Princess From the Past. Caitlin Crews
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