Princess From the Past (10 page)

None of this had killed her yet, after all, and she had spent long nights wishing it would, hoping it would, so she would no longer have to live like such a broken, ruined thing. So she would not have to face herself and figure out how to survive him. The likelihood was that she would live through this, however unpleasant the process might be. And if that was the case why should she keep up the fruitless pretenses that had never protected her from him in the first place?

What did she have left except the truth, no matter how unvarnished?

“I cannot bear it if you use this as one more weapon against me,” she said, feeling stripped and naked in a way she never had before, not even in the worst ugliness of their previous battles. Her hands fell, empty, against her thighs. “I cannot bear it if you mock this too.”

His dark eyes glittered with something heavy and intense, but he did not look away. She respected him more, perhaps, because he did not rush to give her assurances she would have questioned anyway. She did not know why she trusted him more in this strange, bare moment than she ever had before. She did not know why it mattered, but it did. Something hard and bright kindled to life in her broken, battered heart, though she refused to look at it closely.

“I cannot promise you anything,” he said after a long moment, still looking at her as if she was made of glass that only he could see through. “But I can try.”

Bare feet and a picnic basket, of all things.

Those were her first two demands the following morning when she met him at breakfast with a sparkle
in her bright summer eyes. Leo had not seen her eyes dance like that, merry and mischievous, in far too long. He did not wish to speculate about the surprising depth of his own reaction.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, but he was only feigning his customary hauteur. She smiled, that lush mouth curving in a way that sent heat straight to his head, his groin. Oh, the ways he wanted her. But he could not take her as he yearned to do. He could only wait, though it rankled more with each passing second. “You wish for me to scrabble around in the dirt?”

“Like the common peasant you will never, ever be,” she confirmed with no little satisfaction and arched her fine, dark brows challengingly when he laughed.

“And just like that a lifetime of assumptions about the fairer sex disappears into the ether,” he said dryly. He let his eyes trace a longing pattern along her delicate neck, deep into the shadow between the breasts her blouse concealed. His fingers twitched with the need to touch her, to suit action to yearning, but he shoved it aside. “One would think they’d all prefer the prince to the frog, but not you, Bethany. Of course not you.”

His words sat there between them on the gleaming breakfast table, shining in the morning light, weaving in between the platters of food and carafes of steaming coffee, hot tea, and freshly squeezed juices. He had meant them playfully enough, but her expression changed, becoming more guarded as she gazed at him. She cleared her throat and shifted slightly in her chair.

“There is no point playing these games,” she said, her voice stiffer than it had been before. And, he thought, far sadder. He wished he did not feel both as a personal
loss. “I don’t know why we are bothering. Nothing will change the facts of our situation.”

“Indeed, nothing will,” he agreed, aware that he and she had very different ideas about what those facts entailed. But this was not the time to explore those differences. This was no time to feel.

What was the matter with him? This entire situation was about the fulfillment of obligations—hers. He did not know why he was entertaining her requests, worrying about whether or not he had treated her fairly. It did not signify; no matter how she had been treated, it was time to take her rightful place at his side. He was not a man who failed twice and, having accepted his first failure, he knew he would not repeat it. He should not allow anything else to keep him from securing her—or, at the very least, explaining to her exactly what he planned.

Annoyed with himself, and his own inability to say what he should, he rose and headed toward the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked. He was sure it said things about him he was better off not examining that he was pleased to hear the uncertainty in her voice.

Why should he be the only one left unsettled by these seething, unmanageable, unspoken issues that swirled between them, making every moment fraught with tension? History? Longing? Perhaps that was why he did not call this ill-conceived game of hers to a halt. Perhaps that was why he continued to indulge her.

He turned at the door and let his gaze fall on her. She was so artlessly beautiful, this faithless wife of his, with the light streaming in to light up her face, make a symphony of her glorious eyes and wash her dark curls with gold. He had never been able to control this need
for her that ravaged through him, that compelled him, that never, ever left him.

