Bethany almost wished she could hate the place, for on some level she blamed the stones themselves for destroying her marriage. It was a visceral feeling, all guts and irrationality, but the girl who had walked inside those walls had never walked out again.
She wished she could hate the thick, stone walls, the now-unused battlements. She wished she could hate the drawbridge that led through the outer walls of what had originally been a monastery, over the defunct moat and beneath the Di Marco coat of arms that had first been emblazoned above the entryway in the fifteenth century.
“It is so beautiful!” she had breathed, overcome as she’d walked through the great stone archway at the top of the drawbridge. He had swept her into his arms, spinning them both around in a circle until they had both laughed with the sheer joy of it right there in the grand hall.
“Not so beautiful as you,” he had said, his gaze serious, though his mouth had curved into a smile she’d been able to feel inside her own chest. “Never so beautiful as you, amore mio.”
Shaking the memory off, annoyed by her own melancholy, Bethany pulled her suitcase from the passenger seat and headed toward the entrance of the pensione. She had chosen this place deliberately: it was brand new. There would be much less chance of an awkward run-in with anyone she might have known three years ago.
She was reasonably confident she could avoid Leo as easily.
“It should not require more than two weeks of your time,” Leo had estimated with a careless shrug. Two weeks, perhaps a bit more. She had survived the last three years, she’d thought, so what were a few more weeks?
But she couldn’t help the feelings that dragged at her, pulling her inexorably toward that vast cavern of loneliness and pain inside that she could not allow to claim her any longer.
Just as she couldn’t help one last, doubtful look at the castello over her shoulder as she pushed open the door to the lobby and walked inside.
“I am so sorry,” the man said from behind the counter in heavily accented English. “The room—it is not yet ready.”
But Bethany knew the truth. She could see it in the man’s averted gaze, the welcoming smile that had dropped from his lips. It had happened the moment she’d said her name. It did not seem to matter that she’d used her maiden name, as she’d grown used to doing in Toronto.
Her hands tightened around the handle of her suitcase, so hard her knuckles whitened, but she managed to curve her lips into an approximation of a polite smile.
“How odd,” she murmured past the tightness in her throat. “I was certain the check-in time was three o’clock, and it is already past five.”
“If you would not mind waiting …” The man smiled helplessly and gestured toward the small seating-area at the far side of the small lobby.
Feeling helpless, Bethany turned from the counter, aware that her eyes were filled with a dangerous heat. She walked across the lobby with careful precision and then sat on the plush sofa, feeling as if she was made of glass, fragile and precarious. And then feeling broken, somehow, when the man picked up the telephone and murmured something she could not quite hear in rapid Italian.
Sure enough, not ten minutes later the front door was pulled open and two men in dark suits entered. Bethany did not recognize them personally, but she had no doubt at all about who they were.
They walked toward her, coming to a stop only a foot or two away. She stared straight ahead, willing herself to stay calm, adult, and rational, as she’d been so sure she’d remain. She fought to maintain her composure, though her stomach twisted and her heart beat too hard against her ribs.
“Principessa,” the larger of the two men murmured in tones of the greatest respect—which made Bethany that much more furious, somehow, and that much more despairing. “Per favore …?”
What could she do? This was Leo’s village. He was its prince. She had been a fool to think he would let her return to it without controlling her every move. Back when she had felt more charitable toward him she’d told herself he simply knew no other way to behave, that he had been raised to be this dictatorial, that it was not his fault.
Today, she knew the truth. This was who he was. This was who he wanted to be. What she wanted had never mattered, and never, ever would.
So she simply rose to her feet with as much dignity and grace as she could muster. She let Leo’s men guide her to the expected gleaming black sedan that waited outside, elegant and imprisoning, and climbed obediently into the back seat.
And then she sat there, furious, helpless and as brokenhearted as the day she’d left, as they drove her straight into the jaws of the castello.
It was all exactly as she remembered, exactly as she still dreamed.
The great castello was quiet around her—it was open to the public only on certain days of the week or by appointment—and felt empty, even though she knew that hordes of servants were all around her, perhaps even watching her, just out of sight.
Bethany felt a drowning sensation, as if she was being sucked backward in time, thrown back four years into that other life where she had been so miserable, so terribly alone. And it had been worse because she had not known how alone she was at first—she had still believed that she would recover from her father’s death with Leo’s help, that he would become the family she so deeply craved.
Instead, he had abandoned her in every way that mattered.
As if the stones themselves remembered that grief, that ache, they seemed to echo not just her footsteps as she walked but her memories of those awful days here when she’d been so isolated, scared and abandoned.
She barely saw the impressive entryway, the tapestries along the stone walls inside the grand entrance, the rooms filled with priceless art and antiques, each item resplendent with its pedigree, its heritage, its worth across centuries. Her silent escorts ushered her up above the public rooms to the family wing, then down the long, gleaming hallway toward her old, familiar door. But all she could see was the past.
And then it was done. Her suitcase was deposited just inside her chamber and the door was closed behind her with a muted click. She stood inside the bedroom suite that had once been hers, her luxurious cage, quite as if she had never left.
