He looked up as she stirred and she felt herself flush, whether from embarrassment or something far deeper, far more vulnerable, she could not say.
She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. He was still inside of her. She could feel the coarse material of his jeans against the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. She could feel his hard chest against her, his maleness deep within her, his strong arms all around her. There was a part of her that panicked at that stark evidence of his possession even as a darker part, a part she wished to deny even as she became aware of it, gloried in it.
If I taste you, I will take you, he had promised her.
And he had kept his promise.
“That was …” But her voice trailed away and she realized she was still spinning. From a single kiss she had not planned to give, to him buried inside of her. She had no idea at all how to make sense of what had happened.
It felt cataclysmic. Life-altering. And, then again, perhaps it was simply Leo.
“Yes?” he asked; teasing her, she thought.
There was a smile in his eyes, if not on his lips, and she could not have said why seeing it made her chest ache. She only knew that it hurt, that she hurt. She knew she desperately needed to think about everything that had just happened in a critical, logical, unemotional way—which was unlikely to occur while they were joined like this, in the middle of the day, outside where anyone at all could happen by and see them on the banks of a lake that should never have been made in the first place.
Her discomfort grew, skittered through her, made her stomach clench and her breath come faster.
He only gazed at her, those eyes clear in a way that made her want to pull away, shield her own eyes, hide from him. But she could hardly do such a thing in this exposed position, so she was forced to simply gaze back at him, feeling that itchy flush work its way over her skin, her discomfort made real and red on her flesh.
She felt him move slightly, deep within her, and realized with a kind of amazement that he was becoming aroused. Again.
“But you …” Her voice was too high, too breathless, as if she was someone else. She felt like someone else, someone she was not at all sure she should permit herself to acknowledge, much less embody. Someone as silly and as profoundly thrown by him as she had once been, years before. “How can you …so soon?”
He laughed then, his hands moving along her back as if he was soothing her, settling her, using his touch to calm her. She had a vague memory of him doing this long ago, gentling her with that tremendous power he unleashed only when he chose to share it. She had thought it patronizing then; she had believed it an attempt to control her.
She wished she could summon the anger that had once stirred in her, but she could feel only her body’s helpless response to him, as if it wanted him in ways she was afraid to face. She wanted to shake off his hands, but she was too captivated by his expression to do more than shift against him.
And of course, when she moved, she felt him—hard and hot so deep inside of her—and she felt her own melting, shivering response.
“That was but a taste,” he said, that near-smile flirting with his mouth. “It has been a long time.”
Her head spun, and then the world spun too as he swung her around, moving her with an effortless might and grace, rolling them both over on the blanket. He settled himself between her thighs and looked down into her face.
He never broke their intimate connection, and she told herself that was what made her heart hammer even harder against her ribs.
“Since me, you mean?” she stammered, gazing up at him, her eyes wide with a kind of desperation.
Why did she feel the overpowering need to run from him, to put any distance between them she could? But he was everywhere—inside her, above her—and there was no escape.
“You don’t mean a long time over all—you mean since me? Since you and I …?” Her voice trailed away.
The laughter faded from his expression, and an enigmatic light gleamed in his dark eyes. She shivered, and he was still inside her, growing harder by the moment. She shifted, but it only drew him in deeper, closer, and she caught her breath as sensation arrowed through her, bathing her in heat and light.
“I mean that it has been a long time since I touched you,” he said, his eyes pinning her to the ground as surely as his body did, offering no quarter, no compromise. “Which also means that it has been a long time since I have touched anyone.” His eyes rose, challenging her. Shaming her. Reading her secrets and laying her bare. “I take my vows very seriously, Bethany. I did not break them.”
Bethany felt dizzy. Her heart fluttered wildly in her chest and she thought—she hoped—she might faint. But instead one moment dragged into another, and he simply waited. Watched and waited, when she wanted to thrash and scream and howl out her reaction, no matter how little sense that might make.
She felt lost to herself. A stranger.
“Leo …” She could only whisper his name. She could not identify the emotions that swelled in her, rolling and pitching as if she were a tiny boat adrift in a great sea. “You should know …I mean, I never …”
Who had she become? she wondered in a mix of shame, panic and something else, something far deeper and more dangerous. She could not make it through a single sentence.
She felt her eyes fill and was horrified to think she might weep. Not now. Please, not now!
Still, Leo merely waited. He only watched her, propped up on his elbows, his expression unreadable, though she could feel the great, humming power of him as if he connected her to some immense electrical storm—as if he was the storm, just barely held in check by the iron force of his will.
“I thought if I claimed to have a lover you would hate me,” she said, forcing the words out, though her lips felt numb and she knew on some deep level that she could not understand, that there was no going back from this admission. This was new ground, shaky and insecure.
And still she continued on, face to face, more naked and more terrified than she could ever remember being before though she still wore her clothes.