She bit at her lower lip, and he felt it as if she’d sunk those white teeth into his own flesh. He wanted to taste her more than he could remember wanting anything else. But first he was going to play this game of hers. And he was going to win it.

Then, perhaps, they could compare their facts and discuss a few home truths he was certain she would not like at all.

Leo shoved the burning desire as far down as he could and forced himself to look at her blandly, politely. As if he could not imagine six separate ways to take her right here, right now. On the table, on the floor, up against the windows with the light bathing them in—

But that was not productive.

“I must have my valet prepare the appropriate attire to complement bare feet,” he said instead, lazily.

He gazed at her until her neck washed red, and then he smiled, because he knew exactly how she felt. Winded. Hungry. And resentful of both.

This was about crawling out of boxes and removing boundaries, Bethany reminded herself, and that was why she pushed her way into Leo’s bedchamber not long after he’d disappeared into it.

He had never encouraged her to treat his chamber as her own, unless they were naked. And she had heard more than enough from his cousin Vincentio on the topic of appropriate behavior for the wife of such an important man as the
Principe di Felici
, so she had not attempted it.

She shook off the past with effort and stepped into the principe’s master suite.

It befitted the noble ruler of an ancient line. It was magnificent and profoundly male. Deep reds and lustrous mahoganies dominated the great room and the four-poster bed that rose in the center like an altar.

Bethany’s throat went dry, and she found herself wringing her hands like some kind of virgin sacrifice before she caught herself and stopped.

The rugs at her feet were old, impressive. They whispered of wealth across the centuries, of ancient trading routes and princes long past whose regal feet had stepped where hers did now. She wished for a moment that Leo could be just a man, just the simple man she had imagined him to be when she’d first met him in the Hawaiian surf. But even as she wished it something in her rejected the thought.

He had called himself ‘unintelligible’ without his family’s history, and the truth was she could not imagine him separate from all that sweeping past entailed. As awe-inspiring as even his bedchamber might be, a paean to Renaissance architecture and aesthetics, she could not deny that it suited him. He was every inch a prince. He always had been.

Then he walked into the room and Bethany froze.

Her breath caught in her throat and her knees felt like water. He was wearing clothes that Bethany would have sworn this man did not own. On some level, perhaps, she had imagined that her request for bare feet and casual clothing would catch him out—would force him into some kind of awkwardness, make him something more normal, more ordinary.

She should have known better. She should not have forgotten.

Leo sauntered toward her, his eyes hard on hers, alive with a glittering heat that made her body shake with
helpless response. Her nipples hardened against her soft cotton shirt, while everywhere else she melted.

He wore a pair of low-slung, faded denim jeans that clung to his mouthwatering form in a way that made her feel light-headed. And he wore nothing on his magnificent torso save one very, very tight black T-shirt.

Even dressed like the simple man of her old fantasies, Leo Di Marco was completely and totally at ease, fully in command.

It was impossible to drag her eyes away from his toned and rangy body, especially when he moved. His smile was sharp, hungry, his eyes all-seeing, all-knowing. Bethany realized at once that, as ever with this man, she had miscalculated.

She had forgotten how lethal Leo was, how elemental.

If anything, the sleek business suits and predictable finery of the
Principe di Felici
distracted from Leo’s essential male charisma, no doubt allowing him to do business without sending all those around him into fits of the vapors.

How could she have forgotten what lay beneath?

This
was the man who had swept her off of her feet, altering her life completely with one slow smile.
This
was the man she had seen in the warm, soft waters of Waikiki, this confident and dangerously attractive man, all hot eyes and a hard body, who had shorted out her mind, her body, her heart.

This
stripped-down, lean and hungry creature was the one she had followed all the way to Italy.
This
was the man she had married and had loved with every fiber of her being, only to see him swallowed whole into the great, vast mouth of his family, his history, his endless obligations.

The last time she had seen this man, he had convinced her over the course of two heady, passion-drenched, impossible weeks to turn her back on everything she had ever known, marry a stranger and ride off into a sunset she had trusted him to provide.

