“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 impre
ss 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 unobjectionable.
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?
Leo sat in the dark for a long time, staring out at the lights of the city, lost in his own thoughts. In the past. Deep in a pair of bright blue eyes he was determined he would see smiling once again, if it killed him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I DO NOT wish to put you in a box,” Leo announced, striding into the small drawing room off the principessa’s suite.
Bethany was so startled she dropped the book she was reading, letting the heavy first edition thud to the floor beside the gracefully bowed legs of the scarlet and white settee.
“Quite the contrary.”
She had not seen him in days. Four days, to be precise.
She sat up, swinging her legs to the floor and straightening her shoulders as her eyes drank him in, as they always did and always had, no matter how angry and hurt she had been when he reappeared. She could not seem to help herself. Her heart leapt, no matter how sternly she lectured herself against such foolishness.
Since she could not control it, she tried instead to ignore it, and focused on him instead.
He looked …different, somehow. Bethany’s senses, more attuned to him than she was at all comfortable with, whispered an alert.
Leo’s dark eyes glittered in a way that made the edgy need in her belly punch to life and roll lower, setting her alight. His mouth was set into a firm, determined line. He was dressed impeccably in a black jacket over a soft cashmere sweater, his legs packed into dark trousers. Even relatively casually dressed, he was fully the prince. Only he could look so regal so effortlessly.
“I am delighted to hear it,” she said, eyeing him warily.
She felt vulnerable, somehow, as if she’d arranged herself on the settee simply to tempt him, with her curls in wild abandon and a soft wool throw over her bare feet. When, of course, she could not have known he would appear today. If she had, she would not have worn the casual denim jeans she knew annoyed him, much less the skimpy, tissue-thin T-shirt that she was afraid showed far more than it should.
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?
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