Princess From the Past (11 page)

That had been before her traitorous heart had let itself yearn for him so fully, as completely as if he had never
broken it in the first place. What was she supposed to do now?

“How did your meetings in Sydney go?” she asked, because it seemed so innocuous a question and because it could not possibly make this tension between them any worse. And perhaps because she was every bit the coward he had called her.

Leo’s smile deepened, and he reached down to capture a piece of hard cheese with his long fingers. He took a bite, considering her, and she could not have said why she found all of it unbearably erotic.

The lake was so quiet, the breeze so sweet against her skin. The sun above them was so warm, caressing. Her breasts felt heavy, aching behind her thin shirt. She felt a faint sheen of moisture break out across her upper lip.

She knew he missed nothing. His head cocked to the side. “I do not often lose the things I want, Bethany. But perhaps you knew this already.”

“I know you take your business very seriously, if that is what you mean,” she said, unable to look away from the dark seduction of his gaze, unable to keep herself from imagining what might happen if she tilted forward and let herself fall across that hard, rangy body spread out before her like a buffet of sensual delights.

But of course she already knew what would happen. She could already taste the salt and musk of his skin against her tongue. She could already feel his long, smooth muscles hard beneath her palms. She could hardly breathe for the images that chased through her head, memory and imagination fused into one great wave of ache and want and need.

She knew that he knew it, too.

“I take everything seriously,” he said, his voice a low
rumble she could feel as well as hear, moving through her, leaving heat and fire in its wake. “I am known for my attention to detail. Renowned for it, you might even say.”

“Leo …” She did not know what she meant to say, but she felt so snared, so captured, as if he’d trapped her here. The truly terrifying part of that was how little she cared. What was happening to her? How could she let him cast this spell over her just by lying there?

But she had the lowering thought that she’d left the fight somewhere back at the castello. That he had finally disarmed her and she was more vulnerable now than she had ever been before. Mostly because she could not bring herself to care as she knew she had even this morning. As she knew she would again when this dangerous moment was past.

Still, here—now—there was only his hot gaze and her helpless melting deep within.

“I can see the way you look at me, Bethany,” he whispered, his eyes intent on hers, his voice a seduction, a caress. “You are eating me alive with all that blue heat, all of your desires written like poetry across your face. I can see that your breathing has gone shallow and your hands tremble.”

“Perhaps this is disgust,” she breathed. “After all.”

He smiled, but it was a predator’s smile, and it connected hard with her core, sending heat searing through her. Electric. Shattering. Leo.

“You are the student of psychology,” he said. “You tell me what it means, these physical signs and your continued denials that they mean what we both know they must mean.”

Bethany looked away then, the word ‘psychology’ managing to break through the haze. You have another
life, a different life, she told herself fiercely, trying to breathe through the tightness inside of her that mounted with every beat of her heart. This is just a dream by a lake that should not exist in the first place.

“I do not need to be a psychologist to know that touching you would be a monumentally stupid thing to do,” she said in a low voice, her attention trained on the lake’s clear waters as they lapped against the shore.

“If you say so,” he murmured, sounding neither offended nor put off. Hyper-aware of him, she could practically hear every shift of his body.

She knew when he reached for the succulent cuts of salami and prosciutto crudo, when he tore off a piece of fresh-baked bread and slathered it with an olive tapenade. She knew when he relaxed back on his elbows, when he licked his fingers, when he let that hungry gaze of his eat her up instead.

“Why did you never bring me here?” she asked finally when she could no longer stare at the lake without driving herself insane.

Was it worse to imagine what he was doing or watch him do it? All these years later, and she still did not know. She twisted around to look at him, not surprised to find him watching her with that same intense regard.

“Before,” she amended.

He looked at her for a moment, then out toward the opposite bank of the lake where leafy green persimmon trees rustled in the slight breeze.

“This was never a happy place,” he said finally. “It did not seem appropriate to bring a new bride to a place made from one man’s ego and a woman’s tears.”

Bethany swallowed. “And now?”

Why did she ask? What did she want from him?

But she knew what she wanted. She had always
known: everything. That was why the little she’d received had hurt so very badly. That was why she had haunted that house in Toronto for so long, hoping in the dark of night that he might return even as she hated herself for that weakness in the light of day.

She was merely feeling the echoes of all of that now, she told herself desperately. Just the echoes, nothing more.