What would he do this time? When she knew better and still, her heart stopped at the sight of all that casual, male grace? When she hadn’t managed a full breath since he’d walked through that door?

This was not a game at all, Bethany realized, far too late, astounded at the breadth of her own stupidity—her own great weakness. This was everything she’d lost. This was everything she grieved for.

This was a huge mistake.

“Y
OU
have been at pains to tell me what you are not,” he said in that rich, low voice that for all its gentleness still seemed to Bethany to take over the whole of the Felici Valley. “Perhaps it is time to tell me who you are.”

They walked along the cypress-studded footpath that wound down from the castello toward the valley floor and which would, Leo had promised, lead them to a secluded lake just over the crest of the next hill.

It was like a dream, Bethany thought, feeling as if she watched them from some distance—as if that was not her who walked on a warm autumn morning with this dark, brooding, impossibly handsome man, but some other woman. One who was not afraid that her slightest move might shatter this unexpected, fragile accord. One who knew nothing of the long war that had come before and scarred them both.

Oh, the people they could have been. The people they should have been! Bethany could feel the bite of that loss, that tragedy, all around her in the air like the hint of a changing season.

Or perhaps it was simply that they were free of the castello today, free of its heavy stone walls and the great weight of its history—free of the people they had to be when they were inside it.

She darted a glance at him, at his high cheekbones and flashing eyes, at that satyr’s mouth that had once felt so decadent against her skin, yet could flatten into such a grim and disapproving line when he was disappointed with her. And he had so often been disappointed in her.

Next to her, his long legs keeping pace with her shorter ones with no apparent effort, he swung the basket laden with delicacies from the kitchens in one large hand. He seemed as easy with his bare feet stuck in the dirt of his family’s land as he did in full princely regalia at the head of the massive banquet table in the castello’s great hall. For some reason, that observation made her heart seem to expand inside her chest, almost to the point of pain.

“You finished a degree at university, I believe?” he prompted her when it became clear that she was not going to speak of her own volition. Bethany laughed slightly, flustered.

“Yes,” she said, struggling to collect herself, to cast aside the enchantment of the countryside, so green and gold and inviting in the sunshine with the great expanse of the cerulean sky arched above them. To forget what had not been, and could not be. “I studied psychology.”

To find out what was so terribly wrong with me that I could disappear so fully into you, she thought, but did not say. As if I’d never existed at all.

“Fascinating,” he murmured, and though she shot a sharp look at him his expression was mild. “I had no idea the human mind was of such interest to you.”

Only yours, she thought with some fatalism, but then pulled herself together. That was not entirely true, in any case, and this was a day without lies or pretense,
she decided. She could act as if they were suspended out of time, as if they had escaped their history today, their tangled and heavy past.

“Human interaction interests me,” she said. “My mother was an archaeologist, which is something similar, I suppose. She wanted to figure out human lives from the things left behind in ruins. I am less interested in the remains of societies and more interested in how people survive what occurs in their own lives.”

She thought that was too much, that she’d gone too far, revealed herself. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth as she waited for an explosion, a reaction. Leo shot a dark, unreadable look at her, from beneath lashes that were frankly unfair on a man of his physical size and indisputable prowess, but did not strike back as she’d expected.

“You do not normally speak of your mother,” he said. Did she only imagine his hesitant tone? Was he as loath to disrupt this fragile peace as she was?

“She died when I was still so young, just a baby,” she said. She shrugged, wrinkling her nose up toward the sun, tilting her head back to let the warm rays caress her face. “To be honest, I cannot remember her at all.” His silence, his somehow comforting presence beside her, encouraged her to continue. “My father never spoke of her when I was growing up. I think it caused him too much pain. But then toward the end he could not seem to speak of anything else.”

She looked down at her feet, slightly chilled against the rich earth, but it felt good to be barefoot, to act as if she was free of cares, regardless of the truth. “I think he was afraid that if he did not she would disappear when he did.”

