Princess From the Past Read online

  He did not speak for a long moment, yet that simmering awareness between them seemed to reach boiling point. Once again, Bethany felt heat and a deep, encompassing panic wash over her. She thought he almost smiled then.

  Instead, he reached over and took her hand in his impossibly warm, hard grasp.

  Flames raced up her arm, and she felt her whole body tighten in reaction. She felt the ache of it, both physical and, worse, emotional. She wanted to yank her hand from his more than she wanted to draw her next breath, but she forced herself to stand still, to let him touch her, to pretend she was unmoved by the feel of his skin against hers.

  Leo watched her for a moment then dropped his brooding gaze to her hand. His thumb moved back and forth over the backs of her fingers, sending sensation streaking through her. She felt herself melt for him, as she always had at even his slightest touch. She ached—and she hated him for it.

  “What are you doing?” she managed to say through lips that hardly moved. How could she still be so helpless? How could he have this power over her?

  “You seem to have misplaced your wedding ring,” he said quietly, still looking at her hand, the chill in his voice in direct contrast to the bright, hot flame of his touch.

  “I did not misplace it,” she gritted out. “I removed it a long time ago. Deliberately.”

  “Of course you did,” he murmured, and then murmured something else in Italian that she was delighted not to understand.

  “I thought about pawning it,” she continued, knowing that would bring his gaze back to hers. She raised her brows. “But that would be petty.”

  “And you are many things, Bethany, are you not?” His mouth was so grim, his eyes a dark blaze. He let her hand go and she pulled it back too quickly, too obviously. His mouth twisted, mocking her. “But never petty.”

  Leo stared out the floor-to-ceiling window of the penthouse condominium that had been secured for his use. But he did not see the towers of Bay Street, nor the muted lights of downtown Toronto still glittering at his feet despite the late hour.

  He could not sleep. He told himself it was because he hated the inevitable rain, the cold and the wet that swept in from Lake Ontario that chilled to the bone and yet passed for autumn in this remote, northern place. He told himself he needed nothing but another drink—perhaps that might ease the tension that still ravaged through him.

  But he could not seem to get Bethany’s bright blue eyes, clear and challenging, out of his head. And then that flash of vulnerability, as if she’d hurt—and deeply.

  She was like some kind of witch.

  He had thought so when they had collided in the warm, silky surf off of Waikiki Beach. He had caught her in his arms to keep her from tumbling with the breakers toward the sand, and it had been those eyes that had first drawn him in: so wide, so blue, like the sea all around them and the vast Hawaiian sky above. And she had looked up at him with her wet hair plastered to her head and her sensual lips parted, as if he were all the world. He had felt the same.

  How times changed.

  It was not enough that he had lost his life-long, renowned control with her then. That he had betrayed his family’s wishes and his own expectations and married a nobody from a place about as far away from his beloved northern Italy as it was possible to get. He had been supposed to choose an appropriately titled bride, a woman of endless pedigree and celebrated blood—a fate that he had accepted as simply one more aspect of the many duties that comprised his title. He was the Principe di Felici. His family’s roots extended back into thirteenth-century Florence. He had expected his future wife to have a heritage no less impressive.

  Yet he had eloped with Bethany instead. He had married her because, for the first and only time in his life, he had felt wild and reckless. Passionate. Alive. He had not been able to imagine returning to his life without her.

  And he had paid for his folly ever since.

  Leo turned from the window, and set his empty tumbler down on the wide glass table before him. He raked his fingers through his hair and refused to speculate as to the meaning of the heaviness in his chest. He did not spare a glance for the sumptuous leather couches, nor the intricate statuary that accented the great room.

  He thought only of Bethany, saw only Bethany, a haunting he had come to regard as commonplace over the years. She was his one regret, his one mistake. His wife.

  He had already compromised more than he could have ever imagined possible, against all advice and all instinct. He had assumed her increasing sullenness in their first year of marriage was merely a phase she had been going through—a necessary shift from her quiet life into his far more colorful one—and had therefore allowed her more leeway than he should have.

  He had suffered her temper, her baffling resistance to performing her official duties, even her horror that he had wanted to start a family so quickly. He had foolishly believed that she needed time to grow into her role as his wife, when retrospect made it clear that what she’d truly needed was a firmer hand.

  He had let her leave him, shocked and hurt in ways he’d refused to acknowledge that she would attempt it in the first place. He had assumed she would come to her senses while they were apart, that she needed time to adjust to the idea of her new responsibilities and the pressures of her new role and title. Neither was something a common, simple girl from Toronto could have been prepared for, he had come to understand.

  After all, he had spent his whole life coming to terms with the weight and heft of the Di Marco heritage and its many demands upon him. He had reluctantly let her have her freedom—after all, she had been so young when they had married. So unformed. So unsophisticated.