“What answer do you wish me to give?” he asked softly, turning that brooding yet fierce gaze back upon her. “What must I tell you to make you touch me as you want to do, Bethany? As we both want you to do? Tell me what you want and I will say it. Just tell me.”

It was as if there was a sudden earthquake beneath her—as if the earth tumbled and rolled, cracked and heaved all while she sat there, not moving, not touching him, not even fighting with him—which was, she acknowledged in some far-off part of her brain, far easier than whatever this was.

This …aching regret. This longing. This undeniable need and this deep, wrenching fear that if she did not reach over and place her hands on him he would truly disappear as if he had never been.

Because he never should have been. He never should have noticed her in the first place. He had never been meant for her—he had always been on loan, and some part of her had recognized that from the start.

Was that why she had thrown tantrums, indulged her inner lunatic, done everything possible to push him away? Had she done it all to hasten along the inevitable day when he looked at her and saw nothing but his worst mistake? Why not rush to that end, when she’d known they were always destined to get there one way or another?

“You look at me as if I have become a ghost,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Before your very eyes.”

“Sometimes I think that’s all you ever were,” she heard herself say as if she had no control over herself any longer—as if all the things she had only ever admitted to herself in the dark of the night were suddenly free to tumble from her lips. As if this secluded, unnatural spot, so pretty and so calculated at the same time, was somehow the safe haven she had searched for all these years.

“That is all you allowed me to be,” he said quietly. “It is all you would give me—your body, your protestations of love. But the real woman? The flesh and blood? That was never on offer.”

Any other day she might have thrown something back at him, tried to hurt him in return. But today was too different. Too out of time, as if their usual rules did not apply. Or perhaps it was this odd place, this peaceful lake hidden away on a hilltop, yet never meant for happiness—just like us, she thought.

She could not bring herself to do anything but reply honestly.

“Whose flesh and blood did you want?” she asked, her voice as soft as his. “You wanted something I could never be. You wanted the woman you should have married. The woman you would have married, had you not met me instead.”

She did not know what she expected from him. Protestations? Denials? Some part of her yearned for him to storm at her that she was mistaken, to demand that she tell him who had put such thoughts in her head. But he did neither.

Instead, his dark gaze seemed electric on hers, searing
and hard, and his face darkened. A moment passed, and then another, and he did not speak.

“You were meant for someone noble, well-educated, refined and elegant,” she continued, reciting from memory the words his cousin had hurled at her, trapped in Leo’s gaze but unable to look away. “Every day I was none of those things, and every day you resented me more for it.”

“No,” he said, his eyes clear on hers even though his voice was gruff. “I did not. I did not resent you for that.” He paused, then continued, his voice low and harsh. “If anything, I resented myself for trying to make you into something you were not.”

She opened her mouth then, but nothing came out. She looked at him and it was as if she shook, or the earth shook, but nothing made sense. It was all a jumble of regret and misunderstanding; her own fears and his cousins’ poison; his retreat into his title and her inability to reach out to him; resentment and anger, the wounds inflicted across the years, and her inability to dismiss him as she should. And she knew she should.

“The fact that you were not those things, could never be those things, was why I married you in the first place,” he said, his voice softer, yet somehow more urgent.

She was astounded to realize that she believed him. Yet she remembered how it had been. He had been so cold, so distant, so disapproving, and she had not known how to handle that when the man she had fallen so far in love with had been so fiery, so deeply entwined with her at every moment.

“Why did you not tell me that then?” she asked, surprised to find she was whispering. Would it have
made a difference? she asked herself now. Would it have changed anything?

“I could not tell you something I did not know myself,” he said in a low voice.

But she could not get past what his words seemed to imply. And she was shaken by the wave of grief that washed through her, over her, making her feel too large and unwieldy, too exposed, too vulnerable.

“You wanted something different, is that it?” she asked, because she could not seem to stop herself, not because she really wanted to know the answer. Her voice was hoarse from the agony of this conversation. She was sure she had bruises, yet she still could not seem to stop. “You …what? Thought I could be the symbol of your rebellion?”

“I wanted you,” he said, his voice as dark as his eyes, his expression as troubled as she imagined hers to be. His lips pressed together and she could see that tension radiating along the length of his body. “I wanted you. And I confess, Bethany, that I did not think of anything else at all.”

She wanted to weep. To curl herself into a ball and sob until the great mess of the feelings that swirled around inside of her were purged from her once and for all.

