Princess From the Past

by Caitlin Crews

  “I signed it because you told me to sign it,” Bethany said quietly. “I assumed you were concerned with my best interests as well as your own.” She eyed him and gathered her courage around her like a shield. “Not a mistake I intend to repeat.”

  “Of course not,” Leo said in that smooth, sardonic tone, crossing his arms over his hard chest.

  He looked around the room, pointedly taking in the elegance of the furnishings, the pale blue walls beneath delicate moldings and the thick, rich carpeting beneath their feet.

  “Because,” he continued in that same tone, “as we have established, you have lived as if in a nightmare ever since the day you agreed to marry me.”

  “Are you going to tell me what rights I signed away, or would you prefer to stand there making sarcastic remarks?” Bethany snapped at him, exasperated at her own distressing softening as well as his patronizing tone. She hated the way he looked at her then, his arrogant gaze growing somehow more intimidating, burning into her.

  “My apologies,” he said, his tone scathing. “I was unaware that my preferences were of any interest to you.”

  He almost smiled then, a hard, edgy crook of his sensual mouth. Bethany wanted to look away but found she couldn’t—she was as trapped, as if he held her in his hands, which she knew would be the end of her.

  “But that is neither here nor there, is it?” he asked in that deadly, soft tone that sent shivers down Bethany’s spine and twisted through her stomach. “The salient point is that you agreed that any divorce proceedings, should they ever become necessary, would be held in an Italian court under Italian law.”

  “And, naturally, I have only your word for that,” Bethany pointed out, horrified that her voice sounded so insubstantial. She cleared her throat and jerked her gaze from his as if she might turn to stone were she to lose herself any further in that bittersweet darkness. “I could have agreed to anything and I would have no way of knowing, would I?”

  “If you wish to hire a translator and have the documents examined, I will instruct my secretaries to begin compiling copies for your review immediately,” Leo said in a mild way, yet with that sardonic current beneath.

  “And how long will that take?” Bethany asked, her bitterness swelling, hinting at the great wealth of tears beneath. She blinked them back. “Years? This is all just a game to you, isn’t it?”

  His gaze seemed to ignite then, hard, hot and furious. The room constricted around them, narrowing, until there was nothing but Leo—the real Leo, she thought wildly—too dark, too angry and too close. Bethany felt panic race through her; a surge of adrenaline and something far more dangerous kicked up her pulse, hardened her nipples and pooled between her legs. She hated herself for that betrayal above all else.

  And she suddenly realized how close together they were standing, with only the corner of the platform bed between them. She could reach out her hand and lay it against his hard pectoral muscles, or the fascinating valley between them. She could inhale his scent.

  She could completely ruin herself and all she’d fought so hard to achieve!

  “You must return to Italy if you wish to divorce me,” he said, his voice low and furious, like a dark electrical current that set her alight. “There is no other option available to you.”

  “How convenient for you,” she managed to say somehow, not fighting the faint trembling that shook her—not certain she could have hid it if she’d tried. “I wonder how the foreign wife of an Italian prince can expect to be treated in Italy?”

  “It is not your foreign birth that should worry you, Bethany,” Leo said, his noble features so arrogant, so coldly and impossibly beautiful, even now—his low voice like a dark melody. “The abandonment of your husband and subsequent taking of a lover? That, I am afraid, may force the courts to find you at fault for the dissolution of the marriage.” He shrugged, seemingly nonchalant, though his eyes were far too dark, far too hard. “But you are quite proud of both those things, are you not? Why should it distress you?”

  Bethany felt as if something huge and heavy was crushing her, making it impossible to breathe, making tears prick at the backs of her eyes when she had no desire to weep. It was the way he said ‘abandonment’ and ‘lover,’ perhaps. It tore at her. It made her nearly confess the truth to him, confess her lie, simply to see his gaze warm. It made her wish she could still believe in dreams she had been forced to grow out of years ago.

  But she knew better than to give him ammunition. Better he should hate her and release her than think well of her and keep her tied to him in this half-life, no matter how much it hurt her.

  “There must be another way,” she said after a moment or two, battling to keep her voice even.

  Leo merely shook his head, his features carefully blank once again, just that polite exterior masking all the anger and arrogance she knew filled him from within. She could feel it all around them, tightening like a vice. Too much emotion. Too much history.

  “I don’t accept that,” Bethany said, frowning at him.

  “There are many things that you do not accept, it seems,” Leo said silkily. “But that does not make them any less true.”

  He wanted her. He always wanted her. He had stopped asking himself why that should be.

  He did not care about her lies, her insults—or he did not care enough, now, having been without her for so long. He only wanted to be deep inside of her, her legs wrapped around his waist, where there could be only the truth of that hot, silken connection. The only truth that had ever mattered, no matter what she chose to believe. No matter what he felt.

