Bethany’s mouth fell open then. There was a heat behind her eyes and a riot in her limbs as she tried to make sense of what he was saying—what he was doing or, more to the point, deliberately not doing.
“I am not a martyr,” was all she could think to say, instantly wishing she could yank the words back into her mouth. She did not feel like a martyr, she felt adrift and unsteady, as she had always felt here.
“Indeed you are not,” he said softly, deliberately, that gleam in his eyes growing hard, seeming to take over the room, her pounding heart. “What you are is a liar. It is entirely up to you to prove otherwise.”
He thought she was a liar. He had said it before, and she had no doubt he meant it. It was almost amusing, she thought, unable to look away from him for a long, searing moment. It should have been amusing, really, and she wanted to laugh it off, but she found she had no voice. She could not seem to find it.
She could not reply in kind, or at all, and she did not know why that seemed to highlight everything they’d lost. What was being called a liar next to all of that?
“Eight o’clock,” he said with a certain finality and evident satisfaction. “Do not make me come and fetch you.”
Then he walked from the room and left her standing there, shocked, trembling and lost again, so very lost—as he had no doubt planned from the start.
There was so much she had forgotten, Bethany thought as she made her way through the castle’s quiet halls toward dinner moments before eight o’clock, as requested.
She had not expected to find so many memories when she’d ventured into her former closet and searched for something simple to wear to dinner. It was not quite a homecoming, and yet every gown, every bag, every shoe had seemed to whisper a different half-forgotten story to her.
They had all come flooding back to her without warning, leaving her raw and aching for a past she knew she needed to keep firmly behind her if she was to escape it. But the memories had rushed at her anyway.
A night out at the opera in Milan, where the glorious voices had seemed to pale next to the fire in Leo’s gaze that she’d believed could burn out everything else in the world. A weekend at a friend’s villa outside of Rome, replete with sunshine and laughter—and with her growing fear that she was losing him a constant sharpness underneath.
A rare public eruption of his fiercely contained temper on a side street in Verona while walking to a business dinner, quick, brutal and devastating. A passionate moment on a quiet bridge in Venice; the explosive, impossible desire that still shimmered between them had been the only way left to reach each other across the walls of bitterness and silence they’d erected.
So many images and recollections, none of which she had entertained in ages, all of them buffeting her, storming her defenses, making her feel weak, small, vulnerable in ways she hadn’t been in years.
She ran her hands along the swell of her hips as she walked, smoothing the silken, kelly-green material that flowed to her feet, trying to calm herself. The simple cowl-necked dress was the only item she’d been able to find that was both relatively restrained and unconnected to any of the explosive memories she had not known she’d been carrying around with her.
But it was not only the memories connected to her forgotten clothes that had unnerved her.
More than that, she’d realized during that confusing interaction with Leo that on some level she had forgotten who she was back then. The woman Leo had referred to so disparagingly—the one who had behaved so appallingly, who had, she was humiliated to recall, more than once destroyed more than one piece of china while in a temper—was not her.
That was not who she was, not anymore. It made her stomach hurt to think of it. To think of who he must see when he looked at her. To think that she remembered her isolation and the loss of all she had loved, but he remembered nothing but a termagant.
It had been that last night that had changed her, she realised, as she descended the great stone stair that dominated the front hall, rising from both sides to meet in the center and then veer off to the east and west wings. That last, shameful night. It was as if something had broken in her then, as if she’d been faced with the depths of her own temper, her own depraved passions. She’d lost that fiery, inconsolable part of herself, that wild, violent, mad part. For good? she thought.
Or perhaps it is Leo who stirs up all those dark and disgraceful urges, an insidious voice whispered. Perhaps he is the match. Perhaps without him you are simply tinder in a box, harmless and entirely free of fire.
“I am shocked,” came his lazy drawl, as if she’d summoned him simply by thinking of him.