Bethany let her head drop slightly forward, squeezing shut her eyes as she stood there in the center of the grand room. This was the principessa’s historic suite, handed down over the ages from one wife to the next. It boasted the finest furnishings, gilt-edged and ornate. The bed was canopied in gold, the regal bedspread an opulent shade of red. Everything was made of the darkest, richest wood, lovingly crafted and polished to a high shine. There was never a hint of dust in this room, never an item out of place—except for Bethany herself, she thought wryly.
She did not have to investigate to know that all was precisely as it had been the last time she’d been here. She did not have to walk to the towering windows to know what she would see through them: the finely sculpted gardens and beyond them, the rooftops of the village and the gentle, inviting roll of Italian countryside reaching for the horizon. All of it was beautiful beyond measure, and yet somehow capable of making that ache inside of her grow so much more acute.
And she did not have to turn when she heard the paneled side-door open because she knew exactly who would be standing there. But she could not seem to help herself, her gaze was drawn to him as if he were a flickering flame and she no more than a moth. She wished even that did not hurt her, but it did. It still did.
Leo lounged against the paneled door frame, his long, lean form packed into dark trousers and a cashmere black sweater that emphasized his whipcord strength. His eyes seemed nearly black, and she fought off the urge to rub at the back of her neck where the fine hairs there whispered in warning.
He looked dark and powerful, like one of the ancient Roman gods that had once roamed this land, capricious and cruel. And she knew he was bent on vengeance just the same. He did not show her that sardonic smile of his, that mocking twist of his sensual lip
s.
He did not need to. Her very presence was enough.
Already she felt as if she’d lost everything. Again.
“Ah, principessa,” Leo said, his tone laced with irony. “Welcome home.”
He took a moment to drink in the sight of her, back where she belonged after all of this time. Finally.
It almost eased the three years’ worth of simmering anger and the deeper current beneath it he felt when he looked at her. She crossed her arms over her middle, as if it hurt her to stand there in the ancestral bedroom where she had once lived. Where—he knew, whether she did or not—she would live again.
He would allow for no other outcome.
She looked tired, he thought, eyeing her critically. She was unusually pale, though her head was high with the same kind of quiet pride she had showed in Toronto. He did not want her pride, he thought; he wanted her passion. And then her acquiescence.
Because he could think of no other way to reach her. And he had exhausted his futile attempts to pretend that that was not exactly what he wanted.
She wore a tight white T-shirt that clung to her pert, full breasts and a sweater wrap that hung down to her thighs in a soft blue that made her eyes glow even brighter than usual. She still wore those faded denim jeans. In some kind of deliberate rebellion, he had no doubt, though the triumph he felt that he had managed to bring her home far outweighed any disapproval he might have felt about her choice of wardrobe.
He wanted to touch her, taste her. Trace the shape of her graceful neck, sink his fingers into her dark curls. Welcome her back to her home, her responsibilities, him, in the way they would both find most pleasurable. In the only way he knew would bind her to him without having to touch on all that seemed to threaten from beneath the certainty of the fire that raged between them.
If he could only have that fire again, he thought, he would know better how to tend it. He would not let it go again so easily.
The vast room seemed smaller suddenly and her eyes widened with awareness. He smiled slightly. Bethany looked away and swallowed. Leo let his gaze trace the fine column of her throat and saw the wash of red that began to climb there.
“I do not understand why I was dragged from the inn of my choice,” she said after a moment.
“I see you are starting at once on the offensive,” he murmured, mildly reproving. “Are you not tired of it yet? I feel certain we have enough to discuss without any unnecessary histrionics.”
Her brows rose in astonishment. “There is no reason for me to stay here. It is hardly histrionic to say so.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, and rubbed him entirely up the wrong way.
“Why?” he asked coolly. “Other than the fact you’d made your usual dramatic proclamations about how you would never return, what objection can you possibly have to staying in the castello?”
She stared at him with a curious expression that Leo had never seen before—one that suggested that he was not very bright. It made him feel …restless. A slow beat of that same old anger and a very familiar frustration began to hammer in his gut, mixed with a new edge that had everything to do with the calm, cool way she looked at him. As if he was the person outside the bounds of propriety and self-control when that had always been her role.
“I do not want to be here.” She said it very deliberately, her gaze still on his in that insulting manner. “I need no other objection than that.”
Leo straightened from the doorway, coldly amused at the way she jerked back, as if she expected him to lunge at her. He wished he could. He wished he could simply throw her over his shoulder and take her down with him to the soft mattress of the bed behind her. But he knew that, as delightful as it would be to lose himself in her body, it would only delay the inevitable.
Sex had never been their problem. It had been a weapon, a hiding place, a muddying of already murky waters. He knew with a sudden, devastating insight into the part of himself he preferred to ignore that he could not let it be used as such any longer.
He wanted her back where she belonged, and this time he would have all of her.
