Princess From the Past (8 page)

She should not let him speak these things out loud, making both of them remember. Making her yearn. Ache.
Want.

But all she could do was stare up at him and hope her heart did not beat so hard, so frantically, that it might break through her own ribs as she half-feared it might.

“You are under my skin,” he whispered as if it was torn from him. “You are like a poison. You cannot seem to kill me, but I cannot seem to be rid of you.”

He had said too much, Leo thought, and yet he did not step back.

He could not seem to make his own body obey him, not when she was so close. He could feel her breath against his skin, close enough that he could smell the unique scent of her. Like lavender and vanilla—her own delectable perfume.

He could count the freckles that splayed across her nose, and knew what the larger one on her clavicle tasted like. He felt it when their breath began to move in sync, as it always had—as if their bodies insisted on synchronizing even as they dedicated themselves to remaining at war.

This close to her, he could not even remember why.

“You …” She could not manage to speak. He watched,
fascinated, as she wet her soft lips and swallowed. “You must let me go.”

“How many times must I let you go?” he heard himself whisper. Worse, he heard the emotion that was underneath it. The jagged pain. What was more horrifying was that he did not immediately move away from her. Not even then.

“You say you want me,” she said in a low, urgent voice, her impossible blue eyes wide with a sheen that told him he was not the only one rubbed raw by this encounter, no matter that they were not actually touching.

“I do,” he agreed. “Just as you want me, Bethany. I can feel it. I can see it.”

“You say that,” she continued as if it hurt her to push the words out. Her eyes searched his, something desperate there reaching out to him. “But you only want me if you can keep me in a convenient box of your choosing. If I behave, if I conform, if I act according to your rules, then I am treated like a queen. But it’s still a box.”

“You are confusing a box with a bed,” he said. Her mouth was so close and her skin would be so soft and he could not believe he had made such a foolhardy promise, much less that he intended to keep it—even now when he was so hard it bordered on the painful.

“With you they are often the same thing,” she said.

No matter how much he yearned simply to sink into her, he could not miss the reproving tone she used. He tilted his head back slightly and gazed at her, taking in that high red flush across her neck, the determined set of her jaw, the cool gleam in her eyes.

“I am only telling you the truth,” she said after a long moment. She took a breath that lifted her breasts alluringly, but he refused to be sidetracked. “Nothing I did
happened in a vacuum, Leo. You were as responsible for what happened in our marriage as I was. But I suppose it’s easier to look only at me, isn’t it?”

“I looked for you for three long years,” he gritted out. He was so close to her it bordered on madness, yet he still did not touch her. “But you were never where you were supposed to be. Tell me what I was meant to do. Beg? Plead? Weep?”

“Why not?” she whispered fiercely. “Why not all of the above, if that is how you feel?”

“I am not you,” he whispered back in the same hard tone, shoving through the things he refused to admit, even to himself. “I cannot flash my every emotion for all to see.”

“You cannot or you will not?” She moved then, only slightly, but it brought her shoulder into glancing contact with his arm. They both froze, focused on that single, accidental touch. He watched her swallow, the long, graceful column of her throat begging for his mouth, his tongue, his teeth.

“Tell me to touch you,” he ordered her huskily, their history forgotten in that moment like so much smoke. “Tell me to hold your face in my hands. Tell me to kiss you.”

Her lips parted on a soundless breath, but he felt it fan across his jaw. Her eyes widened, darkened. He could feel that shimmering electricity arc between them, hot and wild.

“Tell me …” he whispered, moving his mouth to hover near her ear, so very close, just out of reach. “Tell me to take you in my arms and make you mine. Again and again. Until you cannot remember your name. Or my name. Or why you left.”

*   *   *

She was almost his, until that last whispered sentence.

A chill snaked through her, and it gave her the strength to force open her eyes and remember. Why she was there. Why she could not simply surrender to him as every cell, every breath, every part of her longed to do. Why she could not let him cast this spell around her.

Not again.

“I think it is time for me to get some sleep,” she said, keeping her head turned and choosing her words so carefully, so desperately. “I think the traveling is catching up with me.”

He murmured something in Italian, something lyrical that she did not have to understand to know was all sex and command. She could feel it move between her legs, coil low in her belly and spiral along her skin until she shivered in reaction. But she did not look at him. She knew, somehow, that gazing into his eyes just then would be the end of her. She knew it.

