Then, perhaps, they could compare their facts and discuss a few home truths he was certain she would not like at all.
Leo shoved the burning desire as far down as he could and forced himself to look at her blandly, politely. As if he could not imagine six separate ways to take her right here, right now. On the table, on the floor, up against the windows with the light bathing them in—
But that was not productive.
“I must have my valet prepare the appropriate attire to complement bare feet,” he said instead, lazily.
He gazed at her until her neck washed red, and then he smiled, because he knew exactly how she felt. Winded. Hungry. And resentful of both.
This was about crawling out of boxes and removing boundaries, Bethany reminded herself, and that was why she pushed her way into Leo’s bedchamber not long after he’d disappeared into it.
He had never encouraged her to treat his chamber as her own, unless they were naked. And she had heard more than enough from his cousin Vincentio on the topic of appropriate behavior for the wife of such an important man as the Principe di Felici, so she had not attempted it.
She shook off the past with effort and stepped into the principe’s master suite.
It befitted the noble ruler of an ancient line. It was magnificent and profoundly male. Deep reds and lustrous mahoganies dominated the great room and the four-poster bed that rose in the center like an altar.
Bethany’s throat went dry, and she found herself wringing her hands like some kind of virgin sacrifice before she caught herself and stopped.
The rugs at her feet were old, impressive. They whispered of wealth across the centuries, of ancient trading routes and princes long past whose regal feet had stepped where hers did now. She wished for a moment that Leo could be just a man, just the simple man she had imagined him to be when she’d first met him in the Hawaiian surf. But even as she wished it something in her rejected the thought.
He had called himself ‘unintelligible’ without his family’s history, and the truth was she could not imagine him separate from all that sweeping past entailed. As awe-inspiring as even his bedchamber might be, a paean to Renaissance architecture and aesthetics, she could not deny that it suited him. He was every inch a prince. He always had been.
Then he walked into the room and Bethany froze.
Her breath caught in her throat and her knees felt like water. He was wearing clothes that Bethany would have sworn this man did not own. On some level, perhaps, she had imagined that her request for bare feet and casual clothing would catch him out—would force him into some kind of awkwardness, make him something more normal, more ordinary.
She should have known better. She should not have forgotten.
Leo sauntered toward her, his eyes hard on hers, alive with a glittering heat that made her body shake with helpless response. Her nipples hardened against her soft cotton shirt, while everywhere else she melted.
He wore a pair of low-slung, faded denim jeans that clung to his mouthwatering form in a way that made her feel light-headed. And he wore nothing on his magnificent torso save one very, very tight black T-shirt.
Even dressed like the simple man of her old fantasies, Leo Di Marco was completely and totally at ease, fully in command.
It was impossible to drag her eyes away from his toned and rangy body, especially when he moved. His smile was sharp, hungry, his eyes all-seeing, all-knowing. Bethany realized at once that, as ever with this man, she had miscalculated.
She had forgotten how lethal Leo was, how elemental.
If anything, the sleek business suits and predictable finery of the Principe di Felici distracted from Leo’s essential male charisma, no doubt allowing him to do business without sending all those around him into fits of the vapors.
How could she have forgotten what lay beneath?
This was the man who had swept her off of her feet, altering her life completely with one slow smile. This was the man she had seen in the warm, soft waters of Waikiki, this confident and dangerously attractive man, all hot eyes and a hard body, who had shorted out her mind, her body, her heart.
This stripped-down, lean and hungry creature was the one she had followed all the way to Italy. This was the man she had married and had loved with every fiber of her being, only to see him swallowed whole into the great, vast mouth of his family, his history, his endless obligations.
The last time she had seen this man, he had convinced her over the course of two heady, passion-drenched, impossible weeks to turn her back on everything she had ever known, marry a stranger and ride off into a sunset she had trusted him to provide.
What would he do this time? When she knew better and still, her heart stopped at the sight of all that casual, male grace? When she hadn’t managed a full breath since he’d walked through that door?