This was not a game at all, Bethany realized, far too late, astounded at the breadth of her own stupidity—her own great weakness. This was everything she’d lost. This was everything she grieved for.
This was a huge mistake.
CHAPTER NINE
“YOU have been at pains to tell me what you are not,” he said in that rich, low voice that for all its gentleness still seemed to Bethany to take over the whole of the Felici Valley. “Perhaps it is time to tell me who you are.”
They walked along the cypress-studded footpath that wound down from the castello toward the valley floor and which would, Leo had promised, lead them to a secluded lake just over the crest of the next hill.
It was like a dream, Bethany thought, feeling as if she watched them from some distance—as if that was not her who walked on a warm autumn morning with this dark, brooding, impossibly handsome man, but some other woman. One who was not afraid that her slightest move might shatter this unexpected, fragile accord. One who knew nothing of the long war that had come before and scarred them both.
Oh, the people they could have been. The people they should have been! Bethany could feel the bite of that loss, that tragedy, all around her in the air like the hint of a changing season.
Or perhaps it was simply that they were free of the castello today, free of its heavy stone walls and the great weight of its history—free of the people they had to be when they were inside it.
She darted a glance at him, at his high cheekbones and flashing eyes, at that satyr’s mouth that had once felt so decadent against her skin, yet could flatten into such a grim and disapproving line when he was disappointed with her. And he had so often been disappointed in her.
Next to her, his long legs keeping pace with her shorter ones with no apparent effort, he swung the basket laden with delicacies from the kitchens in one large hand. He seemed as easy with his bare feet stuck in the dirt of his family’s land as he did in full princely regalia at the head of the massive banquet table in the castello’s great hall. For some reason, that observation made her heart seem to expand inside her chest, almost to the point of pain.
“You finished a degree at university, I believe?” he prompted her when it became clear that she was not going to speak of her own volition. Bethany laughed slightly, flustered.
“Yes,” she said, struggling to collect herself, to cast aside the enchantment of the countryside, so green and gold and inviting in the sunshine with the great expanse of the cerulean sky arched above them. To forget what had not been, and could not be. “I studied psychology.”
To find out what was so terribly wrong with me that I could disappear so fully into you, she thought, but did not say. As if I’d never existed at all.
“Fascinating,” he murmured, and though she shot a sharp look at him his expression was mild. “I had no idea the human mind was of such interest to you.”
Only yours, she thought with some fatalism, but then pulled herself together. That was not entirely true, in any case, and this was a day without lies or pretense, she decided. She could act as if they were suspended out of time, as if they had escaped their history today, their tangled and heavy past.
“Human interaction interests me,” she said. “My mother was an archaeologist, which is something similar, I suppose. She wanted to figure out human lives from the things left behind in ruins. I am less interested in the remains of societies and more interested in how people survive what occurs in their own lives.”
She thought that was too much, that she’d gone too far, revealed herself. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth as she waited for an explosion, a reaction. Leo shot a dark, unreadable look at her, from beneath lashes that were frankly unfair on a man of his physical size and indisputable prowess, but did not strike back as she’d expected.
“You do not normally speak of your mother,” he said. Did she only imagine his hesitant tone? Was he as loath to disrupt this fragile peace as she was?
“She died when I was still so young, just a baby,” she said. She shrugged, wrinkling her nose up toward the sun, tilting her head back to let the warm rays caress her face. “To be honest, I cannot remember her at all.” His silence, his somehow comforting presence beside her, encouraged her to continue. “My father never spoke of her when I was growing up. I think it caused him too much pain. But then toward the end he could not seem to speak of anything else.”
She looked down at her feet, slightly chilled against the rich earth, but it felt good to be barefoot, to act as if she was free of cares, regardless of the truth. “I think he was afraid that if he did not she would disappear when he did.”