Princess From the Past (6 page)

But it was not only the memories connected to her forgotten clothes that had unnerved her.

More than that, she’d realized during that confusing
interaction with Leo that on some level she had forgotten who she was back then. The woman Leo had referred to so disparagingly—the one who had behaved so appallingly, who had, she was humiliated to recall, more than once destroyed more than one piece of china while in a temper—was not her.

That was not who she was, not anymore. It made her stomach hurt to think of it. To think of who he must see when he looked at her. To think that she remembered her isolation and the loss of all she had loved, but he remembered nothing but a termagant.

It had been that last night that had changed her, she realised, as she descended the great stone stair that dominated the front hall, rising from both sides to meet in the center and then veer off to the east and west wings. That last, shameful night. It was as if something had broken in her then, as if she’d been faced with the depths of her own temper, her own depraved passions. She’d lost that fiery, inconsolable part of herself, that wild, violent, mad part. For good? she thought.

Or perhaps it is Leo who stirs up all those dark and disgraceful urges, an insidious voice whispered. Perhaps he is the match. Perhaps without him you are simply tinder in a box, harmless and entirely free of fire.

“I am shocked,” came his lazy drawl, as if she’d summoned him simply by thinking of him.

Bethany’s head snapped up and she found Leo standing at the foot of the great stair, his brown eyes fathomless as he watched her approach.

“I had anticipated you would ignore what I told you and force me to come and deliver you to the table myself,” he continued, and she knew there was a part of him that wished she had done just that. Because there was a part of her that wished it too.

“As I keep attempting to explain to you,” she said, forcing a smile that seemed to scrape along all the places she was raw, “You do not know me any longer.”

“I am sure that is true,” he said, but there was an undercurrent in his rich voice that made her wonder what he did not say.

It was so unfair that he was who he was, she thought in a kind of despair as she continued to walk toward him, step by stone step.

The walls were covered with heavy tapestries and magnificent portraits of the Di Marco family from across the ages. Every step she took was an opportunity to note the well-documented provenance of the thrust of Leo’s haughty cheekbones, the fullness of his lips, the flashing, dark richness of his gaze, all laid out for her in an inexorable march through the generations. His height, his rangy male beauty, his thick and lustrous hair: all of this was as much his legacy as the castle they both stood in.

And he was not only the product of this elegant, aristocratic line—he was its masterpiece. Tonight he wore a dark suit she had no doubt he had had made to his specifications in one of Milan’s foremost ateliers, so that the charcoal-hued fabric clung to his every movement. He was a dream made flesh, every inch of him a prince and every part of him devastatingly attractive. It was hardwired into his very DNA.

How could she explain to this man what it was to feel isolated? He was never alone; he had servants, aides, dependants, villagers, employees. Failing that, he had some eight centuries of well-documented family history to keep him company. He was always surrounded by people in one way or another.

Bethany had only had her father since she’d been
tiny, and then she’d had only Leo. But soon she had lost him too, and it had broken her in ways she knew that he—who had never had no one, who could not conceive of such a thing—would never, ever understand. She only knew that she could not allow it to happen a second time or she was afraid she would disappear altogether.

“Why do you frown?” he asked quietly, his gaze disconcertingly warm, incisive—dangerous.

“Am I?” Bethany tried to smooth her features into something more appropriate as she finally came to a stop on the step just above him—something more uninviting, more appropriate for a divorcing couple. “I was thinking of all these portraits,” she said, which was not untrue, and waved a hand at the walls. “I was wondering when yours will grace the walls.”

“On my fortieth birthday,” he replied at once, his brows arching. He smirked slightly, and his tone turned sardonic. “Do you have an artist in mind? Perhaps your lover is a painter. What a delightful commission that would be.”

Bethany pulled in a long breath, determined not to react to him as he obviously wished her to do. Determined not to feel slapped down, somehow—after all, she was the one who had introduced the concept of a lover into this mess. She was lucky Leo preferred to make sardonic remarks and was not altogether more angry, as she’d expected him to be. She was somewhat mystified he was not.

