If she turned her head too quickly she feared she would see her own ghost and his entwined together—on the thick rug beneath their feet, up against the door, on the window seat. They had always been insatiable. As their marriage had worn on and worsened, that had often been their only form of communication.
But those were ghosts, and this was now, and she knew exactly what that light in his eyes meant.
“I am sorry if I have begun to bore you,” she managed to say. “A solution, of course, is to allow me to remain in this room until we go to court. You need never see me until then.”
She sounded desperate to her own ears, yet Leo only smiled, a lazy, knowing smile that sent heat spiraling through her until her toes curled inside her shoes. It would be far too easy simply to move toward him. She knew he would catch her. He would sweep her into his arms and she would lose herself completely in that raging wildfire that was his to command.
A huge part of her wanted that, needed that, more than she wanted anything else—even her freedom. And that terrified her.
If she touched him, if she pressed her lips to his, she would forget. She would forget everything, as if it had all been a nightmare and he was the light of day. Wasn’t that exactly what he’d done for her after her father had died? But she had no idea how she would ever fight her way out of it—not again. Not whole.
And she could not be this broken again. Not ever again.
“That would not suit me at all,” he said, his attention focused on her mouth. “As I think you know.”
“I don’t want you to touch me!” she threw at him from the depths of her fear, her agony and her broken heart. Because she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she could not trust herself, not where he was concerned. She still wanted him too much. She bit her lip but then pulled herself together somehow, even as his arrogant brows climbed high.
“I beg your pardon?” He was all hauteur, untold centuries of nobility.
“You heard me.” She looked around as if there was anything that might redirect her focus when he was standing so close. She sucked in a breath and returned her gaze to his. “The chemistry between us is damaging. It can only lead to confusion.”
“I am not confused,” he offered, smirking slightly.
“I do not want you,” she lied, in a matter-of-fact voice. She did not smile; she met his gaze. “Not in that way. Not at all.”
She expected his temper. His disbelief. She was unprepared for the full force of his devastating smile. He crossed his arms over his tautly muscled chest and gazed at her almost fondly. Somehow, that was far worse than any sardonic expression. It made her almost yearn.
“You are such a liar,” he said softly, without heat. Flustered, she began to speak, but he cut her off. “You want me, Bethany. You always have and you always will, no matter what stories you choose to tell yourself.”
“Your conceit is astonishing,” she said even as her heart leapt in her chest and her legs felt shaky underneath her. Even as she felt the roll and sway, the seductive pull, of all that grief just beneath.
“Just as I want you,” he said, shrugging as if it was of no matter to him—as, she reminded herself forcefully, it doubtless was not. “It is inconvenient, perhaps, but nothing more dangerous than that.”
“Leo, I am telling you—” she began, feeling flushed and edgy.
“You need not concern yourself,” he interrupted her, his words casual, almost offhand, though his gaze burned. “I have no intention of seducing you into my bed. In fact, I will not touch you at all as long as you are here.”
She stared at him, letting those unexpected words sink in, telling herself that this was exactly what she wanted to hear, that this would make everything easy, that this was what she wanted. Though she could not entirely ignore the empty feeling that swamped her suddenly, nearly taking her off her feet.
“I am happy to hear that,” she said. His eyes seemed to see straight through her and she was as terrified of what he might see as of what she might feel. What she already felt.
His smile took on that edge again and the tension between them seemed to crackle with new electricity, making it hard to breathe.
“I will leave it to you,” he said in that compelling voice of his that slid like whiskey and chocolate over her, through her, inside of her.
“To me?” She could hardly do more than echo him.
“If you want me, Bethany, you must come to me.” His deep-brown eyes were mesmerizing, so dark and rich, with that gold gleam within. His voice lowered. “You must be the one to touch me, not the other way around.”
