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.”
“You quite mistake me,” he bit out. “I am astonished that you would have any thoughts at all on what might make for a good marriage. Real relationships are not conducted according to your every melodramatic whim and tantrum, Bethany.”
“That’s taking the concept of the pot calling the kettle black to the level of farce,” she replied, blinking away the avalanche of emotion that threatened to drag her under. There was no room for that here, now. And she could not be certain what lurked just on the other side.
His mouth flattened with displeasure, but she did not back down. Because, no matter what he believed, it was true.
He had left her to die of loneliness, and she nearly had.
“I am not the one who issued ultimatums and then, when they were not met, threw temper tantrums,” he said then. His mouth twisted; his dark eyes were condemning. “I am not the one who stubbornly refused contact for years in an extended fit of pique.”
“Stop it!” she hissed, but he gave no sign of hearing her. She had the sense that he had been waiting to say these things as long as she had. She could see the way he held himself, all that power and ferocity tightly leashed and controlled, even now.
“I am also not the one who issued a demand for a divorce instead of the polite greeting one might give a stranger on the street.” His eyes seemed to glow with his cold, consuming fury. He was, she realized, more angry than she had imagined. More angry than she had ever seen him. Was it sick that she wanted that to mean something? “And having done all of those things, seemingly without shame, I am not the one to sit here now and lecture on about successful marriages.”
She wanted to scream at him, to protest what he’d said, but how could she? She had done all of those things. Could he not see how he had driven her to it? How she had never had any other choice? How she had felt forced to flee—or she might have withered away to nothing but an empty shell?
“I have always been right here, Bethany,” he said, the anger she had never imagined she would see in him lighting him with a cold glow, making her yearn to warm him somehow, despite herself. “Right here, awaiting your return, should you ever condescend to recall your commitments.”
“I don’t know why you would expect—” she began, but cut herself off, her mind reeling. How could she ever imagine he might see these things from her perspective?
He saw only her abandonment of him. He never saw his own abandonment of her, because he had not physically left her. He had only disappeared in every other possible way. Yet he still considered himself firmly on the moral high ground.
“You to keep your promises?” he finished for her, his voice heavy with irony. When his gaze met hers it was too intense and angry, kicking into her and making her stomach clench and her breath catch. “Because you gave your word.”
She wanted to fight him, deny his condemnation—but she was much too afraid that was not what she really wanted. That beneath it, she only wanted those dark eyes to shine at her again, as they had once. And she could not let herself down that way. Not this time. Not again.
“You gave your word too,” she said in a determined undertone. “But that did not prevent you from conveniently—”
“Did I beat you?” he asked, his voice raw, yet still so fiercely controlled. Only his eyes showed any hint of the wildness within, so dark and stormy, bittersweet and on fire. “Did I take other women to my bed? Did I abuse you? Demean you? Did I fail to attend to your every need?”
He waved a hand at the castello.
“Is my home not big enough? Is it too rural? Would you prefer the house in Milan? Exactly what is the root of all this bitterness and hostility?” he demanded. “What did I do that was so terrible you punished me in the only way you could—by running away?”
She could not breathe for a long moment, could not manage it past the swell of agony that swept through her. When she could, she had to fight off tears. Was that truly how he saw her—no more than a spiteful little brat? She knew with a sudden, unbearable certainty that it was. He believed she’d left him on a whim—rather than in pieces.
“I can’t imagine why you ever wanted me in the first place,” she managed to say, her voice trembling, shaken to the bone.
“Oh, I want you.” His voice was far too raw then, with too many undercurrents, and spoke to all the sins she dared not name—all of which he had taught her. The look in his eyes set her afire. His expression was almost brooding. Something deeper, more painful, than simply wry. “It seems there is nothing at all you can do to keep me from wanting you, and you have certainly put that to the test.”
He did not move, he only watched her, and yet he seemed, suddenly, to be everywhere. It was as if she had forgotten the danger of being this close to him—of talking to him, of allowing him to weave his way into her psyche again—until this very second—and now she could notice nothing else.
Her heart beat in a jagged rhythm. Her mouth was far too dry. She felt as if her entire body was short-circuiting, shutting down. Readying itself for his touch.
It did not matter how much it hurt. She still wanted him. She always wanted him.
Blindly, she shoved away from the table and lurched to her feet. She knew only that she had to escape. She had to put distance between them, because he might have made a promise not to touch her of his own volition, but she knew all too well that she was the one who could not be trusted in that area.
