Princess From the Past Read Online Free PDF Page A

possible, against all advice and all instinct. He had assumed her increasing sullenness in their first year of marriage was merely a phase she had been going through—a necessary shift from her quiet life into his far more colorful one—and had therefore allowed her more leeway than he should have.
    He had suffered her temper, her baffling resistance to performing her official duties, even her horror that he had wanted to start a family so quickly. He had foolishly believed that she needed time to grow into her role as his wife, when retrospect made it clear that what she’d truly needed was a firmer hand.
    He had let her leave him, shocked and hurt in ways he’d refused to acknowledge that she would attempt it in the first place. He had assumed she would come to her senses while they were apart, that she needed time to adjust to the idea of her new responsibilities and the pressures of her new role and title. Neither was something a common, simple girl from Toronto could have been prepared for, he had come to understand.
    After all, he had spent his whole life coming to terms with the weight and heft of the Di Marco heritage and its many demands upon him. He had reluctantly let her have her freedom—after all, she had been so young when they had married. So unformed. So unsophisticated.
    And this was how she repaid him. Lies about a lover, when she should have known that he had her every movement tracked and would certainly have allowed no lover to further sully his name. Claims that she wished to divorce him, unforgivably uttered in public whereanyone might hear. Aspersions cast without trepidation upon his character, his honor.
    He took a kind of solace in the anger that surged through him. It was far, far easier to be angry than to confront what he knew lay beneath. And he had vowed that he would never show her his vulnerabilities—never again.
    Revenge would be sweet, he decided, and he would have no qualms whatsoever in extracting it. He thought then of that confusing vulnerability he’d thought he’d seen but dismissed it.
    Di Marcos did not divorce. Ever.
    The Princess Di Marco, Principessa di Felici, had two duties: to support her husband in all he did, and to bear him heirs to secure the title. Leo sank down onto the nearest couch and blew out a breath.
    It was about time that Bethany started living up to her responsibilities.
    And, if those responsibilities forced her to return to him as she should have done years before, all the better.
    Bethany should not have been surprised when she looked up from packing a box the next morning to see Leo looming in the doorway of her bedroom. But she could not contain the gasp that escaped her.
    She jerked back and pressed her hand against her wildly thumping heart. It was surprise, she told herself; no more than surprise. Certainly not that wild, desperate hope she refused to acknowledge within her.
    “What are you doing here?” she asked, appalled at the breathiness of her voice. And, in any case, she knew what he was doing: this was his house, wasn’t it? Three stories of stately brick and pedigreed old-moneyin Rosedale, Toronto’s wealthiest neighborhood. It was exactly where Prince Leopoldo Di Marco,
Principe di Felici
, ought to reside.
    Bethany hated it—she hated everything the house stood for. Her occupying such a monied, ancestrally predetermined sort of space seemed like a contradiction in terms—like one more lie. Yet Leo had insisted that she live in this house, or in Italy with him, and three years ago she had not had the strength to choose her own third option.
    As long as she lived under this roof, she was essentially consenting to her sham of a marriage—and Leo’s control. Yet she had stayed here anyway, until she could no longer pretend that she was not on some level waiting for him to come and claim her.
    Once she had accepted that depressing truth, she had known she had no choice but to act.
    “Surely my presence cannot be quite so