One Reckless Decision

He could, as he had done yesterday, simply enter the chamber she happened to be in, tumble her to one of the soft, plush carpets and be inside of her before she had time to greet him properly. He grew hard merely thinking about it.

He scowled at the sheaf of documents in front of him, trying to make sense of the financial portfolio before him when he could hardly make sense of himself. It wasn’t the sex that was affecting him this way—though he was not above feeling deeply satisfied that, even after all of the time they’d been apart, he was capable of driving Bethany absolutely wild. Driving them both wild.

It was not that at all. It was …the rest of it.

A week had passed, then several more days, and Bethany had made no move to leave; she had not so much as mentioned their divorce. She had not even asked after the court as she had when she had first arrived. Leo wanted to view that as a victory, but somehow he could not.

She shared his meals, his bed. She shared her delectable body with a delight and an enthusiasm that he found alternately humbling and exciting. She talked to him. She laughed with him. There were no tantrums, no tears, no rages, not even the barbed exchanges he had come to expect since seeing her again in Toronto.

She was, in short, everything he had always imagined she could be, as if their tumultuous eighteen months of marriage three years ago had simply been a bad dream they had woken from together.

It should have been blissful—it was blissful—yet it was not, somehow, enough.

Leo could not rid himself of the feeling of unease that never quite left him—the sense that they were living on borrowed time, that there was a clock ticking, for all that he could neither hear it nor see it. It was the faraway look in her eyes sometimes when she thought he was not watching her. It was the sadness he sometimes sensed in her, though she would always smile when he said her name and pretend she did not know what he meant when he asked what troubled her.

He knew she was holding great parts of herself in reserve, and he told himself that was why he felt this edginess, this undercurrent of disquiet. It was at odds with the deep sense of contentment he sometimes felt when she was curled around him in the night. He felt as if he could never get enough of the feel of her softness next to him, the sound of her breathing in the dark room, the scent of her lustrous curls draped across his chest.

He felt. Perhaps that was why he felt that edge inside. It was so unusual. Not new, exactly, for this was exactly why he had married her. How had he managed to forget? This had been what had happened in Hawaii, what had brought them here in the first place. He had looked at her, touched her and it was as if he’d been reborn. Made new.

With Bethany, he was aware of himself as a man in a way he was with no one else. He was not the Principe di Felici. He was not the heir to the Di Marco fortune and executor of its storied legacy. He was simply a man. A man who wanted her, who she wanted in return, as if nothing else mattered. As if only that mattered.

He had hated that he’d felt this way. He could remember it all now with a clarity that had somehow deserted him during the years she had been gone. He remembered how bizarre he had found his own feelings when he’d returned to Italy, having acted out of character for the first time in his life.

He had felt as if he had dishonored himself. He had not known how to act like the man who had fallen so in love with her, so in love that he’d forgotten the history that had made him who he was until he was immersed once again in the seat of that history. He had instead tried to pretend that the man who had been so alive, so accessible, so vulnerable in the soft Hawaiian night had never existed.

Worse, he had tried to make her into the woman he had been meant to marry, the stiff and formal automaton that she had never been and could never be. He had tried to make the two of them into the image of the marriages he’d witnessed his whole life—fake and bloodless society arrangements, all manners and materialism, convenience and practicality. Why had he been surprised when she could not handle it? What had he expected?

The outer door to his office swung open then and Leo glanced up as one of his fleet of secretaries walked in. He could see out into the antechamber, and felt that spike of desire pound through him when he saw that Bethany was standing there, smiling at one of the attorneys who had left earlier to take a telephone call. He snuck a look at his watch and saw that it was nearing noon, when he had planned to meet her for lunch.

She looked fresh and pretty, her curls spilling toward her shoulders from a high ponytail, the dark gloss of her hair seeming to shine against the pale peach cashmere of the turtleneck sweater she wore. Her dark brown trousers clung to her curves, and made him think of more private venues for their meal than the excursion they’d planned into the village.