She forced another smile, hiding the sharp edges she did not wish to feel, pretending they did not exist.

“I only wondered how odd it must be to grow up under the gaze of so many men who look so much like you,” she said. “You must never have spent even a moment
imagining who you might be when you grew up. You already knew exactly what was in store for you.”

She looked at the nearest painting, a well-known Giotto portrait of one of the earliest Di Marco princes, who looked like a shorter, rounder, eccentrically clad version of the man in front of her.

“I am my family’s history,” he said matter-of-factly, yet not without a certain resolute pride. She could feel the current of it in him, around him. “I am unintelligible without it.”

He spoke in an even sort of tone, as if he expected her to fight him about it. Had she done that before? she wondered suddenly. Had she argued simply for the sake of arguing? Or had she simply been too young then to understand how any history could shape and mold whomever it touched? She wondered if some day she would think about their complicated history without the attendant surge of anger and the darker current of grief.

“I can see that living here would make you think so,” she agreed and turned her attention back to him in time to see a curious expression move through his eyes, as if he felt the same currents, then disappear.

“Our dinner awaits,” he said softly. “If you are finished with my ancestors?”

She descended the last few stairs and fell into step with him when he began to walk. The castle seemed so immense all around them, so daunting. Shimmering chandeliers lit their way, spinning light down from the high ceilings, showcasing the grace and beauty of every room they walked through.

“Do we dine alone?” she asked in the same quiet tone he had used, though she was not certain why she felt a kind of pregnant hush surround them. She cleared her
throat and tried to contain her wariness. “Where are your cousins?”

He glanced at her, then away. “They no longer call the castello their home.”

“No?” So polite, Bethany thought wryly, when she had nothing at all courteous to say about Leo’s spiteful, trouble-making cousins. She had been so delighted when she’d met them; as the only child of two deceased only-children, she’d been excited she would finally experience ‘family’ in a broader sense. “I was under the impression that they would never leave here.”

Leo looked down at her, his gaze serious as they moved through a shining gold and royal blue gallery. They headed toward the smaller reception rooms located in the renovated back of the castle that, as of the eighteenth century, opened up to a terrace with a view out over the valley.

“They were not offered any choice in the matter,” he said, a trace of stiffness in his voice. Almost as if he finally knew what she had tried to tell him back then. Almost as if …

Bethany searched his face for a moment, then looked away.

Both the cruel, beautiful Giovanna and the haughty, unpleasant Vincentio had hated—
loathed
—Leo’s spontaneous choice of bride. And neither had had the slightest qualm about expressing their concerns. The noble line polluted. Their family name forever contaminated by Leo’s recklessness.

But Leo had not allowed a word to be spoken against them, not in the year and a half that they had made Bethany’s life a misery. And now he had banished them from Felici?

She was afraid to speculate about what that might
mean, afraid to let herself wonder, even as that treacherous spark of hope that still flickered deep inside of her threatened to bloom into a full flame. She doubted she would survive placing her hopes in Leo again. The very idea of it was sobering.

He did not lead her to one of the more formal rooms as Bethany had anticipated. She had not, of course, anticipated they might dine in the great dining hall itself, which was equipped to serve a multitude, but had imagined the more intimate family dining-room that was still elegant enough to cow her. But Leo did not stop walking until they reached the blue salon with its bright, frescoed ceilings and high, graceful windows.

Through the French doors that opened off the room, Bethany could see a small wrought-iron table had been set up on the patio to overlook the twinkling lights of the village and the valley beyond. The Italian night was soft all around her as she stepped outside, alive with the scent of cypress and rhododendrons, azaleas and wisteria. She could not help taking a deep, fragrant breath and remembering.

