One Reckless Decision

But when she turned toward his door her gaze met his for a split second across the antechamber and the spacious inner-office before the same secretary walked out and closed the door behind her.

The split second had been enough. Leo felt the force of her gaze as if it still seared into him through the heavy wooden door. Tortured. Bitter. Despairing.

Furious.

And he knew then exactly what he had feared, exactly what he had felt floating around them, undermining all the seeming perfection of their reunion    : this moment.

This was what he’d been attempting to avoid all along.

Because he knew what the damned lawyer must have told her. He knew exactly what could put that horrible look on the face that had been soft and shining when he’d left her this morning.

He had taken his biggest gamble yet, he realized, and if that expression was anything to go by Leo Di Marco had finally lost. He had lost and this loss, he realized with a sudden flare of deep certainty, he could not tolerate.

He could not. He would not.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, cutting off the consultant who was still speaking. He rose to his feet. Because he was the prince, no one argued—no one even commented. They merely stood respectfully. “Something has come up.”

Then, with a growing sense of something he refused to call panic, but which shot through him too fast and too slick, he went after her.

He was a liar.

He was still no more than a liar.

Bethany could not breathe. She could not breathe, and she could not seem to stop making that choking sound in the back of her throat as she hurtled herself down the long, history-laden hallway that seemed to shrink around her as she moved. Oppressive, not beautiful. Dark, not graceful. A prison, not a castle—all over again.

How could she have forgotten how ruthless he was? How could she have done the one thing she had known better than to do and fallen right back into his arms, his bed? It was as if he touched her and she immediately contracted some kind of amnesia. What had she been thinking? Had she been thinking?

All the while, he had lied to her.

She reached her chamber and threw open the door, her breath coming in shallow, desperate pants. She was a fool, such a naïve little fool, even now. It was not her youth or her inexperience this time. It was him.

It was Leo, who had never intended to let her go. Who had talked her into coming to Italy simply because he’d grown tired of waiting for her to return of her own volition, because he wanted her here for whatever complicated reason of his own. And he was the prince—he did as he pleased. His wish was her command. Her stomach heaved.

But what other explanation could there be? The lawyer had told her the sickening truth about Italian divorces outside Leo’s office: both spouses had to appear in court and declare they wished to separate. And only after three years of legal separation had passed could divorce be considered, much less granted.

“But I explained all of this to the prince …” the man had stammered apologetically. “Weeks ago.”

She had no doubt at all that he had done precisely that.

Which could only mean one thing, she thought as she staggered into her bedchamber and then stood there, her head spinning around and around: Leo had brought her here under false pretenses. He had known the laws of his own country; of this, Bethany had no doubt. He had always intended to use her body against her, to lull her into a false sense of security.

She heard herself let out a low sound, a kind of sob, and then she bit it back, the pain too great, the anger leaving her as suddenly as it had crashed into her.

She was not his puppet. She was not some kind of marionette that he directed at his whim. She had chosen to kiss him at the lakeside. She had done this to herself, in full possession of her faculties, for all the good they had done her. She had abandoned herself as totally as she had years ago—as completely as everyone else had abandoned her over the years.

Her mother, who had died when she was so young, who she had never known. Her father, who had been wracked with grief, then so weak, then so ill, before he died. Leo, who had left her so alone when she had not known herself at all, much less him. But, above all, she had abandoned herself. She had lost herself again and again, and it was this that she thought she might never forgive. Leo was merely the catalyst.

This was no more than her latest great betrayal—the latest heartbreak she had perpetrated on herself with her own shocking inability to keep herself safe as she should, as any adult would. Leo’s manipulations were almost beside the point. This was, after all, who he was, and she’d known it full well. She’d had no illusions at all about what sort of man he was, had she? So why was she so astonished? Why did it hurt so much that she could not manage to breathe as she should? Why did she feel so …bruised?