# Princess From the Past

Caitlin Crews

The forgotten princess… Behind the imposing walls of the castle, free-spirited Bethany Vassal discovered that her whirlwind marriage to Prince Leo Di Marco was nothing like the fairytale she’d imagined. Before long the forgotten princess ran away, hoping the man she fell in love with would one day see sense and come and find her…Marrying Bethany is the only reckless thing Leo has ever done, and now he is paying the price. The time has come for him to produce a royal heir – and Bethany must return to the castle whence she fled!

## “The divorce. There is a complication.”

“What complication?” she asked, suspicious, though her traitorous body did not seem to care. It throbbed for him, hot and needy.

“I am afraid that it cannot be done remotely.” He shrugged in that supremely Italian way, as if to say that the vagaries of such things were beyond anyone’s control, even his.

“You cannot mean …” she began. His gaze found hers then, so very dark and commanding, and she felt goosebumps rise along her arms, her neck. As if someone walked across her grave, she thought distantly.

“There is no getting around it,” he said, but his voice was not apologetic. His gaze was direct. And Bethany went completely cold. “I am afraid that you must return to Italy.”

## About the Author

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her lifelong love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.


PRINCESS

FROM THE PAST

CAITLIN CREWS


www.millsandboon.co.uk

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This one is for Jeff.

## CHAPTER ONE

BETHANY Vassal did not have to turn around. She knew exactly who had just entered the exclusive art-gallery in Toronto’s glamorous Yorkville neighborhood. Even if she had not heard the increased buzz from the well-clad, cocktail-sipping crowd, or felt the sudden spike in energy roll through the long, bright space like an earthquake, she would have known. Her body knew and reacted immediately. The back of her neck prickled in warning. Her stomach tensed. Her muscles clenched tight in automatic response. She stopped pretending to gaze at the bold colors and twisted shapes of the painting before her and let her eyes drift closed to ward off the memories. And the pain—so much pain.

He was here. After all this time, after all her agonizing, planning and years of isolation, he was in the same room. She told herself she was ready.

She had to be.

Bethany turned slowly. She had deliberately situated herself in the furthest corner of the upscale gallery so she could see down the gleaming wood and white corridor to the door, so she could prepare herself when he arrived. But the truth, she was forced to admit to herself as she finally twisted all the way around to face the inevitable commotion near the great glass doors, was that there was really no way to prepare. Not for Prince Leopoldo Di Marco.

Her husband.

Soon to be ex-husband, she told herself fiercely. If she told herself the same thing long enough, it had to become true, didn’t it? It had nearly killed her to leave him three years ago, but this was different. She was different.

She had been so broken when she’d met him—still reeling from the death of the bed-ridden father she’d cared for through his last years; still spinning wildly in the knowledge that suddenly, at twenty-three, she could have any life she wanted instead of being a sick man’s care-giver. Except she hadn’t known what to want. The only world she’d ever known had been so small. She had been grieving—and then there had been Leo, like a sudden bright sunrise after years of rain.

She’d believed he was perfect, the perfect prince out of a story book. And she’d believed that with him she was some kind of fairy-tale princess who could escape into the perfect dream come true. Bethany’s mouth twisted. She’d certainly learned better, hadn’t she? He’d smashed that belief into pieces by abandoning her in every way that mattered once they’d reached his home in Italy. By shutting her out, leaving her more alone than she had ever been before, overwhelmed and lonely half a world away from all she’d ever known.

And then he’d decided he wanted to bring a child into all of that despair. It had been impossible, the final straw. Bethany’s hands clenched at her sides as if she could strike out at her memories. She forced herself to take a deep breath. Anger would not help her now—only focus. She had very specific goals tonight. She wanted her freedom, and she could not allow herself to get sidetracked by the past.

Then she looked up and saw him. The world seemed to contract and then expand around her. Time seemed to stop—or perhaps that was simply her ability to draw breath.

He strode through the gallery, flanked by two stone-faced members of his security detail. He was, as he had always been, a heartbreaking study of dark-haired, gleaming-eyed Italian male beauty. He wore, with nonchalant ease, an elegantly tailored dark suit that somehow made him seem even more ruggedly handsome than he naturally was. It clung to his broad shoulders and showcased his mouth-watering physique.

But Bethany could not allow herself to focus on his physicality; it was too dangerous. She had forgotten, somehow, that he was so …vivid. Her memory had made him smaller, duller. It had muted the sheer force of him, making her forget how commanding he was, how his uncompromising masculinity and irrefutable power seemed to radiate from him, making everyone in his vicinity both step back and stare.

It also made her profoundly sad. She swallowed and tried to shake the melancholy away. It could not possibly help her here.

His long, tall, exquisitely hewn body, was all rangy muscle and sensual male grace, moving through the crowd with a kind of liquid ease. His cheekbones were high and pronounced—noticeable from across a large room. He carried himself as if he were a king or a god. His mouth, even in its current flat, disapproving line, hinted at the shattering sensuality she knew far too well he could and would use as his most devastating weapon against her. His rich, thick, dark-brown hair was cut to suit perfectly the ruthless, focused magnate she knew him to be—whatever else he might be.

