Princess From the Past (12 page)

“I thought if I claimed to have a lover you would hate me,” she said, forcing the words out, though her lips felt numb and she knew on some deep level that she could not understand, that there was no going back from this admission. This was new ground, shaky and insecure.

And still she continued on, face to face, more naked and more terrified than she could ever remember being before though she still wore her clothes.

“And I thought if you hated me,” she managed to say, “You would let me go.”

Something seemed to shimmer between them, bright and sharp, and he very nearly smiled. He moved closer to her, pulling a curl between his fingers and tucking it behind her ear. She was sure she saw something sad and resigned move through him before he laid a trail of soft kisses along her jaw.

He does not believe me, she thought in a dawning kind of horror, and it broke her heart.

“I never had a lover,” she confessed, desperate that he hear her, that he listen, that he believe her. She was as desperate he believe this truth as she had been that he believe the lie, and even as she spoke she could not quite face the reasons she was so distraught. She only felt it, deep within, like a great abyss she had been pretending for years did not exist at all. “I made it up.”

He looked up then, his eyes gleaming with a bone-deep satisfaction, bright and hard and triumphant. His mouth curved into a stark, male smile that made her shudder deep within.

“Believe me,” he said, a ruthless heat in his voice, his gaze, his skin against hers, “I know.”

“But …” she breathed, her voice catching in her throat, her mind a sudden tumult of ‘how?’ and ‘when?’ and ‘why?’ but he only laughed. It was a resoundingly wolfish sound, and she could not help the way she shuddered around him.

Then he began to move.

Later, Bethany could not pinpoint the moment she let go—the moment she stopped desperately trying to cling to the shreds of the persona she had built around Leo’s absence and allowed herself instead to sink into the overwhelming, devastating reality of his presence, his body, his clever hands.

Leo made love to her with shattering intensity and ruthless, focused thoroughness. He stripped them both of all their clothes until they were naked in the sun, and then he fed her with his own fingers, olives and cheeses, salted meats and sweet grapes, and washed it down with wine and kisses.

Then he took her again, making her fall apart over and over, until she could hardly remember who she had been before that kiss of hers that had started it all again—this madness and fire, this need and heat.

When the shadows lengthened over the quiet water of the lake, Leo led her back to the castello along the same path that they had traveled that morning. Bethany felt as if years had passed since then—whole decades, perhaps, lost beneath the quiet, encompassing mastery of Leo’s hands, his mouth, his hard and fascinating body.

She was not sure, she thought as he wrapped his hand around hers and tugged her with him through the vineyards, if she would recognize herself if she came face
to face with the woman who had set out on this walk. She’d been so determined to play a game, so sure that game would change Leo—never dreaming how deeply it would change
her
.

But she pushed that thought away because she had no other choice. He was too demanding, too enticing, and she could not seem to stop herself from responding to his smallest caress, his barest glance. And, if she was honest, she did not want to stop herself. She did not want to stop at all.

At some point, when the enchantment of the green and gold fields had worn away and he was not there to ensnare her with his rich, dark gaze, she might have to worry about that.
But not today
, she told herself, repeating it like a litany.

When they returned to the castello, Bethany was not surprised when he was pulled aside by the usual collection of aides and servants, all of them anxious to speak to him. She climbed to her chamber and ran a hot bath in the deep tub that stood before the high windows of her expansive private bathroom.

Feeling as if she was in a dream, she pulled off the clothes he had so recently put on her, her hands trembling slightly as she remembered his method of dressing her—his mouth against the tender underside of her breasts as he smoothed her bra into place, his fingers exploring every curve, every secret, making each and every one his. She felt a deep shuddering inside of her; she could not stop herself from shivering, though she knew she was not cold.

She knew it was him: the fever of Leo Di Marco, the flush of him still heating her skin. It was the same sorcery he had always wielded over her, rendering her his slave, desperate to do or say anything that would
make him touch her, take her, bring her screaming and sobbing to the completion only he could provide.

She should be horrified with herself, with what she had let happen—with what she had made happen. She knew that, could see it objectively, as if from a great distance.

She stood naked as the tub filled, and let the bath salts run through her fingers into the foamy water. She understood that she should be appalled that there was not a single square inch of her body that he had not touched, not one part of her he had not claimed beneath the canopy of the Italian sky. She raised her arms to clip her heavy curls up on the back of her head and winced slightly. She could feel him still, in the slight aches in sensitive areas that were somehow more arousing than painful; in the ecstatic, left-over shivering that she could not control or deny.

That she did not want to control. That she did not want to deny.

Whatever that made her, she did not want to know.

She had just settled into the hot, silky water, letting out a blissful sigh and tipping her head back against the high porcelain edge of the tub, when something prickled across her skin like a breeze. She opened her eyes, not at all surprised to see him in the doorway, his dark eyes shadowed.

