Free Princess From the Past by Caitlin Crews

could hardly do more than echo him.
    “If you want me, Bethany, you must come to me.” His deep-brown eyes were mesmerizing, so dark and rich, with that gold gleam within. His voice lowered. “You must be the one to touch me, not the other way around.”
    “That will work perfectly,” she said, her voice betraying her by cracking even as her breasts and her hidden core grew heavy and ached, yearned. “As I have absolutely no intention—”
    “There are your intentions and then there is reality,” he said smoothly. His gaze sharpened suddenly, catching her off-guard. “You cannot keep your hands off me. You never could. But you prefer to pretend that the passion between us is something I use to control you. Is that not what you said so memorably? That I would prefer it if I could keep you chained to my bed? It certainly makes you feel more the martyr to think so.”
    Bethany’s mouth fell open then. There was a heatbehind her eyes and a riot in her limbs as she tried to make sense of what he was saying—what he was doing or, more to the point, deliberately not doing.
    “I am not a martyr,” was all she could think to say, instantly wishing she could yank the words back into her mouth. She did not feel like a martyr, she felt adrift and unsteady, as she had always felt here.
    “Indeed you are not,” he said softly, deliberately, that gleam in his eyes growing hard, seeming to take over the room, her pounding heart. “What you are is a liar. It is entirely up to you to prove otherwise.”
    He thought she was a liar. He had said it before, and she had no doubt he meant it. It was almost amusing, she thought, unable to look away from him for a long, searing moment. It should have been amusing, really, and she wanted to laugh it off, but she found she had no voice. She could not seem to find it.
    She could not reply in kind, or at all, and she did not know why that seemed to highlight everything they’d lost. What was being called a liar next to all of that?
    “Eight o’clock,” he said with a certain finality and evident satisfaction. “Do not make me come and fetch you.”
    Then he walked from the room and left her standing there, shocked, trembling and lost again, so very lost—as he had no doubt planned from the start.
    There was so much she had forgotten, Bethany thought as she made her way through the castle’s quiet halls toward dinner moments before eight o’clock, as requested.
    She had not expected to find so many memories when she’d ventured into her former closet and searched for something simple to wear to dinner. It was not quite a homecoming, and yet every gown, every bag, every shoehad seemed to whisper a different half-forgotten story to her.
    They had all come flooding back to her without warning, leaving her raw and aching for a past she knew she needed to keep firmly behind her if she was to escape it. But the memories had rushed at her anyway.
    A night out at the opera in Milan, where the glorious voices had seemed to pale next to the fire in Leo’s gaze that she’d believed could burn out everything else in the world. A weekend at a friend’s villa outside of Rome, replete with sunshine and laughter—and with her growing fear that she was losing him a constant sharpness underneath.
    A rare public eruption of his fiercely contained temper on a side street in Verona while walking to a business dinner, quick, brutal and devastating. A passionate moment on a quiet bridge in Venice; the explosive, impossible desire that still shimmered between them had been the only way left to reach each other across the walls of bitterness and silence they’d erected.
    So many images and recollections, none of which she had entertained in ages, all of them buffeting her, storming her defenses, making her feel weak, small, vulnerable in ways she hadn’t been in years.
    She ran her hands along the swell of her hips as she walked, smoothing the silken, kelly-green material that flowed to her feet,