“And to what farce, exactly, do you refer?” he asked silkily, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, his gaze fixed on her face in a way that made her want to fidget. It made her feel scorched from the inside out. “When you ran away from me, from our marriage and our home, and relocated halfway across the globe?”
“That was not a farce,” she dared to say. There was no longer anything to lose, and she could not give in to her own desolation. “It was a fact.”
“It is a disgrace,” he said, his voice deceptively quiet, though she did not mistake the cold ferocity and hard lash of it. “But why speak of such things? You prove with your every breath that you have no interest at all in the shame you bring upon my family, my name.”
“Which is why we must divorce,” Bethany said, fighting to keep the edge from her voice and failing. “Problem solved.”
“Tell me something,” he said. With a peremptory jerk of his chin, he dismissed a hovering gallery-worker bearing a tray of champagne flutes then returned his gaze to Bethany’s. “Why this particular step? And why now? It has been three years since you abandoned me.”
“Since I escaped, you mean,” she retorted without thinking, and knew as soon as the words had passed her lips that she had made a grave error.
His dark eyes flared with heat and she felt an answering fire rage through her. It was as potent as the sense of being nothing more to him than prey, but she could not allow herself to look away.
She could not allow him to railroad her into another bargain with the devil made out of desperation and, cruelest of all, that tiny flicker of hope that nothing had ever managed to stamp out—not even his disinterest. She had to be out from under his thumb.
For good.
Prince Leo Di Marco told himself he was coldly, deeply furious. But it was no more than anger, no more than righteous indignation, he assured himself; it went no deeper than that. This woman’s uncanny ability to sneak around his lifelong armor and wound him was a thing of the past. It had to be.
He had spent the whole of his day in meetings on Bay Street, Toronto’s financial center. There was not a banker or businessman there who dared challenge the ancient Di Marco name—much less the near-limitless funds that went with it. Bethany was the only woman who had ever defied him, who had ever hurt him. The only person that he could remember doing so.
Three years on and she was doing it still. He had to fight himself to maintain his controlled exterior. He could feel the anger that only she inspired in him opening up that great, black cavern within him that he had long preferred to ignore. He knew exactly why she had demanded they meet in a public place—as if he was some kind of wild animal. As if he needed to be contained. Handled. He was not certain why this insult, atop all the others, should bite at him so deeply.
It infuriated him that he was not immune to her fresh-faced beauty that had so captivated and deceived him in the first place. She was still far too much of a temptation. Her angelic blue eyes were such an intriguing contrast to her dark-brown curls, all of it tempered with the faintest spray of freckles across her pert nose. He did not allow himself to concentrate on the delicate fullness of her mouth. It did not seem to matter that he knew her appearance of wide-eyed innocence was nothing more than an act.
It never seemed to matter.
He wanted his hands on her skin, his mouth on her breast. Those tight, ripe nipples against his tongue. He told himself it was all he wanted, all he chose to allow himself to want.
“Escaped?” he queried, icily. “The last I checked, you were living quite comfortably. In a house I own.”
“Because you demanded it!” she hissed, that fascinating splash of color rising from her graceful neck toward her soft cheeks. He knew other ways to raise that color upon her delicate skin and very nearly smiled, remembering. She darted a glance around at the crowd which surrounded them, as if for strength, then faced him again. “I wanted nothing to do with that house.”
He was a man who commanded empires. He had done so since his father’s death when he was only twenty-eight, maintaining his family’s ancient wealth while expanding it into the new era. How could this one woman continue to defy him? How was it possible? What weakness in him kept him from simply crushing her beneath his foot?
But he already knew the weakness intimately. It had already ruined him. He felt it in the heaviness in his groin, the edgy need that spiraled through him and demanded he get his hands beneath the heavy black suit he knew she was wearing to hide from him. Because she could never deny what she felt when he touched her, that he knew full well. Whatever else she chose to deny, or he preferred to ignore.