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“It should not take long,” he said, his own tone measured. He watched her, his expression cool.
“Which, if memory serves, can mean anything from an evening to two weeks,” she said crisply. “A month? Six weeks? Who can say, when duty calls?”
He only lifted a brow and gazed at her, his expression inscrutable. After a moment he lifted his hand and with a careless wave dismissed the hovering servants. The way he had always done—as a precaution, he had said once, so condescendingly, should she fly off the handle.
She gritted her teeth and shoved aside the humiliating memories. The tension that always swirled between them seemed to tighten, to pull at her, hard and hot.
“I sense this is a problem for you,” he said with exaggerated patience.
He had said such things before, she recalled. A problem for you. The implication being, as ever, that only a hysteric like Bethany would ever dream of finding his business affairs personally objectionable. It made her want to scream.
But she would not give him the satisfaction of reducing her to that. She would tear out her own throat first.
“Why am I here?” she asked quietly. A sudden thought occurred to her and she could not hold it back. “Did you plan this?”
“It is business, Bethany,” he said, his voice dismissive. “I know you choose to concoct plots and conspiracies wherever you look, but it is only business.”
Any pretense of an appetite deserted her and she stood, pushing her chair back with a loud screech as she rose to her feet. The high shoes she’d worn to make his height seem less impressive compared to her own now seemed precarious, but she refused to show it.
“I might as well go home to Toronto and continue living this mockery of a life,” she began, as angry that she had not foreseen something like this as that he was behaving in the same manner he always had: putting his title above his wife.
“I cannot control the entire world, Bethany,” he said in that tone she loathed, the one that made her feel like an out-of-control, embarrassing infant—the tone that had so often goaded her into becoming exactly that. “I would prefer not to have to leave you now that you have finally returned to Italy, but I must. What would you have me do? Lose billions because you are in a snit?”
She fought off the haze of fury that descended on her then, and did not care if he could see that her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. She wanted to do more than simply ball up her hands in futility. She wanted to scream. She wanted to reach him, somehow. She wanted to make him feel this small, this unimportant, this useless.
But that would be descending to levels she never planned to visit again. She did not care that he stared at her while she fought her own demons. When she had battled herself into some semblance of control, she dared to look at him again.
“I understand that you need to speak to me this way,” she said after a long moment. She was proud that her voice neither wavered nor cracked. “It even makes sense. Heaven forfend you treat me like an equal. Like a partner. That might make your own behavior subject to scrutiny, and the Principe di Felici cannot have that. Far better to manipulate the situation—to manipulate me into acting out the only way I could.”
“You cannot be serious.” He even let out a scoffing sort of laugh. “Is there nothing you are not prepared to throw at me? No accusation too big or too small?”
“You got to remain the long-suffering adult, while I got to be the screaming child,” she continued as if he had not spoken. “It was a great disservice to both of us.” She spread her palms wide as if she could encompass everything they’d destroyed, all they’d lost. “But I am not the same person, Leo. I am not going to break down into a tantrum so that you can feel better about yourself.”
“All I have ever wanted is for you to act as you should,” he threw at her, no longer quite so languid. His jaw was set, his dark eyes glittering as he rose to his feet. They faced each other across the table, too close and yet, as ever, so very far apart. “But it seems to me I was nothing more than a replacement parent for you.”
A surprising wave of grief for her lost father washed through her, combined with a different kind of grief for the things she had not realized she’d wanted when she had married this man.
The things she had not realized she had inadvertently asked for, that she had not liked at all when he’d provided them. Like this impossible, disastrous, circular dynamic that seemed to engulf them, that she could not seem to fight off or freeze out or flee from.
“But what about your behavior?” she managed to get out, fighting for control, her hold on her emotions tenuous as things she thought she’d never dare say flowed from her mouth. “Never a husband. Never a lover. Always the parent. What could I be, except a child?” She shook her head in astonishment—and censure. “And then you wanted to actually have one, too?”
