Princess From the Past

by Caitlin Crews

  “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 irrit
ated him far more than it should have done. As if he was the unreasonable one, the hysterical one!

  “You want to …talk?” she asked. Her tone of amazement set his teeth on edge. “You, Leo Di Marco, want to talk. Now. After all this time.”

  Something that looked like pain washed through her extraordinary eyes—but it could not be; how could it be? Then it was gone, hidden once more behind that brand-new armor of hers that she wore far too comfortably for his tastes.

  “There was a time I might have killed to hear you say such a thing,” she said after a moment, her voice husky. Her mouth twisted slightly, wryly. “But that is long past, Leo. It is too late for talking now, so far after the fact. Surely you see that?”

  “Three years have passed since we were last together,” Leo said, unperturbed, keeping his attention focused on her face. She looked away and he felt the loss, as if she had deliberately shut him out. “I imagine that ought to provide us the necessary distance.”

  “The distance to do what?” she asked—almost wistfully, he thought. She was still gazing out at the dark gardens, a faint frown between her brows. “Rake over the old coals? Poke around for old wounds? I do not understand the purpose of such an exercise. What will it accomplish? Our scars are our scars. Must we compare them?”

  He searched her face, so much like a stranger’s, when he had once thought he’d known it and its secrets far better than he knew his own.

  He did not understand his own feelings. He wanted to go to her, to comfort her, and he could not understand the urge. The need for her body, for that addictive fire that raged between them—that he comprehended fully. But why should he want to chase the shadows from her eyes? Why should he yearn to make her smile? He wanted to focus on her duties, her obligations, the role he expected her to play. The rest of it, these softer urges, led directly to places within himself he had no desire to visit. He had walled them off long ago.

  “You have returned after a long absence,” he said, feeling as if he moved across shards of broken glass, buried mines. As if any wrong move might shatter them both.

  He was aware of the tension rising between them and aware that it was not sexual in origin. He knew better than to let down his walls and feel, as he had once allowed himself to do so disastrously in the seductive tropics of Hawaii. Yet he could not seem to block her as he knew he should.

  She shifted in her seat and her fingers crept up to her neck, as if she held her own pulse in her hand. Her eyes seemed huge and bruised, somehow, in the candlelight.

  “I have not exactly returned, have I?” she said quietly, her gaze mysterious, compelling, more like the sea now than the summer sky. “Not really. Soon it will be as if I never came to this place at all.”

  “If that is what you want,” he replied just as quietly, aware of the soft night all around them and the sense of change, of some kind of promise, in the air.

  He wanted to see into her. He wanted to know her secrets, finally, and in so doing vanquish the ghost of her that haunted him even now while she sat within reach.

  He wanted to reach out, but did not.

  Could not.

  He would not let himself, because it felt too much like it had so long before in Hawaii, when he had fallen too hard and trusted too much, and he had vowed he would never give into that weakness again. Not even for her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I WANT a great many things,” Bethany said, lulled by the strangest sensation of something almost like peace that hovered between them. It made her wonder. It made her reckless. It tempted her to forget. “But I am finally old enough to understand that not everything I want is good for me.”

  If she expected him to smile, or nod in agreement, she was disappointed. He only stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head slightly, dispelling the odd feeling.

  “From that I am to gather that it is your marriage you find … What is it?” He affected a total lack of understanding, as if it was perhaps the English she knew very well he spoke fluently that eluded him. She felt it like a slap. “Bad for your health?”

  It was Leo at his most patronizing and it reminded her forcibly of the reason why she was here—not to understand what had happened between them, but to put it behind her once and for all.

  She sighed, annoyed at herself for her momentary lapse, and busied herself with filling her plate. At least she knew that everything that was offered to her in this place would be excellent. Nothing else would be tolerated. She took a few slices of the chicken, and could not resist a large helping of the creamy risotto.

  “No answer?” he asked quietly. He let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Bethany straightened her shoulders and took a calming breath as she picked up her fork. “As it happens, I have given the matter some thought,” she said evenly. As if she was unaware he was coiled in his chair, waiting to strike. “I believe that when a marriage diminishes and degrades the people in it—” she began.