  And this was how she repaid him. Lies about a lover, when she should have known that he had her every movement tracked and would certainly have allowed no lover to further sully his name. Claims that she wished to divorce him, unforgivably uttered in public where anyone might hear. Aspersions cast without trepidation upon his character, his honor.

  He took a kind of solace in the anger that surged through him. It was far, far easier to be angry than to confront what he knew lay beneath. And he had vowed that he would never show her his vulnerabilities—never again.

  Revenge would be sweet, he decided, and he would have no qualms whatsoever in extracting it. He thought then of that confusing vulnerability he’d thought he’d seen but dismissed it.

  Di Marcos did not divorce. Ever.

  The Princess Di Marco, Principessa di Felici, had two duties: to support her husband in all he did, and to bear him heirs to secure the title. Leo sank down onto the nearest couch and blew out a breath.

  It was about time that Bethany started living up to her responsibilities.

  And, if those responsibilities forced her to return to him as she should have done years before, all the better.

  Bethany should not have been surprised when she looked up from packing a box the next morning to see Leo looming in the doorway of her bedroom. But she could not contain the gasp that escaped her.

  She jerked back and pressed her hand against her wildly thumping heart. It was surprise, she told herself; no more than surprise. Certainly not that wild, desperate hope she refused to acknowledge within her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, appalled at the breathiness of her voice. And, in any case, she knew what he was doing: this was his house, wasn’t it? Three stories of stately brick and pedigreed old-money in Rosedale, Toronto’s wealthiest neighborhood. It was exactly where Prince Leopoldo Di Marco, Principe di Felici, ought to reside.

  Bethany hated it—she hated everything the house stood for. Her occupying such a monied, ancestrally predetermined sort of space seemed like a contradiction in terms—like one more lie. Yet Leo had insisted that she live in this house, or in Italy with him, and three years ago she had not had the strength to choose her own third option.

  As long as she lived under this roof, she was essentially consenting to her sham of a marriage—and Leo’s contr
ol. Yet she had stayed here anyway, until she could no longer pretend that she was not on some level waiting for him to come and claim her.

  Once she had accepted that depressing truth, she had known she had no choice but to act.

  “Surely my presence cannot be quite so shocking?” Leo asked in that way of his that felt like a slap, as if she was too foolish, too naïve. It set her teeth on edge.

  “Are you so grand that you cannot ring the doorbell like anyone else?” she asked more fiercely than she’d intended.

  It did not help that she had not slept well, her mind racing and her skin buzzing as if she’d been wildly over-caffeinated. Nor did it help that she had dressed to pack boxes today, in a pair of faded blue jeans and a simple, blue long-sleeved T-shirt, with her curls tied up in a haphazard knot on the back of her head. Not exactly the height of elegance.

  Leo, of course, looked exquisite and impeccable in a charcoal-colored buttoned-down shirt that clung to his flat, hard chest and a pair of dark, wool trousers that only emphasized the strong lines of his body.

  He leaned against the doorjamb and watched her for a simmering moment, his mouth unsmiling, those coffee eyes hooded.

  “Is your lot in life truly so egregious, Bethany?” he asked softly. “Do I deserve quite this level of hostility?”

  Something thicker than regret—and much too close to shame—turned over in her stomach. But Bethany forced herself not to do what every instinct screamed at her to do: she would not apologize, cajole or soothe. She knew from painful experience that there was only one way such things would end. Leo took and took until there was nothing in her left to give.

  So she did not cross to him. She did not even shrug an apology. She only brushed a fallen strand of hair away from her face, ignored the spreading hollowness within and concentrated on the box in front of her on the wide bed.

  “I realize this is your house,” she said stiffly into the uncomfortable silence. “But I would appreciate it if you would do me the courtesy of announcing your arrival, rather than appearing in doorways. It seems only polite.”

  There were so many land mines littered about the floor and so many memories cluttering the air between them—too many. Her chest felt tight, yet all she could think of was her first night in Italy and Leo’s patient instructions about how she would be expected to behave—delivered between kisses in his grand bed. He had grown less patient and much less affectionate over time, when it had become clear to all involved that he had made a dreadful mistake in marrying someone like Bethany. Her mouth tightened at the memory.

  “Of course,” Leo murmured. His dark gaze tracked her movements. “You are already packing your belongings?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, shooting him a look. “I won’t take anything that isn’t mine.”

  That muscle in his jaw jumped and his eyes narrowed.

  “I am relieved to hear it,” he said after a thick, simmering moment.

  When she had folded the same white cotton sweater four times, and still failed to do it correctly, Bethany gave up. She turned from the bed and faced him, swallowing back any fear, anxiety or any of the softer, deeper things she pretended not to feel—because none would do her any good.

  “Leo, really.” She shoved her hands into her hip pockets so he could not see that they were curling into fists. “Why are you here?”

  “I have not visited this place in a long time,” he said, and she hated him for it.

  “No,” she agreed, her voice a rasp in the sudden tense air of the room.

  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.