The path along the valley floor meandered through
the vineyards before beginning an easy climb toward the next rolling hill. They walked side by side, as if they had all the time in the world, Bethany thought. As if they were under enchantment. As if this game of theirs was real and they could live this day forever.

What did it say about her that so much of her wished that they could?

“When I returned to Toronto …” she began, sneaking a look at him and flushing slightly when he met her gaze, his eyes sardonic. “I wanted to finish my degree,” she continued hurriedly, jerking her gaze away. “And I suppose in some way I wanted to honor her, too. It felt like a continuation of her studies, somehow.”

“I am glad for you,” he said simply when she stopped talking and returned her attention to the path in front of them. “I know you wanted very much to maintain ties with your family however you could.”

She did not like the way he said that—as if he had spent time pondering her. As if he knew things about her that she might not, as if he cared in ways she was not prepared to accept. It made her feel restless in a way she could not name.

“That cannot be something you ever worry about,” she said, changing the focus of this odd, out-of-body conversation, pushing the spotlight away from herself and the panic that she desperately wanted to hide. “You cannot take a step without coming face to face with the Di Marco history.”

He smiled slightly.

“Indeed I cannot,” he agreed. “But it is not necessarily the voyage of discovery you seem to imagine, I think.” He let out a short laugh. “My father was not an easy man. He believed absolutely in his own dominion
over all things. His wealth and estates. His wife and family. He was neither tolerant nor kind.”

“Leo …” But he did not hear her, or he did not choose to stop.

“I was sent to boarding school in Austria when I was barely turned four,” Leo said in that same matter-of-fact, emotionless voice. “It was a slightly more nurturing environment than my father’s home. I was raised to think that nothing and no one could ever be as important as the Di Marco legacy. My responsibilities and obligations were beaten into me early.” His eyes met hers, and she could not read what swam in those bittersweet, chocolate depths, just as she could not identify the mess of emotion that fought inside of her. “There is a certain liberty in having no choices, you must understand.”

“That sounds horrible,” she said, her eyes heavy with tears she could not shed where he could see her. “Cancer took my mother too soon, and my father grieved for her the rest of his days, but he loved me. I never doubted that he loved me.”

“I was raised to disdain such foolishness,” Leo said, something indefinable across that mobile, fascinating face before he hid it behind his customary mask of polite indifference.

She knew she should recognize that odd expression—that something in her swelled to meet it, to match it—but her mind shied away from it before she could properly identify it. She found she was holding her breath.

“The Di Marcos, no doubt, had more important things to concentrate on,” she managed to say, forcing herself to breathe past the knot in her belly.

“My duties were very clear from a very young age, and there was never any point in rebelling or arguing,” he continued, his voice hushed, his eyes clear. “I must
never forget myself and act with the recklessness of other young men. I must always think of the Di Marco legacy first, never my own needs or desires.” He shrugged. “If I forgot myself, there were never any shortage of people around to remind me. Especially my father, using any means he deemed necessary.”

“That seems so cruel.” Bethany could not look at him; she was afraid she would try to do something she should not, like hold him, or soothe him, or try to make something up to the little boy she was not certain he had ever been. “You were a child, not a tiny robot to be programmed according to a set of archaic demands!”

“My father did not want a child,” Leo said quietly. “He wanted the next
Principe di Felici
.”

There did not seem to be anything she could say to such a simple yet devastating statement. It hung there with them, as if it ripened on the vines that stretched out beside them and climbed the hill along with them.

Bethany could not bring herself to speak because she was afraid the tears she fought to keep at bay would spill over and betray her, and the worst of it was, she was not entirely certain what emotions these were that held her so securely in a tight, fast grip. She only knew that things were clear to her now that had not been clear before, though she could not have articulated what she meant by that.

She only knew the truth of it, and that that truth was painful and seared her right through to the bone.

But then they reached the top of the second hill and her breath caught in her throat for an entirely different reason. The path delivered them to the banks of an absolutely perfect, kidney-shaped lake. The water gleamed like crystal and glass in the autumn sun, basking in the late-morning light. All around, birds called from the
shade trees, and sweet-smelling grass swept along the banks.