But instead, responding to an urgency she dared not examine too closely, she leaned forward. She propped herself up on her hands and held herself above him for a long, trembling moment. Then she closed the distance between them and went to press her lips to his.

“Wait.”

He stopped her just before she touched him and she froze, her mouth so close to his, so very close. She dragged her gaze up to his, so bright now, with desire
glowing like molten gold. She shivered and he smiled, though his whole big body was as taut as a spring, coiled tight beneath her, so much raw male power leashed and ready.

“What is it?” she whispered just a breath away. Her heart pounded wildly in her chest, and she could see his hands in fists at his hips, digging into the blue and white blanket beneath them.

“If I taste you, I will take you.” His eyes, glittering with that intoxicating heat, were hard on hers. His harsh promise hung between them and lit her on fire. She exulted in the flames, the burn. “Be certain, Bethany. Be very certain.”

She was not certain at all. She felt reckless, compelled. She felt as if she had lost herself in quicksand. She felt too much, all of it so big, so terrifying, shaking her even as she sat.

I wanted you, he had said, and it made her shiver. Today of all days, here beside a lake that should not have been—a monument to a marriage disturbingly like the one she had walked away from—she would not let herself worry about the consequences.

She licked her lips and felt him sigh against her, felt that dark and intoxicating desire kick hard and hot between them.

Just for today, she promised herself. This is only for today.

And then, reaching across all of their history, across too many years and regrets, too much resentment and the space of one quick breath, she fit her mouth to his.

L
EO
let her kiss him, her soft, lush mouth hot against his. Once. Twice. Like heaven, her taste. A kind of paradise, the slide of her lips on his—tasting, touching. Needing him as he needed her. If this was his rebellion, he did not know why he would ever do anything but fall.

And then he could not help the thudding, pounding, heady mix of desire and triumph, victory and relief that flooded through him. He jack-knifed forward, never taking his mouth from hers, and took her face in his hands, angling her head for a better, hotter, slicker fit.

Oh, the taste of her. It was like the finest of his wines, like the heat of the summer sun, and he had been hard for her for days. Years. He went harder still when he heard the impatient, greedy sounds she made, her mouth opening over his, her hands spearing into the thickness of his hair to hold his head close to hers.

He felt her fine cheekbones under his thumbs, the soft swell of her cheeks. Still he tasted her, over and over, as if he could sate himself on this alone—as if he feared that should he stop, should they breathe, should they pause for even a moment, she would disappear from him all over again.

Not again
, he told himself. Not now. Not while he captured her curls beneath his palms. Not while he
tasted her as if he were dying of thirst and she was the coolest, sweetest, purest water he had ever known.

And then he could not think. He could not plan. He could only pull her close, crushing her breasts against the wall of his chest. But soon even that delicious pressure was not enough. Could anything be enough?

He shifted, sliding one hand down the enticing line of her spine, the other along the side of her body to trace her perfect, delectable curves—the side of her breast, the indentation of her waist, the fascinating curve of her hip.

When his hands reached the tempting swell of her bottom, he lifted her, shifting her up and toward him so she sat astride him, the heat of her nestled tight against the hardest part of him.

She gasped and pulled back, bracing her small hands against his shoulders, and for a long, fierce moment he gazed at her. Her curls tumbled around them, dark and wild, and her lips were swollen and slick from his. Her color was high and bright, and her eyes glowed like sapphires, dazed with the same dizzying, raging passion that charged through him, burning him alive.

She was the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld, like lightning and quicksilver in his arms, and she was his. She was his. She had always been his. Even when he had wanted her to be something other than she was, he had known that simple truth. Every curve, every sigh, every shiver that wracked her delicate body—all of it, all of her, was his.

Leo wanted to lick every single inch of her until she admitted the truth of it, until she screamed it, until she sobbed out his name like it was a prayer that only he could answer. And he would.

“Tell me you want me,” he commanded her, his voice
a stranger’s, no more than a growl as his hands retraced their journey and she squirmed on his lap, rocking her core against him, making them both sigh as the fire licked through them.

“You know I do,” she replied, more groan than words, her hands testing the shape of his shoulders, the corded muscles she found there, the smooth skin that stretched across his biceps.

He found her high breasts with his hands and let them fill his palms, teased the hard nipples through her soft shirt until she rocked against him, her eyes dark with need, her breath coming in quick, shallow pants.