Everything he wore, even the way he held himself, broadcasted his wealth, his power, and that dark, sexual magnetism that was uniquely his. It was as much a part of him as his olive skin, his corded muscles and his earthy, woodsy scent—which she must be remembering, she told herself, frowning, for she was certainly not close enough to him to smell his skin. Nor would she be ever again, she vowed.

For he was no fairy tale prince, as she had once so innocently imagined. Bethany had to bite back a hollow laugh. There were no swelling, happy songs, no happily-ever-afters—not with Leo Di Marco, Principe di Felici. Bethany had learned that the hardest, most painful way possible. His was an ancient and revered title, with ancient responsibilities and immutable duties, and Leo was its steward. First, foremost, always, he was the title.

She watched his dark eyes flick through the crowd with ruthless impatience. He looked annoyed. Already. She sucked in a shaky breath. Then, inevitably, he found her. She felt the kick of his gaze like a punch to her gut and had to breathe through the sudden light-headedness. She had wanted this, she reminded herself. She had to see this through now, finally, or she did not know what might become of her.

Bethany had to force herself to stand up straight, to simply wait there as he bore down on her. She crossed her arms, held on tight to her elbows and tried to look unmoved by his approach even as she quaked with that inevitable, unfair reaction to his presence that had always ruined her attempts to stand up to him before. Meanwhile memories she refused to delve into haunted her still, flickering across her mind too quickly, leaving the same old scars behind.

Leo dismissed his bodyguards with the barest flick of a finger, his dark gaze fused to hers, his long legs eating up the distance between them. He looked overpowering and overwhelming, as he always had, as he always would—as if he alone could block out the rest of the world. Worst of all, she knew he could. And would. And did.

Bethany’s throat was too dry. She had the overwhelming urge to turn away, to run, but she knew he would only follow. More than that, it would defeat her purpose. She had chosen this particular meeting-place deliberately: a bright and crowded art-opening filled with the sort of people who would recognize a man of Leo’s stature at a glance. Protection, she had thought, as much from Leo’s inevitable fury as from her own ungovernable response to this man.

This would not be like the last time. He had been so angry and she had foolishly thought that maybe they might work something out—if he’d actually spoken to her for once, instead of putting her off. Three years had passed since that night, and still, thinking of the things he had said and the way it had all exploded into that devastating, unwanted and uncontainable passion, that still shamed her to remember—

She shoved the memories aside and squared her shoulders.

Then he was right there in front of her, his gaze taut on hers. She could not breathe.

Leo.

Already, after mere seconds, that heady, potent masculinity that was his and his alone pulled her in, tugging at parts of her she’d thought long dead. Already she felt that terrible, familiar yearning swell within her, urging her to move closer, to bury herself in the heat of him, to lose herself in him as she nearly had before.

But she was different now. She’d had to be to survive him. She was no longer the naïve, weak little girl he had handled so carelessly throughout the eighteen harrowing months of their marriage. The girl with no boundaries and no ability to stand up for herself.

She would never be that girl again. She had worked too hard three years ago to leave her behind. To grow into the woman she should have been all along.

Leo merely stared at her, his dark, coffee-colored eyes narrowing slightly, as bitter and black as she remembered. He would have looked indolent, almost bored, were it not for the faintest hint of grim tension in his lean jaw and the sense of carefully leashed power that hummed just beneath his skin.

“Hello, Bethany,” he said, his sardonic voice richer, deeper than she’d remembered.

Her name in his cruel mouth felt …intimate. It mocked her with the memories she refused to acknowledge, yet still seemed to affect her breathing, her skin, her heartbeat.

“What game are you playing tonight?” he asked softly, his eyes dark and unreadable, his voice controlled. “I am touched that you thought to include me after all this time.”

She could not let him cow her; she could not let him shake her. Bethany knew it was now or never. She clenched her hands tighter around her elbows, digging her fingers deep into her own flesh.

“I want a divorce,” she said, tilting back her head to look at him directly.

She had planned and practiced those words for so long in her mirror, in her head, in every spare moment, that she knew she sounded just as she wished to sound: calm, cool, resolute. There was no hint at all of the turmoil that rolled inside of her.

The words seemed to hang there in the space between their bodies. Bethany kept her gaze trained on Leo’s, ignoring the hectic color she could feel scratching at her neck and pretending she was not at all affected by the way he seemed to go very still as he looked at her with narrowed eyes. As if he was gathering himself to pounce. Bethany’s heart pounded as if she’d screamed that single sentence loud enough to shatter glass, shred clothing and perhaps even rebound off the top of the iconic CN Tower to deafen the entire city.

It was the man standing much too close to her. Leo was next to her, so close she could nearly feel the waves of heat and arrogance emanate from him. Leo, watching her with those intense, unreadable eyes. It made something deep inside of her flex and coil. Leo was the husband she had once loved so destructively, so desperately, when she did not know enough to love herself. It made her want to weep as that same old sadness washed through her, reminding her of all the ways they had failed each other. But no more. No more.

Her stomach was a tense, clenched ball. Her palms were damp. She had to fight to keep her vision clear, her eyes bland. She had to order herself repeatedly not to heed her body’s urgent demand that she wrench her gaze away and flee.

Indifference, she reminded herself. She must show him nothing but indifference, however feigned it might be. Anything but that, and all would be lost. She would be lost.

