Temporarily His Princess - By Olivia Gates Page 0,39

experienced.

His gut finally communicated with his brain, reaching a decision.

If he took out the terrible blot of her betrayal from their lives, he could connect the woman he’d once loved with this woman he laughed so easily with, the woman he now wanted more than he’d known he was capable of wanting. And he didn’t want that woman to be under any form of compulsion.

Taking another step back, severing any intimacy, he exhaled. “It doesn’t have to happen.”

More uncertainty flooded her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you don’t have to marry me.”

*

Glory wondered if the sun had overheated her brain.

That would explain feeling and hearing things that couldn’t be real. When Vincenzo had stepped away, she’d felt as if she was teetering on a cliff without his support. Then, because of the distance that had come over him, she’d felt she’d fallen into the abyss of the past, discarded all over again.

That remoteness couldn’t have been real. Not after all his pursuit and passion. And he couldn’t have just said…

“I don’t have to marry you?” There she went, parroting him again. She swallowed the knot of anxiety that rose in her throat. “Just a minute ago you wanted me to marry you in seven hours or seven days, and now… Just what are you playing at?”

He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Nothing. No more games, Glory. But don’t worry. I’ll still help your family. Of course, they can never again as much as forge a note to your nephew’s kindergarten or take a cent from a tip dish.”

Her heart slowed, as if fearing every beat would make this real. “Y-you mean that?” His slow nod, his solemn gaze cleaved into her. “Wh-what will you do about King Ferruccio’s decree?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking on the fly here. Maybe I’ll ask someone else.”

Her heart boomed now, each beat almost tearing it apart.

She couldn’t bear thinking he’d marry someone else, even in pretense. “Why?”

His shrug was heavy; his spectacular face gripped in the brooding she hadn’t seen there since she’d met him again. “It just suddenly hit me, how wrong this whole thing is.”

It suddenly hit her, too. That he wasn’t only confounding. He was nerve-racking. Heartbreaking. And he probably did suffer from a severe bipolar disorder. What else explained the violent pendulum of his mood swings?

He forced out an exhalation. “You can go back as soon as you wish. If you want me to escort you, I will. If not, the royal jet is at your disposal.”

Feeling as if her whole world was being swept from under her, she leaned back on the balustrade before she collapsed.

He meant it. He was setting her free.

But she didn’t want to be free.

She no longer knew what to do with her freedom.

Before he’d reinvaded her life, she’d spent years nurturing the illusion of steadiness. His hurricane had uprooted her simulated peace and exposed the truth of her chaos, the bleakness of her isolation.

But she’d already succumbed and had woven a tapestry of expectations around this time she would have had with him. She’d anticipated its rejuvenation, thought it would see her through the rest of her life. In her worst estimations she’d never thought it would all end before it began.

But it had. He’d suddenly cut her loose, letting her plummet back into her endless spiral of nothingness.

She pushed away from the balustrade as if from a precipice and past the monolith who stood brooding down at her.

She looked around her stunning surroundings, every nerve burning with despondency.

In a different life, Vincenzo would have brought her here because he wanted to share his home with her. If not permanently, then at least sincerely, passionately, for as long the fates let them be together.

In this life, he’d brought her here for all the wrong reasons, only to send her away before she got more than a tantalizing taste of the place that had forged him into the man she loved.

Yes, in spite of the insanity and self-destructiveness of it all, she still loved him.

Now she’d only gotten enough of a glimpse of him in his element to live with their memory gnawing at her, to mourn what hadn’t and could never have been.

Needing to get it over with, she turned and found him still standing where he had been, his back to her, looking up at the sky. Thunder filled her ears as her gaze ached over the sight of his majestic figure…then she realized.

The din didn’t come from her stampeding heart. It