Settled in her seat, the thick white linen napkin draped over her lap, Bethany faced him fully, to offer the expected polite greeting that would prove her to be as unaffected as he was. To present him with the cool and calm façade that she knew she needed to use if she was to survive any of this intact.
But she froze when her eyes met his. The dark, passionate, starkly sexual dreams that had kept her half-awake and tormented with longing the whole of the endless night rose again in her head, taunting her. Shocking her. She could see all of that and more in his black-coffee gaze.
He did not merely look at her—he devoured her, his eyes hot and hard.
Hungry.
Her lips parted slightly as her breath deserted her. She felt her eyes glaze over, and that same tell-tale flush begin to heat its way along her breasts and neck.
It was as if he’d touched her, as if he was touching her right now—as if he’d reached over, yanked her into his lap and finally fixed that wicked mouth of his to hers. When all he had really done was greet her and then watch her, hard male satisfaction gleaming in his eyes and stamped across his beautiful, impossible face.
She did not need to be a mind reader to realize that he knew exactly what her flush meant—that he suspected she had tossed and turned, her body aching for him, all night long. Leo knew exactly what he did to her—what she felt—simply because of his proximity.
He knew.
“All you need to do is touch me,” he said now, his intoxicating voice slightly hoarse, as if his own want shook him as it shook her. “It would take so very little, Bethany. You need only reach your hand to mine. You need only—”
“Leo, please,” she said, trying desperately to sound stern instead of weak, all too aware that she fell far short. “The only thing I want right now is coffee.”
“Of course,” he said, not even attempting to hide his sardonic amusement. “My apologies.” He did not even need to call her a liar. It hung between them like a shout.
Bethany scowled at her plate as the efficient staff poured her thick, aromatic coffee and placed the toast and jam she had always favored before her. She did not want to think about the fact that her preferences still registered here. She would not consider the ramifications of that.
Instead, she somehow managed to keep her hands from shaking as she lifted her delicate china coffee cup to her lips and drank the rich brew. Only after she’d taken a few bracing, head-clearing sips could she bear to look at him again.
He had placed his newspaper to the side of his plate. He lounged back against his chair, his expression brooding, one hand supporting his jaw. He looked every inch the prince, the magnate, the duly crowned emperor of his vast and ever-expanding personal empire.
He wore another perfectly tailored suit, the charcoal fabric molded to his shoulders, pressed lovingly to his fine chest. He was freshly shaved, newly showered—his dark hair glossy, begging for her fingers to run through it. He was like a dream made flesh. Her dream, specifically. The explicit, delicious dream that had tortured her all night long.
But she could not reach across the divide between them, no matter how much she longed to do it. She could not allow herself to fall again, not when she knew exactly how hard that landing was. And how impossible it seemed to her that she would ever truly climb back to her feet and walk away from him.
“I must go to Sydney,” he said into the simmering silence. She had the sense he picked his words carefully, for all his voice remained cool and unemotional. “There are fires to put out, I am afraid, and only I can do it.”
“You are going to Australia?” she asked, jolted from her own depressing cycle of thoughts. “Today?”
“I am interested in some hotels there,” he said. Again, with care. “We are at a delicate stage in the negotiations.” He shrugged, though his gaze did not leave her face or soften at all. “I did not expect that I would have to attend to this personally.”
Her mind raced. What exactly was he saying? But then, she knew. Hadn’t she been here before? Repeatedly? There was always something, somewhere, that required his attention. A day here. A week there. Always at the last minute. Always non-negotiable.
“How long will you be gone?” she asked with as little expression as she could manage. She picked up a piece of perfectly toasted bread then dropped it again, unable to conceive of putting anything in her mouth when her throat felt too dry and her stomach clenched.
“It should not take long,” he said, his own tone measured. He watched her, his expression cool.
“Which, if memory serves, can mean anything from an evening to two weeks,” she said crisply. “A month? Six weeks? Who can say, when duty calls?”
He only lifted a brow and gazed at her, his expression inscrutable. After a moment he lifted his hand and with a careless wave dismissed the hovering servants. The way he had always done—as a precaution, he had said once, so condescendingly, should she fly off the handle.
She gritted her teeth and shoved aside the humiliating memories. The tension that always swirled between them seemed to tighten, to pull at her, hard and hot.
“I sense this is a problem for you,” he said with exaggerated patience.
He had said such things before, she recalled. A problem for you. The implication being, as ever, that only a hysteric like Bethany would ever dream of finding his business affairs personally objectionable. It made her want to scream.
But she would not give him the satisfaction of reducing her to that. She would tear out her own throat first.
“Why am I here?” she asked quietly. A sudden thought occurred to her and she could not hold it back. “Did you plan this?”
“It is business, Bethany,” he said, his voice dismissive. “I know you choose to concoct plots and conspiracies wherever you look, but it is only business.”
Any pretense of an appetite deserted her and she stood, pushing her chair back with a loud screech as she rose to her feet. The high shoes she’d worn to make his height seem less impressive compared to her own now seemed precarious, but she refused to show it.