She thought he might speak, or that she should, but neither of them moved for a long moment. She felt the steam rise around her, heating her face, making her curls tighten and bounce. But she could not look away from him.

She could not, it seemed, do anything at all but gaze at this man, helpless, as her body reacted to him in the same, predictable manner it always had. As if he had
not spent the afternoon having her again and again in a variety of clever and devastating ways. Her body did not seem to care. It only wanted more.

Bethany understood something then, something that seemed to drop through her like a stone while he stood there before her.

It had always been like this—this unquenchable thirst for him, this explosive passion whenever they’d touched. She remembered that shameful night in Toronto, the night she had held up for years as the very lowest point of her life, and realized that she had needed to think of it that way. Not because they had both been so angry, but because she had needed to demonize the sexual connection between them in order to think past it, in order to figure out who she might be without it. Because when he was near her she lost the ability to think at all.

She must have known, on some level, that to demonize it the way she had was the only way she was likely to survive the loss of it, of him, for so long.

She still did not dare think of why that was. She still shied away from the simple truth that her body knew, had always known, that moved through her, illuminating her.

Not today, she thought fiercely. It would be too much, that level of self-awareness. She could not quite do it. She would not allow it.

She opened her mouth to speak, but stopped when he moved. He came to stand beside the tub, still looking down at her, that same simmering awareness lighting up his dark gaze, making his sensual mouth move into something approaching a smile.

She found she could not tear her eyes away from him. She stopped trying.

He pulled the tight black T-shirt over his head, tossing
it carelessly to the floor. Bethany let her gaze travel over his rock-hard pectoral muscles, the tantalizing indentation between them, the ridged expanse of his abdomen. She let out a small sound when he stripped off the jeans as well, kicking them out of his way so that he stood fully naked and indescribably beautiful before her.

She could only stare. He was pure, masculine perfection, lethal grace and tightly controlled strength, and she wanted to touch him and taste him all over again.

“Move over,” he ordered her with a regal tilt of his jaw in a tone that expected instant compliance. That demanded it.

She knew she should object. She knew she should set her ground rules, define her boundaries. She knew she should demand her space—she knew that she should want the space from him she ought to demand. But she did not say a word. Not now, she told herself, her own private prayer. Not today.

She sat forward so he could sink down behind her in the tub that had been built for precisely this purpose. She sighed in a contentment she opted not to question when he pulled her back against the wall of his chest, settling her between his thighs, bringing his strong, hard arms around her.

The water lapped against her breasts. She could not tell which was hotter—the steaming bath or his silk-and-steel skin against hers. His hardness pressed against the small of her back, making her core throb and ache.

When she tipped her head back against his shoulder, she saw something she could not quite define flash across his face. It made something deep inside of her shift, like a tectonic plate deep beneath the ground. Grief turned to something else, something less raw,
more smooth. But before she could do more than note it he fit his mouth to hers.

Soft. Sweet. The fire raged anew.

Not today, she thought. Not today.

And then she stopped thinking altogether.

L
EO
could not quite put his finger on the complicated emotions that held him in such a tight grip that it bordered on the uncomfortable.

He sat in yet another tedious meeting in the suite of rooms in the castello’s west wing that he used as his corporate offices when he was in Felici. He lounged behind the massive desk that his father had bought as a match for his grand ego, and knew that he looked every inch the prince, as he ought to. He had been raised to wield his own magnificence as a weapon, and he had long done so without thought. He did not want to investigate why the mantle of it seemed so ill-fitting today. As if it was no longer his second skin, indistinguishable from his own.

The meeting should not have been tedious. There had been a time when the thrill of figuring out how best to beat a rival’s offer, or managing to pull together a deal in the eleventh hour, would have kept him high on adrenaline and triumph for days.

He had never involved himself in the kind of extreme adventures that attracted so many of his wealthy peers, because he could not risk himself or the Di Marco legacy. He had therefore contented himself instead with the drama of high finance—the greatest poker game in
the world, with the highest stakes—and it had always worked.

Yet today, even that familiar thrill seemed to have lost its appeal. He knew that Bethany was somewhere in the castello—not in Canada, as she had been. Not across the planet. Not even so terribly angry with him any longer. She was somewhere close and, more than that, agreeable.

He knew that she was nearby, and that was what thrilled him—not these papers, these debates, these strategies that he found so unaccountably boring these days. He knew that he could walk out of this meeting, go to her and he could have her. It would be as easy as a look, a touch. As simple as their presence in the same room.

He could, as he had done yesterday, simply enter the chamber she happened to be in, tumble her to one of the soft, plush carpets and be inside of her before she had time to greet him properly. He grew hard merely thinking about it.

