Princess From the Past (4 page)

Leo’s eyes darkened with that pure male fire she knew too well. It called to that twisted part of her, the part she most wanted to deny.

Because despite the pain, the grief and the loneliness, she still wanted him. She still ached for him, that wave of longing and lust that made everything else the very lies he accused her of telling. His body. His presence. The light of his smile, the brush of his hand, the very fact of his nearness. She ached.

Time seemed to stand still. There was only that fierce, knowing gleam in his eyes, as there had always been. One touch, his gaze promised her, hot, gleaming and sure. Only one small touch and she would be his. Only that, and she would betray herself completely.

And she knew some part of her wanted him to do it—wanted him to tumble her to the bed and take her with all the easy command and consummate skill that had always shaken her so completely, melted her so fully, made her his in every way. She no longer even bothered to despair of herself.

“My plane awaits,” he said softly, and she could hear the intense satisfaction behind his words. As if he had known they would end up in exactly this place. As if he had made it so. As if he could read her mind.

“I will not travel with you,” she told him, holding her head high even as she surrendered, because she could not think of anything else to do, any way to escape this. Escape him. Their past. She would go to Italy and fight it there, where it had gone so wrong in the first place.

She glared at him. “I will find my own way there.”

And Leo, damn him, smiled.

T
HE
small, achingly picturesque village of Felici—ancestral seat of the Di Marco family and the very last place Bethany ever wanted to visit again—clung to the hillside in the late-afternoon sun, red-roofed and white-walled.

The local church thrust its proud white steeple high into the air, bells tolling out the turn of the hour. Carefully cultivated vineyards stretched out across the tidy Felici Valley, reaching toward the alpine foothills rising in the distance. And at the highest point in the village loomed the ancient Castello di Felici itself, defining the very hill it clung to, announcing the might and power of the Di Marco family to all who ventured near.

Yet all Bethany could see was ghosts.

She drove the hired car along the main road that wound up into the village, so renowned for its narrow medieval streets and prosperous, cheerful architecture. She pulled into the small parking area near the pensione located at the hill’s midway point. But she still couldn’t seem to draw a full breath, or calm the nervous fluttering in her belly.

It had been that way since her plane had taken off from Toronto two nights before. She had only managed a
fitful, restless kind of doze for most of the long overnight flight. When she had managed to sleep, her dreams had been filled with dread, loss and panic and Leo’s bittersweet, chocolate gaze like a laser cutting through her. Hardly rejuvenating.

“My men will meet you at the airport,” he had told her, in that peremptory manner that made it clear there was to be no discussion before taking his leave from the house in Rosedale.

It had been like a flashback into the very heart of their married life, and not a pleasant one. Bethany had not been able to stand the thought of doing what he’d decreed she should do, and not simply because he’d decreed it. She’d felt claustrophobic imagining how it would go: she would be marched from the plane, deposited into one of the endless fleet of gleaming black cars he had at his disposal and spirited away to his castello like …property.

She shuddered anew, just thinking of it. That was exactly why she had opted to fly into Rome instead of the much-closer Milan.

She’d fought off her exhaustion throughout the long drive up the middle of the country, arriving in the outskirts of Milan early the previous evening. She’d fallen gratefully into a clean bed in a cheap hotel outside the city limits and had finally slept. It had been nearly noon when she’d pulled herself out of bed, cotton-headed and reeling, her thudding heart telling her the anxiety dreams had continued even if she hadn’t quite remembered them once awake.

She’d remembered other things, however, no matter how she’d tried to keep the memories at bay.

“Ah, luce mio, how I love you,” he had whispered as he had held her close, high on a balcony that overlooked
the Felici Valley as the sun had set before them that first night in Italy.

My light, she had thought, dazed by him as if he were all the fire and song of the stars above. “Why am I your light?” she had asked. She’d meant, how can you love me when you are you and I am me?

“These eyes,” he had murmured, kissing one closed lid and then the next. “They are as blue as the summer sky. How could you be anything but light, with eyes such as these?”

She had lingered over strong espresso in a café near her hotel after she woke, putting off the inevitable for as long as she could. With every bone in her body, every fiber of her being, she had not wanted to make the last leg of this journey. She had not wanted to travel the last few hours into the countryside, further and further into the past. Further and further into everything she’d wanted so badly and lost despite herself.

