Princess From the Past

But he already knew the weakness intimately. It had already ruined him. He felt it in the heaviness in his groin, the edgy need that spiraled through him and demanded he get his hands beneath the heavy black suit he knew she was wearing to hide from him. Because she could never deny what she felt when he touched her, that he knew full well. Whatever else she chose to deny, or he preferred to ignore.

“I am fascinated by your uncharacteristic acquiescence,” he said through his teeth, furious with himself and with their entire tangled history, her trail of broken promises. “I recall making any number of demands that you chose to ignore: that you remained in Italy, as tradition required. That you refrained from casting shame on my family’s name with your behavior. That you honored your vows.”

“I will not fight with you,” she told him, her blue eyes flashing and her chin rising. She made a dismissive gesture with one hand, the one that should have worn his ring yet was offensively bare. He clamped down on the surge of temper. “You can choose to revise history however you like, but I am finished arguing about it.”

“Then we are in perfect agreement,” he bit out, keeping his voice low and for her ears alone despite the fierce kick of his temper—and that hollow place beneath it that he refused to acknowledge. “I have not gained an appreciation for public scenes since we last met, Bethany. If it is your plan to embarrass me further tonight, I suggest you rethink it. I do not think this will end the way you wish it to end.”

“There is no need for a scene,” she said at once. “Public or otherwise.” She shrugged, drawing attention to her delicate neck, and reminding him of the kisses he’d once pressed there and the sweet, addictive taste of her skin. But it was as if that was from another life. “I only want to be divorced from you. Finally.”

“Because it has been such a hardship for you to stay married to me?” he asked, his voice cutting and sarcastic. “How you must struggle.”

He was not a man who believed in impassioned displays—particularly in public, where he was forever being held up against the example of his family’s long legacy—but this woman had always provoked him like no other. Tonight her eyes were too blue, her mouth set in too firm a line. It clawed at him.

“I understand how it must cut at you,” he continued coldly. “To live in such unearned luxury. To have all the benefits of my name and protection with none of the attendant responsibilities.”

“You will be pleased to learn that I no longer want them, then,” she said. She raised her brows at him in direct challenge, but he was caught by the flash of vulnerability he saw move across her face. Bethany—vulnerable? That was not a word he’d ever use to describe her. Wild. Uncontrollable. Rebellious. But never defenseless, wounded. Never.

Impatiently, Leo shoved the odd turn of thought aside. The last thing in the world he needed now was to become intrigued anew by his wife. He had yet to recover from the initial disaster that had been his first, ruinous fascination with this woman. Look where it had led them both.

“Do you not?” he asked, his voice harsh, directed as much at his errant thoughts as at her. “How can you be certain when you have treated both with such disrespect?”

“I want a divorce,” she said again with a quiet strength. “This is the end, Leo. I’m moving on with my life.”

“Are you?” he asked, his tone dangerous. She either did not hear it or did not care. “How so?”

“I am moving out of that house,” she said at once, a wild fire he could not entirely comprehend raging in her sky-blue eyes. “I hate it. I never wanted to live there in the first place.”

“You are my wife.” His voice cracked like a whip, though he knew the words had long held no meaning for her, no matter that they still moved through him like blood, like need. “Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. Just because you have turned your back on the vows you made, does not mean that I have. I told you I would protect you and I meant it, even if it is from your own folly and stubborn recklessness.”

“I’m sure you think that makes you some kind of hero,” she threw at him in a falsely polite tone that he knew was for the benefit of the crowd around them. Yet he could see the real Bethany burn bright in her eyes and the flush on her neck. “But I never thought anyone was likely to kidnap me in the first place.” She let out a short, hollow laugh. “Believe me, I do not advertise our connection.”

“And yet it exists.” His voice brooked no argument; it could have melted steel. “And because of it, you are a target.”

“I won’t be for much longer,” she said, her foolhardy determination showing in that stubborn set to her jaw and the fire in her eyes. He almost admired it. Almost. “And you’ll find that I’ve never touched any of the money in that account of yours, either. I’m going to walk out of this marriage exactly as I walked into it.”

“And where do you intend to go?” he asked quietly, softly, not daring himself to move closer. He knew, somehow, that putting his hands on her would ruin them both and expose too much.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” she said, her gaze direct and challenging, searing into him. “But I’ve met someone else.”

CHAPTER TWO

THE room seemed to drop away. All Bethany could see was the arrested look in his eyes that narrowed as he gazed at her. He did not move, yet she felt clenched in a kind of tight fist that held only the two of them, and that simmering tension that sparked and surged between them.

Had she really said that? Had she truly dared to say something like that to this man? To her husband?

How much worse would it be, she wondered in a panic, if it was actually true? She found she was holding her breath.

For a long, impossible moment Leo only stared at her, but she could feel the beat of his fury—and her own heart—like a wild drum. He looked almost murderous for a moment—or perhaps she was succumbing to hysteria. Then he shifted, and Bethany could breathe again.

“And who is the lucky man?” Leo asked in a lethally soft voice. When she only stared at him, afraid that her slightest movement might act as a red flag before a bull, his head tilted slightly to the left, though he did not lift his dark eyes from hers. “Your lover?”

Bethany somehow kept herself from shivering. It was the way he’d said that word. It seemed to skate over her skin, dangerous and deadly. She already regretted the lie. She knew she had only said it to hit at him, to hurt him in some small way—to get inside that iron control of his and make him as uncertain and unsettled as she always felt in his presence. To show him that she was deadly serious about divorcing him. Why had she sunk to his level?