“I might as well go home to Toronto and continue living this mockery of a life,” she began, as angry that she had not foreseen something like this as that he was behaving in the same manner he always had: putting his title above his wife.
“I cannot control the entire world, Bethany,” he said in that tone she loathed, the one that made her feel like an out-of-control, embarrassing infant—the tone that had so often goaded her into becoming exactly that. “I would prefer not to have to leave you now that you have finally returned to Italy, but I must. What would you have me do? Lose billions because you are in a snit?”
She fought off the haze of fury that descended on her then, and did not care if he could see that her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. She wanted to do more than simply ball up her hands in futility. She wanted to scream. She wanted to reach him, somehow. She wanted to make him feel this small, this unimportant, this useless.
But that would be descending to levels she never planned to visit again. She did not care that he stared at her while she fought her own demons. When she had battled herself into some semblance of control, she dared to look at him again.
“I understand that you need to speak to me this way,” she said after a long moment. She was proud that her voice neither wavered nor cracked. “It even makes sense. Heaven forfend you treat me like an equal. Like a partner. That might make your own behavior subject to scrutiny, and the Principe di Felici cannot have that. Far better to manipulate the situation—to manipulate me into acting out the only way I could.”
“You cannot be serious.” He even let out a scoffing sort of laugh. “Is there nothing you are not prepared to throw at me? No accusation too big or too small?”
“You got to remain the long-suffering adult, while I got to be the screaming child,” she continued as if he had not spoken. “It was a great disservice to both of us.” She spread her palms wide as if she could encompass
everything they’d destroyed, all they’d lost. “But I am not the same person, Leo. I am not going to break down into a tantrum so that you can feel better about yourself.”
“All I have ever wanted is for you to act as you should,” he threw at her, no longer quite so languid. His jaw was set, his dark eyes glittering as he rose to his feet. They faced each other across the table, too close and yet, as ever, so very far apart. “But it seems to me I was nothing more than a replacement parent for you.”
A surprising wave of grief for her lost father washed through her, combined with a different kind of grief for the things she had not realized she’d wanted when she had married this man.
The things she had not realized she had inadvertently asked for, that she had not liked at all when he’d provided them. Like this impossible, disastrous, circular dynamic that seemed to engulf them, that she could not seem to fight off or freeze out or flee from.
“But what about your behavior?” she managed to get out, fighting for control, her hold on her emotions tenuous as things she thought she’d never dare say flowed from her mouth. “Never a husband. Never a lover. Always the parent. What could I be, except a child?” She shook her head in astonishment—and censure. “And then you wanted to actually have one, too?”
“I must have an heir,” he snapped, his expression frozen. “I never made any secret of that. You are well aware it is my primary duty as the Principe di Felici.”
“Let us not forget that,” she threw back at him, her voice uneven to match the heaviness and wildness in her chest. “Let us not forget for even one moment that you are your duty first, your legacy second and only thereafter a man!”
“Is this what you learned in your years away, Bethany?” he asked after a brief, tense pause, his tone dangerous. Hard like a bullet. “This apportioning of blame?”
“I don’t know who to blame,” she admitted, the sea of emotion she’d fought to keep at bay choking her suddenly. “But it hardly matters anymore. We both paid for it, didn’t we?”
When he did not speak, when he only gazed at her with fire and bitterness in equal measure, his mouth a grim line, she sighed.
Did his silence not say all there was to say? Wasn’t this the tragic truth of their short marriage? He would not speak to her about the things that mattered, and he would not listen to her. She could only scream, and she could never reach him.
It hurt to look at it, so stark and unadorned in the bright morning sunshine. It hurt in ways she thought might take her lifetimes to overcome. But she would overcome this somehow. She would do more than simply survive him. She would.
“Go to Sydney, Leo,” she said quietly, because there was nothing left to say. There never had been. “I do not care how long it takes. I will be here when you deign to return, ready and waiting to finally put all of this behind us.”
Leo was in a towering rage, a fact he did nothing to conceal from his aides when they met his jet in Sydney and whisked him away to the sumptuous suite that awaited him at the hotel he no longer cared at all if he owned. He had stewed over Bethany’s words the whole way from Milan, and had reached nothing even approaching a satisfying conclusion.
He started to worry that he never would—which was entirely unacceptable.
The picture she’d painted of their marriage had enraged him. It had infuriated him that night over dinner, and it had further incensed him this morning. Who was she to accuse him of such things, when her own sins were so great and egregious? When he was the one who had remained and she the one who had abandoned their marriage?
But his rage had eased the further he’d flown from the castello. His reluctance to be parted from her grew, no matter how angry she made him, and he found himself unable to maintain that level of fury.
Partly, it had been the brash courage written all over her face, as if she had had to fight herself to confront him in the way she had. He could not seem to force the image from his mind. Her remarkable eyes, blazing with bravado and no little trepidation. Her spine so straight, her chin high, her mouth set in a fierce line. Did it require so much strength to speak her mind to him, however off-base? Was he such a monster in her mind, after all they had shared?