  She should know better than to row with him so close to a bed. She should remember that all her posturing, all her demands, rages and pouts, disappeared the moment he touched her. His hands itched to prove that to her.

  She pushed her curls back from her face and looked unutterably tired for a flashing moment. “I would ask you what you mean, and I am certain you would love to tell me, but I am tired of your games, Leo,” she said in that quiet yet matter-of-fact voice that he was growing to dislike intensely. “I will not go back to Italy. Ever.”

  He thought of the vulnerability he had sensed in her, that undercurrent of pain. He could see hints of it in the way she looked at him now, the careful way she held herself. Sex and temper, he understood; both could be solved in the same way. But this was something else.

  A game, he assured himself. This is just another game.

  “You make such grand proclamations, luce mio,” he said softly, never taking his eyes from hers. “How can you keep them all straight? Today you will not go to Italy. Three years ago you would not remain my wife. So many threats, Bethany, all of which end in nothing.”

  “Those are not threats,” she threw at him, her eyes dark in that way that made things shift uncomfortably in him, her soft mouth trembling. “They are the unvarnished truth. I’m sorry if you are not used to hearing such a thing, but then you surround yourself with sycophants, don’t you? You have only yourself to blame.”

  Leo moved toward her, his gaze tight on hers. “There were so many sweeping threats, as I recall,” he said softly, mockingly, as if she had not spoken. As if there were no shifts, no darkness, no depths he could not comprehend. “You would not speak to me again once you left Italy. You would not remain in this house even twenty-four hours after I left you here. They begin to run together, do they not?”

  She only stared at him, her blue eyes wide, furious and something else, something deeper. But her very presence before him, in the house she had vowed to leave, was all the answer that was needed.

  “And we cannot forget my favorite threat of all, can we?” He closed the space between them then, though he did not reach over and touch her as he longed to do. He was so close she was forced to tilt her face up toward his if she wanted to look at him. Her lips parted slightly, her eyes widening as heat bloomed on her cheeks.

  “Is this supposed to terrify me?” she asked, but it was hardly a whisper, barely a
thread of sound. “Am I expected to cower away from you in fear and awe?”

  “You promised me you would never go near me again, that I disgusted you,” he said softly, looking down into her eyes, reading one emotion after another—none of them disgust. “Is that why you shake, Bethany? Is this disgust?”

  “It is nothing so deep as disgust,” she said, her voice a thread of sound, her eyes too bright. She cleared her throat. “It is simply acute boredom with this situation.”

  “You are a liar, then and now,” he said, reluctantly intrigued by the shadows that chased through her bright blue eyes. He was not surprised when she moved away from him, putting more space between their bodies as if that might dampen the heat they generated between them. As if anything ever could.

  “That is almost funny, Leo,” she said in a quiet voice, her gaze dark. “Coming from you.”

  “Tell me, Bethany, how have I deceived you?” he asked softly, watching her school her expressive face into the smooth blandness he hated. “What are my crimes?”

  “I refuse to discuss this with you, as if you do not already know,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “As if we have not gone over it again and again to the point of nausea.”

  “Very well, then,” he said, hearing that harsh edge in his voice, unable to control it. “Then let us discuss your crimes. We can start with your lover.”

  His words seemed to hang there, accusation and curse wrapping around her like a vise. She wanted to scream, to rage, to shove at him. To collapse to the floor and sob out her anguish.

  But she could not bring herself to move. She felt pinned as much by the heat in his dark gaze as her own eternal folly. Why had she told him such an absurd lie? Why had she put herself in a position where he could claim the moral high-ground over her?

  “You do not wish to discuss my lover,” she told him stiffly, hating herself, her own voice sounding like a stranger’s. But she had to make it believable, didn’t she? “You do not compare well in any department.”

  “How will you tell him that you cannot ever do more than commit adultery so long as you remain married to me?” he murmured in that way of his that seemed to channel directly along her spine, making her feel shivery and weak. “What man would tolerate such a thing, when all you need do is fly to Italy to take care of that one, small detail?”

  “He is enormously tolerant,” Bethany said through her teeth. The word ‘adultery’ seemed to ricochet through her, chipping off pieces of her heart until they fell like stones into the pit of her stomach.

  “As it happens,” Leo said in that quiet, lethal tone, “I am flying to Italy tomorrow morning. We could finish with this unpleasantness in no time at all.”

  It paralyzed her. For a moment, she simply stared at him, lost, as if he’d reached over and torn her heart from her chest. It was as if she could no longer feel it beating. She could not begin to imagine the damage his capitulation caused her. She did not want to imagine it.

  “If there is no other way,” she said slowly, feeling as if she was teetering on the edge of a vast, deep abyss, as if her voice was something she’d dug up somewhere, rusty and unused, not hers at all. “Then I suppose I will have to go to Italy.”

  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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE 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 st
rong 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.