One Reckless Decision

Leo lounged against the paneled door frame, his long, lean form packed into dark trousers and a cashmere black sweater that emphasized his whipcord strength. His eyes seemed nearly black, and she fought off the urge to rub at the back of her neck where the fine hairs there whispered in warning.

He looked dark and powerful, like one of the ancient Roman gods that had once roamed this land, capricious and cruel. And she knew he was bent on vengeance just the same. He did not show her that sardonic smile of his, that mocking twist of his sensual lips.

He did not need to. Her very presence was enough.

Already she felt as if she’d lost everything. Again.

“Ah, principessa,” Leo said, his tone laced with irony. “Welcome home.”

He took a moment to drink in the sight of her, back where she belonged after all of this time. Finally.

It almost eased the three years’ worth of simmering anger and the deeper current beneath it he felt when he looked at her. She crossed her arms over her middle, as if it hurt her to stand there in the ancestral bedroom where she had once lived. Where—he knew, whether she did or not—she would live again.

He would allow for no other outcome.

She looked tired, he thought, eyeing her critically. She was unusually pale, though her head was high with the same kind of quiet pride she had showed in Toronto. He did not want her pride, he thought; he wanted her passion. And then her acquiescence.

Because he could think of no other way to reach her. And he had exhausted his futile attempts to pretend that that was not exactly what he wanted.

She wore a tight white T-shirt that clung to her pert, full breasts and a sweater wrap that hung down to her thighs in a soft blue that made her eyes glow even brighter than usual. She still wore those faded denim jeans. In some kind of deliberate rebellion, he had no doubt, though the triumph he felt that he had managed to bring her home far outweighed any disapproval he might have felt about her choice of wardrobe.

He wanted to touch her, taste her. Trace the shape of her graceful neck, sink his fingers into her dark curls. Welcome her back to her home, her responsibilities, him, in the way they would both find most pleasurable. In the only way he knew would bind her to him without having to touch on all that seemed to threaten from beneath the certainty of the fire that raged between them.

If he could only have that fire again, he thought, he would know better how to tend it. He would not let it go again so easily.

The vast room seemed smaller suddenly and her eyes widened with awareness. He smiled slightly. Bethany looked away and swallowed. Leo let his gaze trace the fine column of her throat and saw the wash of red that began to climb there.

“I do not understand why I was dragged from the inn of my choice,” she said after a moment.

“I see you are starting at once on the offensive,” he murmured, mildly reproving. “Are you not tired of it yet? I feel certain we have enough to discuss without any unnecessary histrionics.”

Her brows rose in astonishment. “There is no reason for me to stay here. It is hardly histrionic to say so.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, and rubbed him entirely up the wrong way.

“Why?” he asked coolly. “Other than the fact you’d made your usual dramatic proclamations about how you would never return, what objection can you possibly have to staying in the castello?”

She stared at him with a curious expression that Leo had never seen before—one that suggested that he was not very bright. It made him feel …restless. A slow beat of that same old anger and a very familiar frustration began to hammer in his gut, mixed with a new edge that had everything to do with the calm, cool way she looked at him. As if he was the person outside the bounds of propriety and self-control when that had always been her role.

“I do not want to be here.” She said it very deliberately, her gaze still on his in that insulting manner. “I need no other objection than that.”

Leo straightened from the doorway, coldly amused at the way she jerked back, as if she expected him to lunge at her. He wished he could. He wished he could simply throw her over his shoulder and take her down with him to the soft mattress of the bed behind her. But he knew that, as delightful as it would be to lose himself in her body, it would only delay the inevitable.

Sex had never been their problem. It had been a weapon, a hiding place, a muddying of already murky waters. He knew with a sudden, devastating insight into the part of himself he preferred to ignore that he could not let it be used as such any longer.

He wanted her back where she belonged, and this time he would have all of her.

“Let me be clear,” he said, his voice clipped. Authoritative. “You will not stay in the village. The fact that you attempted to do so after the childish stunt you pulled with your flight—without my ring on your finger or my name, though you are easily identifiable and must know the shame that casts upon this house—only underscores your selfishness.”