The deal that would end life as she knew it.
Leandro D’Agostino fought the urge building inside him until he felt as if his head were expanding under its pressure, heard the bones in his hand crackle under its force.
He stared down at that hand before he realized it was his cell phone issuing that sound. The cell phone he was crushing.
He swore, threw it away. It clanged on the gleaming wood of his desk, skidded and clattered to the mirror-like hardwood floor. He gritted his teeth as silence filled the racket’s wake.
Dammit. How many phones had he damaged in the past eight years so that he wouldn’t use them to call her? Even though that had been for the exact opposite purpose for which he wanted to call her now?
Well, he was not calling Phoebe Alexander. He was not canceling his meeting with her.
She wanted an interview with him? She was getting one.
For all the good it would do her.
She’d picked a bad day to break an eight-year silence. A bad month. A bad lifetime.
And she was about to find out how a tiger felt when those who’d ripped a claw from his paw came to poke at the festering wound.
They dared call him back. They now offered the mantle of power and responsibility. After they’d slandered him and cast him out, stripped him of his identity before his people, before the world. After he’d spent his life in service of his kingdom and its people, after he’d been certain he’d be named crown prince as the one D’Agostino male who met all the ancient criteria.
The closer he’d come to the crown, the more the Council had panicked. They wanted to remain the ruling body for life, had feared—and correctly—that his first action as king would be to replace them. So they beat him to it while they still could. They’d turned on him, removing him as a threat. After all, they’d still had the power. And King Benedetto’s ear.
King Benedetto. His kin and king. His hero. The king hadn’t just stood aside and let the dogs shred him, he’d delivered the decree that had torn Leandro’s guts out himself.
But being unable to call himself of the royal house of D’Agostino, ceasing to be a Castaldinian, hadn’t been the worst injury he’d sustained. That had been her betrayal. Her desertion.
And she was on her way here. To negotiate on his former king’s behalf. Or was it on her own?
It could be the latter, disguised as the first.
As if he’d fall for her again.
Whatever she was coming here for, he wasn’t letting her have it, or any influence on him again. Not in this life. Or the next.
Si, let her come. He was in the mood to be provoked. Her memory had been the source of heartache for far too long. Let her flesh-and-blood presence inflict something less pathetic. Something hot and harsh. Something he could sink his teeth into. And rip.
It was time to tear out anything soft or stupid from his depths, the remnants of the spell he hadn’t been able to break. It was time to exorcise her…
All his hairs stood on end as if he’d been doused in a field of static electricity. A presence. Unmistakable even after all these years. Here. She was here.
Phoebe.
Ernesto must have met her downstairs, let her up here. Let her walk alone into his den. Like eight years ago.
Caution told him not to move, to make her initiate the confrontation. Every instinct screamed for him to turn, to catch her first uncensored reaction to seeing him after that lifetime.
It was the hot, sharp sound that spilled from lips he knew to be rose-soft and cherry-tinted, that had once wrung all coherence from him with soul-wrenching kisses and moans, that shattered the stalemate. He swung around.
Déjà vu engulfed him.
Time rewound to the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. To the last time he had. And like both times, like every time in between, everything about her bombarded him all at once.
Different droned in his mind. Raven-haired when she’d been caramel blond before, creamy pale when she’d been deeply tanned, curvaceous when she’d been willowy. The woman who stood two dozen feet away had little in common with the younger one who occupied his memory, who’d never relinquished her hold over his senses.
He took in the enhancements in one glance, knew he’d need hours, days, more…far more, to sort through them.
But he didn’t have to catalog them to suffer their effects, to relive that incendiary—and to his rage and resignation, unrepeatable—attraction.
For a stretch that existed outside time, it was as if the only thing that could happen was that he would surge toward her, that she would rush to meet him halfway.
She stood as transfixed as he. As shocked.
That conviction jogged him from the surreal timelessness he’d plunged into, the version where nothing had gone wrong between them. He crash-landed into the distasteful present.
Of course she wasn’t shocked. She was here with full premeditation…
No. She was shocked. This was no act, not any more than his own dive into that time warp had been. So what did it mean?
He exhaled the breath trapped in his lungs, admitted he’d probably never know what anything meant where she was concerned, that he had no more grasp on this situation than he had on anything else that had happened in the past.
But he intended to take control of it. Or at least try to. He’d start by taking control of himself.
He turned fully to her, bracing for the change that would come over her expression as she regained control.
The last of the shock he’d detected in her drained. He caught a stinging lip in his teeth, counted down the seconds before her gaze heated, her posture relaxed, beckoned…
“For the record, I told King Benedetto what I think of a man who refuses to do his duty out of petty pride.”
Leandro blinked. What the…?
“But it’s my job to negotiate on the king’s behalf. Even for a prize I don’t think worth winning.”
Two
L eandro consulted his hearing. And his memory.
Had she really said what he’d heard her say?
A prize I don’t think worth winning.
And that would be…him?
He stared at the woman Phoebe Alexander had become. She strode into his den as if it were her own sanctuary and he the intruder, each stride loud with the bearing of someone who knew her worth, her effect, exuded it to perfection with each breath.
Confusion mounted as his gaze clung to the new lushness encased in the formal attire of her profession, the severity of which only accentuated each long limb and ripe curve. His eyes followed each undulation of feminine assurance and fluid grace, pored over the areas her suit left exposed. That smooth neck with the modest expanse of flesh just below, those molded legs. He could almost taste her new creaminess. Would it taste the same as her honeyed tan once had…?