“It is a great pleasure to see you too,” Leo said finally with an unmistakable edge in his voice. His English had a distinctly British intonation that spoke of his years of education, with the sensual caress of his native Italian beneath. His dark eyes gleamed with cold censure as they flicked over her, taking in the careful chignon that tamed her dark-brown curls, her minimal cosmetics, the severe black suit. She had worn it to convince them both that this was nothing more than a bit of unpleasant business—and because it helped conceal her figure from his appraisal. She was a far cry from the girl he had once memorably brought to climax with no more than his hot, demanding gaze, and still he made her want to squirm. Still, she felt brushfires blaze to life in every place his dark gaze touched her.

She hated what he could do to her even now, after everything. As if three years later her body still had not received the message that they were finished.

Leo continued, his voice dangerously even, his gaze like steel. “I do not know why it should surprise me in the least that a woman who would behave as you have done should greet your husband in such a fashion.”

She could not let him see that he rattled her still, when she had thought—prayed—that she’d put all that behind her. But she told herself she could worry about what that might mean later, at her leisure, when she had the years ahead of her to process all the things she felt about this man. When she was free of him.

And she had to be free of him. It was finally time to live her own life on her own terms. It was time to give up that doomed, pathetic hope she was embarrassed to admit she harbored that he would keep his angry promise to come after her and drag her back home if she dared leave him. He had come that one terrible night and then left again, telling her in no uncertain terms of her importance to him. It was three years past time to accord him the same courtesy.

“You will forgive me if I did not think the social niceties had any place here,” she said instead as calmly as she could, as if she could not feel that sharp gaze of his leaving marks on her skin. “Given our circumstances.”

Bethany had to move then, or explode. She walked toward the next bright, jumbled canvas on the stark-white wall and sensed instead of saw Leo keep pace with her. When she stopped moving, he was beside her once again, close enough that she could almost feel his heat, the corded strength in his arm. Close enough that she was tempted to lean into him.

At least now she could control her destructive impulses, she thought bitterly, even if she could not quite rid herself of those urges as she’d like.

“Our ‘circumstances,’” he echoed after a tense, simmering moment, his voice dark and sinful, at odds with the razor’s edge beneath. “Is that what you call it? Is that how you rationalize your actions?” A quick sideways glance confirmed that one dark brow was raised, mocking and cruel, matching his tone perfectly. Bethany knew that expression all too well. A chill moved through her.

She was aware of her own pulse drumming wildly in her veins and had to stop herself from fidgeting with the force of will that, three years ago, she had not known she possessed. But it had been forged day by day in the bright fire of his cold indifference. At least she knew it existed now, and that she could use it.

“It does not matter what you wish to call it,” she said, fighting to remain cool. She turned toward him and wished at once that she had not. He was too big, too male, too much. “It is obviously time that both of us moved on.”

She did not care for the way that Leo watched her then, his eyes hooded, predatory. They reminded her exactly how dangerous this man was and exactly why she had left him in the first place.

“This is why you deigned to contact me tonight?” he asked in a deceptively soft voice that sent a chill spiraling down her spine. “To discuss a divorce?”

“Why else would I contact you?” she asked, wanting her voice to sound careless, light, but hearing all too well that it was tight with anxiety.

“I can think of no other reason, of course,” he said, his eyes fixed on her in a way that made her deeply uncomfortable down into her very bones. She set her jaw and refused to look away. “Certainly I knew better than to imagine that you might finally be ready to resume your duties or keep your promises. And yet here I am.”

She did not know how long she could keep this up. He was too overwhelming, too impossible. She had been unable to handle him when he had been as lost in the volcanic passion between them as she was. But his anger, his lacerating coldness, was much, much worse. She was not certain she was equal to it. She was not at all sure she could pretend not to be wounded by it.

“I do not want anything from you except this divorce,” Bethany forced herself to say.

Her body was staging a civil war. One part wanted to run for the door and disappear into the chilly fall evening. What was truly distressing and shocking was that part of her did not. Part of her instead ached for his hands that she knew could wield such dark sorcery against her flesh. She did not want to think about that. To remember. Touching Leo Di Marco was like leaping head-first into the sun. She would not survive it a second time. She would feel too much, he would feel too little and she would be the one to pay the price. She knew it as well as she knew her own name.

She straightened her shoulders, and made herself look at him directly, as if she were truly brave instead of desperate. Did it really matter which? “I want to be done with this farce, Leo.”

“And to what farce, exactly, do you refer?” he asked silkily, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, his gaze fixed on her face in a way that made her want to fidget. It made her feel scorched from the inside out. “When you ran away from me, from our marriage and our home, and relocated halfway across the globe?”

“That was not a farce,” she dared to say. There was no longer anything to lose, and she could not give in to her own desolation. “It was a fact.”

“It is a disgrace,” he said, his voice deceptively quiet, though she did not mistake the cold ferocity and hard lash of it. “But why speak of such things? You prove with your every breath that you have no interest at all in the shame you bring upon my family, my name.”

“Which is why we must divorce,” Bethany said, fighting to keep the edge from her voice and failing. “Problem solved.”

“Tell me something,” he said. With a peremptory jerk of his chin, he dismissed a hovering gallery-worker bearing a tray of champagne flutes then returned his gaze to Bethany’s. “Why this particular step? And why now? It has been three years since you abandoned me.”