It seemed impossible that any of this was really happening. It reminded her of the dreams she’d had on and off since leaving Italy three years ago. She would dream that she had never left at all, that she had only imagined it, that she was still trying to bite her tongue and keep her feelings to herself like the dutiful principessa she had failed to become and that the hard, lonely years since leaving Leo had been the dream.

She had always woken in a panic, her face wet with tears, the bedroom seeming to echo around her as if she had screamed out in her sleep.

There was no waking up from this, Bethany thought now, feeling flushed, too hot with emotions she refused to examine. She stared at the ivy-covered wall before her as if it could help her—as if anything could.

She climbed out of the car and couldn’t help the
deep breath she took then, almost against her will. The air was crisp, clean, and sweet-smelling. She fancied she could smell the Italian sun as it headed west high above her; she could see the Alps in the far distance, the vines and the olive groves. She could smell cheerful local meals spicing the early-evening air: rich polenta and creamy, decadent risotto, the mellow undertone of warming olive oil on the breeze.

It brought back too many memories. It hurt.

She was unable to keep herself from a brooding look up at the castello itself. It sat there, the high walls seeming to be part of the cliff itself, feudal and imposing, crouched over the town like a dragon guarding its treasure. She could easily imagine generations of Di Marcos fighting off sieges, bolstering their wealth and influence from the safety of those towering heights. She almost imagined she could see Leo, like some feudal lord high on the walls, the world at his feet.

Bethany almost wished she could hate the place, for on some level she blamed the stones themselves for destroying her marriage. It was a visceral feeling, all guts and irrationality, but the girl who had walked inside those walls had never walked out again.

She wished she could hate the thick, stone walls, the now-unused battlements. She wished she could hate the drawbridge that led through the outer walls of what had originally been a monastery, over the defunct moat and beneath the Di Marco coat of arms that had first been emblazoned above the entryway in the fifteenth century.

“It is so beautiful!” she had breathed, overcome as she’d walked through the great stone archway at the top of the drawbridge. He had swept her into his arms, spinning them both around in a circle until they had
both laughed with the sheer joy of it right there in the grand hall.

“Not so beautiful as you,” he had said, his gaze serious, though his mouth had curved into a smile she’d been able to feel inside her own chest. “Never so beautiful as you, amore mio.”

Shaking the memory off, annoyed by her own melancholy, Bethany pulled her suitcase from the passenger seat and headed toward the entrance of the pensione. She had chosen this place deliberately: it was brand new. There would be much less chance of an awkward run-in with anyone she might have known three years ago.

She was reasonably confident she could avoid Leo as easily.

“It should not require more than two weeks of your time,” Leo had estimated with a careless shrug. Two weeks, perhaps a bit more. She had survived the last three years, she’d thought, so what were a few more weeks?

But she couldn’t help the feelings that dragged at her, pulling her inexorably toward that vast cavern of loneliness and pain inside that she could not allow to claim her any longer.

Just as she couldn’t help one last, doubtful look at the castello over her shoulder as she pushed open the door to the lobby and walked inside.

“I am so sorry,” the man said from behind the counter in heavily accented English. “The room—it is not yet ready.”

But Bethany knew the truth. She could see it in the man’s averted gaze, the welcoming smile that had dropped from his lips. It had happened the moment she’d said her name. It did not seem to matter that she’d
used her maiden name, as she’d grown used to doing in Toronto.

Her hands tightened around the handle of her suitcase, so hard her knuckles whitened, but she managed to curve her lips into an approximation of a polite smile.

“How odd,” she murmured past the tightness in her throat. “I was certain the check-in time was three o’clock, and it is already past five.”

“If you would not mind waiting …” The man smiled helplessly and gestured toward the small seating-area at the far side of the small lobby.

Feeling helpless, Bethany turned from the counter, aware that her eyes were filled with a dangerous heat. She walked across the lobby with careful precision and then sat on the plush sofa, feeling as if she was made of glass, fragile and precarious. And then feeling broken, somehow, when the man picked up the telephone and murmured something she could not quite hear in rapid Italian.

Sure enough, not ten minutes later the front door was pulled open and two men in dark suits entered. Bethany did not recognize them personally, but she had no doubt at all about who they were.