“This is beautiful,” Bethany breathed. But a different set of tears stung her eyes now. How could she have missed this place, in a year and a half spent only a hill away? How was that possible? She had the strangest sense of vertigo—as if everything she had accepted as fact, had acted upon, was spun around before her, out of focus and somehow not at all what she had believed it to be.

“My mother might have been an artist,” Leo said in that low, irresistible voice of his, velvet and steel, whiskey and chocolate. He gazed out over the postcard-perfect setting, though the look in his eyes was far away. “Had she not had the misfortune to be the
Principessa di Felici
. When she provided my father with the necessary heir, he provided her with a token of appreciation for services rendered. This lake.”

He crossed his arms over his leanly muscled chest, making the black T-shirt strain against his well-formed biceps.

“He had it made to resemble a lake on an estate in Andalucia where my mother spent summers as a girl.” He sent her a dark look beneath a sardonic lift of his brow. “But do not cast my father as a romantic in this scenario. He had not one sensitive bone in his body. He did, however, care deeply about public opinion, and the birth of a new prince was certainly an event worth celebrating in an ostentatious manner.”

He waved a hand at the enchanting, peaceful view. “And he built her a lake so that forever after Domenico Di Marco might be hailed as the great romantic hero he was not.”

“It is beautiful,” Bethany said again, more firmly, past
the lump in her throat, the ache in her heart. “However it came to be here.”

She moved toward the water, that same deep restlessness making her feel edgy, nervous. She stared out over the sparkling surface for long moments, only half-aware that he was moving around behind her. She needed to think, to calm herself. She needed to rein in the wild, chaotic emotions that buffeted her. This was supposed to be a different kind of day—no wildness, no upset.

Surely she could handle that? Surely she could manage to keep her cool if Leo, of all people, could bring himself to talk to her like this?

She would not let herself regret that it could happen only now, when it was all over between them save the legalities. She would not imagine what might have been between them if this day had occurred three years ago, four years ago, instead of now. She would not ruin this, whatever it was, with the things that could not be changed no matter how this day went. No matter what she felt.

When she turned back around, he had set out a large, square ground-covering and had unpacked some of the hamper’s tempting items. Cold chicken, a bowl of olives. Wine and two glasses. Cheeses and slices of meats—
carpaccio
,
prosciutto
—and a selection of pâtés. Slices of apple and plump bunches of grapes.

He lounged across the blue and white blanket, his jeans-clad body on deliberate display, every inch of him clearly a delectable and dangerous male animal, for all that he appeared so indolent. She could not seem to look at that tight black T-shirt without losing her focus, much less the tanned, taut ridge of his abdomen that was revealed beneath the hiked-up hem. She had to swallow twice.

The look in his dark eyes, when they met hers, made her temperature soar. She felt feverish, too hot and too cold all at the same time.

“Come sit with me,” he said, the wolf to the foolish girl.

And, because she had never been anything but a fool when she was near him, no matter what else she might have been or wanted to be, she did.

Bethany knew the moment she lowered herself to the ground beside him that something had changed. She wanted it to be no more than a shift in the light breeze that danced in the trees above her head, or in the temperature of the day around them, but she was afraid she knew better.

She tucked the white cotton skirt she’d worn because it felt far too casual for a
principessa
tight around her knees, and tried to keep her attention trained on the beautiful water in front of her rather than the raw sexual energy emanating from the man lounging next to her.

“Are you not hungry?” he asked after one heated moment bled into another. She could not help herself—she turned to look at him, as if his very body commanded her and she was helpless to do anything but obey.

And he knew it. She could see that smug, male satisfaction in his dark gaze, the faint smile that toyed with the corner of his mouth.

She did not know what to do. She knew how she might have handled this moment even two hours ago, but that had been before they’d walked through fields of green and gold and he’d told her things that still made her feel raw. Unsettled.