Princess From the Past

by Caitlin Crews

  She would have chosen far better armor to ward him off, to keep him at arm’s length where he belonged.

  As if he could read her as easily as she’d read the novel at her feet, Leo’s full lips quirked slightly, knowingly. Mockingly, she thought, and frowned.

  She did not understand the tension that rolled through the room, seeming to rebound off of the elegant wall-hangings. She told herself it was no more complicated than his sudden return, his unexpected appearance before her.

  The castello had been a very different place while he’d been gone. She could remember what it had been like before, every time Leo had left on another one of his business trips. He had gone to Bangkok, New York, Tokyo, Singapore—and she had been trapped.

  In retrospect, it was so easy to see how well the cousins had played on her fears. While Leo had been in residence, they’d been nothing but charming—yet once he’d left, they’d attacked. But this time the castello had been empty of their negative voices.

  Bethany had been able to wander through it at her leisure, with no one whispering poison in her ear or pointing out her unsuitability at every turn. It was as if she’d come to the place brand new. As if it were scrubbed free of ghosts.

  She had not cared for the softening she had felt as she moved through the place, exploring it as if it were a beloved museum of a house she’d once known, a home. As if, given the opportunity, she could truly fall in love with it as she had when she’d first laid eyes on it so long ago.

  She did not feel so differently about the man, she thought as she studied him now, and that shook her, down to her bones and back again. Her frown deepened, even as her heart began to pound.

  “You look as if you have seen a ghost,” he said with his usual inconvenient perceptiveness. Bethany actually smiled then, very nearly amused at her own predictability where this man was concerned, but covered it by leaning down and reaching for her book.

  “Quite the opposite,” she murmured.

  She straightened and pushed her curls back from her face with one hand. She wished she had tamed the great mess of them into an elegant chignon or a sleek bun. She wished she had it in her to be appropriate. But then, she reminded herself, she had no need to seek his approval any longer. She told herself she did not want to, in any event, no matter the quickening in her pulse.

  She placed the book next to her on the settee, and took her time about looking up at him again. “I hope you have come to tell me it is time to visit the divorce court?”

  His expression darkened. He was still propped up against the doorjamb, yet somehow he had taken over the whole of the small room in that way of his, using up all the air, stealing all the light.

  “I am afraid not,” he drawled. There was something she couldn’t quite understand in his tone, something she did not want to comprehend in his gaze. “Though your impatience is duly noted.”

  “I have been here for days and days,” she pointed out mildly enough. “I did not ask you to travel half the world away. Once again, I must remind you that I have an entire life in Toronto—”

  “You do not need to remind me, Bethany,” he interrupted silkily, her name like some kind of incantation on his lips. She shivered involuntarily. His gaze slammed into hers. “I think of your lover often. It is a subject I find unaccountably captivating.”

  Her breath deserted her then, and she realized that she had actually forgotten all about that seemingly harmless lie. She wrenched her gaze away from his and contemplated her hands for one moment, then another, while she attempted to remain calm. Why did she have the near-overwhelming urge to confess the truth to him? Did she really believe that would change anything?

  “My lover,” she repeated.

  “Of course,” Leo said, his gaze never leaving her face. “We must make sure we do not forget him in all of this.”

  She fought off the flush of temper that colored her face. None of that mattered now. And she knew why he pretended to care about any lover she might have taken—he sought to own her, to control her, because she bore his name. It was about his reputation. His honor. Him—and that damned Di Marco legacy that he saw as being the most important part of himself.

  “I am surprised that you have taken the news of him so …easily,” she said, holding herself too still. “I rather thought you would have a different reaction.”

  “The fact that you have taken a lover, Bethany, is a grave and deep insult to my honor and to my name,” Leo said softly, a thundercloud in his coffee eyes—confirming her own conclusions that simply. But then his brows rose. “But, since you are in such a great hurry to divest yourself of that name, thus removing the stain upon the Di Marco name, why should I object?”

  She stared at him, a mix of despair and fury swirling in her belly, making her flush red. He would never, ever change. He could not change. She even understood that salient truth differently now, having had these past days to really investigate the mausoleum where he’d been raised, and having finally, belatedly understood the kind of life he must have led.

  He had been carefully cultivated his whole life to be exactly who he was. He’d been educated, molded, primed and prepared to assume his title, his wealth, his lands and his many business concerns. She was the idiot for having ever expected something different.

  And if his belief that she could have betrayed him would help her gain her freedom, that was what she wanted. What she needed. She did not really believe that she could hurt him—that it was possible to hurt him. She told herself the softening she felt inside, the longing to explain herself, was no more than a distraction. She took a deep breath and refused to allow herself that distraction.

  “What is your excuse this time?” she asked finally.

  She raised her gaze to his and was surprised at the expression she found there. Not the fury she might have expected. Something softer, more considering. More dangerous. Her pulse skipped, then took on a staccato beat.

  “For not going to court immediately?” she hastened to add.

