“Come now,” he murmured, coming closer.
But still she wept, as if she would never stop, as if she was only beginning, as if she could make sense of the past five years through the salt of her tears.
“Bethany,” he said softly as his arms went around her and lifted her. “Please.”
But she sobbed against the wide wall of his chest, his scent and heat enveloping her like an embrace, warming her, caressing her, keeping her safe while the storm raged on.
“Come, luce mio; do not cry like this,” he murmured close to her ear, pressing a kiss against the flushed skin of her cheek, soothing her the only way he could. “I beg you.”
But she could not seem to stop. Not when he lapsed into crooning, comforting Italian. Not when he carried her to the window seat in the bedchamber and settled her on his lap, holding her close and murmuring into her ear. She cried and cried, and she could not make herself stop it any more than she had been able to make herself stand up and walk out the door.
Instead, she simply let him hold her.
“This is my fault,” he said when she had been quiet against him, in his arms, for a time. Bethany tilted her head back and searched his face. He held her close to his chest, but for once she did not worry that this made her appear the child. She felt …comforted by the steady beat of his heart. By his warmth. By his muscled strength surrounding her.
“If there is fault,” she said, her voice raspy in the aftermath of the storm that had shaken her, her eyes feeling swollen and bruised. “Then there is enough to go around.”
“I am the perfect prince,” he said, his tone heavily sardonic, and for once she knew he aimed it at himself. “I have spent my life practicing, so one should hope I’ve succeeded at it after all these years.” His eyes blazed at her, alight with a kind of determination she had never seen before. “But I am not much of a man.”
“I love you,” she said unevenly.
The fear was gone, wept away. She was washed clean. Only the truth remained, shining hot and bright inside her like a beacon. Like something profoundly, life-alteringly simple. She loved him. What else mattered?
She sat forward, turning so she could face him on the window seat. “That does not mean it is not complicated. That it is not painful. But I have always loved you.”
“I know,” he said, a ghost of his arrogant smile curving his sensual lips, though his eyes blazed and his face filled with an emotion that made her stomach clench. “But I did not think that mattered to you any longer.”
“Of course it matters to me!” she whispered. He reached over and traced her mouth with one long, tapered finger, elegant as the rest of him. He smoothed his fingertip along the bow of her upper lip, the curve of her lower lip, and Bethany shivered slightly as that same familiar fire scorched her from within, as it always did. Always. Leo smiled slightly and drew his hand away.
Bethany stared at him for a long moment, as if she could see the answer to all of their problems tattooed across his beautiful, regal, beloved face. She was not sure what she felt, or how. All she knew was that once again she could not take the final step that would separate her from him. She could not do it. And every second that she did not leave, that she let him hold her, that she breathed in and felt him do the same beside her, that resilient little thread of hope stretched out between them. And grew thicker. Tougher. It would be that much harder to break the next time.
Maybe, a little voice whispered inside her heart, it is not supposed to break at all.
She had wanted him to be all things to her, when he had wanted the chance to be no more than a man. She had wanted him to keep her safe, but there was nothing safe about loving like this—so deep and so hard that it had altered her completely, changed her, made her into someone she had not recognized for years. She had feared it for so long, fought it, fought him, desperate to keep herself from disappearing in him. Because that was what she’d always been so scared would happen if she succumbed to the power of her feelings. He was so much bigger than life, so much more than she had ever dared dream … Of course she had thought he would consume her whole.
But what if that was not what happened at all?
Today she had seen Leo as she never had before. Perhaps he had always been this way and she had been too overawed by him to note it, but today she realized that she had the power to hurt him as much as he had hurt her. It did not make her happy or proud of herself. But, as she sat and looked at him, she felt that shifting once again, as if they sat on a fault line and the earth was readjusting itself beneath them. If he did not hold all the power, then that meant she could only disappear if she chose to let that happen. If she did it herself, to herself. But …what if she did not?