“Let me be clear,” he said, his voice clipped. Authoritative. “You will not stay in the village. The fact that you attempted to do so after the childish stunt you pulled with your flight—without my ring on your finger or my name, though you are easily identifiable and must know the shame that casts upon this house—only underscores your selfishness.”
He watched that red flush on her skin deepen one shade darker, then two. Her soft mouth firmed into a hard line he found unaccountably fascinating.
“How incredibly patronizing you are, Leo,” she said coolly, though he could hear temper and something else crackling through her voice. “Patronizing and dismissive.”
Leo shrugged. “If you feel you must call me names because it is difficult for you to accept that you have returned here, I will not blame you,” he said.
Whatever it took, she would truly be his wife again, he vowed. She would be the principessa he had imagined she could be. He would not allow for any other outcome. Not this time.
Her blue eyes blazed into hard sapphires.
“I am having no difficulty at all accepting that I am here,” she bit out. “I am, however, unable to process the fact that you feel comfortable speaking to me as if I am a child.”
“I am well aware that you are not a child,” he said. His gaze met hers and held. “It has always been your behavior that causes the confusion.”
Her eyes narrowed. He could sense her temper skyrocketing, but could not imagine what it was that so enraged her. The simple truth? He was surprised she had not already thrown something at him, or launched her own body at his, nails like claws, as she would have done in the past.
He watched, fascinated despite himself, as she visibly fought for control. This was not the Bethany he knew. His Bethany was a creature of passion and regret, rages and tears. She threw precious china against the wall, screamed herself hoarse, threw tantrums that shook the ancient stones beneath their feet. She was not capable of reining in her temper once it ignited, like the woman before him.
He could see it in her eyes, the rage and the passion, the fury and the heat. But she did not move to strike him. She did not scream like a banshee. She only faced him.
He did not know if he admired her unexpected fortitude, or felt it as a loss.
“I will not be spoken to as if I am a recalcitrant adolescent or a lowly member of your staff, Leo,” she told him, her voice tight and hard. “I understand that you live in a world where you need only express a desire and it is met, but I am not your underling. I am a grown woman. I do, in fact, know my own mind.”
Leo let out a short laugh. “I am delighted to hear it,” he said. “Does that mean the antique vases are safe from your rampages? I will notify the household staff.”
Her face darkened, but she did not scream at him. Against his will, Leo’s fascination deepened.
“Treat me like a child and I will treat you exactly the same way,” she said instead, her words very precise, very pointed. “And I very much doubt your exalted sense of self could handle it.”
She was an adult? She had outgrown her childishness? He was thrilled, he told himself, eyeing her narrowly. Overjoyed, in fact. Wasn’t that why he’d allowed her to run off to Canada in the first place? She had been so very young when he had met her; far younger than her years. Hadn’t he wanted her to mature?
He had only himself to blame if he did not quite care for the specific direction her show of maturity had taken—if he found he preferred the angry child to this unknowable woman who stood before him with unreadable eyes.
“You are still my wife,” he said after a long moment, his tone even. “As long as that is true, you cannot stay in the village. It will cause too much comment.”
“Thank you for speaking to me as an adult for once,” she said. Her chin tilted up and her bright eyes sparkled with a combination of defiance and a certain resignation that made his hackles rise.
“What does that say about you, I wonder, that it was so hard to do?”
CHAPTER FIVE
“I TRUST that was rhetorical,” he said mildly enough.
But Leo’s gaze was too sharp, and Bethany knew that she could no longer maintain any pretense of calm if she continued to look at him.
She moved, restless and more agitated than she wanted to admit, wandering further into the room. She let her gaze dance over the painting that dominated the far wall, a richly imagined, opulently hued rendition of the view outside these very windows, give or take a handful of centuries, painted by no less an artist than Titian.
Murano glass vases glowed scarlet and blue on the dresser, picking up the light from the Venetian chandelier that hung from the ceiling high above. Bethany knew that one of this room’s more famous occupants hundreds of years ago had been the daughter of a grand and noble Venetian family, and this room had ever since been adapted to pay homage to her residency.
What legacy might Bethany have left behind, she wondered, had she stayed? Would she have left her mark at all or would she have been swallowed whole into this castle, this family, this history? Annoyed by her sentimentality, and that wrenching sense of loss that inevitably followed, she shook the thought away.
She pretended she was not aware of Leo still standing in the doorway that connected his suite to hers. She pretended she could not feel the weight of his gaze and the far heavier and more damaging crush of the memories she fought to keep from her mind tugging at her, pulling at her, making her feel as if she waded through molasses.
Yet, despite herself, she was attuned to his every movement, his every breath.
“Dinner will be served at eight o’clock,” he said in his inexorable way when the silence in the room seemed to pound in her ears. “And, yes, we still maintain tradition and dress for dinner.”
She turned back toward him, hoping the fact that she was wearing jeans annoyed him as much as it had three years ago, when he had had his social secretary admonish her for her relentlessly common fashion-sense. She had been seen wearing them in the village, where anyone might have recognized her—oh, the horror.
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