Princess From the Past (7 page)

“You want to …talk?” she asked. Her tone of amazement set his teeth on edge. “You, Leo Di Marco, want to talk. Now. After all this time.”

Something that looked like pain washed through her extraordinary eyes—but it could not be; how could it be? Then it was gone, hidden once more behind that brand-new armor of hers that she wore far too comfortably for his tastes.

“There was a time I might have killed to hear you say such a thing,” she said after a moment, her voice husky. Her mouth twisted slightly, wryly. “But that is long past, Leo. It is too late for talking now, so far after the fact. Surely you see that?”

“Three years have passed since we were last together,” Leo said, unperturbed, keeping his attention focused on her face. She looked away and he felt the loss, as if she had deliberately shut him out. “I imagine that ought to provide us the necessary distance.”

“The distance to do what?” she asked—almost wistfully, he thought. She was still gazing out at the dark gardens, a faint frown between her brows. “Rake over the old coals? Poke around for old wounds? I do not understand the purpose of such an exercise. What will it accomplish? Our scars are our scars. Must we compare them?”

He searched her face, so much like a stranger’s, when he had once thought he’d known it and its secrets far better than he knew his own.

He did not understand his own feelings. He wanted to go to her, to comfort her, and he could not understand the urge. The need for her body, for that addictive fire that raged between them—that he comprehended fully. But why should he want to chase the shadows from her eyes? Why should he yearn to make her smile? He wanted to focus on her duties, her obligations, the role he expected her to play. The rest of it, these softer urges, led directly to places within himself he had no desire to visit. He had walled them off long ago.

“You have returned after a long absence,” he said, feeling as if he moved across shards of broken glass, buried mines. As if any wrong move might shatter them both.

He was aware of the tension rising between them and aware that it was not sexual in origin. He knew better than to let down his walls and feel, as he had once allowed himself to do so disastrously in the seductive
tropics of Hawaii. Yet he could not seem to block her as he knew he should.

She shifted in her seat and her fingers crept up to her neck, as if she held her own pulse in her hand. Her eyes seemed huge and bruised, somehow, in the candlelight.

“I have not exactly returned, have I?” she said quietly, her gaze mysterious, compelling, more like the sea now than the summer sky. “Not really. Soon it will be as if I never came to this place at all.”

“If that is what you want,” he replied just as quietly, aware of the soft night all around them and the sense of change, of some kind of promise, in the air.

He wanted to see into her. He wanted to know her secrets, finally, and in so doing vanquish the ghost of her that haunted him even now while she sat within reach.

He wanted to reach out, but did not.

Could not.

He would not let himself, because it felt too much like it had so long before in Hawaii, when he had fallen too hard and trusted too much, and he had vowed he would never give into that weakness again. Not even for her.

“I
WANT
a great many things,” Bethany said, lulled by the strangest sensation of something almost like peace that hovered between them. It made her wonder. It made her reckless. It tempted her to forget. “But I am finally old enough to understand that not everything I want is good for me.”

If she expected him to smile, or nod in agreement, she was disappointed. He only stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head slightly, dispelling the odd feeling.

“From that I am to gather that it is your marriage you find … What is it?” He affected a total lack of understanding, as if it was perhaps the English she knew very well he spoke fluently that eluded him. She felt it like a slap. “Bad for your health?”

It was Leo at his most patronizing and it reminded her forcibly of the reason why she was here—not to understand what had happened between them, but to put it behind her once and for all.

She sighed, annoyed at herself for her momentary lapse, and busied herself with filling her plate. At least she knew that everything that was offered to her in this place would be excellent. Nothing else would be tolerated.
She took a few slices of the chicken, and could not resist a large helping of the creamy risotto.

“No answer?” he asked quietly. He let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Why am I not surprised?”

Bethany straightened her shoulders and took a calming breath as she picked up her fork. “As it happens, I have given the matter some thought,” she said evenly. As if she was unaware he was coiled in his chair, waiting to strike. “I believe that when a marriage diminishes and degrades the people in it—” she began.

He actually laughed then, cutting her off.

“Such strong words,” he taunted her. “You feel degraded, Bethany? I degrade you?” He shook his head, his eyes glittering, as if she had accused him of a terrible crime—as if was not the simple truth.

“You are the one who wanted a discussion, Leo,” she threw back at him, exasperated, and unable to completely repress her reaction to him even under these circumstances. What was the matter with her? “You should have made it clear you meant that discussion to be entirely on your terms, as ever! I can do without your scorn.”

“What you would like to do without is the truth,” he said, all pretense of laughter gone from his hard face. The candles cast his features into harsh angles, forbidding shadows. “Because the truth is that you do not come out the victim in this scenario. The fact that you have cast yourself in that role is one more example of the infantile behavior you claim to have left behind you.”

