LITMIR.BIZ

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of her own.

      And the king thought her the one best equipped to talk Leandro into coming back. The man she hadn’t had one rational discussion with in the fourteen months she’d been his lover.

      But she had to be fair here. Their past affair was unknown, thanks to the lengths to which Leandro had gone to keep it a secret. The king was asking her to do her job as Castaldini’s diplomatic troubleshooter, who had negotiated many precarious deals and smoothed potentially treacherous situations on the kingdom’s behalf. If she took personal history and emotions out of it, this, while a one-of-a-kind situation, was still within her job parameters.

      Not that she hadn’t tried to excuse herself from the chore, extricate herself from this impending mess. But without admitting why she couldn’t face Leandro, she’d had no ground on which to squirm out of that trap. She thought even a confession would have backfired. The king’s reliance on her “charms” would have only taken on new relevance. As a man, and a desperate monarch to boot, he would have believed a former lover who just happened to be the kingdom’s best negotiator would be a double-barreled weapon that was sure to win the battle.

      She had one more reason she couldn’t have used. The consequences of this turn of events.

      Leandro must be punishing the king and his Council, forcing them to grovel for his return after they’d banished him. But she had no doubt that when his pride was appeased and his conditions were made and met, he’d become part of the D’Agostino family again, would become its crown prince and future king.

      And her time on Castaldini would come to an end.

      The moment he came back to stay, she’d leave.

      She was an hour away from meeting the man who’d made it impossible for her to love or even want another. From negotiating the deal that she had to succeed in negotiating at any price.

      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

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