“Since I escaped, you mean,” she retorted without thinking, and knew as soon as the words had passed her lips that she had made a grave error.

His dark eyes flared with heat and she felt an answering fire rage through her. It was as potent as the sense of being nothing more to him than prey, but she could not allow herself to look away.

She could not allow him to railroad her into another bargain with the devil made out of desperation and, cruelest of all, that tiny flicker of hope that nothing had ever managed to stamp out—not even his disinterest. She had to be out from under his thumb.

For good.

Prince Leo Di Marco told himself he was coldly, deeply furious. But it was no more than anger, no more than righteous indignation, he assured himself; it went no deeper than that. This woman’s uncanny ability to sneak around his lifelong armor and wound him was a thing of the past. It had to be.

He had spent the whole of his day in meetings on Bay Street, Toronto’s financial center. There was not a banker or businessman there who dared challenge the ancient Di Marco name—much less the near-limitless funds that went with it. Bethany was the only woman who had ever defied him, who had ever hurt him. The only person that he could remember doing so.

Three years on and she was doing it still. He had to fight himself to maintain his controlled exterior. He could feel the anger that only she inspired in him opening up that great, black cavern within him that he had long preferred to ignore. He knew exactly why she had demanded they meet in a public place—as if he was some kind of wild animal. As if he needed to be contained. Handled. He was not certain why this insult, atop all the others, should bite at him so deeply.

It infuriated him that he was not immune to her fresh-faced beauty that had so captivated and deceived him in the first place. She was still far too much of a temptation. Her angelic blue eyes were such an intriguing contrast to her dark-brown curls, all of it tempered with the faintest spray of freckles across her pert nose. He did not allow himself to concentrate on the delicate fullness of her mouth. It did not seem to matter that he knew her appearance of wide-eyed innocence was nothing more than an act.

It never seemed to matter.

He wanted his hands on her skin, his mouth on her breast. Those tight, ripe nipples against his tongue. He told himself it was all he wanted, all he chose to allow himself to want.

“Escaped?” he queried, icily. “The last I checked, you were living quite comfortably. In a house I own.”

“Because you demanded it!” she hissed, that fascinating splash of color rising from her graceful neck toward her soft cheeks. He knew other ways to raise that color upon her delicate skin and very nearly smiled, remembering. She darted a glance around at the crowd which surrounded them, as if for strength, then faced him again. “I wanted nothing to do with that house.”

He was a man who commanded empires. He had done so since his father’s death when he was only twenty-eight, maintaining his family’s ancient wealth while expanding it into the new era. How could this one woman continue to defy him? How was it possible? What weakness in him kept him from simply crushing her beneath his foot?

But he already knew the weakness intimately. It had already ruined him. He felt it in the heaviness in his groin, the edgy need that spiraled through him and demanded he get his hands beneath the heavy black suit he knew she was wearing to hide from him. Because she could never deny what she felt when he touched her, that he knew full well. Whatever else she chose to deny, or he preferred to ignore.

“I am fascinated by your uncharacteristic acquiescence,” he said through his teeth, furious with himself and with their entire tangled history, her trail of broken promises. “I recall making any number of demands that you chose to ignore: that you remained in Italy, as tradition required. That you refrained from casting shame on my family’s name with your behavior. That you honored your vows.”

“I will not fight with you,” she told him, her blue eyes flashing and her chin rising. She made a dismissive gesture with one hand, the one that should have worn his ring yet was offensively bare. He clamped down on the surge of temper. “You can choose to revise history however you like, but I am finished arguing about it.”

“Then we are in perfect agreement,” he bit out, keeping his voice low and for her ears alone despite the fierce kick of his temper—and that hollow place beneath it that he refused to acknowledge. “I have not gained an appreciation for public scenes since we last met, Bethany. If it is your plan to embarrass me further tonight, I suggest you rethink it. I do not think this will end the way you wish it to end.”

“There is no need for a scene,” she said at once. “Public or otherwise.” She shrugged, drawing attention to her delicate neck, and reminding him of the kisses he’d once pressed there and the sweet, addictive taste of her skin. But it was as if that was from another life. “I only want to be divorced from you. Finally.”

“Because it has been such a hardship for you to stay married to me?” he asked, his voice cutting and sarcastic. “How you must struggle.”

He was not a man who believed in impassioned displays—particularly in public, where he was forever being held up against the example of his family’s long legacy—but this woman had always provoked him like no other. Tonight her eyes were too blue, her mouth set in too firm a line. It clawed at him.

“I understand how it must cut at you,” he continued coldly. “To live in such unearned luxury. To have all the benefits of my name and protection with none of the attendant responsibilities.”

“You will be pleased to learn that I no longer want them, then,” she said. She raised her brows at him in direct challenge, but he was caught by the flash of vulnerability he saw move across her face. Bethany—vulnerable? That was not a word he’d ever use to describe her. Wild. Uncontrollable. Rebellious. But never defenseless, wounded. Never.

Impatiently, Leo shoved the odd turn of thought aside. The last thing in the world he needed now was to become intrigued anew by his wife. He had yet to recover from the initial disaster that had been his first, ruinous fascination with this woman. Look where it had led them both.