She moved toward the French doors and she knew even as she reached for the handle that he was behind her. She did not have to turn and confirm it, not when she could feel him.
She stopped with her hand on the ornate handle and felt the heat of him at her back, so close she could smell the faintest hint of his cologne—so near that if she shifted her weight backward she would be nestled beneath his chin, her back against the hot, hard wall of his chest.
“You promised!” she whispered, desperate to run away and yet frozen in place. She wanted him, but she also wanted the comfort of his heat, his clos
eness, his scent.
He had been her man, her family, her love. She still did not know how to let go of any of that, only that she must.
Even so, her eyes drifted closed. “You said you would not …”
“Am I touching you?” he asked in that low, stirring tone that seemed to roll through her, quietly devastating her, reducing her to little more than mindlessness and need.
She turned then, before her knees collapsed beneath her, and found her back against the door with nothing before her but Leo. As if he was all the world.
He leaned closer, resting his hands against the paned glass on either side of her head, a move that brought his mouth nearly flush with hers.
And though she could feel him in every part of her—in her swollen breasts, her taut belly, her molten femininity—he did not touch her. He kept his promise. He only gazed down at her, his eyes hard with a passion she recognized all too well.
“I cannot stop wanting you,” he said then, his mouth a breath away, his sensual lips close enough to kiss. “And I have tried. Nights I lay awake, cursing your name, and yet here I am—as ready for you as if there was no history between us, no years apart, no demands for a divorce.”
“Leo …” But she could not seem to form any words save his name, even then, when she knew she should end this moment, whatever it was.
She should not let him speak these things out loud, making both of them remember. Making her yearn. Ache. Want.
But all she could do was stare up at him and hope her heart did not beat so hard, so frantically, that it might break through her own ribs as she half-feared it might.
“You are under my skin,” he whispered as if it was torn from him. “You are like a poison. You cannot seem to kill me, but I cannot seem to be rid of you.”
He had said too much, Leo thought, and yet he did not step back.
He could not seem to make his own body obey him, not when she was so close. He could feel her breath against his skin, close enough that he could smell the unique scent of her. Like lavender and vanilla—her own delectable perfume.
He could count the freckles that splayed across her nose, and knew what the larger one on her clavicle tasted like. He felt it when their breath began to move in sync, as it always had—as if their bodies insisted on synchronizing even as they dedicated themselves to remaining at war.
This close to her, he could not even remember why.
“You …” She could not manage to speak. He watched, fascinated, as she wet her soft lips and swallowed. “You must let me go.”
“How many times must I let you go?” he heard himself whisper. Worse, he heard the emotion that was underneath it. The jagged pain. What was more horrifying was that he did not immediately move away from her. Not even then.
“You say you want me,” she said in a low, urgent voice, her impossible blue eyes wide with a sheen that told him he was not the only one rubbed raw by this encounter, no matter that they were not actually touching.
“I do,” he agreed. “Just as you want me, Bethany. I can feel it. I can see it.”
“You say that,” she continued as if it hurt her to push the words out. Her eyes searched his, something desperate there reaching out to him. “But you only want me if you can keep me in a convenient box of your choosing. If I behave, if I conform, if I act according to your rules, then I am treated like a queen. But it’s still a box.”
“You are confusing a box with a bed,” he said. Her mouth was so close and her skin would be so soft and he could not believe he had made such a foolhardy promise, much less that he intended to keep it—even now when he was so hard it bordered on the painful.
“With you they are often the same thing,” she said.
No matter how much he yearned simply to sink into her, he could not miss the reproving tone she used. He tilted his head back slightly and gazed at her, taking in that high red flush across her neck, the determined set of her jaw, the cool gleam in her eyes.
“I am only telling you the truth,” she said after a long moment. She took a breath that lifted her breasts alluringly, but he refused to be sidetracked. “Nothing I did happened in a vacuum, Leo. You were as responsible for what happened in our marriage as I was. But I suppose it’s easier to look only at me, isn’t it?”
“I looked for you for three long years,” he gritted out. He was so close to her it bordered on madness, yet he still did not touch her. “But you were never where you were supposed to be. Tell me what I was meant to do. Beg? Plead? Weep?”
“Why not?” she whispered fiercely. “Why not all of the above, if that is how you feel?”
“I am not you,” he whispered back in the same hard tone, shoving through the things he refused to admit, even to himself. “I cannot flash my every emotion for all to see.”
