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“I must have an heir,” he snapped, his expression frozen. “I never made any secret of that. You are well aware it is my primary duty as the Principe di Felici.”
“Let us not forget that,” she threw back at him, her voice uneven to match the heaviness and wildness in her chest. “Let us not forget for even one moment that you are your duty first, your legacy second and only thereafter a man!”
“Is this what you learned in your years away, Bethany?” he asked after a brief, tense pause, his tone dangerous. Hard like a bullet. “This apportioning of blame?”
“I don’t know who to blame,” she admitted, the sea of emotion she’d fought to keep at bay choking her suddenly. “But it hardly matters anymore. We both paid for it, didn’t we?”
When he did not speak, when he only gazed at her with fire and bitterness in equal measure, his mouth a grim line, she sighed.
Did his silence not say all there was to say? Wasn’t this the tragic truth of their short marriage? He would not speak to her about the things that mattered, and he would not listen to her. She could only scream, and she could never reach him.
It hurt to look at it, so stark and unadorned in the bright morning sunshine. It hurt in ways she thought might take her lifetimes to overcome. But she would overcome this somehow. She would do more than simply survive him. She would.
“Go to Sydney, Leo,” she said quietly, because there was nothing left to say. There never had been. “I do not care how long it takes. I will be here when you deign to return, ready and waiting to finally put all of this behind us.”
Leo was in a towering rage, a fact he did nothing to conceal from his aides when they met his jet in Sydney and whisked him away to the sumptuous suite that awaited him at the hotel he no longer cared at all if he owned. He had stewed over Bethany’s words the whole way from Milan, and had reached nothing even approaching a satisfying conclusion.
He started to worry that he never would—which was entirely unacceptable.
The picture she’d painted of their marriage had enraged him. It had infuriated him that night over dinner, and it had further incensed him this morning. Who was she to accuse him of such things, when her own sins were so great and egregious? When he was the one who had remained and she the one who had abandoned their marriage?
But his rage had eased the further he’d flown from the castello. His reluctance to be parted from her grew, no matter how angry she made him, and he found himself unable to maintain that level of fury.
Partly, it had been the brash courage written all over her face, as if she had had to fight herself to confront him in the way she had. He could not seem to force the image from his mind. Her remarkable eyes, blazing with bravado and no little trepidation. Her spine so straight, her chin high, her mouth set in a fierce line. Did it require so much strength to speak her mind to him, however off-base? Was he such a monster in her mind, after all they had shared?
What did that say about the kind of man he was? But he was afraid he already knew, and he did not care for the twist of self-recrimination that the knowledge brought him.
He could remember all too well his father’s thundering voice booming through the halls of the Di Marco estates, the shouting and the sneering, his mother’s bowed head and set, miserable expression. He remembered the way his mother had flinched away from the strong, cruel fingers on her upper arm. He remembered the curl of his father’s lip when he had referred to her, when she’d not been in the room—and, worse, when she had been.
Leo did not like the juxtaposition at all.
But it was impossible, he told himself grimly. He was not Domenico Di Marco, the bully. He had never laid a finger on his wife. He had never done anything that should make any woman cower from him in fear, much less this particular woman. He had spent his life ensuring that he was absolutely nothing like his father.
Except … He remembered the look in Bethany’s eyes three years ago. That misery. That fear. He had found it infuriating then—unacceptable that she could be so desperately miserable when he had given her so much and asked for so little in return. It had never crossed his mind that she might have had the slightest reason to feel that way.
She’d had no reason! he told himself angrily. Just as she has no basis for her accusations now!
Later, he sat in a boardroom packed with financial advisors and consultants who were paid to impress him. He pretended to watch yet one more presentation with the discerning eye for which he was so renowned. But he could not seem to concentrate on dry facts and figures, projections and market analysis. He could not seem to think of anything but Bethany.