“Say it.” It was a stark demand, a necessity for reasons he could not understand and did not care to examine.

As if she understood that on some primal level, she bent her head down and licked him, her small tongue tracing fire across the sensitive skin where his neck met his shoulder. He felt himself shudder with an elemental need as the storm within him began to howl.

“Bethany …” A warning. A plea.

“You know that I do,” she whispered in his ear. “You have always known it.”

He was lost. He found her mouth with his, hot and wet and perfect, as his hands worked between them. He tested her thighs beneath his palms, pushed her skirt out of the way and felt the scalding heat of her at her core. It inflamed him.

With a muttered curse, and more determination than skill, he released himself, letting his member free, proud and hard between them. Then he lifted her again, pulled her lacy panties to one side with an economy of motion and held himself perfectly still at her entrance for a breathless, shattering moment.

“Leo …” His name was a sob, a curse, a chant.

“Tell me.” His voice was thick, tortured.

He could feel her heat, beckoning and promising, so close. So close. She squirmed against him, her hips wild beneath his hands. Desperate.

“I want to hear the words,” he gritted out. “From your mouth. I want you to say it.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her breasts tighter against him, torturing them both. When she spoke it was as if it had been torn from her, as if she was as helpless in the face of this passion as he was, and he loved it.

How he loved it.

“I want you, Leo,” she whispered, her voice broken, dazed, aching for him. He could feel it resonate in him, his chest, his head, his sex. “God, I want you.”

He plunged into her, sheathing himself to the hilt, the fit tight and hot and as perfect as it had always been—like she was made for him, crafted expressly for this heat, this passion,
him
.

She shattered around him almost before he had finished that deep, perfect thrust. Her head fell back, her eyes drifted closed, her body rode his through tremor after tremor. He pulled back, shaking slightly with the effort, the control, reveling in the feel of her against him, so soft and wet where he was hard—all of it heaven and all of it his.

It was not enough. It was never enough.

But it was a start.

She could not breathe, she was in a thousand pieces, and yet he was still hot and hard inside of her.

Bethany managed somehow to pry open her eyes and found him watching her, his features tight and sensually intense as he gazed at her. She bit her lip as aftershocks
rippled through her, making her nipples harden and her thighs clench.

Never breaking eye contact, he moved inside of her, guiding her over him.

She clung to his shoulders, loving the width and strength of them, letting her fingers caress the intriguing rock-hard muscle she found there. He held her hips in his capable hands and slowly, deliberately, he built the fire within her—stoking the embers, fanning the flames.

Bethany felt the tension she’d just released roar back, coiling with twice the strength inside of her. His thrusts were long, slow, deep, driving her mad with a need far greater, far more encompassing, than what had come before.

She could not think, she could only feel. His mouth on hers, his face against her neck. Her breasts pressed against his chest, his strong arms encircling her. She was swept away in his demanding rhythm until all she could feel was his possession.

Deep. Slow. Devastating.

Her head fell back, and his mouth was like a brushfire against the sensitive skin of her neck, hot and electric.

“Do not close your eyes,” he ordered her, his voice low and sensual. It vibrated against her, through her. She could feel it deep in her core, where he slid into her again and again, so hard and hot where she melted all around him. “You have been away from me for three years. Stay with me now.”

She forced her eyes open and met his. She could feel the air sizzle. Dark need arced between them, filled her vision, became the world. The fires burned high within, turned white-hot, and still he continued to move
so slowly, so deliberately, so surely, each thrust almost more than she could bear until the next. And the next.

He was killing her.

“Leo …” she whispered, desperate, her voice strangled and her eyes bright with heat. “Please …”

As if he’d been waiting for exactly that plea, as if he’d planned it, he smiled and his thrusts grew faster, less measured. Wild and hot. Perfect.

“Now,” he murmured, his voice a dark, deep command, and she shivered.

But that was not enough.

Leo reached between them, found the center of her with his sure fingers and then, as he licked her neck and took her mouth in a frank, carnal kiss of possession, he catapulted them both over the edge.

She came back to herself slowly, to find his mouth against the skin at her neck as she lay boneless against him, draped across him, her heart still pounding in her chest, her limbs, her ears.

He looked up as she stirred and she felt herself flush, whether from embarrassment or something far deeper, far more vulnerable, she could not say.