The table was laden with simple, undoubtedly local fare. Bethany knew the wine would be from the Di Marco vineyards, and it would be full-bodied and perfect. The olives would have been hand-picked from the groves she could see from her windows. The bread smelled fresh and warm, and had likely been baked that morning in the castello’s grand kitchens.

A simple roasted chicken sat in the center of the table, fragrant with rosemary and garlic, flanked by side dishes of mushroom risotto and a polenta with vegetables and nuts. Candles flickered in the night air, casting a pool of warm, intimate light around the cozy, inviting scene.

Bethany swallowed and carefully took the seat that
Leo offered her. She felt a deep pang of something like nostalgia roll through her, shaking her. It was worse in its way than the usual grief, but by the time Leo took his place opposite her she was sure she had hid it.

“This is by far the most romantic setting I could have imagined,” she said, a feeling of desperation coiling into a tense ball in her belly.

Why was he torturing her like this? What was the point of this meal, of their elegant attire, of this entire charade?

She met his gaze, though it took more out of her than she wanted to admit, even to herself. “It is more than a little inappropriate, don’t you think? This is the first night of our divorce, Leo.”

Leo did not respond at once, letting her words sit there between them. There was something almost brittle in the way she sat opposite him, as if she were on the verge of shattering like glass. He was not certain where the image had come from, nor did he care for it.

The Bethany he knew was vocal, mercurial. She did not break; she bent until she’d twisted herself—and him—into new and often contradictory shapes. He was not at all sure what to do with a Bethany he could not read, a Bethany whose temper he could not predict with fatalistic accuracy.

He was even less sure how it made him feel.

He reached over and poured the wine, a rich and aromatic red, into both of their glasses.

“Can we not enjoy each other’s company, no matter the circumstances?” he asked. “Have we really fallen so far?”

He let his gaze track the flush that tinted her skin slightly red, and made the deep, inviting green of her
dress seem that much more beckoning. He wanted to reach across the table and test the curls that fell from the twist she’d secured to the crown of her head, but refrained. When he gave his word, he kept it.

No matter what it cost him.

“It is questions like that which make me question your motives,” she said, a vulnerable cast to her fine mouth. She kept her gaze trained on him as he lounged back in his chair and merely eyed her in return, trying to figure her out, trying to see beyond the facade.

He was starting to wonder why she was so determined to divorce him—and why she refused even to discuss it. It was almost as if she feared he would talk her out of it, should she allow the conversation. Which, of course, he would.

Talk or no talk, there would be no divorce. He wondered why he did not simply announce this truth to her here and now and do away with the suspense. He knew he would have done so three years ago without a second thought.

Was it a weakness in him that he was content to let this play out—that he was intrigued despite himself by this new version of his wife? Her return, her uncertainty, her obvious response to him that she worked so hard to conceal …he found himself fascinated by it all. He did not want to crush her with a truth he suspected she would claim to find unbearable. He wanted to see what happened between them first.

He did not want to investigate why that was. He did not want to look too closely at what felt more and more like an indulgence with every passing second.

He began to realize exactly what he had done by vowing he would not touch her. Perhaps she was not the only one who had hidden in their explosive passion.
Perhaps he too had used it as a shorthand—a bridge. It was an unsettling notion.

But this time, he thought with a certain grimness, he would make sure that there were no shortcuts taken. They would achieve the same destination, but this time they would both do it with their eyes wide open. It was the only way he could be sure that there would be no more years of estrangement, no more talk of divorce. And the more he let this play out, he told himself, the less likely that there could be arguments from Bethany about compulsion and manipulation, and all the rest of the accusations she levied at him.

“You are so focused on our divorce,” he said after a moment. He selected a plump, ripe olive from the small bowl, swimming in oil and spices. He popped it in his mouth. “Don’t you think we should first discuss our marriage?”

She let out a startled laugh. Her blue eyes looked shocked, which irritated him far more than it should have done. As if
he
was the unreasonable one, the hysterical one!