“And I thought if you hated me,” she managed to say, “You would let me go.”
Something seemed to shimmer between them, bright and sharp, and he very nearly smiled. He moved closer to her, pulling a curl between his fingers and tucking it behind her ear. She was sure she saw something sad and resigned move through him before he laid a trail of soft kisses along her jaw.
He does not believe me, she thought in a dawning kind of horror, and it broke her heart.
“I never had a lover,” she confessed, desperate that he hear her, that he listen, that he believe her. She was as desperate he believe this truth as she had been that he believe the lie, and even as she spoke she could not quite face the reasons she was so distraught. She only felt it, deep within, like a great abyss she had been pretending for years did not exist at all. “I made it up.”
He looked up then, his eyes gleaming with a bone-deep satisfaction, bright and hard and triumphant. His mouth curved into a stark, male smile that made her shudder deep within.
“Believe me,” he said, a ruthless heat in his voice, his gaze, his skin against hers, “I know.”
“But …” she breathed, her voice catching in her throat, her mind a sudden tumult of ‘how?’ and ‘when?’ and ‘why?’ but he only laughed. It was a resoundingly wolfish sound, and she could not help the way she shuddered around him.
Then he began to move.
Later, Bethany could not pinpoint the moment she let go—the moment she stopped desperately trying to cling to the shreds of the persona she had built around Leo’s absence and allowed herself instead to sink into the overwhelming, devastating reality of his presence, his body, his clever hands.
Leo made love to her with shattering intensity and ruthless, focused thoroughness. He stripped them both of all their clothes until they were naked in the sun, and then he fed her with his own fingers, olives and cheeses, salted meats
and sweet grapes, and washed it down with wine and kisses.
Then he took her again, making her fall apart over and over, until she could hardly remember who she had been before that kiss of hers that had started it all again—this madness and fire, this need and heat.
When the shadows lengthened over the quiet water of the lake, Leo led her back to the castello along the same path that they had traveled that morning. Bethany felt as if years had passed since then—whole decades, perhaps, lost beneath the quiet, encompassing mastery of Leo’s hands, his mouth, his hard and fascinating body.
She was not sure, she thought as he wrapped his hand around hers and tugged her with him through the vineyards, if she would recognize herself if she came face to face with the woman who had set out on this walk. She’d been so determined to play a game, so sure that game would change Leo—never dreaming how deeply it would change her.
But she pushed that thought away because she had no other choice. He was too demanding, too enticing, and she could not seem to stop herself from responding to his smallest caress, his barest glance. And, if she was honest, she did not want to stop herself. She did not want to stop at all.
At some point, when the enchantment of the green and gold fields had worn away and he was not there to ensnare her with his rich, dark gaze, she might have to worry about that. But not today, she told herself, repeating it like a litany.
When they returned to the castello, Bethany was not surprised when he was pulled aside by the usual collection of aides and servants, all of them anxious to speak to him. She climbed to her chamber and ran a hot bath in the deep tub that stood before the high windows of her expansive private bathroom.
Feeling as if she was in a dream, she pulled off the clothes he had so recently put on her, her hands trembling slightly as she remembered his method of dressing her—his mouth against the tender underside of her breasts as he smoothed her bra into place, his fingers exploring every curve, every secret, making each and every one his. She felt a deep shuddering inside of her; she could not stop herself from shivering, though she knew she was not cold.
She knew it was him: the fever of Leo Di Marco, the flush of him still heating her skin. It was the same sorcery he had always wielded over her, rendering her his slave, desperate to do or say anything that would make him touch her, take her, bring her screaming and sobbing to the completion only he could provide.
She should be horrified with herself, with what she had let happen—with what she had made happen. She knew that, could see it objectively, as if from a great distance.
She stood naked as the tub filled, and let the bath salts run through her fingers into the foamy water. She understood that she should be appalled that there was not a single square inch of her body that he had not touched, not one part of her he had not claimed beneath the canopy of the Italian sky. She raised her arms to clip her heavy curls up on the back of her head and winced slightly. She could feel him still, in the slight aches in sensitive areas that were somehow more arousing than painful; in the ecstatic, left-over shivering that she could not control or deny.
That she did not want to control. That she did not want to deny.
Whatever that made her, she did not want to know.
She had just settled into the hot, silky water, letting out a blissful sigh and tipping her head back against the high porcelain edge of the tub, when something prickled across her skin like a breeze. She opened her eyes, not at all surprised to see him in the doorway, his dark eyes shadowed.
She thought he might speak, or that she should, but neither of them moved for a long moment. She felt the steam rise around her, heating her face, making her curls tighten and bounce. But she could not look away from him.
She could not, it seemed, do anything at all but gaze at this man, helpless, as her body reacted to him in the same, predictable manner it always had. As if he had not spent the afternoon having her again and again in a variety of clever and devastating ways. Her body did not seem to care. It only wanted more.