  He actually laughed then, cutting her off.

  “Such strong words,” he taunted her. “You feel degraded, Bethany? I degrade you?” He shook his head, his eyes glittering, as if she had accused him of a terrible crime—as if was not the simple truth.

  “You are the one who wanted a discussion, Leo,” she threw back at him, exasperated, and unable to completely repress her reaction to him even under these circumstances. What was the matter with her? “You should have made it clear you meant that discussion to be entirely on your terms, as ever! I can do without your scorn.”

  “What you would like to do without is the truth,” he said, all pretense of laughter gone from his hard face. The candles cast his features into harsh angles, forbidding shadows. “Because the truth is that you do not come out the victim in this scenario. The fact that you have cast yourself in that role is one more example of the infantile behavior you claim to have left behind you.”

  “You are proving my point,” she said, unable to keep the faint tremor from her voice. Even so, she kept her spine ramrod straight, determined to look strong no matter how she might feel when he ripped into her.

  He studied her for a moment and Bethany felt her face heat. Anger, she told herself. It was nothing more than anger, and never mind the twisting ache inside. Never mind the contradictory, baffling urge to reach out to him, to bridge the gap between them, no matter what it cost her.

  “Perhaps it is simply that you are too fragile to face up to who you really are,” he said softly. Deliberately.

  She let out a small laugh and then put down her fork, no longer able even to pretend to enjoy the food, no matter how perfectly prepared.

  “Who are you to tell me who I really am?” she asked with a kick of temper, clenching her hands into fists below the table, where he could not see. She had longed for him to know her, to see her, for years—but he never had. She shook away the old wants, the old needs, even as they seemed to sear through her, leaving deep marks behind. “When you are the person who knows me least of all?”

  “I know you,” he said, with that terrifying ring of finality, of certainty, that she could sense meant things to him that she was better off not knowing. “I know you in ways no one else could.”

  “If that was ever true, it has not been true for a long time,” she replied, choosing her words carefully. Trying to ignore the part of her that still desperately wanted him to know her the way he claimed he did, the part of her that wished so deeply that somehow, some way, he could.

  She shook her head, trying to ward off her own turmoil and his accusatory glare.

  “Let me guess,” he said icily. He did not move, and yet she could feel the way his gaze, his attention and temper focused on her, narrowing in on them both, trapping them in the grip of this roiling tension between them. “No doubt you have spent the past three years coming up with the perfect, bloodless fantasy to use as a comparison to our relationship. No doubt your supernaturally forgiving lover aids you in this. Anything to a
void looking at yourself with any form of honest appraisal, is that it?”

  Her temper flared. And for once she could think of no particular reason to keep it locked up. She told herself she had nothing to lose—it was all already lost. This was simply a pointless dance around the bonfire of what they had been. An opportunity to watch it all burn away into ash.

  So why should she bite her tongue?

  “I do not think marriage should be a monarchy, with you installed as king by divine right while I am expected to play the role of grateful, subservient subject,” she told him, the words three years in the making. For a brief moment she felt just as she sounded. Calm. Deadly. “It cannot even be called a marriage. It is an exercise in steamrolling, and I am tired of feeling flattened by you.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment. His expression was frozen, arrested. She was aware of the slight breeze against her bare skin, the dance of the candles in their crystal holders. She was not holding her breath, not quite. She felt as if she watched the scene from on high.

  She had never dared say such things to Leo before. How could she? Their relationship had been entirely based on his acknowledged superiority. What room had there been for her to call his actions or his assumptions into question?

  And she knew that her own appalling behavior had only made everything worse. Who would have listened to an out-of-control maniac who smashed things? Who would take the emotional mess seriously? Certainly not Leo.

  And not even herself, Bethany acknowledged with no little pain. That had come later.

  “You say the most extraordinary things,” he said coldly.

  Because Leo did not explode. Leo did not rage, yell or allow things to become messy. Leo did not, could not, feel.

  “I understand that this is all a foreign concept to someone who has issued orders to his minions from his cradle,” she said, her voice stiff from her own revelations, and only partially a response to his chilly glare, no matter how it pierced her. “Who has priceless paintings on his walls of his own family members. Who lives in a castle.”