They walked toward her, coming to a stop only a foot or two away. She stared straight ahead, willing herself to stay calm, adult, and rational, as she’d been so sure she’d remain. She fought to maintain her composure, though her stomach twisted and her heart beat too hard against her ribs.

“Principessa,” the larger of the two men murmured in tones of the greatest respect—which made Bethany that much more furious, somehow, and that much more despairing. “Per favore …?”

What could she do? This was Leo’s village. He was
its prince. She had been a fool to think he would let her return to it without controlling her every move. Back when she had felt more charitable toward him she’d told herself he simply knew no other way to behave, that he had been raised to be this dictatorial, that it was not his fault.

Today, she knew the truth. This was who he was. This was who he wanted to be. What she wanted had never mattered, and never, ever would.

So she simply rose to her feet with as much dignity and grace as she could muster. She let Leo’s men guide her to the expected gleaming black sedan that waited outside, elegant and imprisoning, and climbed obediently into the back seat.

And then she sat there, furious, helpless and as brokenhearted as the day she’d left, as they drove her straight into the jaws of the castello.

It was all exactly as she remembered, exactly as she still dreamed.

The great castello was quiet around her—it was open to the public only on certain days of the week or by appointment—and felt empty, even though she knew that hordes of servants were all around her, perhaps even watching her, just out of sight.

Bethany felt a drowning sensation, as if she was being sucked backward in time, thrown back four years into that other life where she had been so miserable, so terribly alone. And it had been worse because she had not known how alone she was at first—she had still believed that she would recover from her father’s death with Leo’s help, that he would become the family she so deeply craved.

Instead, he had abandoned her in every way that mattered.

As if the stones themselves remembered that grief, that ache, they seemed to echo not just her footsteps as she walked but her memories of those awful days here when she’d been so isolated, scared and abandoned.

She barely saw the impressive entryway, the tapestries along the stone walls inside the grand entrance, the rooms filled with priceless art and antiques, each item resplendent with its pedigree, its heritage, its worth across centuries. Her silent escorts ushered her up above the public rooms to the family wing, then down the long, gleaming hallway toward her old, familiar door. But all she could see was the past.

And then it was done. Her suitcase was deposited just inside her chamber and the door was closed behind her with a muted click. She stood inside the bedroom suite that had once been hers, her luxurious cage, quite as if she had never left.

Bethany let her head drop slightly forward, squeezing shut her eyes as she stood there in the center of the grand room. This was the principessa’s historic suite, handed down over the ages from one wife to the next. It boasted the finest furnishings, gilt-edged and ornate. The bed was canopied in gold, the regal bedspread an opulent shade of red. Everything was made of the darkest, richest wood, lovingly crafted and polished to a high shine. There was never a hint of dust in this room, never an item out of place—except for Bethany herself, she thought wryly.

She did not have to investigate to know that all was precisely as it had been the last time she’d been here. She did not have to walk to the towering windows to know what she would see through them: the finely sculpted
gardens and beyond them, the rooftops of the village and the gentle, inviting roll of Italian countryside reaching for the horizon. All of it was beautiful beyond measure, and yet somehow capable of making that ache inside of her grow so much more acute.

And she did not have to turn when she heard the paneled side-door open because she knew exactly who would be standing there. But she could not seem to help herself, her gaze was drawn to him as if he were a flickering flame and she no more than a moth. She wished even that did not hurt her, but it did. It still did.

Leo lounged against the paneled door frame, his long, lean form packed into dark trousers and a cashmere black sweater that emphasized his whipcord strength. His eyes seemed nearly black, and she fought off the urge to rub at the back of her neck where the fine hairs there whispered in warning.

He looked dark and powerful, like one of the ancient Roman gods that had once roamed this land, capricious and cruel. And she knew he was bent on vengeance just the same. He did not show her that sardonic smile of his, that mocking twist of his sensual lips.

He did not need to. Her very presence was enough.

Already she felt as if she’d lost everything. Again.

“Ah, principessa,” Leo said, his tone laced with irony. “Welcome home.”

He took a moment to drink in the sight of her, back where she belonged after all of this time. Finally.

It almost eased the three years’ worth of simmering anger and the deeper current beneath it he felt when he looked at her. She crossed her arms over her middle, as if it hurt her to stand there in the ancestral bedroom
where she had once lived. Where—he knew, whether she did or not—she would live again.