  He shrugged, a wonderfully unconcerned Italian gesture that should not have warmed her as it did. What was the matter with her? Their most recent parting had been bleak, and yet she practically fell at his feet simply because he’d bothered to return?

  She was aghast at her own weakness. Her susceptibility. She knew that his vow to keep from touching her was a godsend. It might very well be the only thing that saved her from herself.

  “It is Friday afternoon,” he said. When she stared at him blankly, he laughed. “The court is not open on the weekend, Bethany. And Monday is a holiday. I am afraid you must suffer through a few more days as my wife.”

  She could not understand the undercurrents that swirled between them then. It was as if he’d changed somehow, as if everything had changed without her noticing it—but why should it have? She remembered his bitter expression in the breakfast room, the things he’d said, the same old cycle of their frustrating conversation. Blame, recrimination and that ever-tightening noose of shame and hurt she carried inside of her, made all the more acute when she was with him.

  She’d had days to ponder the whole of that interaction, and had come away none the wiser. Yet somehow she was even further determined to simply put an end to the back and forth. What was the point of it, when it got them nowhere, when it only made her feel worse?

  He moved farther into the room and Bethany had to fight the urge to rise to her feet, to face him on a more equal physical level. The room was too small, she told herself, and he too easily dominated it. That did not mean he dominated her. She would not let it. She would not let him.

  “Have you ever wondered what would happen if I did not, as you say, keep you in a box?” he asked, his voice so smooth, so quiet, it washed through her like wine. Like heat. It took her too long to make sense of what he’d said. She blinked. If he had produced a second head from the back of his sweater and begun speaking with it, Bethany could not have been more surprised.

  “Of course I have,” she
said, too shocked to be careful. “Just as I wonder what the world would be like if Santa Claus were real, or if all manner of magical creatures walked among us.”

  He did not take the bait. His inky dark brows rose, daring her, and she felt herself flush. Then, unaccountably, an edgy kind of anger swept through her, cramping her belly and making her pulse pound.

  “I am not going to play games with you, Leo,” she said stiffly, a sudden, terrific storm swirling inside of her, clouds and panic and thunder. She shot to her feet and found her hands in tight fists at her sides. “I am not going to have fairy tale conversations with you, or salt the wounds with discussions of ‘what if.’”

  “Coward.”

  It was such a little word, said so softly, almost kindly—yet it set Bethany ablaze. She felt the kick of her temper like a wildfire and clamped down on it desperately. She would not implode. She would not give him the satisfaction of making her do so. She would not crack, not now, not after she had worked so hard to remain calm and cool around him. She only glared at him mutinously.

  “You are a coward,” he repeated with a gleam in his eyes that she could not mistake for anything save what it was: satisfaction. That he was getting to her. That he could poke at her. He was not the only one with the ability to read things he should not be able to see. “You have complained at length that I did this thing to you, that I insisted upon it—but, when I ask you to imagine what it might be like if I did not, you lose your temper. You cannot even have the conversation. What are you afraid of?”

  “I do not see the point of hypothetical discussions,” she said as icily as she could.

  She recognized on some dim level that she wanted to scream. To let everything out in a rush, like a tidal wave. But why should she feel this way? Surely there were any number of things that he’d already said to her that were far, far worse than this game he suddenly wanted to play.

  “Then by all means let us not dwell in hypotheticals,” he said smoothly—almost, she thought with sudden suspicion, as if he had planned this. He opened up his hands and spread them wide, as if between them he held all the world. “Consider yourself out of the box, Bethany. What happens now?”

  She knew then, with shattering insight, why her reaction was this unwieldy surge of rage, this piping-hot furnace of anger—it covered up the dangerous longing beneath. The quicksand of her long-lost dreams, her once-upon-a-time, naïve wishes, the epic and impossible hopes she’d pinned on this frustrating man. Her prince.

  For a long moment she felt suspended in his knowing gaze, lost in it, as if he was truly offering her the things she was afraid to admit she still wanted.

  Wanted once, she amended quickly, but no more. I want nothing from him any longer—this is only a memory. Just a game. It’s not real.

  It could not be real. What she felt as she stared at him was an echo, surely? Nothing more.

  “Why would you want to do this?” she heard herself ask as if from afar. As if someone else had said it.

  The drawing room, with its scarlets and golds, its exquisitely crafted furniture and graceful wall-hangings, disappeared. She could not feel the floor beneath her bare feet. She could not see anything but his fierce, focused gaze. There was only Leo and the vast sea of things she wanted from him that she could never, ever have.

  “Why not?” he asked in the same tone, as if they stood together, yet still not touching, on the edge of a vast precipice and below them was nothing but darkness and turmoil. “What is left for us to lose?”

  Bethany understood in that moment that she was every bit the coward that he had called her, and it galled her. Deeply. She felt her temper dissipate as if it had never been, leaving her slightly nauseated in its aftermath. But she took a deep breath, blinked away the sheen of anger and panicked temper in her eyes and confronted the facts. They were steadying, somehow, for all she would have preferred to ignore them.