“Do you not?” he asked, his voice harsh, directed as much at his errant thoughts as at her. “How can you be certain when you have treated both with such disrespect?”

“I want a divorce,” she said again with a quiet strength. “This is the end, Leo. I’m moving on with my life.”

“Are you?” he asked, his tone dangerous. She either did not hear it or did not care. “How so?”

“I am moving out of that house,” she said at once, a wild fire he could not entirely comprehend raging in her sky-blue eyes. “I hate it. I never wanted to live there in the first place.”

“You are my wife.” His voice cracked like a whip, though he knew the words had long held no meaning for her, no matter that they still moved through him like blood, like need. “Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. Just because you have turned your back on the vows you made, does not mean that I have. I told you I would protect you and I meant it, even if it is from your own folly and stubborn recklessness.”

“I’m sure you think that makes you some kind of hero,” she threw at him in a falsely polite tone that he knew was for the benefit of the crowd around them. Yet he could see the real Bethany burn bright in her eyes and the flush on her neck. “But I never thought anyone was likely to kidnap me in the first place.” She let out a short, hollow laugh. “Believe me, I do not advertise our connection.”

“And yet it exists.” His voice brooked no argument; it could have melted steel. “And because of it, you are a target.”

“I won’t be for much longer,” she said, her foolhardy determination showing in that stubborn set to her jaw and the fire in her eyes. He almost admired it. Almost. “And you’ll find that I’ve never touched any of the money in that account of yours, either. I’m going to walk out of this marriage exactly as I walked into it.”

“And where do you intend to go?” he asked quietly, softly, not daring himself to move closer. He knew, somehow, that putting his hands on her would ruin them both and expose too much.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” she said, her gaze direct and challenging, searing into him. “But I’ve met someone else.”

## CHAPTER TWO

THE room seemed to drop away. All Bethany could see was the arrested look in his eyes that narrowed as he gazed at her. He did not move, yet she felt clenched in a kind of tight fist that held only the two of them, and that simmering tension that sparked and surged between them.

Had she really said that? Had she truly dared to say something like that to this man? To her husband?

How much worse would it be, she wondered in a panic, if it was actually true? She found she was holding her breath.

For a long, impossible moment Leo only stared at her, but she could feel the beat of his fury—and her own heart—like a wild drum. He looked almost murderous for a moment—or perhaps she was succumbing to hysteria. Then he shifted, and Bethany could breathe again.

“And who is the lucky man?” Leo asked in a lethally soft voice. When she only stared at him, afraid that her slightest movement might act as a red flag before a bull, his head tilted slightly to the left, though he did not lift his dark eyes from hers. “Your lover?”

Bethany somehow kept herself from shivering. It was the way he’d said that word. It seemed to skate over her skin, dangerous and deadly. She already regretted the lie. She knew she had only said it to hit at him, to hurt him in some small way—to get inside that iron control of his and make him as uncertain and unsettled as she always felt in his presence. To show him that she was deadly serious about divorcing him. Why had she sunk to his level?

But then she remembered who she was dealing with. Leo would say anything—do anything—to get what he wanted. She must be as ruthless as he was; if he had taught her nothing else, he had taught her that.

“We met at university while I finished my degree,” she said carefully, searching his hard features for some sign of what might happen next, or some hint of the anger she suspected lurked just out of sight beneath those cold eyes.

She reminded herself that the point was to end this tragedy of a marriage once and for all. Why should she feel as if she should go easy, as if she should protect Leo in some way? When had he ever protected her—from anything?

“He is everything I want in a man,” she said boldly. Surely some day she would meet someone who fit that bill? Surely she deserved that much? “He is considerate. Communicative. As interested in my life as in his own.”

Unlike Leo, who had abandoned his young wife entirely the moment they’d reached Italy, claiming his business concerns were far more pressing. Unlike Leo, who had closed himself off completely and had been coldly dismissive, when Bethany had not been able to understand why the man who had once adored her in every possible way had disappeared. Unlike Leo, who had thrown around words like ‘responsibility’ and ‘duty’ but had only meant that Bethany should follow his orders without question.

Unlike Leo, who had used the powerful sexual chemistry between them like a weapon, keeping her addicted, desperate and yet so very lonely for far longer than she should have been.

Something flared in the depths of his dark gaze then, something that shimmered through her, arrowing straight to her core, coiling tight and hot inside of her. It was as if he knew exactly what she was remembering and was remembering it too. Their bodies twined together, their skin slick and warm, their mouths fused—and Leo thrusting deep inside her again and again.

She took a ragged breath, jerked her gaze away from his and tried to calm her thudding heart. Those memories had no place here, now. There was no point to them. Leo had not destroyed her, as he’d seemed so bent on doing. She had survived. She had left him, and all that remained was this small legal matter. She would have spoken only to his staff about it and avoided this meeting, had they not insisted that the principe would wish to deal with this, with her, personally.

“He sounds like quite the paragon,” Leo replied after a long moment, much too calmly. He raised his dark brows slightly when she frowned at him.

“He is,” Bethany said firmly, wondering why she felt so unbalanced, as if she was being childish somehow—instead of using the only weapon she could think of that might actually do more than bounce off of him. Perhaps it was simply that being near Leo now made her feel as she had felt when she’d been with him: so very young and silly. Naïve and foolish.