What did that say about the kind of man he was? But he was afraid he already knew, and he did not care for the twist of self-recrimination that the knowledge brought him.
He could remember all too well his father’s thundering voice booming through the halls of the Di Marco estates, the shouting and the sneering, his mother’s bowed head and set, miserable expression. He remembered the way his mother had flinched away from the strong, cruel fingers on her upper arm. He remembered the curl of his father’s lip when he had referred to her, when she’d not been in the room—and, worse, when she had been.
Leo did not like the juxtaposition at all.
But it was impossible, he told himself grimly. He was not Domenico Di Marco, the bully. He had never laid a finger on his wife. He had never done anything that should make any woman cower from him in fear, much less this particular woman. He had spent his life ensuring that he was absolutely nothing like his father.
Except … He remembered the look in Bethany’s eyes three years ago. That misery. That fear. He had found it infuriating then—unacceptable that she could be so desperately miserable when he had given her so much and asked for so little in return. It had never crossed his mind that she might have had the slightest reason to feel that way.
She’d had no reason! he told himself angrily. Just as she has no basis for her accusations now!
Later, he sat in a boardroom packed with financial advisors and consultants who were paid to impress him. He pretended to watch yet one more presentation with the discerning eye for which he was so renowned. But he could not seem to concentrate on dry facts and figures, projections and market analysis. He could not seem to think of anything but Bethany.
I do not think marriage should be a monarchy, he heard her say over and over again on an endless loop in his brain. I am tired of feeling flattened by you.
His instinct was to dismiss what she said out of hand. She would say anything to try to hurt him. She had proven that to be true over and over again. She was interested in scoring points, that was all.
But he could not quite believe it.
It would have been one thing if she’d lapsed into her customary hysteria. It was so easy to ignore what she said when it was screamed or accompanied by a flying missile in the form of priceless china or ancient vases. But the Bethany who had faced him this morning had not flown off the handle, though she had been visibly upset by one more round in their endless, excruciating war.
She had fought for calm instead of succumbing to her temper and emotions, yet even so he had seen exactly how much that fight had cost her. He had seen the defeat and the pain written across her face as if, once more, he had disappointed her.
He wished that did not eat at him, but it did.
You only want me if you can keep me in a convenient box of your choosing, she had said. It resonated within him in a way he hated. She had accused him of wanting to be the father figure, the parent, the adult in their relationship. He had never wanted that, had he? That had been a reaction to her, hadn’t it? Never a husband, she had said. Always the parent. What could I be, except a child?
A feeling he did not like at all snaked through him then as he accepted the fact that three years ago, he would not even have tried to figure out where she was coming from. He had not bothered.
He had simply let her go when it had occurred to him that perhaps the polish and experience of a few years’ growth might work wonders for the brand new, far-too-young wife he had inexplicably taken, upsetting a lifetime’s worth of expectations. He had been weary of all the fighting, all the wild uncertainty and drama. He had wanted her to turn into the wife he had been expected to marry all along, the wife he’d always been told he, as the Principe di Felici, needed to marry to fulfill his obligations. He had wanted her to be dutiful and u
nobjectionable.
What was that, if not a box? The very same box, in fact, in which he had lived his whole life?
The day’s business was concluded in due course, and Leo sat through a tedious dinner with his soon-to-be new partners, forcing himself to play along with the expected joviality when he could not have felt less disposed to do so. Finally, after an endless round of drinks and toasts—that he found slightly premature, given the contracts that had yet to be signed and his lawyers’ ability to ferret out objections to every clause they viewed—he was able to retire to his rooms and drop the act.
He had long ago stopped questioning how Bethany could haunt him so thoroughly in places she had never been. And yet, as he sat out on the balcony and soaked in the mild Sydney autumn night, it was as if she sat beside him, astride him. It was as if he could smell the rich, sweet scent of her skin, as if he could hear the cadence of her voice echo all around him, as if from the city itself.
Was every man doomed to become his father? He rejected the idea, but it was harder to push away than it should have been. Because, if he cast aside his own anger and frustration long enough, the view into their marriage from Bethany’s perspective was not at all pretty. He had failed her.
He faced the truth of that and sighed slightly.
He had not protected her from his spiteful cousins, when he should have known the trouble they would cause with their insinuations and their ingrained snobbery. He had not properly prepared her for how different his daily life was from their Hawaiian idyll. And he had been the older, experienced one. He still was. It had surely been his responsibility to make sure she felt secure, safe, at home in a place that he knew had been wildly foreign to her. And he had not done it.
He had not done it.
He had been so quick to accuse her of all manner of ills, but he had never thought to examine his own behavior. Who was the child—the woman who had been so sheltered and naïve? Or the man who had such a high opinion of himself it had never occurred to him to see what responsibility lay at his feet for the mess of his own marriage?
One Reckless Decision (Mills & Boon M&B): Majesty, Mistress...Missing Heir / Katrakis's Last Mistress / Princess From the Past (Special Releases) Page 41