But then she remembered who she was dealing with. Leo would say anything—do anything—to get what he wanted. She must be as ruthless as he was; if he had taught her nothing else, he had taught her that.

“We met at university while I finished my degree,” she said carefully, searching his hard features for some sign of what might happen next, or some hint of the anger she suspected lurked just out of sight beneath those cold eyes.

She reminded herself that the point was to end this tragedy of a marriage once and for all. Why should she feel as if she should go easy, as if she should protect Leo in some way? When had he ever protected her—from anything?

“He is everything I want in a man,” she said boldly. Surely some day she would meet someone who fit that bill? Surely she deserved that much? “He is considerate. Communicative. As interested in my life as in his own.”

Unlike Leo, who had abandoned his young wife entirely the moment they’d reached Italy, claiming his business concerns were far more pressing. Unlike Leo, who had closed himself off completely and had been coldly dismissive, when Bethany had not been able to understand why the man who had once adored her in every possible way had disappeared. Unlike Leo, who had thrown around words like ‘responsibility’ and ‘duty’ but had only meant that Bethany should follow his orders without question.

Unlike Leo, who had used the powerful sexual chemistry between them like a weapon, keeping her addicted, desperate and yet so very lonely for far longer than she should have been.

Something flared in the depths of his dark gaze then, something that shimmered through her, arrowing straight to her core, coiling tight and hot inside of her. It was as if he knew exactly what she was remembering and was remembering it too. Their bodies twined together, their skin slick and warm, their mouths fused—and Leo thrusting deep inside her again and again.

She took a ragged breath, jerked her gaze away from his and tried to calm her thudding heart. Those memories had no place here, now. There was no point to them. Leo had not destroyed her, as he’d seemed so bent on doing. She had survived. She had left him, and all that remained was this small legal matter. She would have spoken only to his staff about it and avoided this meeting, had they not insisted that the principe would wish to deal with this, with her, personally.

“He sounds like quite the paragon,” Leo replied after a long moment, much too calmly. He raised his dark brows slightly when she frowned at him.

“He is,” Bethany said firmly, wondering why she felt so unbalanced, as if she was being childish somehow—instead of using the only weapon she could think of that might actually do more than bounce off of him. Perhaps it was simply that being near Leo now made her feel as she had felt when she’d been with him: so very young and silly. Naïve and foolish.

“Far be it from me to stand in the way of such a perfect union,” Leo murmured, running his hand along the front of his exquisite suit jacket as if it required smoothing. As if anything he wore would dare defy him and wrinkle!

Bethany’s frown deepened. That was too blatant, surely? “There is no need for sarcasm.”

“I must contact my attorneys,” Leo said, his dark eyes hard on hers. Bethany felt slightly dizzy as that familiar old fire licked through her, making her legs tremble beneath her and her breath tangle in her throat.

How unfair that he could still affect her so after everything that had happened! Yet there was a part of her that knew that it was safer to acknowledge the attraction than the grief that lurked beneath it.

“Your attorneys?” she echoed, knowing she had to say something. She knew she could not simply stare at him with that impossible yearning welling up within her for the man he could never be, the man he was not.

She wished suddenly that she had more experience. That she had not been so sheltered and out of her depth when she’d met Leo. As if she’d spent her youth hermetically sealed away, which of course, in many ways, she had. But how could she have done anything else? There had been no one but Bethany to nurse her father through his long, extended illness; no one but Bethany to administer what care she could until his eventual death.

But she had had to drop out of her second year of university to do it when she was barely nineteen. She had been twenty-three when she’d met Leo on that fateful trip to her father’s favorite place in the world, Hawaii. She had dutifully traveled with the small inheritance he’d left behind to spread his ashes in the sea, as he’d wished. How could she have been prepared for an honest-to-goodness prince?

She had hardly imagined such creatures existed outside of fiction. She had been utterly off-balance from the moment he’d looked at her with those deep, dark eyes that had seemed to brand her from the inside out. Maybe if she’d been more like other girls her age, if she’d been more mature, if she’d ventured out from the tiny little world her father’s needs had dictated she make her own …

But there was no use trying to change the past—and, anyway, Bethany could not begrudge the years she’d spent caring for her father. She could only move forward now, armed with the strength she had not possessed at twenty-three. She had been artless and unformed then, and Leo had flattened her. That would never happen again.

“Yes,” he said now, his gaze moving over her face as if he could see the very things she so desperately wished to keep hidden: her lies. Her bravado. That deep despair at what they’d made of their marriage. That tiny spark of hope she would give anything to extinguish, once and for all. “My attorneys must handle any divorce proceedings, of course. They will let me know what is involved in such a matter.” His smile was thin, yet still polite. Barely. “I have no experience with such things.”

Bethany was confused and wary. Was this really happening? Was he simply caving? Agreeing? She had not imagined such a thing could be possible. She had imagined he would fight, and fight dirty. Not because he wanted her, of course, but because he was not a man who had ever been left, and his pride would demand he fight. She was not certain what the hollow feeling that washed through her meant.

“Is this a trick?” she asked after a moment.

Leo’s brows lifted with pure, male arrogance. He looked every inch the scion of a noble bloodline that he was.

“A trick?” he repeated, as if he was unfamiliar with the term yet found it vaguely distasteful.

“You were opposed to my leaving you in the first place,” she pointed out stiffly. That was a vast understatement. “And you did not seem any more resigned to the idea of it tonight. How can I trust that you will really do this?”

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 control. 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.