“You are proving my point,” she said, unable to keep the faint tremor from her voice. Even so, she kept her spine ramrod straight, determined to look strong no matter how she might feel when he ripped into her.

He studied her for a moment and Bethany felt her face heat. Anger, she told herself. It was nothing more than anger, and never mind the twisting ache inside. Never mind the contradictory, baffling urge to reach out to him, to bridge the gap between them, no matter what it cost her.

“Perhaps it is simply that you are too fragile to face up to who you really are,” he said softly. Deliberately.

She let out a small laugh and then put down her fork, no longer able even to pretend to enjoy the food, no matter how perfectly prepared.

“Who are you to tell me who I really am?” she asked with a kick of temper, clenching her hands into fists below the table, where he could not see. She had longed for him to know her, to see her, for years—but he never had. She shook away the old wants, the old needs, even as they seemed to sear through her, leaving deep marks behind. “When you are the person who knows me least of all?”

“I know you,” he said, with that terrifying ring of finality, of certainty, that she could sense meant things to him that she was better off not knowing. “I know you in ways no one else could.”

“If that was ever true, it has not been true for a long time,” she replied, choosing her words carefully. Trying to ignore the part of her that still desperately wanted him to know her the way he claimed he did, the part of her that wished so deeply that somehow, some way, he could.

She shook her head, trying to ward off her own turmoil and his accusatory glare.

“Let me guess,” he said icily. He did not move, and yet she could feel the way his gaze, his attention and temper focused on her, narrowing in on them both,
trapping them in the grip of this roiling tension between them. “No doubt you have spent the past three years coming up with the perfect, bloodless fantasy to use as a comparison to our relationship. No doubt your supernaturally forgiving lover aids you in this. Anything to avoid looking at yourself with any form of honest appraisal, is that it?”

Her temper flared. And for once she could think of no particular reason to keep it locked up. She told herself she had nothing to lose—it was all already lost. This was simply a pointless dance around the bonfire of what they had been. An opportunity to watch it all burn away into ash.

So why should she bite her tongue?

“I do not think marriage should be a monarchy, with you installed as king by divine right while I am expected to play the role of grateful, subservient subject,” she told him, the words three years in the making. For a brief moment she felt just as she sounded. Calm. Deadly. “It cannot even be called a marriage. It is an exercise in steamrolling, and I am tired of feeling flattened by you.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. His expression was frozen, arrested. She was aware of the slight breeze against her bare skin, the dance of the candles in their crystal holders. She was not holding her breath, not quite. She felt as if she watched the scene from on high.

She had never dared say such things to Leo before. How could she? Their relationship had been entirely based on his acknowledged superiority. What room had there been for her to call his actions or his assumptions into question?

And she knew that her own appalling behavior had
only made everything worse. Who would have listened to an out-of-control maniac who smashed things? Who would take the emotional mess seriously? Certainly not Leo.

And not even herself, Bethany acknowledged with no little pain. That had come later.

“You say the most extraordinary things,” he said coldly.

Because Leo did not explode. Leo did not rage, yell or allow things to become messy. Leo did not, could not, feel.

“I understand that this is all a foreign concept to someone who has issued orders to his minions from his cradle,” she said, her voice stiff from her own revelations, and only partially a response to his chilly glare, no matter how it pierced her. “Who has priceless paintings on his walls of his own family members. Who lives in a castle.”

“You quite mistake me,” he bit out. “I am astonished that you would have any thoughts at all on what might make for a good marriage. Real relationships are not conducted according to your every melodramatic whim and tantrum, Bethany.”

“That’s taking the concept of the pot calling the kettle black to the level of farce,” she replied, blinking away the avalanche of emotion that threatened to drag her under. There was no room for that here, now. And she could not be certain what lurked just on the other side.

His mouth flattened with displeasure, but she did not back down. Because, no matter what he believed, it was true.

He had left her to die of loneliness, and she nearly had.

“I am not the one who issued ultimatums and then,
when they were not met, threw temper tantrums,” he said then. His mouth twisted; his dark eyes were condemning. “I am not the one who stubbornly refused contact for years in an extended fit of pique.”

“Stop it!” she hissed, but he gave no sign of hearing her. She had the sense that he had been waiting to say these things as long as she had. She could see the way he held himself, all that power and ferocity tightly leashed and controlled, even now.

“I am also not the one who issued a demand for a divorce instead of the polite greeting one might give a stranger on the street.” His eyes seemed to glow with his cold, consuming fury. He was, she realized, more angry than she had imagined. More angry than she had ever seen him. Was it sick that she wanted that to mean something? “And having done all of those things, seemingly without shame, I am not the one to sit here now and lecture on about successful marriages.”

