Princess From the Past

How dared he refer to that night—that awful, shameful night? How could she have behaved that way, so out of control and crazed with her heartbreak, her desperate resolve to really, truly leave him? And how could all of that fury and fire have twisted around and around and left her so wanton, so shameless, that she could have … mated with him like that? With such ferocity it still made her shiver years later.

She’d had no idea of the depths to which she could sink. Not until he’d taken her there and then left her behind to stew in it.

“I have news,” he said, his gaze moving over her face, once again making her wonder exactly what he could read there. “But I do not think you will be pleased.” He straightened from the door and suddenly seemed much closer than he should. She fought to stand still, to keep from backing away.

“Well?” she asked.

But he did not answer her immediately. Instead, he moved into the room, seeming to take it over, somehow, seeming to diminish it with the force of his presence.

Bethany felt the way his eyes raked over the white linen piled high on the unmade bed even as her memory played back too-vivid recollections of the night she most wanted to forget. The crash and splintering of a vase against the wall. Her fists against his chest. His fierce, mocking laughter. His shirt torn from him with her own desperate hands. His mouth fused to hers. His hands like fire, punishment and glory all over her, lifting her, spurring her on, damning them both.

She shook it off and found him watching her, a gleam in his dark gaze, as if he too remembered the very same scenes. He stood at the foot of the bed, too close to her. He could too easily reach over and tip her onto the mattress, and Bethany was not at all certain what might happen then.

She froze, appalled at the direction of her thoughts. A familiar despair washed through her, all the more bitter because she knew it so well. Still she wanted him. Still. She did not understand how that could be true. She did not want to understand; she only wanted it—and him—to go away. She wanted to be free of the heavy weight of him, of his loss. She simply wanted to be free.

It was as if he could read her mind. The silence between them seemed charged, alive. His gaze dropped from hers to flick over her mouth then lower, to test her curves, and she could feel it as clearly as if he’d put his hands upon her.

“You said you had something to tell me,” she managed to grate out as if her thighs did not feel loose, ready, despite her feelings of hopelessness. As if her core did not pulse for him. As if she did not feel that electricity skate over her skin, letting her know he was near, stirring up that excitement she would give anything to deny.

“I do,” Leo murmured, dark and tall, too big and too powerful to be in this room. This house. Her life. “The divorce. There is a complication.”

“What complication?” she asked, suspicious, though her traitorous body did not seem to care. It throbbed for him, hot and needy.

“I am afraid that it cannot be done remotely.” He shrugged in that supremely Italian way, as if to say that the vagaries of such things were beyond anyone’s control, even his.

“You cannot mean …?” she began. His gaze found hers then, so very dark and commanding, and she felt goosebumps rise along her arms and neck. It was as though someone walked across her grave, she thought distantly.

“There is no getting around it,” he said, but his voice was not apologetic. His gaze was direct. And Bethany went completely cold. “I am afraid that you must return to Italy.”

CHAPTER THREE

“I AM not going back to Italy,” Bethany blurted out, shocked that he would suggest such an outlandish thing.

Had he lost his mind? He had managed to ruin the entire country for her. She couldn’t imagine what would ever induce her to return to it. In her mind, any return to Italy meant a return to the spineless creature she had been when she lived there; she could not—would not—be that person ever again.

But Leo merely watched her with those knowing, mocking eyes as if he knew something she did not.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” she tossed at him to offset the panic skipping through her nerves.

Leo’s dark brows rose in a haughty sort of amazement, and she remembered belatedly that the Principe di Felici was not often called things like ‘ridiculous.’ He was no doubt more used to being showered in honorifics. ‘Your Excellency.’ ‘My Prince.’ She bit her lower lip but did not retract her words.

“I am afraid there is no other way, if you wish to divorce me,” he said. If he were another man, she might have thought that tone apologetic. But this was Leo, and his eyes were too unreadable, so she could only be suspicious. “If you wish to remain merely separated, of course, you can continue to do as you please.”

“I am not the idiot you seem to think,” she said, her mind reeling. “I am a Canadian citizen. I do not need to go all the way to Italy to divorce you—I can do it right here.”

“That would be true, had you not signed all the papers,” Leo said calmly. His gaze was disconcertingly direct, seeming to push inside of her and render her transparent. Yet she could not seem to look away. His head tilted slightly to one side. “When you first arrived at the castello. Perhaps you do not recall.”

“Of course I remember.” Bethany let out a short laugh even as her stomach twisted anxiously. “How could anyone forget three days of legal documents?”

She remembered all too well the intimidating sheaves of paper that had been thrust at her by an unsmiling phalanx of attorneys, her signature required again and again. Sign here, principessa.