“If that is what you wish,” he said eventually, and he pushed away. The night air seemed to rush at her, cooler than it had been moments before; shocking.

He stood only a foot or two away, his beautiful face shadowed, though his eyes burned with a fire she dared not touch. Or even acknowledge.

“I will see you in the morning,” she said with absurd, unnecessary courtesy.

His brows arched with a dark amusement, and she did not wait to see what he might say. Instead, she fled.

Again, she fled from him. She had spent her whole life running away from this man, it seemed. Was he right to accuse her as he had? Was he right to lay the blame at her feet?

She moved through the quiet halls as if pursued,
though she knew he did not follow her. Not then. She closed the heavy door of her bedchamber tight behind her and did not so much as glance at the other door.

She did not let herself think about where it led or how easy it would be to simply walk through the doorway and succumb to what her body wanted—and what would be, she knew, so very easy. So deliriously easy. Far easier than these conversations that ripped apart scars she had thought long-healed.

She pulled off her gown, changed into the comfortable pajamas she had brought with her from Toronto, scrubbed her face until there was no hint of color left in her skin and crawled into the wide, empty bed.

It was as soft and inviting as she remembered. No place for terrifying, unwieldy emotions. No room for a very old grief.

But she did not get to sleep for a long, long time.

H
E WAS
waiting for her in the breakfast room the next morning.

She walked in, her head still a confused muddle from the night before, and there he was. The sunlight poured in through the high, arched windows and surrounded him with a golden halo, despite the fact he looked forbidding and unapproachable at the head of the table. His gaze rose to meet hers over the top of the paper he held before him, cool and remote, in direct contrast to the pool of light around him.

She knew perfectly well he was challenging her, and it hit her hard and true, like an electrical charge, sizzling directly into the coiled tension low in her belly and between her legs.

Somehow, Bethany managed to keep herself from stumbling in the high, wedged sandals she had foolishly opted to wear beneath a casual knit sundress. She could feel his gaze in every cell, along every nerve. She had to fight to breathe normally.

Pressing her lips together, she let the ever-present servant seat her with a solicitousness that struck her as an absurdly formal manner to take with the soon-to-be ex-wife. The room was bathed in light and seemed to shimmer with promise, from the painted medieval
ceiling with its long, dark beams to the bright friezes that decorated the walls above the wainscoting.

She could sense more than feel Leo’s long legs stretched out beneath the polished wooden table, too close to her own, and wished that it was bigger or that she was further away from him instead of having to share a corner with him. As it was, she sat at a diagonal to Leo. But her body was not about to let her pretend she was not attuned to every single detail of his distressingly perfect appearance, the power he exuded as easily as he drew breath and the incredible, undeniable force of the pull he seemed to exert upon her.

Even now, when she had vowed to start anew this morning. When she had vowed not be so affected by him.

“Good morning,” he said, and she was all too aware of the amusement that lurked in his gaze, his voice, the slight twist of his sensual lips.

Settled in her seat, the thick white linen napkin draped over her lap, Bethany faced him fully, to offer the expected polite greeting that would prove her to be as unaffected as he was. To present him with the cool and calm façade that she knew she needed to use if she was to survive any of this intact.

But she froze when her eyes met his. The dark, passionate, starkly sexual dreams that had kept her half-awake and tormented with longing the whole of the endless night rose again in her head, taunting her. Shocking her. She could see all of that and more in his black-coffee gaze.

He did not merely look at her—he devoured her, his eyes hot and hard.

Hungry.

Her lips parted slightly as her breath deserted her.
She felt her eyes glaze over, and that same tell-tale flush begin to heat its way along her breasts and neck.

It was as if he’d touched her, as if he was touching her
right now
—as if he’d reached over, yanked her into his lap and finally fixed that wicked mouth of his to hers. When all he had really done was greet her and then watch her, hard male satisfaction gleaming in his eyes and stamped across his beautiful, impossible face.

She did not need to be a mind reader to realize that he knew exactly what her flush meant—that he suspected she had tossed and turned, her body aching for him, all night long. Leo knew exactly what he did to her—what she felt—simply because of his proximity.

He knew.

“All you need to do is touch me,” he said now, his intoxicating voice slightly hoarse, as if his own
want
shook him as it shook her. “It would take so very little, Bethany. You need only reach your hand to mine. You need only—”

“Leo, please,” she said, trying desperately to sound stern instead of weak, all too aware that she fell far short. “The only thing I want right now is coffee.”

