One Reckless Decision

Leo’s eyes darkened with that pure male fire she knew too well. It called to that twisted part of her, the part she most wanted to deny.

Because despite the pain, the grief and the loneliness, she still wanted him. She still ached for him, that wave of longing and lust that made everything else the very lies he accused her of telling. His body. His presence. The light of his smile, the brush of his hand, the very fact of his nearness. She ached.

Time seemed to stand still. There was only that fierce, knowing gleam in his eyes, as there had always been. One touch, his gaze promised her, hot, gleaming and sure. Only one small touch and she would be his. Only that, and she would betray herself completely.

And she knew some part of her wanted him to do it—wanted him to tumble her to the bed and take her with all the easy command and consummate skill that had always shaken her so completely, melted her so fully, made her his in every way. She no longer even bothered to despair of herself.

“My plane awaits,” he said softly, and she could hear the intense satisfaction behind his words. As if he had known they would end up in exactly this place. As if he had made it so. As if he could read her mind.

“I will not travel with you,” she told him, holding her head high even as she surrendered, because she could not think of anything else to do, any way to escape this. Escape him. Their past. She would go to Italy and fight it there, where it had gone so wrong in the first place.

She glared at him. “I will find my own way there.”

And Leo, damn him, smiled.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE small, achingly picturesque village of Felici—ancestral seat of the Di Marco family and the very last place Bethany ever wanted to visit again—clung to the hillside in the late-afternoon sun, red-roofed and white-walled.

The local church thrust its proud white steeple high into the air, bells tolling out the turn of the hour. Carefully cultivated vineyards stretched out across the tidy Felici Valley, reaching toward the alpine foothills rising in the distance. And at the highest point in the village loomed the ancient Castello di Felici itself, defining the very hill it clung to, announcing the might and power of the Di Marco family to all who ventured near.

Yet all Bethany could see was ghosts.

She drove the hired car along the main road that wound up into the village, so renowned for its narrow medieval streets and prosperous, cheerful architecture. She pulled into the small parking area near the pensione located at the hill’s midway point. But she still couldn’t seem to draw a full breath, or calm the nervous fluttering in her belly.

It had been that way since her plane had taken off from Toronto two nights before. She had only managed a fitful, restless kind of doze for most of the long overnight flight. When she had managed to sleep, her dreams had been filled with dread, loss and panic and Leo’s bittersweet, chocolate gaze like a laser cutting through her. Hardly rejuvenating.

“My men will meet you at the airport,” he had told her, in that peremptory manner that made it clear there was to be no discussion before taking his leave from the house in Rosedale.

It had been like a flashback into the very heart of their married life, and not a pleasant one. Bethany had not been able to stand the thought of doing what he’d decreed she should do, and not simply because he’d decreed it. She’d felt claustrophobic imagining how it would go: she would be marched from the plane, deposited into one of the endless fleet of gleaming black cars he had at his disposal and spirited away to his castello like …property.

She shuddered anew, just thinking of it. That was exactly why she had opted to fly into Rome instead of the much-closer Milan.

She’d fought off her exhaustion throughout the long drive up the middle of the country, arriving in the outskirts of Milan early the previous evening. She’d fallen gratefully into a clean bed in a cheap hotel outside the city limits and had finally slept. It had been nearly noon when she’d pulled herself out of bed, cotton-headed and reeling, her thudding heart telling her the anxiety dreams had continued even if she hadn’t quite remembered them once awake.

She’d remembered other things, however, no matter how she’d tried to keep the memories at bay.

“Ah, luce mio, how I love you,” he had whispered as he had held her close, high on a balcony that overlooked the Felici Valley as the sun had set before them that first night in Italy.

My light, she had thought, dazed by him as if he were all the fire and song of the stars above. “Why am I your light?” she had asked. She’d meant, how can you love me when you are you and I am me?

“These eyes,” he had murmured, kissing one closed lid and then the next. “They are as blue as the summer sky. How could you be anything but light, with eyes such as these?”