“That will work perfectly,” she said, her voice betraying her by cracking even as her breasts and her hidden core grew heavy and ached, yearned. “As I have absolutely no intention—”
“There are your intentions and then there is reality,” he said smoothly. His gaze sharpened suddenly, catching her off-guard. “You cannot keep your hands off me. You never could. But you prefer to pretend that the passion between us is something I use to control you. Is that not what you said so memorably? That I would prefer it if I could keep you chained to my bed? It certainly makes you feel more the martyr to think so.”
Bethany’s mouth fell open then. There was a heat behind her eyes and a riot in her limbs as she tried to make sense of what he was saying—what he was doing or, more to the point, deliberately not doing.
“I am not a martyr,” was all she could think to say, instantly wishing she could yank the words back into her mouth. She did not feel like a martyr, she felt adrift and unsteady, as she had always felt here.
“Indeed you are not,” he said softly, deliberately, that gleam in his eyes growing hard, seeming to take over the room, her pounding heart. “What you are is a liar. It is entirely up to you to prove otherwise.”
He thought she was a liar. He had said it before, and she had no doubt he meant it. It was almost amusing, she thought, unable to look away from him for a long, searing moment. It should have been amusing, really, and she wanted to laugh it off, but she found she had no voice. She could not seem to find it.
She could not reply in kind, or at all, and she did not know why that seemed to highlight everything they’d lost. What was being called a liar next to all of that?
“Eight o’clock,” he said with a certain finality and evident satisfaction. “Do not make me come and fetch you.”
Then he walked from the room and left her standing there, shocked, trembling and lost again, so very lost—as he had no doubt planned from the start.
There was so much she had forgotten, Bethany thought as she made her way through the castle’s quiet halls toward dinner moments before eight o’clock, as requested.
She had not expected to find so many memories when she’d ventured into her former closet and searched for something simple to wear to dinner. It was not quite a homecoming, and yet every gown, every bag, every shoe had seemed to whisper a different half-forgotten story to her.
They had all come flooding back to her without warning, leaving her raw and aching for a past she knew she needed to keep firmly behind her if she was to escape it. But the memories had rushed at her anyway.
A night out at the opera in Milan, where the glorious voices had seemed to pale next to the fire in Leo’s gaze that she’d believed could burn out everything else in the world. A weekend at a friend’s villa outside of Rome, replete with sunshine and laughter—and with her growing fear that she was losing him a constant sharpness underneath.
A rare public eruption of his fiercely contained temper on a side street in Verona while walking to a business dinner, quick, brutal and devastating. A passionate moment on a quiet bridge in Venice; the explosive, impossible desire that still shimmered between them had been the only way left to reach each other across the walls of bitterness and silence they’d erected.
So many images and recollections, none of which she had entertained in ages, all of them buffeting her, storming her defenses, making her feel weak, small, v
ulnerable in ways she hadn’t been in years.
She ran her hands along the swell of her hips as she walked, smoothing the silken, kelly-green material that flowed to her feet, trying to calm herself. The simple cowl-necked dress was the only item she’d been able to find that was both relatively restrained and unconnected to any of the explosive memories she had not known she’d been carrying around with her.
But it was not only the memories connected to her forgotten clothes that had unnerved her.
More than that, she’d realized during that confusing interaction with Leo that on some level she had forgotten who she was back then. The woman Leo had referred to so disparagingly—the one who had behaved so appallingly, who had, she was humiliated to recall, more than once destroyed more than one piece of china while in a temper—was not her.
That was not who she was, not anymore. It made her stomach hurt to think of it. To think of who he must see when he looked at her. To think that she remembered her isolation and the loss of all she had loved, but he remembered nothing but a termagant.
It had been that last night that had changed her, she realised, as she descended the great stone stair that dominated the front hall, rising from both sides to meet in the center and then veer off to the east and west wings. That last, shameful night. It was as if something had broken in her then, as if she’d been faced with the depths of her own temper, her own depraved passions. She’d lost that fiery, inconsolable part of herself, that wild, violent, mad part. For good? she thought.
