“Tell me to touch you,” he ordered her huskily, their history forgotten in that moment like so much smoke. “Tell me to hold your face in my hands. Tell me to kiss you.”
Her lips parted on a soundless breath, but he felt it fan across his jaw. Her eyes widened, darkened. He could feel that shimmering electricity arc between them, hot and wild.
“Tell me …” he whispered, moving his mouth to hover near her ear, so very close, just out of reach. “Tell me to take you in my arms and make you mine. Again and again. Until you cannot remember your name. Or my name. Or why you left.”
* * *
She was almost his, until that last whispered sentence.
A chill snaked through her, and it gave her the strength to force open her eyes and remember. Why she was there. Why she could not simply surrender to him as every cell, every breath, every part of her longed to do. Why she could not let him cast this spell around her.
Not again.
“I think it is time for me to get some sleep,” she said, keeping her head turned and choosing her words so carefully, so desperately. “I think the traveling is catching up with me.”
He murmured something in Italian, something lyrical that she did not have to understand to know was all sex and command. She could feel it move between her legs, coil low in her belly and spiral along her skin until she shivered in reaction. But she did not look at him. She knew, somehow, that gazing into his eyes just then would be the end of her. She knew it.
“If that is what you wish,” he said eventually, and he pushed away. The night air seemed to rush at her, cooler than it had been moments before; shocking.
He stood only a foot or two away, his beautiful face shadowed, though his eyes burned with a fire she dared not touch. Or even acknowledge.
“I will see you in the morning,” she said with absurd, unnecessary courtesy.
His brows arched with a dark amusement, and she did not wait to see what he might say. Instead, she fled.
Again, she fled from him. She had spent her whole life running away from this man, it seemed. Was he right to accuse her as he had? Was he right to lay the blame at her feet?
She moved through the quiet halls as if pursued, though she knew he did not follow her. Not then. She closed the heavy door of her bedchamber tight behind her and did not so much as glance at the other door.
She did not let herself think about where it led or how easy it would be to simply walk through the doorway and succumb to what her body wanted—and what would be, she knew, so very easy. So deliriously easy. Far easier than these conversations that ripped apart scars she had thought long-healed.
She pulled off her gown, changed into the comfortable pajamas she had brought with her from Toronto, scrubbed her face until there was no hint of color left in her skin and crawled into the wide, empty bed.
It was as soft and inviting as she remembered. No place for terrifying, unwieldy emotions. No room for a very old grief.
But she did not get to sleep for a long, long time.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE WAS waiting for her in the breakfast room the next morning.
She walked in, her head still a confused muddle from the night before, and there he was. The sunlight poured in through the high, arched windows and surrounded him with a golden halo, despite the fact he looked forbidding and unapproachable at the head of the table. His gaze rose to meet hers over the top of the paper he held before him, cool and remote, in direct contrast to the pool of light around him.
She knew perfectly well he was challenging her, and it hit her hard and true, like an electrical charge, sizzling directly into the coiled tension low in her belly and between her legs.
Somehow, Bethany managed to keep herself from stumbling in the high, wedged sandals she had foolishly opted to wear beneath a casual knit sundress. She could feel his gaze in every cell, along every nerve. She had to fight to breathe normally.
Pressing her lips together, she let the ever-present servant seat her with a solicitousness that struck her as an absurdly formal manner to take with the soon-to-be ex-wife. The room was bathed in light and seemed to shimmer with promise, from the painted medieval ceiling with its long, dark beams to the bright friezes that decorated the walls above the wainscoting.
She could sense more than feel Leo’s long legs stretched out beneath the polished wooden table, too close to her own, and wished that it was bigger or that she was further away from him instead of having to share a corner with him. As it was, she sat at a diagonal to Leo. But her body was not about to let her pretend she was not attuned to every single detail of his distressingly perfect appearance, the power he exuded as easily as he drew breath and the incredible, undeniable force of the pull he seemed to exert upon her.