She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. He was still inside of her. She could feel the coarse material of his jeans against the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. She could feel his hard chest against her, his maleness deep within her, his strong arms all around her. There was a part of her that panicked at that stark evidence of his possession even as a darker part, a part she wished to deny even as she became aware of it, gloried in it.

If I taste you, I will take you, he had promised her.

And he had kept his promise.

“That was …” But her voice trailed away and she realized she was still spinning. From a single kiss she had not planned to give, to him buried inside of her. She had no idea at all how to make sense of what had happened.

It felt cataclysmic. Life-altering. And, then again, perhaps it was simply Leo.

“Yes?” he asked; teasing her, she thought.

There was a smile in his eyes, if not on his lips, and she could not have said why seeing it made her chest ache. She only knew that it hurt, that she hurt. She knew she desperately needed to think about everything that had just happened in a critical, logical, unemotional way—which was unlikely to occur while they were joined like this, in the middle of the day, outside where anyone at all could happen by and see them on the banks of a lake that should never have been made in the first place.

Her discomfort grew, skittered through her, made her stomach clench and her breath come faster.

He only gazed at her, those eyes clear in a way that made her want to pull away, shield her own eyes, hide from him. But she could hardly do such a thing in this exposed position, so she was forced to simply gaze back at him, feeling that itchy flush work its way over her skin, her discomfort made real and red on her flesh.

She felt him move slightly, deep within her, and realized with a kind of amazement that he was becoming aroused. Again.

“But you …” Her voice was too high, too breathless, as if she was someone else. She felt like someone else, someone she was not at all sure she should permit herself to acknowledge, much less embody. Someone as
silly and as profoundly thrown by him as she had once been, years before. “How can you …so soon?”

He laughed then, his hands moving along her back as if he was soothing her, settling her, using his touch to calm her. She had a vague memory of him doing this long ago, gentling her with that tremendous power he unleashed only when he chose to share it. She had thought it patronizing then; she had believed it an attempt to control her.

She wished she could summon the anger that had once stirred in her, but she could feel only her body’s helpless response to him, as if it wanted him in ways she was afraid to face. She wanted to shake off his hands, but she was too captivated by his expression to do more than shift against him.

And of course, when she moved, she felt him—hard and hot so deep inside of her—and she felt her own melting, shivering response.

“That was but a taste,” he said, that near-smile flirting with his mouth. “It has been a long time.”

Her head spun, and then the world spun too as he swung her around, moving her with an effortless might and grace, rolling them both over on the blanket. He settled himself between her thighs and looked down into her face.

He never broke their intimate connection, and she told herself that was what made her heart hammer even harder against her ribs.

“Since me, you mean?” she stammered, gazing up at him, her eyes wide with a kind of desperation.

Why did she feel the overpowering need to run from him, to put any distance between them she could? But he was everywhere—inside her, above her—and there was no escape.

“You don’t mean a long time over all—you mean since me? Since you and I …?” Her voice trailed away.

The laughter faded from his expression, and an enigmatic light gleamed in his dark eyes. She shivered, and he was still inside her, growing harder by the moment. She shifted, but it only drew him in deeper, closer, and she caught her breath as sensation arrowed through her, bathing her in heat and light.

“I mean that it has been a long time since I touched you,” he said, his eyes pinning her to the ground as surely as his body did, offering no quarter, no compromise. “Which also means that it has been a long time since I have touched anyone.” His eyes rose, challenging her. Shaming her. Reading her secrets and laying her bare. “I take my vows very seriously, Bethany. I did not break them.”

Bethany felt dizzy. Her heart fluttered wildly in her chest and she thought—she hoped—she might faint. But instead one moment dragged into another, and he simply waited. Watched and waited, when she wanted to thrash and scream and howl out her reaction, no matter how little sense that might make.

She felt lost to herself. A stranger.

“Leo …” She could only whisper his name. She could not identify the emotions that swelled in her, rolling and pitching as if she were a tiny boat adrift in a great sea. “You should know …I mean, I never …”

Who had she become? she wondered in a mix of shame, panic and something else, something far deeper and more dangerous. She could not make it through a single sentence.

She felt her eyes fill and was horrified to think she might weep. Not now. Please, not now!

Still, Leo merely waited. He only watched her,
propped up on his elbows, his expression unreadable, though she could feel the great, humming power of him as if he connected her to some immense electrical storm—as if he was the storm, just barely held in check by the iron force of his will.