Or perhaps it is Leo who stirs up all those dark and disgraceful urges, an insidious voice whispered. Perhaps he is the match. Perhaps without him you are simply tinder in a box, harmless and entirely free of fire.
“I am shocked,” came his lazy drawl, as if she’d summoned him simply by thinking of him.
Bethany’s head snapped up and she found Leo standing at the foot of the great stair, his brown eyes fathomless as he watched her approach.
“I had anticipated you would ignore what I told you and force me to come and deliver you to the table myself,” he continued, and she knew there was a part of him that wished she had done just that. Because there was a part of her that wished it too.
“As I keep attempting to explain to you,” she said, forcing a smile that seemed to scrape along all the places she was raw, “You do not know me any longer.”
“I am sure that is true,” he said, but there was an undercurrent in his rich voice that made her wonder what he did not say.
It was so unfair that he was who he was, she thought in a kind of despair as she continued to walk toward him, step by stone step.
The walls were covered with heavy tapestries and magnificent portraits of the Di Marco family from across the ages. Every step she took was an opportunity to note the well-documented provenance of the thrust of Leo’s haughty cheekbones, the fullness of his lips, the flashing, dark richness of his gaze, all laid out for her in an inexorable march through the generations. His height, his rangy male beauty, his thick and lustrous hair: all of this was as much his legacy as the castle they both stood in.
And he was not only the product of this elegant, aristocratic line—he was its masterpiece. Tonight he wore a dark suit she had no doubt he had had made to his specifications in one of Milan’s foremost ateliers, so that the charcoal-hued fabric clung to his every movement. He was a dream made flesh, every inch of him a prince and every part of him devastatingly attractive. It was hardwired into his very DNA.
How could she explain to this man what it was to feel isolated? He was never alone; he had servants, aides, dependants, villagers, employees. Failing that, he had some eight centuries of well-documented family history to keep him company. He was always surrounded by people in one way or another.
Bethany had only had her father since she’d been tiny, and then she’d had only Leo. But soon she had lost him too, and it had broken her in ways she knew that he—who had never had no one, who could not conceive of such a thing—would never, ever understand. She only knew that she could not allow it to happen a second time or she was afraid she would disappear altogether.
“Why do you frown?” he asked quietly, his gaze disconcertingly warm, incisive—dangerous.
“Am I?” Bethany tried to smooth her features into something more appropriate as she finally came to a stop on the step just above him—something more uninviting, more appropriate for a divorcing couple. “I was thinking of all these portraits,” she said, which was not untrue, and waved a hand at the walls. “I was wondering when yours will grace the walls.”
“On my fortieth birthday,” he replied at once, his brows arching. He smirked slightly, and his tone turned sardonic. “Do you have an artist in mind? Perhaps your lover is a painter. What a delightful commission that would be.”
Bethany pulled in a long breath, determined not to react to him as he obviously wished her to do. Determined not to feel slapped down, somehow—after all, she was the one who had introduced the concept of a lover into this mess. She was lucky Leo preferred to make sardonic remarks and was not altogether more angry, as she’d expected him to be. She was somewhat mystified he was not.
She forced another smile, hiding the sharp edges she did not wish to feel, pretending they did not exist.
“I only wondered how odd it must be to grow up under the gaze of so many men who look so much like you,” she said. “You must never have spent even a moment imagining who you might be when you grew up. You already knew exactly what was in store for you.”
She looked at the nearest painting, a well-known Giotto portrait of one of the earliest Di Marco princes, who looked like a shorter, rounder, eccentrically clad version of the man in front of her.
“I am my family’s history,” he said matter-of-factly, yet not without a certain resolute pride. She could feel the current of it in him, around him. “I am unintelligible without it.”
He spoke in an even sort of tone, as if he expected her to fight him about it. Had she done that before? she wondered suddenly. Had she argued simply for the sake of arguing? Or had she simply been too young then to understand how any history could shape and mold whomever it touched? She wondered if some day she would think about their complicated history without the attendant surge of anger and the darker current of grief.
“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.
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