Princess From the Past Read Online Free PDF Page B

exactly what he couldread there. “But I do not think you will be pleased.” He straightened from the door and suddenly seemed much closer than he should. She fought to stand still, to keep from backing away.
    “Well?” she asked.
    But he did not answer her immediately. Instead, he moved into the room, seeming to take it over, somehow, seeming to diminish it with the force of his presence.
    Bethany felt the way his eyes raked over the white linen piled high on the unmade bed even as her memory played back too-vivid recollections of the night she most wanted to forget. The crash and splintering of a vase against the wall. Her fists against his chest. His fierce, mocking laughter. His shirt torn from him with her own desperate hands. His mouth fused to hers. His hands like fire, punishment and glory all over her, lifting her, spurring her on, damning them both.
    She shook it off and found him watching her, a gleam in his dark gaze, as if he too remembered the very same scenes. He stood at the foot of the bed, too close to her. He could too easily reach over and tip her onto the mattress, and Bethany was not at all certain what might happen then.
    She froze, appalled at the direction of her thoughts. A familiar despair washed through her, all the more bitter because she knew it so well. Still she wanted him. Still. She did not understand how that could be true. She did not want to understand; she only wanted it—and him—to go away. She wanted to be free of the heavy weight of him, of his loss. She simply wanted to be free.
    It was as if he could read her mind. The silence between them seemed charged, alive. His gaze dropped from hers to flick over her mouth then lower, to test hercurves, and she could feel it as clearly as if he’d put his hands upon her.
    “You said you had something to tell me,” she managed to grate out as if her thighs did not feel loose, ready, despite her feelings of hopelessness. As if her core did not pulse for him. As if she did not feel that electricity skate over her skin, letting her know he was near, stirring up that excitement she would give anything to deny.
    “I do,” Leo murmured, dark and tall, too big and too powerful to be in this room. This house. Her life. “The divorce. There is a complication.”
    “What complication?” she asked, suspicious, though her traitorous body did not seem to care. It throbbed for him, hot and needy.
    “I am afraid that it cannot be done remotely.” He shrugged in that supremely Italian way, as if to say that the vagaries of such things were beyond anyone’s control, even his.
    “You cannot mean …?” she began. His gaze found hers then, so very dark and commanding, and she felt goosebumps rise along her arms and neck. It was as though someone walked across her grave, she thought distantly.
    “There is no getting around it,” he said, but his voice was not apologetic. His gaze was direct. And Bethany went completely cold. “I am afraid that you must return to Italy.”

CHAPTER THREE
    “I AM not going back to Italy,” Bethany blurted out, shocked that he would suggest such an outlandish thing.
    Had he lost his mind? He had managed to ruin the entire country for her. She couldn’t imagine what would ever induce her to return to it. In her mind, any return to Italy meant a return to the spineless creature she had been when she lived there; she could not—would not—be that person ever again.
    But Leo merely watched her with those knowing, mocking eyes as if he knew something she did not.
    “Don’t be ridiculous!” she tossed at him to offset the panic skipping through her nerves.
    Leo’s dark brows rose in a haughty sort of amazement, and she remembered belatedly that the
Principe di Felici
was not often called things like ‘ridiculous.’ He was no doubt more used to being showered in honorifics. ‘Your Excellency.’ ‘My Prince.’ She bit her lower lip but did not retract her words.
    “I am afraid there is no other way, if