Bethany understood something then, something that seemed to drop through her like a stone while he stood there before her.
It had always been like this—this unquenchable thirst for him, this explosive passion whenever they’d touched. She remembered that shameful night in Toronto, the night she had held up for years as the very lowest point of her life, and realized that she had needed to think of it that way. Not because they had both been so angry, but because she had needed to demonize the sexual connection between them in order to think past it, in order to figure out who she might be without it. Because when he was near her she lost the ability to think at all.
She must have known, on some level, that to demonize it the way she had was the only way she was likely to survive the loss of it, of him, for so long.
She still did not dare think of why that was. She still shied away from the simple truth that her body knew, had always known, that moved through her, illuminating her.
Not today, she thought fiercely. It would be too much, that level of self-awareness. She could not quite do it. She would not allow it.
She opened her mouth to speak, but stopped when he moved. He came to stand beside the tub, still looking down at her, that same simmering awareness lighting up his dark gaze, making his sensual mouth move into something approaching a smile.
She found she could not tear her eyes away from him. She stopped trying.
He pulled the tight black T-shirt over his head, tossing it carelessly to the floor. Bethany let her gaze travel over his rock-hard pectoral muscles, the tantalizing indentation between them, the ridged expanse of his abdomen. She let out a small sound when he stripped off the jeans as well, kicking them out of his way so that he stood fully naked and indescribably beautiful before her.
She could only stare. He was pure, masculine perfection, lethal grace and tightly controlled strength, and she wanted to touch him and taste him all over again.
“Move over,” he ordered her with a regal tilt of his jaw in a tone that expected instant compliance. That demanded it.
She knew she should object. She knew she should set her ground rules, define her boundaries. She knew she should demand her space—she knew that she should want the space from him she ought to demand. But she did not say a word. Not now, she told herself, her own private prayer. Not today.
She sat forward so he could sink down behind her in the tub that had been built for precisely this purpose. She sighed in a contentment she opted not to question when he pulled her back against the wall of his chest, settling her between his thighs, bringing his strong, hard arms around her.
The water lapped against her breasts. She could not tell which was hotter—the steaming bath or his silk-and-steel skin against hers. His hardness pressed against the small of her back, making her core throb and ache.
When she tipped her head back against his shoulder, she saw something she could not quite define flash across his face. It made something deep inside of her shift, like a tectonic plate deep beneath the ground. Grief turned to something else, something less raw, more smooth. But before she could do more than note it he fit his mouth to hers.
Soft. Sweet. The fire raged anew.
Not today, she thought. Not today.
And then she stopped thinking altogether.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LEO could not quite put his finger on the complicated emotions that held him in such a tight grip that it bordered on the uncomfortable.
He sat in yet another tedious meeting in the suite of rooms in the castello’s west wing that he used as his corporate offices when he was in Felici. He lounged behind the massive desk that his father had bought as a match for his grand ego, and knew that he looked every inch the prince, as he ought to. He had been raised to wield his own magnificence as a weapon, and he had long done so without thought. He did not want to investigate why the mantle of it seemed so ill-fitting today. As if it was no longer his second skin, indistinguishable from his own.
>
The meeting should not have been tedious. There had been a time when the thrill of figuring out how best to beat a rival’s offer, or managing to pull together a deal in the eleventh hour, would have kept him high on adrenaline and triumph for days.
He had never involved himself in the kind of extreme adventures that attracted so many of his wealthy peers, because he could not risk himself or the Di Marco legacy. He had therefore contented himself instead with the drama of high finance—the greatest poker game in the world, with the highest stakes—and it had always worked.
Yet today, even that familiar thrill seemed to have lost its appeal. He knew that Bethany was somewhere in the castello—not in Canada, as she had been. Not across the planet. Not even so terribly angry with him any longer. She was somewhere close and, more than that, agreeable.
He knew that she was nearby, and that was what thrilled him—not these papers, these debates, these strategies that he found so unaccountably boring these days. He knew that he could walk out of this meeting, go to her and he could have her. It would be as easy as a look, a touch. As simple as their presence in the same room.
He could, as he had done yesterday, simply enter the chamber she happened to be in, tumble her to one of the soft, plush carpets and be inside of her before she had time to greet him properly. He grew hard merely thinking about it.
He scowled at the sheaf of documents in front of him, trying to make sense of the financial portfolio before him when he could hardly make sense of himself. It wasn’t the sex that was affecting him this way—though he was not above feeling deeply satisfied that, even after all of the time they’d been apart, he was capable of driving Bethany absolutely wild. Driving them both wild.
It was not that at all. It was …the rest of it.
A week had passed, then several more days, and Bethany had made no move to leave; she had not so much as mentioned their divorce. She had not even asked after the court as she had when she had first arrived. Leo wanted to view that as a victory, but somehow he could not.
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