“Far be it from me to stand in the way of such a perfect union,” Leo murmured, running his hand along the front of his exquisite suit jacket as if it required smoothing. As if anything he wore would dare defy him and wrinkle!

Bethany’s frown deepened. That was too blatant, surely? “There is no need for sarcasm.”

“I must contact my attorneys,” Leo said, his dark eyes hard on hers. Bethany felt slightly dizzy as that familiar old fire licked through her, making her legs tremble beneath her and her breath tangle in her throat.

How unfair that he could still affect her so after everything that had happened! Yet there was a part of her that knew that it was safer to acknowledge the attraction than the grief that lurked beneath it.

“Your attorneys?” she echoed, knowing she had to say something. She knew she could not simply stare at him with that impossible yearning welling up within her for the man he could never be, the man he was not.

She wished suddenly that she had more experience. That she had not been so sheltered and out of her depth when she’d met Leo. As if she’d spent her youth hermetically sealed away, which of course, in many ways, she had. But how could she have done anything else? There had been no one but Bethany to nurse her father through his long, extended illness; no one but Bethany to administer what care she could until his eventual death.

But she had had to drop out of her second year of university to do it when she was barely nineteen. She had been twenty-three when she’d met Leo on that fateful trip to her father’s favorite place in the world, Hawaii. She had dutifully traveled with the small inheritance he’d left behind to spread his ashes in the sea, as he’d wished. How could she have been prepared for an honest-to-goodness prince?

She had hardly imagined such creatures existed outside of fiction. She had been utterly off-balance from the moment he’d looked at her with those deep, dark eyes that had seemed to brand her from the inside out. Maybe if she’d been more like other girls her age, if she’d been more mature, if she’d ventured out from the tiny little world her father’s needs had dictated she make her own …

But there was no use trying to change the past—and, anyway, Bethany could not begrudge the years she’d spent caring for her father. She could only move forward now, armed with the strength she had not possessed at twenty-three. She had been artless and unformed then, and Leo had flattened her. That would never happen again.

“Yes,” he said now, his gaze moving over her face as if he could see the very things she so desperately wished to keep hidden: her lies. Her bravado. That deep despair at what they’d made of their marriage. That tiny spark of hope she would give anything to extinguish, once and for all. “My attorneys must handle any divorce proceedings, of course. They will let me know what is involved in such a matter.” His smile was thin, yet still polite. Barely. “I have no experience with such things.”

Bethany was confused and wary. Was this really happening? Was he simply caving? Agreeing? She had not imagined such a thing could be possible. She had imagined he would fight, and fight dirty. Not because he wanted her, of course, but because he was not a man who had ever been left, and his pride would demand he fight. She was not certain what the hollow feeling that washed through her meant.

“Is this a trick?” she asked after a moment.

Leo’s brows lifted with pure, male arrogance. He looked every inch the scion of a noble bloodline that he was.

“A trick?” he repeated, as if he was unfamiliar with the term yet found it vaguely distasteful.

“You were opposed to my leaving you in the first place,” she pointed out stiffly. That was a vast understatement. “And you did not seem any more resigned to the idea of it tonight. How can I trust that you will really do this?”

He did not speak for a long moment, yet that simmering awareness between them seemed to reach boiling point. Once again, Bethany felt heat and a deep, encompassing panic wash over her. She thought he almost smiled then.

Instead, he reached over and took her hand in his impossibly warm, hard grasp.

Flames raced up her arm, and she felt her whole body tighten in reaction. She felt the ache of it, both physical and, worse, emotional. She wanted to yank her hand from his more than she wanted to draw her next breath, but she forced herself to stand still, to let him touch her, to pretend she was unmoved by the feel of his skin against hers.

Leo watched her for a moment then dropped his brooding gaze to her hand. His thumb moved back and forth over the backs of her fingers, sending sensation streaking through her. She felt herself melt for him, as she always had at even his slightest touch. She ached—and she hated him for it.

“What are you doing?” she managed to say through lips that hardly moved. How could she still be so helpless? How could he have this power over her?

“You seem to have misplaced your wedding ring,” he said quietly, still looking at her hand, the chill in his voice in direct contrast to the bright, hot flame of his touch.

“I did not misplace it,” she gritted out. “I removed it a long time ago. Deliberately.”

“Of course you did,” he murmured, and then murmured something else in Italian that she was delighted not to understand.

“I thought about pawning it,” she continued, knowing that would bring his gaze back to hers. She raised her brows. “But that would be petty.”

“And you are many things, Bethany, are you not?” His mouth was so grim, his eyes a dark blaze. He let her hand go and she pulled it back too quickly, too obviously. His mouth twisted, mocking her. “But never petty.”

Leo stared out the floor-to-ceiling window of the penthouse condominium that had been secured for his use. But he did not see the towers of Bay Street, nor the muted lights of downtown Toronto still glittering at his feet despite the late hour.

He could not sleep. He told himself it was because he hated the inevitable rain, the cold and the wet that swept in from Lake Ontario that chilled to the bone and yet passed for autumn in this remote, northern place. He told himself he needed nothing but another drink—perhaps that might ease the tension that still ravaged through him.