He scowled at the sheaf of documents in front of him, trying to make sense of the financial portfolio before him when he could hardly make sense of himself. It wasn’t the sex that was affecting him this way—though he was not above feeling deeply satisfied that, even after all of the time they’d been apart, he was capable of driving Bethany absolutely wild. Driving them both wild.

It was not that at all. It was …the rest of it.

A week had passed, then several more days, and Bethany had made no move to leave; she had not so much as mentioned their divorce. She had not even asked after the court as she had when she had first arrived. Leo wanted to view that as a victory, but somehow he could not.

She shared his meals, his bed. She shared her delectable body with a delight and an enthusiasm that he found alternately humbling and exciting. She talked to him. She laughed with him. There were no tantrums, no tears, no rages, not even the barbed exchanges he had come to expect since seeing her again in Toronto.

She was, in short, everything he had always imagined she could be, as if their tumultuous eighteen months of marriage three years ago had simply been a bad dream they had woken from together.

It should have been blissful—it was blissful—yet it was not, somehow, enough.

Leo could not rid himself of the feeling of unease that never quite left him—the sense that they were living on borrowed time, that there was a clock ticking, for all that he could neither hear it nor see it. It was the faraway look in her eyes sometimes when she thought he was not watching her. It was the sadness he sometimes sensed in her, though she would always smile when he said her name and pretend she did not know what he meant when he asked what troubled her.

He knew she was holding great parts of herself in reserve, and he told himself that was why he felt this edginess, this undercurrent of disquiet. It was at odds with the deep sense of contentment he sometimes felt when she was curled around him in the night. He felt as if he could never get enough of the feel of her softness next to him, the sound of her breathing in the dark room, the scent of her lustrous curls draped across his chest.

He felt. Perhaps that was why he felt that edge inside. It was so unusual. Not new, exactly, for this was exactly why he had married her. How had he managed to forget? This had been what had happened in Hawaii, what had brought them here in the first place. He had looked
at her, touched her and it was as if he’d been reborn. Made new.

With Bethany, he was aware of himself as a man in a way he was with no one else. He was not the
Principe di Felici
. He was not the heir to the Di Marco fortune and executor of its storied legacy. He was simply a man. A man who wanted her, who she wanted in return, as if nothing else mattered. As if only that mattered.

He had hated that he’d felt this way. He could remember it all now with a clarity that had somehow deserted him during the years she had been gone. He remembered how bizarre he had found his own feelings when he’d returned to Italy, having acted out of character for the first time in his life.

He had felt as if he had dishonored himself. He had not known how to act like the man who had fallen so in love with her, so in love that he’d forgotten the history that had made him who he was until he was immersed once again in the seat of that history. He had instead tried to pretend that the man who had been so alive, so accessible, so vulnerable in the soft Hawaiian night had never existed.

Worse, he had tried to make her into the woman he had been meant to marry, the stiff and formal automaton that she had never been and could never be. He had tried to make the two of them into the image of the marriages he’d witnessed his whole life—fake and bloodless society arrangements, all manners and materialism, convenience and practicality. Why had he been surprised when she could not handle it? What had he expected?

The outer door to his office swung open then and Leo glanced up as one of his fleet of secretaries walked in. He could see out into the antechamber, and felt that
spike of desire pound through him when he saw that Bethany was standing there, smiling at one of the attorneys who had left earlier to take a telephone call. He snuck a look at his watch and saw that it was nearing noon, when he had planned to meet her for lunch.

She looked fresh and pretty, her curls spilling toward her shoulders from a high ponytail, the dark gloss of her hair seeming to shine against the pale peach cashmere of the turtleneck sweater she wore. Her dark brown trousers clung to her curves, and made him think of more private venues for their meal than the excursion they’d planned into the village.

But when she turned toward his door her gaze met his for a split second across the antechamber and the spacious inner-office before the same secretary walked out and closed the door behind her.

The split second had been enough. Leo felt the force of her gaze as if it still seared into him through the heavy wooden door. Tortured. Bitter. Despairing.

Furious.

And he knew then exactly what he had feared, exactly what he had felt floating around them, undermining all the seeming perfection of their reunion: this moment.

This was what he’d been attempting to avoid all along.

Because he knew what the damned lawyer must have told her. He knew exactly what could put that horrible look on the face that had been soft and shining when he’d left her this morning.

He had taken his biggest gamble yet, he realized, and if that expression was anything to go by Leo Di Marco had finally lost. He had lost and this loss, he realized with a sudden flare of deep certainty, he could not tolerate.

He could not. He would not.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, cutting off the consultant who was still speaking. He rose to his feet. Because he was the prince, no one argued—no one even commented. They merely stood respectfully. “Something has come up.”

Then, with a growing sense of something he refused to call panic, but which shot through him too fast and too slick, he went after her.

He was a liar.

He was still no more than a liar.

