Had he lost his mind? He had managed to ruin the entire country for her. She couldn’t imagine what would ever induce her to return to it. In her mind, any return to Italy meant a return to the spineless creature she had been when she lived there; she could not—would not—be that person ever again.
But Leo merely watched her with those knowing, mocking eyes as if he knew something she did not.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she tossed at him to offset the panic skipping through her nerves.
Leo’s dark brows rose in a haughty sort of amazement, and she remembered belatedly that the Principe di Felici was not often called things like ‘ridiculous.’ He was no doubt more used to being showered in honorifics. ‘Your Excellency.’ ‘My Prince.’ She bit her lower lip but did not retract her words.
“I am afraid there is no other way, if you wish to divorce me,” he said. If he were another man, she might have thought that tone apologetic. But this was Leo, and his eyes were too unreadable, so she could only be suspicious. “If you wish to remain merely separated, of course, you can continue to do as you please.”
“I am not the idiot you seem to think,” she said, her mind reeling. “I am a Canadian citizen. I do not need to go all the way to Italy to divorce you—I can do it right here.”
“That would be true, had you not signed all the papers,” Leo said calmly. His gaze was disconcertingly direct, seeming to push inside of her and render her transparent. Yet she could not seem to look away. His head tilted slightly to one side. “When you first arrived at the castello. Perhaps you do not recall.”
“Of course I remember.” Bethany let out a short laugh even as her stomach twisted anxiously. “How could anyone forget three days of legal documents?”
She remembered all too well the intimidating sheaves of paper that had been thrust at her by an unsmiling phalanx of attorneys, her signature required again and again. Sign here, principessa.
Most of the documents had been in Italian, affixed with serious and official seals and covered with intimidatingly dense prose. She had not understood a single thing that had been put in front of her, but she had been so desperately in love with her brand-new husband that she had signed everything anyway.
That great cavern of sorrow she carried within her yawned open, but she ignored it. She could not collapse in that way. Not now.
“Then you perhaps have forgotten what, exactly, it is that you signed,” Leo continued, his cool, faintly mocking voice kindling fear and fury in equal measure and sending both shooting along Bethany’s limbs like a hot wind.
“I have no idea what I signed,” she was forced to admit. It pained her that she could ever have been so blindly trusting, even five years ago at the start of her marriage when she had thought Leo Di Marco was the whole of the cosmos.
He inclined his head toward her, as if that statement said all that need be said.
“I signed it because you told me to sign it,” Bethany said quietly. “I assumed you were concerned with my best interests as well as your own.” She eyed him and gathered her courage around her like a shield. “Not a mistake I intend to repeat.”
“Of course not,” Leo said in that smooth, sardonic tone, crossing his arms over his hard chest.
He looked around the room, pointedly taking in the elegance of the furnishings, the pale blue walls beneath delicate moldings and the thick, rich carpeting beneath their feet.
“Because,” he continued in that same tone, “as we have established, you have lived as if in a nightmare ever since the day you agreed to marry me.”
“Are you going to tell me what rights I signed away, or would you prefer to stand there making sarcastic remarks?” Bethany snapped at him, exasperated at her own distressing softening as well as his patronizing tone. She hated the way he looked at her then, his arrogant gaze growing somehow more intimidating, burning into her.
“My apologies,” he said, his tone scathing. “I was unaware that my preferences were of any interest to you.”
He almost smiled then, a hard, edgy crook of his sensual mouth. Bethany wanted to look away but found she couldn’t—she was as trapped, as if he held her in his hands, which she knew would be the end of her.
“But that is neither here nor there, is it?” he asked in that deadly, soft tone that sent shivers down Bethany’s spine and twisted through her stomach. “The salient point is that you agreed that any divorce proceedings, should they ever become necessary, would be held in an Italian court under Italian law.”
“And, naturally, I have only your word for that,” Bethany pointed out, horrified that her voice sounded so insubstantial. She cleared her throat and jerked her gaze from his as if she might turn to stone were she to lose herself any further in that bittersweet darkness. “I could have agreed to anything and I would have no way of knowing, would I?”