“Of course,” he said, not even attempting to hide his sardonic amusement. “My apologies.” He did not even need to call her a liar. It hung between them like a shout.

Bethany scowled at her plate as the efficient staff poured her thick, aromatic coffee and placed the toast and jam she had always favored before her. She did not want to think about the fact that her preferences still registered here. She would not consider the ramifications of that.

Instead, she somehow managed to keep her hands from shaking as she lifted her delicate china coffee cup
to her lips and drank the rich brew. Only after she’d taken a few bracing, head-clearing sips could she bear to look at him again.

He had placed his newspaper to the side of his plate. He lounged back against his chair, his expression brooding, one hand supporting his jaw. He looked every inch the prince, the magnate, the duly crowned emperor of his vast and ever-expanding personal empire.

He wore another perfectly tailored suit, the charcoal fabric molded to his shoulders, pressed lovingly to his fine chest. He was freshly shaved, newly showered—his dark hair glossy, begging for her fingers to run through it. He was like a dream made flesh. Her dream, specifically. The explicit, delicious dream that had tortured her all night long.

But she could not reach across the divide between them, no matter how much she longed to do it. She could not allow herself to fall again, not when she knew exactly how hard that landing was. And how impossible it seemed to her that she would ever truly climb back to her feet and walk away from him.

“I must go to Sydney,” he said into the simmering silence. She had the sense he picked his words carefully, for all his voice remained cool and unemotional. “There are fires to put out, I am afraid, and only I can do it.”

“You are going to Australia?” she asked, jolted from her own depressing cycle of thoughts. “Today?”

“I am interested in some hotels there,” he said. Again, with care. “We are at a delicate stage in the negotiations.” He shrugged, though his gaze did not leave her face or soften at all. “I did not expect that I would have to attend to this personally.”

Her mind raced. What exactly was he saying? But then, she knew. Hadn’t she been here before? Repeatedly?
There was always something, somewhere, that required his attention. A day here. A week there. Always at the last minute. Always non-negotiable.

“How long will you be gone?” she asked with as little expression as she could manage. She picked up a piece of perfectly toasted bread then dropped it again, unable to conceive of putting anything in her mouth when her throat felt too dry and her stomach clenched.

“It should not take long,” he said, his own tone measured. He watched her, his expression cool.

“Which, if memory serves, can mean anything from an evening to two weeks,” she said crisply. “A month? Six weeks? Who can say, when duty calls?”

He only lifted a brow and gazed at her, his expression inscrutable. After a moment he lifted his hand and with a careless wave dismissed the hovering servants. The way he had always done—as a precaution, he had said once, so condescendingly, should she fly off the handle.

She gritted her teeth and shoved aside the humiliating memories. The tension that always swirled between them seemed to tighten, to pull at her, hard and hot.

“I sense this is a problem for you,” he said with exaggerated patience.

He had said such things before, she recalled.
A problem for you.
The implication being, as ever, that only a hysteric like Bethany would ever dream of finding his business affairs personally objectionable. It made her want to scream.

But she would not give him the satisfaction of reducing her to that. She would tear out her own throat first.

“Why am I here?” she asked quietly. A sudden
thought occurred to her and she could not hold it back. “Did you plan this?”

“It is business, Bethany,” he said, his voice dismissive. “I know you choose to concoct plots and conspiracies wherever you look, but it is only business.”

Any pretense of an appetite deserted her and she stood, pushing her chair back with a loud screech as she rose to her feet. The high shoes she’d worn to make his height seem less impressive compared to her own now seemed precarious, but she refused to show it.

“I might as well go home to Toronto and continue living this mockery of a life,” she began, as angry that she had not foreseen something like this as that he was behaving in the same manner he always had: putting his title above his wife.

“I cannot control the entire world, Bethany,” he said in that tone she loathed, the one that made her feel like an out-of-control, embarrassing infant—the tone that had so often goaded her into becoming exactly that. “I would prefer not to have to leave you now that you have finally returned to Italy, but I must. What would you have me do? Lose billions because you are in a snit?”

She fought off the haze of fury that descended on her then, and did not care if he could see that her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. She wanted to do more than simply ball up her hands in futility. She wanted to scream. She wanted to reach him, somehow. She wanted to make him feel this small, this unimportant, this useless.