Bethany could not breathe. She could not breathe, and she could not seem to stop making that choking sound in the back of her throat as she hurtled herself down the long, history-laden hallway that seemed to shrink around her as she moved. Oppressive, not beautiful. Dark, not graceful. A prison, not a castle—all over again.

How could she have forgotten how ruthless he was? How could she have done the one thing she had known better than to do and fallen right back into his arms, his bed? It was as if he touched her and she immediately contracted some kind of amnesia. What had she been thinking? Had she been thinking?

All the while, he had lied to her.

She reached her chamber and threw open the door, her breath coming in shallow, desperate pants. She was a fool, such a naïve little fool, even now. It was not her youth or her inexperience this time. It was him.

It was Leo, who had never intended to let her go. Who had talked her into coming to Italy simply because he’d grown tired of waiting for her to return of her own volition, because he wanted her here for whatever complicated reason of his own. And he was the prince—he
did as he pleased. His wish was her command. Her stomach heaved.

But what other explanation could there be? The lawyer had told her the sickening truth about Italian divorces outside Leo’s office: both spouses had to appear in court and declare they wished to separate. And only after three years of legal separation had passed could divorce be considered, much less granted.

“But I explained all of this to the prince …” the man had stammered apologetically. “Weeks ago.”

She had no doubt at all that he had done precisely that.

Which could only mean one thing, she thought as she staggered into her bedchamber and then stood there, her head spinning around and around: Leo had brought her here under false pretenses. He had known the laws of his own country; of this, Bethany had no doubt. He had always intended to use her body against her, to lull her into a false sense of security.

She heard herself let out a low sound, a kind of sob, and then she bit it back, the pain too great, the anger leaving her as suddenly as it had crashed into her.

She was not his puppet. She was not some kind of marionette that he directed at his whim. She had chosen to kiss him at the lakeside. She had done this to herself, in full possession of her faculties, for all the good they had done her. She had abandoned herself as totally as she had years ago—as completely as everyone else had abandoned her over the years.

Her mother, who had died when she was so young, who she had never known. Her father, who had been wracked with grief, then so weak, then so ill, before he died. Leo, who had left her so alone when she had not known herself at all, much less him. But, above all, she
had abandoned herself. She had lost herself again and again, and it was this that she thought she might never forgive. Leo was merely the catalyst.

This was no more than her latest great betrayal—the latest heartbreak she had perpetrated on herself with her own shocking inability to keep herself safe as she should, as any adult would. Leo’s manipulations were almost beside the point. This was, after all, who he was, and she’d known it full well. She’d had no illusions at all about what sort of man he was, had she? So why was she so astonished? Why did it hurt so much that she could not manage to breathe as she should? Why did she feel so …bruised?

It didn’t matter who was to blame, she told herself, pushing past the anguish. It only underscored what she had always known: she could not stay here. She should never have come here. She had known better, and yet she had done it anyway.

And she even knew why.

It was like a sickness, she thought, a great wave of despair crashing over her, so hard it nearly took her to her knees. She moved over to the great four-poster bed and leaned against it, her hands loath to touch the linens where she had lain with him, over him, where he had brought her to such great heights with his hands, his mouth, that all-seeing gaze and boundless need.

And all of it part of this lie, she thought, miserable. The lie she should have known he would tell, because this was who he was. Why did it hurt so much to have her worst suspicions confirmed?

But she knew. She loved him. Despite everything, she was in love with him.

She rubbed her hands over her face, but the uncomfortable and ugly truth did not dissipate. The love, fierce
and tough and uncompromising, remained. It was why she had stayed in that house in Toronto, rattling around like a wraith. It was why she had let him talk her into coming here. It was why. It was that silken, unbreakable thread of hope that could not let him go. She did not want to love him, but she did. She still did. She always had.

She had loved him since she’d first laid eyes on him, wet and glistening in the Hawaiian sun, and nothing had ever altered that love. Nothing had changed it or diminished it. She had adored him, hated him, feared him, blamed him—and still she loved him.

These past days had been a fantasy of all they could have been; he had been, at last, the man she remembered from Hawaii so long ago. The man she had thrown away all she’d known to follow heedlessly across the globe. But even knowing now what she had not wanted to suspect—even now, she loved him.

There was no one else for her. She faced the truth of that, and managed not to flinch. There would be no ‘moving on’, no ‘getting over it.’ There was only Leo. He had broken her heart so many times she had stopped expecting anything else. Yet still she could feel the way she loved him swell in her, dance through her veins and slide deep into her bones. Even now, when she wondered how she would ever survive this moment. Even now, when she was not even sure she wanted to survive it.

She loved him, but he was still playing his games. He was still playing lord of the manor, the presumptuous prince. He was still manipulative and deceiving, patronizing and cruel. She had stopped questioning why she should love a man like that, who seemed sometimes to be so different, so good, so noble.