Princess From the Past

“There must be another way,” she said after a moment or two, battling to keep her voice even.

Leo merely shook his head, his features carefully blank once again, just that polite exterior masking all the anger and arrogance she knew filled him from within. She could feel it all around them, tightening like a vice. Too much emotion. Too much history.

“I don’t accept that,” Bethany said, frowning at him.

“There are many things that you do not accept, it seems,” Leo said silkily. “But that does not make them any less true.”

He wanted her. He always wanted her. He had stopped asking himself why that should be.

He did not care about her lies, her insults—or he did not care enough, now, having been without her for so long. He only wanted to be deep inside of her, her legs wrapped around his waist, where there could be only the truth of that hot, silken connection. The only truth that had ever mattered, no matter what she chose to believe. No matter what he felt.

She should know better than to row with him so close to a bed. She should remember that all her posturing, all her demands, rages and pouts, disappeared the moment he touched her. His hands itched to prove that to her.

She pushed her curls back from her face and looked unutterably tired for a flashing moment. “I would ask you what you mean, and I am certain you would love to tell me, but I am tired of your games, Leo,” she said in that quiet yet matter-of-fact voice that he was growing to dislike intensely. “I will not go back to Italy. Ever.”

He thought of the vulnerability he had sensed in her, that undercurrent of pain. He could see hints of it in the way she looked at him now, the careful way she held herself. Sex and temper, he understood; both could be solved in the same way. But this was something else.

A game, he assured himself. This is just another game.

“You make such grand proclamations, luce mio,” he said softly, never taking his eyes from hers. “How can you keep them all straight? Today you will not go to Italy. Three years ago you would not remain my wife. So many threats, Bethany, all of which end in nothing.”

“Those are not threats,” she threw at him, her eyes dark in that way that made things shift uncomfortably in him, her soft mouth trembling. “They are the unvarnished truth. I’m sorry if you are not used to hearing such a thing, but then you surround yourself with sycophants, don’t you? You have only yourself to blame.”

Leo moved toward her, his gaze tight on hers. “There were so many sweeping threats, as I recall,” he said softly, mockingly, as if she had not spoken. As if there were no shifts, no darkness, no depths he could not comprehend. “You would not speak to me again once you left Italy. You would not remain in this house even twenty-four hours after I left you here. They begin to run together, do they not?”

She only stared at him, her blue eyes wide, furious and something else, something deeper. But her very presence before him, in the house she had vowed to leave, was all the answer that was needed.

“And we cannot forget my favorite threat of all, can we?” He closed the space between them then, though he did not reach over and touch her as he longed to do. He was so close she was forced to tilt her face up toward his if she wanted to look at him. Her lips parted slightly, her eyes widening as heat bloomed on her cheeks.

“Is this supposed to terrify me?” she asked, but it was hardly a whisper, barely a thread of sound. “Am I expected to cower away from you in fear and awe?”

“You promised me you would never go near me again, that I disgusted you,” he said softly, looking down into her eyes, reading one emotion after another—none of them disgust. “Is that why you shake, Bethany? Is this disgust?”

“It is nothing so deep as disgust,” she said, her voice a thread of sound, her eyes too bright. She cleared her throat. “It is simply acute boredom with this situation.”

“You are a liar, then and now,” he said, reluctantly intrigued by the shadows that chased through her bright blue eyes. He was not surprised when she moved away from him, putting more space between their bodies as if that might dampen the heat they generated between them. As if anything ever could.

“That is almost funny, Leo,” she said in a quiet voice, her gaze dark. “Coming from you.”

“Tell me, Bethany, how have I deceived you?” he asked softly, watching her school her expressive face into the smooth blandness he hated. “What are my crimes?”

“I refuse to discuss this with you, as if you do not already know,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “As if we have not gone over it again and again to the point of nausea.”

“Very well, then,” he said, hearing that harsh edge in his voice, unable to control it. “Then let us discuss your crimes. We can start with your lover.”

His words seemed to hang there, accusation and curse wrapping around her like a vise. She wanted to scream, to rage, to shove at him. To collapse to the floor and sob out her anguish.

But she could not bring herself to move. She felt pinned as much by the heat in his dark gaze as her own eternal folly. Why had she told him such an absurd lie? Why had she put herself in a position where he could claim the moral high-ground over her?

“You do not wish to discuss my lover,” she told him stiffly, hating herself, her own voice sounding like a stranger’s. But she had to make it believable, didn’t she? “You do not compare well in any department.”

“How will you tell him that you cannot ever do more than commit adultery so long as you remain married to me?” he murmured in that way of his that seemed to channel directly along her spine, making her feel shivery and weak. “What man would tolerate such a thing, when all you need do is fly to Italy to take care of that one, small detail?”

“He is enormously tolerant,” Bethany said through her teeth. The word ‘adultery’ seemed to ricochet through her, chipping off pieces of her heart until they fell like stones into the pit of her stomach.

“As it happens,” Leo said in that quiet, lethal tone, “I am flying to Italy tomorrow morning. We could finish with this unpleasantness in no time at all.”

It paralyzed her. For a moment, she simply stared at him, lost, as if he’d reached over and torn her heart from her chest. It was as if she could no longer feel it beating. She could not begin to imagine the damage his capitulation caused her. She did not want to imagine it.

“If there is no other way,” she said slowly, feeling as if she was teetering on the edge of a vast, deep abyss, as if her voice was something she’d dug up somewhere, rusty and unused, not hers at all. “Then I suppose I will have to go to Italy.”

Leo’s eyes darkened with that pure male fire she knew too well. It called to that twisted part of her, the part she most wanted to deny.

Because despite the pain, the grief and the loneliness, she still wanted him. She still ached for him, that wave of longing and lust that made everything else the very lies he accused her of telling. His body. His presence. The light of his smile, the brush of his hand, the very fact of his nearness. She ached.

Time seemed to stand still. There was only that fierce, knowing gleam in his eyes, as there had always been. One touch, his gaze promised her, hot, gleaming and sure. Only one small touch and she would be his. Only that, and she would betray herself completely.

And she knew some part of her wanted him to do it—wanted him to tumble her to the bed and take her with all the easy command and consummate skill that had always shaken her so completely, melted her so fully, made her his in every way. She no longer even bothered to despair of herself.

“My plane awaits,” he said softly, and she could hear the intense satisfaction behind his words. As if he had known they would end up in exactly this place. As if he had made it so. As if he could read her mind.