But he could not seem to get Bethany’s bright blue eyes, clear and challenging, out of his head. And then that flash of vulnerability, as if she’d hurt—and deeply.

She was like some kind of witch.

He had thought so when they had collided in the warm, silky surf off of Waikiki Beach. He had caught her in his arms to keep her from tumbling with the breakers toward the sand, and it had been those eyes that had first drawn him in: so wide, so blue, like the sea all around them and the vast Hawaiian sky above. And she had looked up at him with her wet hair plastered to her head and her sensual lips parted, as if he were all the world. He had felt the same.

How times changed.

It was not enough that he had lost his life-long, renowned control with her then. That he had betrayed his family’s wishes and his own expectations and married a nobody from a place about as far away from his beloved northern Italy as it was possible to get. He had been supposed to choose an appropriately titled bride, a woman of endless pedigree and celebrated blood—a fate that he had accepted as simply one more aspect of the many duties that comprised his title. He was the Principe di Felici. His family’s roots extended back into thirteenth-century Florence. He had expected his future wife to have a heritage no less impressive.

Yet he had eloped with Bethany instead. He had married her because, for the first and only time in his life, he had felt wild and reckless. Passionate. Alive. He had not been able to imagine returning to his life without her.

And he had paid for his folly ever since.

Leo turned from the window, and set his empty tumbler down on the wide glass table before him. He raked his fingers through his hair and refused to speculate as to the meaning of the heaviness in his chest. He did not spare a glance for the sumptuous leather couches, nor the intricate statuary that accented the great room.

He thought only of Bethany, saw only Bethany, a haunting he had come to regard as commonplace over the years. She was his one regret, his one mistake. His wife.

He had already compromised more than he could have ever imagined possible, against all advice and all instinct. He had assumed her increasing sullenness in their first year of marriage was merely a phase she had been going through—a necessary shift from her quiet life into his far more colorful one—and had therefore allowed her more leeway than he should have.

He had suffered her temper, her baffling resistance to performing her official duties, even her horror that he had wanted to start a family so quickly. He had foolishly believed that she needed time to grow into her role as his wife, when retrospect made it clear that what she’d truly needed was a firmer hand.

He had let her leave him, shocked and hurt in ways he’d refused to acknowledge that she would attempt it in the first place. He had assumed she would come to her senses while they were apart, that she needed time to adjust to the idea of her new responsibilities and the pressures of her new role and title. Neither was something a common, simple girl from Toronto could have been prepared for, he had come to understand.

After all, he had spent his whole life coming to terms with the weight and heft of the Di Marco heritage and its many demands upon him. He had reluctantly let her have her freedom—after all, she had been so young when they had married. So unformed. So unsophisticated.

And this was how she repaid him. Lies about a lover, when she should have known that he had her every movement tracked and would certainly have allowed no lover to further sully his name. Claims that she wished to divorce him, unforgivably uttered in public where anyone might hear. Aspersions cast without trepidation upon his character, his honor.

He took a kind of solace in the anger that surged through him. It was far, far easier to be angry than to confront what he knew lay beneath. And he had vowed that he would never show her his vulnerabilities—never again.

Revenge would be sweet, he decided, and he would have no qualms whatsoever in extracting it. He thought then of that confusing vulnerability he’d thought he’d seen but dismissed it.

Di Marcos did not divorce. Ever.

The Princess Di Marco, Principessa di Felici, had two duties: to support her husband in all he did, and to bear him heirs to secure the title. Leo sank down onto the nearest couch and blew out a breath.

It was about time that Bethany started living up to her responsibilities.

And, if those responsibilities forced her to return to him as she should have done years before, all the better.

Bethany should not have been surprised when she looked up from packing a box the next morning to see Leo looming in the doorway of her bedroom. But she could not contain the gasp that escaped her.

She jerked back and pressed her hand against her wildly thumping heart. It was surprise, she told herself; no more than surprise. Certainly not that wild, desperate hope she refused to acknowledge within her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, appalled at the breathiness of her voice. And, in any case, she knew what he was doing: this was his house, wasn’t it? Three stories of stately brick and pedigreed old-money in Rosedale, Toronto’s wealthiest neighborhood. It was exactly where Prince Leopoldo Di Marco, Principe di Felici, ought to reside.

Bethany hated it—she hated everything the house stood for. Her occupying such a monied, ancestrally predetermined sort of space seemed like a contradiction in terms—like one more lie. Yet Leo had insisted that she live in this house, or in Italy with him, and three years ago she had not had the strength to choose her own third option.

As long as she lived under this roof, she was essentially consenting to her sham of a marriage—and Leo’s control. Yet she had stayed here anyway, until she could no longer pretend that she was not on some level waiting for him to come and claim her.

Once she had accepted that depressing truth, she had known she had no choice but to act.

“Surely my presence cannot be quite so shocking?” Leo asked in that way of his that felt like a slap, as if she was too foolish, too naïve. It set her teeth on edge.

“Are you so grand that you cannot ring the doorbell like anyone else?” she asked more fiercely than she’d intended.

It did not help that she had not slept well, her mind racing and her skin buzzing as if she’d been wildly over-caffeinated. Nor did it help that she had dressed to pack boxes today, in a pair of faded blue jeans and a simple, blue long-sleeved T-shirt, with her curls tied up in a haphazard knot on the back of her head. Not exactly the height of elegance.