Most of the documents had been in Italian, affixed with serious and official seals and covered with intimidatingly dense prose. She had not understood a single thing that had been put in front of her, but she had been so desperately in love with her brand-new husband that she had signed everything anyway.

That great cavern of sorrow she carried within her yawned open, but she ignored it. She could not collapse in that way. Not now.

“Then you perhaps have forgotten what, exactly, it is that you signed,” Leo continued, his cool, faintly mocking voice kindling fear and fury in equal measure and sending both shooting along Bethany’s limbs like a hot wind.

“I have no idea what I signed,” she was forced to admit. It pained her that she could ever have been so blindly trusting, even five years ago at the start of her marriage when she had thought Leo Di Marco was the whole of the cosmos.

He inclined his head toward her, as if that statement said all that need be said.

“I signed it because you told me to sign it,” Bethany said quietly. “I assumed you were concerned with my best interests as well as your own.” She eyed him and gathered her courage around her like a shield. “Not a mistake I intend to repeat.”

“Of course not,” Leo said in that smooth, sardonic tone, crossing his arms over his hard chest.

He looked around the room, pointedly taking in the elegance of the furnishings, the pale blue walls beneath delicate moldings and the thick, rich carpeting beneath their feet.

“Because,” he continued in that same tone, “as we have established, you have lived as if in a nightmare ever since the day you agreed to marry me.”

“Are you going to tell me what rights I signed away, or would you prefer to stand there making sarcastic remarks?” Bethany snapped at him, exasperated at her own distressing softening as well as his patronizing tone. She hated the way he looked at her then, his arrogant gaze growing somehow more intimidating, burning into her.

“My apologies,” he said, his tone scathing. “I was unaware that my preferences were of any interest to you.”

He almost smiled then, a hard, edgy crook of his sensual mouth. Bethany wanted to look away but found she couldn’t—she was as trapped, as if he held her in his hands, which she knew would be the end of her.

“But that is neither here nor there, is it?” he asked in that deadly, soft tone that sent shivers down Bethany’s spine and twisted through her stomach. “The salient point is that you agreed that any divorce proceedings, should they ever become necessary, would be held in an Italian court under Italian law.”

“And, naturally, I have only your word for that,” Bethany pointed out, horrified that her voice sounded so insubstantial. She cleared her throat and jerked her gaze from his as if she might turn to stone were she to lose herself any further in that bittersweet darkness. “I could have agreed to anything and I would have no way of knowing, would I?”

“If you wish to hire a translator and have the documents examined, I will instruct my secretaries to begin compiling copies for your review immediately,” Leo said in a mild way, yet with that sardonic current beneath.

“And how long will that take?” Bethany asked, her bitterness swelling, hinting at the great wealth of tears beneath. She blinked them back. “Years? This is all just a game to you, isn’t it?”

His gaze seemed to ignite then, hard, hot and furious. The room constricted around them, narrowing, until there was nothing but Leo—the real Leo, she thought wildly—too dark, too angry and too close. Bethany felt panic race through her; a surge of adrenaline and something far more dangerous kicked up her pulse, hardened her nipples and pooled between her legs. She hated herself for that betrayal above all else.

And she suddenly realized how close together they were standing, with only the corner of the platform bed between them. She could reach out her hand and lay it against his hard pectoral muscles, or the fascinating valley between them. She could inhale his scent.

She could completely ruin herself and all she’d fought so hard to achieve!

“You must return to Italy if you wish to divorce me,” he said, his voice low and furious, like a dark electrical current that set her alight. “There is no other option available to you.”

“How convenient for you,” she managed to say somehow, not fighting the faint trembling that shook her—not certain she could have hid it if she’d tried. “I wonder how the foreign wife of an Italian prince can expect to be treated in Italy?”

“It is not your foreign birth that should worry you, Bethany,” Leo said, his noble features so arrogant, so coldly and impossibly beautiful, even now—his low voice like a dark melody. “The abandonment of your husband and subsequent taking of a lover? That, I am afraid, may force the courts to find you at fault for the dissolution of the marriage.” He shrugged, seemingly nonchalant, though his eyes were far too dark, far too hard. “But you are quite proud of both those things, are you not? Why should it distress you?”

Bethany felt as if something huge and heavy was crushing her, making it impossible to breathe, making tears prick at the backs of her eyes when she had no desire to weep. It was the way he said ‘abandonment’ and ‘lover,’ perhaps. It tore at her. It made her nearly confess the truth to him, confess her lie, simply to see his gaze warm. It made her wish she could still believe in dreams she had been forced to grow out of years ago.

But she knew better than to give him ammunition. Better he should hate her and release her than think well of her and keep her tied to him in this half-life, no matter how much it hurt her.