move but, even so, she felt as if he loomed over her, around her, and she knew he was remembering it even as she did—those harsh words they’d thrown at each other in the middle of a ballroom in Rome, the wild flush she’d felt taking over her whole body, the way he’d only looked at her and sent that impossible, terrifying fire roaring through her. She felt it again now. Just as hot. Just as bright.

And just like then, it was much too tempting. She wanted to leap right into the heart of it, burn herself alive—

She shoved it aside, all of it, her heart pounding far too hard against her ribs. There was so much to lose if she didn’t handle this situation correctly—if Niccolo found her. If she forgot what she was doing, and why. If she lost herself in Alessandro Corretti’s dark, wild fire the way she still wanted to do, all these months later, despite what had happened since then.

“Far be it from me to stand in the way of your pettiness,” she said, jerking her gaze from his and moving out from behind the bar. She headed for the doorway to the deck and the sunshine that beckoned, bright and clear. “It’s a beautiful day for a swim, isn’t it? Quite summery, really, for May. I’m sure I won’t drown in such a small sea.”

“Elena. Stop.”

She ignored him and kept moving.

“Don’t make me put my hands on you,” he said then, almost conversationally, but the dark heat in it, the frank sensual promise, almost made her stumble. And, to her eternal shame, stop walking. “Who knows where that might lead? There are no chaperones here. No avid eyes to record our every move. No fiancé to watch jealously from the side of the dance floor. Which reminds me, are congratulations in order? Are you Signora Falco at last?”

Elena fought to breathe, to keep standing. To keep herself from telling this man—this dangerous, ruinous man—the truth the way every part of her screamed she should. She hardly knew him. She couldn’t trust him. She didn’t know what made her persist in thinking she could.

She thought of her parents—her loving mother and her poor, sick father—and what they must believe about her now, what Niccolo must have told them. The pain of that shot through her, taking her breath. And on some level, she knew, she deserved it. She thought about the unspoiled little village she’d come from, nestled on a rocky hill that ran along the sea, looking very much the same as it had hundreds of years ago. She needed to protect it. Because she was the only one who could. Because her foolishness, her selfishness and her vanity, had caused the problem in the first place.

She’d chosen this course when she’d run from Niccolo. She couldn’t change it now. She didn’t know what it was about Alessandro, even as surly and forbidding as he was today, that made her want to abandon everything, put herself in his hands, bask in that intense ruthlessness of his as if it could save her.

As if he could. Or would.

“No,” she said. She cleared her throat. She had to be calm, cool. The woman he thought she was, unbothered by emotion, unaffected by sentiment. “Not yet.”

“You’ve not yet had that great honor, then?”

She didn’t know what demon possessed her then, but she looked back over her shoulder at him as if his words didn’t sting. He was lounging back against the bar, gazing at her, and she knew what that fire in his eyes meant. She’d known in Rome, too. She felt the answering kick of heat deep in her core.

“I can’t think of a greater one,” she said. Lying through her teeth.

He watched her for a long, simmering moment, his gaze considering.

“And because you feel so honored you have decided to take a brief sabbatical from your engagement to tour the world as a stewardess on a yacht? My yacht, no less? When Europe is overrun by yachts this time of year, swarming like ants in every harbor, and only one of them belongs to me?”

“I always wished I’d taken a gap year before university,” she said airily. Careless and offhanded. “This is my chance to remedy that.”

“And tell me, Elena,” he said, his voice curling all around her, tangling inside of her, making her despair of herself for all the ways he made her weak when she should have been completely immune to him, when she wanted to be immune to him, “what will happen when this little journey is complete? Will you race back into the great honor of your terrible marriage, grateful for the brief holiday? Docile and meek, as a pissant like Niccolo no doubt prefers?”

She didn’t want to hear him talk about Niccolo. About the marriage he’d warned her against in such stark terms six months ago. It made something shudder deep inside of her, then begin to ache, and she didn’t want to explore why that was. She never had.

This is not about you, she snapped at herself then, reminding herself how much more she had to lose this time. And it’s certainly not about him.

“Of course,” she said with an air of surprise, as if he really might believe that Niccolo Falco’s fiancée was acting as a stewardess on a yacht simply to broaden her horizons before her marriage. As if she did. “I think that’s the whole point.”

“I’ve witnessed more than my share of terrible marriages,” he said then, a bleakness beneath his voice and moving in his too-dark eyes as he regarded her. It made her shiver, though she tried to hide it. “I was only yesterday jilted at the start of one myself, as a matter of fact. My blushing bride was halfway down the aisle when she thought better of it.” His mouth curved, cynical and hard. “And yet yours, I guarantee you, will be worse. Much worse.”

She didn’t want to think about Alessandro’s wedding, jilted groom or not. Much less her own. Once again, she fought back the strangest urge to explain, to tell him the truth about Niccolo, about her broken engagement. But he was not her friend. He was not a safe harbor.

If anything, he was worse than Niccolo. Why was that so hard to keep in mind?

“I’m sorry about your wedding.” It was the best she could do, and she was painfully aware that it wasn’t even true.

“I’m not,” he said, and she understood the tone he used then, at last, because she recognized it. Self-loathing. She blinked in surprise. “Not as sorry as I should be, and certainly not for the right reasons.”

Alessandro straightened then, pushing away from the bar. He moved toward her—stalked toward her, if she was precise—and she turned all the way around to face him fully. As if that might dull the sheer force of him. Or her wild, helpless reaction to him that seemed to intensify the longer she was in his presence.

It did neither.

He stopped when he was much too close, that marvelous chest of his near enough that if she’d dared—if she’d taken leave of her senses entirely, if she’d lost what small grip she had left on what remained of her life—she could have tipped her head forward and pressed her mouth against that hard, beautiful expanse that she shouldn’t have let herself notice in the first place.

“Tell me why you’re here,” he said in a deceptively quiet voice that made her knees feel like water. “And spare me the lies about gap-year adventures. I know exactly what kind of woman you are, Elena. Don’t forget that. I never have.”

There was no reason why that comment should have felt like he’d slapped her, when she already knew what he thought of her. When she was banking on it.

“You’re hardly one to talk, are you? Remember that I know who you are, too.”

“Wrong answer.”

Elena sighed. “You were never meant to know I was here. Let me off when we reach port—any port—and it will be like I was never on this boat at all.”

And for a moment, she almost believed he would do it.

That he would simply let it drop, this destructive awareness that hummed between them and the fact she’d turned up on his property. That he would shrug it off. But Alessandro’s mouth curved again, slightly swollen and still so cynical, his eyes flashed cold, and she knew better.