She wanted to scream at him, to protest what he’d said, but how could she? She had done all of those things. Could he not see how he had driven her to it? How she had never had any other choice? How she had felt forced to flee—or she might have withered away to nothing but an empty shell?

“I have always been right here, Bethany,” he said, the anger she had never imagined she would see in him lighting him with a cold glow, making her yearn to warm him somehow, despite herself. “Right here, awaiting your return, should you ever condescend to recall your commitments.”

“I don’t know why you would expect—” she began, but cut herself off, her mind reeling. How could she ever imagine he might see these things from her perspective?

He saw only her abandonment of him. He never saw his own abandonment of her, because he had not physically left her. He had only disappeared in every other possible way. Yet he still considered himself firmly on the moral high ground.

“You to keep your promises?” he finished for her, his voice heavy with irony. When his gaze met hers it was too intense and angry, kicking into her and making her stomach clench and her breath catch. “Because you gave your word.”

She wanted to fight him, deny his condemnation—but she was much too afraid that was not what she really wanted. That beneath it, she only wanted those dark eyes to shine at her again, as they had once. And she could not let herself down that way. Not this time. Not again.

“You gave your word too,” she said in a determined undertone. “But that did not prevent you from conveniently—”

“Did I beat you?” he asked, his voice raw, yet still so fiercely controlled. Only his eyes showed any hint of the wildness within, so dark and stormy, bittersweet and on fire. “Did I take other women to my bed? Did I abuse you? Demean you? Did I fail to attend to your every need?”

He waved a hand at the castello.

“Is my home not big enough? Is it too rural? Would you prefer the house in Milan? Exactly what is the root of all this bitterness and hostility?” he demanded. “What did I do that was so terrible you punished me in the only way you could—by running away?”

She could not breathe for a long moment, could not manage it past the swell of agony that swept through her. When she could, she had to fight off tears. Was that truly
how he saw her—no more than a spiteful little brat? She knew with a sudden, unbearable certainty that it was. He believed she’d left him on a whim—rather than in pieces.

“I can’t imagine why you ever wanted me in the first place,” she managed to say, her voice trembling, shaken to the bone.

“Oh, I want you.” His voice was far too raw then, with too many undercurrents, and spoke to all the sins she dared not name—all of which he had taught her. The look in his eyes set her afire. His expression was almost brooding. Something deeper, more painful, than simply
wry
. “It seems there is nothing at all you can do to keep me from wanting you, and you have certainly put that to the test.”

He did not move, he only watched her, and yet he seemed, suddenly, to be everywhere. It was as if she had forgotten the danger of being this close to him—of talking to him, of allowing him to weave his way into her psyche again—until this very second—and now she could notice nothing else.

Her heart beat in a jagged rhythm. Her mouth was far too dry. She felt as if her entire body was short-circuiting, shutting down. Readying itself for his touch.

It did not matter how much it hurt. She still wanted him. She always wanted him.

Blindly, she shoved away from the table and lurched to her feet. She knew only that she had to escape. She had to put distance between them, because he might have made a promise not to touch her of his own volition, but she knew all too well that she was the one who could not be trusted in that area.

She moved toward the French doors and she knew even as she reached for the handle that he was behind
her. She did not have to turn and confirm it, not when she could
feel
him.

She stopped with her hand on the ornate handle and felt the heat of him at her back, so close she could smell the faintest hint of his cologne—so near that if she shifted her weight backward she would be nestled beneath his chin, her back against the hot, hard wall of his chest.

“You promised!” she whispered, desperate to run away and yet frozen in place. She wanted him, but she also wanted the comfort of his heat, his closeness, his scent.

He had been her man, her family, her love. She still did not know how to let go of any of that, only that she must.

Even so, her eyes drifted closed. “You said you would not …”

“Am I touching you?” he asked in that low, stirring tone that seemed to roll through her, quietly devastating her, reducing her to little more than mindlessness and need.

She turned then, before her knees collapsed beneath her, and found her back against the door with nothing before her but Leo. As if he was all the world.

He leaned closer, resting his hands against the paned glass on either side of her head, a move that brought his mouth nearly flush with hers.

And though she could feel him in every part of her—in her swollen breasts, her taut belly, her molten femininity—he did not touch her. He kept his promise. He only gazed down at her, his eyes hard with a passion she recognized all too well.

“I cannot stop wanting you,” he said then, his mouth a breath away, his sensual lips close enough to kiss. “And
I have tried. Nights I lay awake, cursing your name, and yet here I am—as ready for you as if there was no history between us, no years apart, no demands for a divorce.”

“Leo …” But she could not seem to form any words save his name, even then, when she knew she should end this moment, whatever it was.