But that would be descending to levels she never planned to visit again. She did not care that he stared at her while she fought her own demons. When she had battled herself into some semblance of control, she dared to look at him again.

“I understand that you need to speak to me this way,” she said after a long moment. She was proud that her voice neither wavered nor cracked. “It even makes sense. Heaven forfend you treat me like an equal. Like a partner. That might make your own behavior subject to scrutiny, and the
Principe di Felici
cannot have that. Far better to manipulate the situation—to manipulate me into acting out the only way I could.”

“You cannot be serious.” He even let out a scoffing sort of laugh. “Is there nothing you are not prepared to throw at me? No accusation too big or too small?”

“You got to remain the long-suffering adult, while I got to be the screaming child,” she continued as if he had not spoken. “It was a great disservice to both of us.” She spread her palms wide as if she could encompass everything they’d destroyed, all they’d lost. “But I am not the same person, Leo. I am not going to break down into a tantrum so that you can feel better about yourself.”

“All I have ever wanted is for you to act as you should,” he threw at her, no longer quite so languid. His jaw was set, his dark eyes glittering as he rose to his feet. They faced each other across the table, too close and yet, as ever, so very far apart. “But it seems to me I was nothing more than a replacement parent for you.”

A surprising wave of grief for her lost father washed through her, combined with a different kind of grief for the things she had not realized she’d wanted when she had married this man.

The things she had not realized she had inadvertently asked for, that she had not liked at all when he’d provided them. Like this impossible, disastrous, circular dynamic that seemed to engulf them, that she could not seem to fight off or freeze out or flee from.

“But what about your behavior?” she managed to get out, fighting for control, her hold on her emotions tenuous as things she thought she’d never dare say flowed from her mouth. “Never a husband. Never a lover. Always the parent. What could I be, except a child?” She shook her head in astonishment—and censure. “And then you wanted to actually have one, too?”

“I must have an heir,” he snapped, his expression frozen. “I never made any secret of that. You are well aware it is my primary duty as the
Principe di Felici
.”

“Let us not forget that,” she threw back at him, her voice uneven to match the heaviness and wildness in her chest. “Let us not forget for even one moment that you are your duty first, your legacy second and only thereafter a man!”

“Is this what you learned in your years away, Bethany?” he asked after a brief, tense pause, his tone dangerous. Hard like a bullet. “This apportioning of blame?”

“I don’t know who to blame,” she admitted, the sea of emotion she’d fought to keep at bay choking her suddenly. “But it hardly matters anymore. We both paid for it, didn’t we?”

When he did not speak, when he only gazed at her with fire and bitterness in equal measure, his mouth a grim line, she sighed.

Did his silence not say all there was to say? Wasn’t this the tragic truth of their short marriage? He would not speak to her about the things that mattered, and he would not listen to her. She could only scream, and she could never reach him.

It hurt to look at it, so stark and unadorned in the bright morning sunshine. It hurt in ways she thought might take her lifetimes to overcome. But she would
overcome this somehow. She would do more than simply survive him. She would.

“Go to Sydney, Leo,” she said quietly, because there was nothing left to say. There never had been. “I do not care how long it takes. I will be here when you deign to return, ready and waiting to finally put all of this behind us.”

Leo was in a towering rage, a fact he did nothing to conceal from his aides when they met his jet in Sydney and whisked him away to the sumptuous suite that awaited him at the hotel he no longer cared at all if he owned. He had stewed over Bethany’s words the whole way from Milan, and had reached nothing even approaching a satisfying conclusion.

He started to worry that he never would—which was entirely unacceptable.

The picture she’d painted of their marriage had enraged him. It had infuriated him that night over dinner, and it had further incensed him this morning. Who was she to accuse him of such things, when her own sins were so great and egregious? When he was the one who had remained and she the one who had abandoned their marriage?

But his rage had eased the further he’d flown from the castello. His reluctance to be parted from her grew, no matter how angry she made him, and he found himself unable to maintain that level of fury.

Partly, it had been the brash courage written all over her face, as if she had had to fight herself to confront him in the way she had. He could not seem to force the image from his mind. Her remarkable eyes, blazing with bravado and no little trepidation. Her spine so straight, her chin high, her mouth set in a fierce line.
Did it require so much strength to speak her mind to him, however off-base? Was he such a monster in her mind, after all they had shared?