One Reckless Decision

“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.