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“If you would not mind waiting …” The man smiled helplessly and gestured toward the small seating-area at the far side of the small lobby.
Feeling helpless, Bethany turned from the counter, aware that her eyes were filled with a dangerous heat. She walked across the lobby with careful precision and then sat on the plush sofa, feeling as if she was made of glass, fragile and precarious. And then feeling broken, somehow, when the man picked up the telephone and murmured something she could not quite hear in rapid Italian.
Sure enough, not ten minutes later the front door was pulled open and two men in dark suits entered. Bethany did not recognize them personally, but she had no doubt at all about who they were.
They walked toward her, coming to a stop only a foot or two away. She stared straight ahead, willing herself to stay calm, adult, and rational, as she’d been so sure she’d remain. She fought to maintain her composure, though her stomach twisted and her heart beat too hard against her ribs.
“Principessa,” the larger of the two men murmured in tones of the greatest respect—which made Bethany that much more furious, somehow, and that much more despairing. “Per favore …?”
What could she do? This was Leo’s village. He was its prince. She had been a fool to think he would let her return to it without controlling her every move. Back when she had felt more charitable toward him she’d told herself he simply knew no other way to behave, that he had been raised to be this dictatorial, that it was not his fault.
Today, she knew the truth. This was who he was. This was who he wanted to be. What she wanted had never mattered, and never, ever would.
So she simply rose to her feet with as much dignity and grace as she could muster. She let Leo’s men guide her to the expected gleaming black sedan that waited outside, elegant and imprisoning, and climbed obediently into the back seat.
And then she sat there, furious, helpless and as brokenhearted as the day she’d left, as they drove her straight into the jaws of the castello.
It was all exactly as she remembered, exactly as she still dreamed.
The great castello was quiet around her—it was open to the public only on certain days of the week or by appointment—and felt empty, even though she knew that hordes of servants were all around her, perhaps even watching her, just out of sight.
Bethany felt a drowning sensation, as if she was being sucked backward in time, thrown back four years into that other life where she had been so miserable, so terribly alone. And it had been worse because she had not known how alone she was at first—she had still believed that she would recover from her father’s death with Leo’s help, that he would become the family she so deeply craved.
Instead, he had abandoned her in every way that mattered.
As if the stones themselves remembered that grief, that ache, they seemed to echo not just her footsteps as she walked but her memories of those awful days here when she’d been so isolated, scared and abandoned.
She barely saw the impressive entryway, the tapestries along the stone walls inside the grand entrance, the rooms filled with priceless art and antiques, each item resplendent with its pedigree, its heritage, its worth across centuries. Her silent escorts ushered her up above the public rooms to the family wing, then down the long, gleaming hallway toward her old, familiar door. But all she could see was the past.
And then it was done. Her suitcase was deposited just inside her chamber and the door was closed behind her with a muted click. She stood inside the bedroom suite that had once been hers, her luxurious cage, quite as if she had never left.
Bethany let her head drop slightly forward, squeezing shut her eyes as she stood there in the center of the grand room. This was the principessa’s historic suite, handed down over the ages from one wife to the next. It boasted the finest furnishings, gilt-edged and ornate. The bed was canopied in gold, the regal bedspread an opulent shade of red. Everything was made of the darkest, richest wood, lovingly crafted and polished to a high shine. There was never a hint of dust in this room, never an item out of place—except for Bethany herself, she thought wryly.
She did not have to investigate to know that all was precisely as it had been the last time she’d been here. She did not have to walk to the towering windows to know what she would see through them: the finely sculpted gardens and beyond them, the rooftops of the village and the gentle, inviting roll of Italian countryside reaching for the horizon. All of it was beautiful beyond measure, and yet somehow capable of making that ache inside of her grow so much more acute.
And she did not have to turn when she heard the paneled side-door open because she knew exactly who would be standing there. But she could not seem to help herself, her gaze was drawn to him as if he were a flickering flame and she no more than a moth. She wished even that did not hurt her, but it did. It still did.
