Princess From the Past by Caitlin Crews Page A

was so close to her it bordered on madness, yet he still did not touch her. “But you were never where you were supposed to be. Tell me what I was meant to do. Beg? Plead? Weep?”
    “Why not?” she whispered fiercely. “Why not all of the above, if that is how you feel?”
    “I am not you,” he whispered back in the same hard tone, shoving through the things he refused to admit, even to himself. “I cannot flash my every emotion for all to see.”
    “You cannot or you will not?” She moved then, only slightly, but it brought her shoulder into glancing contact with his arm. They both froze, focused on that single, accidental touch. He watched her swallow, the long, graceful column of her throat begging for his mouth, his tongue, his teeth.
    “Tell me to touch you,” he ordered her huskily, their history forgotten in that moment like so much smoke. “Tell me to hold your face in my hands. Tell me to kiss you.”
    Her lips parted on a soundless breath, but he felt it fan across his jaw. Her eyes widened, darkened. He could feel that shimmering electricity arc between them, hot and wild.
    “Tell me …” he whispered, moving his mouth to hover near her ear, so very close, just out of reach. “Tell me to take you in my arms and make you mine. Again and again. Until you cannot remember your name. Or my name. Or why you left.”
    *   *   *
    She was almost his, until that last whispered sentence.
    A chill snaked through her, and it gave her the strength to force open her eyes and remember. Why she was there. Why she could not simply surrender to him as every cell, every breath, every part of her longed to do. Why she could not let him cast this spell around her.
    Not again.
    “I think it is time for me to get some sleep,” she said, keeping her head turned and choosing her words so carefully, so desperately. “I think the traveling is catching up with me.”
    He murmured something in Italian, something lyrical that she did not have to understand to know was all sex and command. She could feel it move between her legs, coil low in her belly and spiral along her skin until she shivered in reaction. But she did not look at him. She knew, somehow, that gazing into his eyes just then would be the end of her. She knew it.
    “If that is what you wish,” he said eventually, and he pushed away. The night air seemed to rush at her, cooler than it had been moments before; shocking.
    He stood only a foot or two away, his beautiful face shadowed, though his eyes burned with a fire she dared not touch. Or even acknowledge.
    “I will see you in the morning,” she said with absurd, unnecessary courtesy.
    His brows arched with a dark amusement, and she did not wait to see what he might say. Instead, she fled.
    Again, she fled from him. She had spent her whole life running away from this man, it seemed. Was he right to accuse her as he had? Was he right to lay the blame at her feet?
    She moved through the quiet halls as if pursued,though she knew he did not follow her. Not then. She closed the heavy door of her bedchamber tight behind her and did not so much as glance at the other door.
    She did not let herself think about where it led or how easy it would be to simply walk through the doorway and succumb to what her body wanted—and what would be, she knew, so very easy. So deliriously easy. Far easier than these conversations that ripped apart scars she had thought long-healed.
    She pulled off her gown, changed into the comfortable pajamas she had brought with her from Toronto, scrubbed her face until there was no hint of color left in her skin and crawled into the wide, empty bed.
    It was as soft and inviting as she remembered. No place for terrifying, unwieldy emotions. No room for a very old grief.
    But she did not get to sleep for a long, long time.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    H E WAS waiting for her in the breakfast room the next morning.
    She walked in, her head still a confused muddle from the night before, and there he was. The