  There was truly nothing left to lose here, just as he’d said. So why was she so determined to protect herself? Why did she imagine her girlish, silly fantasies about who they could have been would matter once these strange in-between days were finished? Why did she act as if it would kill her to let him know how much she had once wanted him, and how desperately?

  None of this had killed her yet, after all, and she had spent long nights wishing it would, hoping it would, so she would no longer have to live like such a broken, ruined thing. So she would not have to face herself and figure out how to survive him. The likelihood was that she would live through this, however unpleasant the process might be. And if that was the case why should she keep up the fruitless pretenses that had never protected her from him in the first place?

  What did she have left except the truth, no matter how unvarnished?

  “I cannot bear it if you use this as one more weapon against me,” she said, feeling stripped and naked in a way she never had before, not even in the worst ugliness of their previous battles. Her hands fell, empty, against her thighs. “I cannot bear it if you mock this too.”

  His dark eyes glittered with something heavy and intense, but he did not look away. She respected him more, perhaps, because he did not rush to give her assurances she would have questioned anyway. She did not know why she trusted him more in this strange, bare moment than she ever had before. She did not know why it mattered, but it did. Something hard and bright kindled to life in her broken, battered heart, though she refused to look at it closely.

  “I cannot promise you anything,” he said after a long moment, still looking at her as if she was made of glass that only he could see through. “But I can try.”

  Bare feet and a picnic basket, of all things.

  Those were her first two demands the following morning when she met him at breakfast with a sparkle in her bright summer eyes. Leo had not seen her eyes dance like that, merry and mischievous, in far too long. He did not wish to speculate about the surprising depth of his own reaction.

  “I beg your pardon?” he asked, but he was only feigning his customary hauteur. She smiled, that lush mouth curving in a way that sent heat straight to his head, his groin. Oh, the ways he wanted her. But he could not take her as he yearned to do. He could only wait, though it rankled more with each passing second. “You wish for me to scrabble around in the dirt?”

  “Like the common peasant you will never, ever be,” she confirmed with no little satisfaction and arched her fine, dark brows challengingly when he laughed.

  “And just like that a lifetime of assumptions about the fairer sex disappears into the ether,” he said dryly. He let his eyes trace a longing pattern along her delicate neck, deep into the shadow between the breasts her blouse concealed. His fingers twitched with the need to touch her, to suit action to yearning, but he shoved it aside. “One would think they’d all prefer the prince to the frog, but not you, Bethany. Of course not you.”

  His words sat there between them on the gleaming breakfast table, shining in the morning light, weaving in between the platters of food and carafes of steaming coffee, hot tea, and freshly squeezed juices. He had meant them playfully enough, but her expression changed, becoming more guarded as she gazed at him. She cleared her throat and shifted slightly in her chair.

  “There is no point playing these games,” she said, her voice stiffer than it had been before. And, he thought, far sadder. He wished he did not feel both as a personal loss. “I don’t know why we are bothering. Nothing will change the facts of our situation.”

  “Indeed, nothing will,” he agreed, aware that he and she had very different ideas about what those facts entailed. But this was not the time to explore those differences. This was no time to feel.

  What was the matter with him? This entire situation was about the fulfillment of obligations—hers. He did not know why he was entertaining her requests, worrying about whether or not he had treated her fairly. It did not signify; no matter how she had been treated, it was time to take her rightful place at his side. He was not a man who failed twi
ce and, having accepted his first failure, he knew he would not repeat it. He should not allow anything else to keep him from securing her—or, at the very least, explaining to her exactly what he planned.

  Annoyed with himself, and his own inability to say what he should, he rose and headed toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” she asked. He was sure it said things about him he was better off not examining that he was pleased to hear the uncertainty in her voice.

  Why should he be the only one left unsettled by these seething, unmanageable, unspoken issues that swirled between them, making every moment fraught with tension? History? Longing? Perhaps that was why he did not call this ill-conceived game of hers to a halt. Perhaps that was why he continued to indulge her.

  He turned at the door and let his gaze fall on her. She was so artlessly beautiful, this faithless wife of his, with the light streaming in to light up her face, make a symphony of her glorious eyes and wash her dark curls with gold. He had never been able to control this need for her that ravaged through him, that compelled him, that never, ever left him.

  She bit at her lower lip, and he felt it as if she’d sunk those white teeth into his own flesh. He wanted to taste her more than he could remember wanting anything else. But first he was going to play this game of hers. And he was going to win it.

  Then, perhaps, they could compare their facts and discuss a few home truths he was certain she would not like at all.

  Leo shoved the burning desire as far down as he could and forced himself to look at her blandly, politely. As if he could not imagine six separate ways to take her right here, right now. On the table, on the floor, up against the windows with the light bathing them in—

  But that was not productive.

  “I must have my valet prepare the appropriate attire to complement bare feet,” he said instead, lazily.

  He gazed at her until her neck washed red, and then he smiled, because he knew exactly how she felt. Winded. Hungry. And resentful of both.