Leo, of course, looked exquisite and impeccable in a charcoal-colored buttoned-down shirt that clung to his flat, hard chest and a pair of dark, wool trousers that only emphasized the strong lines of his body.

He leaned against the doorjamb and watched her for a simmering moment, his mouth unsmiling, those coffee eyes hooded.

“Is your lot in life truly so egregious, Bethany?” he asked softly. “Do I deserve quite this level of hostility?”

Something thicker than regret—and much too close to shame—turned over in her stomach. But Bethany forced herself not to do what every instinct screamed at her to do: she would not apologize, cajole or soothe. She knew from painful experience that there was only one way such things would end. Leo took and took until there was nothing in her left to give.

So she did not cross to him. She did not even shrug an apology. She only brushed a fallen strand of hair away from her face, ignored the spreading hollowness within and concentrated on the box in front of her on the wide bed.

“I realize this is your house,” she said stiffly into the uncomfortable silence. “But I would appreciate it if you would do me the courtesy of announcing your arrival, rather than appearing in doorways. It seems only polite.”

There were so many land mines littered about the floor and so many memories cluttering the air between them—too many. Her chest felt tight, yet all she could think of was her first night in Italy and Leo’s patient instructions about how she would be expected to behave—delivered between kisses in his grand bed. He had grown less patient and much less affectionate over time, when it had become clear to all involved that he had made a dreadful mistake in marrying someone like Bethany. Her mouth tightened at the memory.

“Of course,” Leo murmured. His dark gaze tracked her movements. “You are already packing your belongings?”

“Don’t worry,” she said, shooting him a look. “I won’t take anything that isn’t mine.”

That muscle in his jaw jumped and his eyes narrowed.

“I am relieved to hear it,” he said after a thick, simmering moment.

When she had folded the same white cotton sweater four times, and still failed to do it correctly, Bethany gave up. She turned from the bed and faced him, swallowing back any fear, anxiety or any of the softer, deeper things she pretended not to feel—because none would do her any good.

“Leo, really.” She shoved her hands into her hip pockets so he could not see that they were curling into fists. “Why are you here?”

“I have not visited this place in a long time,” he said, and she hated him for it.

“No,” she agreed, her voice a rasp in the sudden tense air of the room.

How dared he refer to that night—that awful, shameful night? How could she have behaved that way, so out of control and crazed with her heartbreak, her desperate resolve to really, truly leave him? And how could all of that fury and fire have twisted around and around and left her so wanton, so shameless, that she could have … mated with him like that? With such ferocity it still made her shiver years later.

She’d had no idea of the depths to which she could sink. Not until he’d taken her there and then left her behind to stew in it.

“I have news,” he said, his gaze moving over her face, once again making her wonder exactly what he could read there. “But I do not think you will be pleased.” He straightened from the door and suddenly seemed much closer than he should. She fought to stand still, to keep from backing away.

“Well?” she asked.

But he did not answer her immediately. Instead, he moved into the room, seeming to take it over, somehow, seeming to diminish it with the force of his presence.

Bethany felt the way his eyes raked over the white linen piled high on the unmade bed even as her memory played back too-vivid recollections of the night she most wanted to forget. The crash and splintering of a vase against the wall. Her fists against his chest. His fierce, mocking laughter. His shirt torn from him with her own desperate hands. His mouth fused to hers. His hands like fire, punishment and glory all over her, lifting her, spurring her on, damning them both.

She shook it off and found him watching her, a gleam in his dark gaze, as if he too remembered the very same scenes. He stood at the foot of the bed, too close to her. He could too easily reach over and tip her onto the mattress, and Bethany was not at all certain what might happen then.

She froze, appalled at the direction of her thoughts. A familiar despair washed through her, all the more bitter because she knew it so well. Still she wanted him. Still. She did not understand how that could be true. She did not want to understand; she only wanted it—and him—to go away. She wanted to be free of the heavy weight of him, of his loss. She simply wanted to be free.

It was as if he could read her mind. The silence between them seemed charged, alive. His gaze dropped from hers to flick over her mouth then lower, to test her curves, and she could feel it as clearly as if he’d put his hands upon her.

“You said you had something to tell me,” she managed to grate out as if her thighs did not feel loose, ready, despite her feelings of hopelessness. As if her core did not pulse for him. As if she did not feel that electricity skate over her skin, letting her know he was near, stirring up that excitement she would give anything to deny.

“I do,” Leo murmured, dark and tall, too big and too powerful to be in this room. This house. Her life. “The divorce. There is a complication.”

“What complication?” she asked, suspicious, though her traitorous body did not seem to care. It throbbed for him, hot and needy.

“I am afraid that it cannot be done remotely.” He shrugged in that supremely Italian way, as if to say that the vagaries of such things were beyond anyone’s control, even his.

“You cannot mean …?” she began. His gaze found hers then, so very dark and commanding, and she felt goosebumps rise along her arms and neck. It was as though someone walked across her grave, she thought distantly.

“There is no getting around it,” he said, but his voice was not apologetic. His gaze was direct. And Bethany went completely cold. “I am afraid that you must return to Italy.”