“You cannot or you will not?” She moved then, only slightly, but it brought her shoulder into glancing contact with his arm. They both froze, focused on that single, accidental touch. He watched her swallow, the long, graceful column of her throat begging for his mouth, his tongue, his teeth.
“Tell me to touch you,” he ordered her huskily, their history forgotten in that moment like so much smoke. “Tell me to hold your face in my hands. Tell me to kiss you.”
Her lips parted on a soundless breath, but he felt it fan across his jaw. Her eyes widened, darkened. He could feel that shimmering electricity arc between them, hot and wild.
“Tell me …” he whispered, moving his mouth to hover near her ear, so very close, just out of reach. “Tell me to take you in my arms and make you mine. Again and again. Until you cannot remember your name. Or my name. Or why you left.”
* * *
She was almost his, until that last whispered sentence.
A chill snaked through her, and it gave her the strength to force open her eyes and remember. Why she was there. Why she could not simply surrender to him as every cell, every breath, every part of her longed to do. Why she could not let him cast this spell around her.
Not again.
“I think it is time for me to get some sleep,” she said, keeping her head turned and choosing her words so carefully, so desperately. “I think the traveling is catching up with me.”
He murmured something in Italian, something lyrical that she did not have to understand to know was all sex and command. She could feel it move between her legs, coil low in her belly and spiral along her skin until she shivered in reaction. But she did not look at him. She knew, somehow, that gazing into his eyes just then would be the end of her. She knew it.
“If that is what you wish,” he said eventually, and he pushed away. The night air seemed to rush at her, cooler than it had been moments before; shocking.
He stood only a foot or two away, his beautiful face shadowed, though his eyes burned with a fire she dared not touch. Or even acknowledge.
“I will see you in the morning,” she said with absurd, unnecessary courtesy.
His brows arched with a dark amusement, and she did not wait to see what he might say. Instead, she fled.
Again, she fled from him. She had spent her whole life running away from this man, it seemed. Was he right to accuse her as he had? Was he right to lay the blame at her feet?
She moved through the quiet halls as if pursued, though she knew he did not follow her. Not then. She closed the heavy door of her bedchamber tight behind her and did not so much as glance at the other door.
She did not let herself think about where it led or how easy it would be to simply walk through the doorway and succumb to what her body wanted—and what would be, she knew, so very easy. So deliriously easy. Far easier than these conversations that ripped apart scars she had thought long-healed.
She pulled off her gown, changed into the comfortable pajamas she had brought with her from Toronto, scrubbed her face until there was no hint of color left in her skin and crawled into the wide, empty bed.
It was as soft and inviting as she remembered. No place for terrifying, unwieldy e
motions. No room for a very old grief.
But she did not get to sleep for a long, long time.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE WAS waiting for her in the breakfast room the next morning.
She walked in, her head still a confused muddle from the night before, and there he was. The sunlight poured in through the high, arched windows and surrounded him with a golden halo, despite the fact he looked forbidding and unapproachable at the head of the table. His gaze rose to meet hers over the top of the paper he held before him, cool and remote, in direct contrast to the pool of light around him.
She knew perfectly well he was challenging her, and it hit her hard and true, like an electrical charge, sizzling directly into the coiled tension low in her belly and between her legs.
Somehow, Bethany managed to keep herself from stumbling in the high, wedged sandals she had foolishly opted to wear beneath a casual knit sundress. She could feel his gaze in every cell, along every nerve. She had to fight to breathe normally.
Pressing her lips together, she let the ever-present servant seat her with a solicitousness that struck her as an absurdly formal manner to take with the soon-to-be ex-wife. The room was bathed in light and seemed to shimmer with promise, from the painted medieval ceiling with its long, dark beams to the bright friezes that decorated the walls above the wainscoting.
She could sense more than feel Leo’s long legs stretched out beneath the polished wooden table, too close to her own, and wished that it was bigger or that she was further away from him instead of having to share a corner with him. As it was, she sat at a diagonal to Leo. But her body was not about to let her pretend she was not attuned to every single detail of his distressingly perfect appearance, the power he exuded as easily as he drew breath and the incredible, undeniable force of the pull he seemed to exert upon her.
Even now, when she had vowed to start anew this morning. When she had vowed not be so affected by him.
“Good morning,” he said, and she was all too aware of the amusement that lurked in his gaze, his voice, the slight twist of his sensual lips.
One Reckless Decision (Mills & Boon M&B): Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past (Special Releases) Page 40