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A Baby To Bind His Bride
CAITLIN CREWS
Claiming his wedding night!Presumed dead after a tragic accident, billionaire CEO Leonidas Betancur does not recall the vows he made four years ago. But when he's tracked down by his wife Susannah fragments of his memory reappear. He denied her a wedding night, and now he's ready to collect!Abandoned in her bridal gown, believing herself to be a widow, Susannah now wants Leonidas to reclaim his empire so she can be free. But he is more untamed and dangerously attractive than she remembers! With a single touch she surrenders her innocence… And the consequences of their passion will bind them together for ever!
Claiming his wedding night!
Presumed dead after a tragic accident, billionaire CEO Leonidas Betancur does not recall the vows he made four years ago. But after he is tracked down by his wife, Susannah, fragments of his memory reappear. He denied her of a wedding night, and now he is ready to collect!
Abandoned in her bridal gown and believing herself a widow, Susannah now wants Leonidas to reclaim his empire so she can be free. But he is more untamed and dangerously attractive than she remembers! With a single touch she surrenders her innocence... And now the consequences of their passion will bind them together forever!
“I understand that you’re used to ruling everything you see, but I took care of your company and your family and this whole great mess just fine when you were gone. I don’t need you. I don’t want you.”
“Then why did you go to such trouble to find me?” Leonidas demanded, and the force of it rocked Susannah back on her heels. “No one else was looking for me. No one else considered for even one second that I might be anything but dead. Only you. Why?”
Susannah hardly knew what she felt as she stared at him, her chest heaving as if she’d been running and her hands in fists at her sides. There were too many things inside her. There was the fact that she was trapped in this marriage and in this family and in this life that she’d wanted to escape the whole time she’d been stuck in it. More than that, there was the astounding reality of the situation. That there was life inside her. That she’d found her husband on a mountaintop when everyone had accepted that he was gone, and that she’d done more than save him. They’d made a life.
One Night With Consequences
When one night...leads to pregnancy!
When succumbing to a night of unbridled desire, it’s impossible to think past the morning after!
But, with the sheets barely settled, that little blue line appears on the pregnancy test and it doesn’t take long to realise that one night of white-hot passion has turned into a lifetime of consequences!
Only one question remains:
How do you tell a man you’ve just met that you’re about to share more than just his bed?
Find out in:
The Guardian’s Virgin Ward by Caitlin Crews
A Child Claimed by Gold by Rachael Thomas
The Consequence of His Vengeance by Jennie Lucas
Secrets of a Billionaire’s Mistress by Sharon Kendrick
The Boss’s Nine-Month Negotiation by Maya Blake
The Pregnant Kavakos Bride by Sharon Kendrick
A Ring for the Greek’s Baby by Melanie Milburne
Engaged for Her Enemy’s Heir by Kate Hewitt
The Virgin’s Shock Baby by Heidi Rice
The Italian’s Christmas Secret by Sharon Kendrick
A Night of Royal Consequences by Susan Stephens
Look for more One Night With Consequences coming soon!
A Baby to Bind His Bride
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She even teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://caitlincrews.com).
Books by Caitlin Crews
Mills & Boon Modern Romance
Undone by the Billionaire Duke
Castelli’s Virgin Widow
At the Count’s Bidding
Scandalous Royal Brides
The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal
The Billionaire’s Secret Princess
Wedlocked!
Bride by Royal Decree
Expecting a Royal Scandal
One Night With Consequences
The Guardian’s Virgin Ward
The Billionaire’s Legacy
The Return of the Di Sione Wife
Secret Heirs of Billionaires
Unwrapping the Castelli Secret
Scandalous Sheikh Brides
Protecting the Desert Heir
Traded to the Desert Sheikh
Visit the Author Profile page at millsandboon.co.uk (http://millsandboon.co.uk) for more titles.
Contents
Cover (#u4042b257-20ff-5924-911d-8ff216902f98)
Back Cover Text (#uf9595a18-d946-5185-9dc1-0e5dd40befbd)
Introduction (#uc9e5606f-b948-585a-8b5b-f7fd93443c54)
One Night With Consequences (#u1cb4920e-7f15-5895-a86d-97c88d6d4aba)
Title Page (#uab8fc131-b537-5901-8e57-ae1c44524e11)
About the Author (#u35d22694-e2da-5fd6-91d2-b245827a9b8b)
CHAPTER ONE (#uae566908-c5c7-53f9-865a-9f5823de26c4)
CHAPTER TWO (#ubcf48c26-fc8c-5662-8686-e2527791748b)
CHAPTER THREE (#u4981c43f-e8d8-559d-8198-2bdb3fa93e87)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u25916eb9-d04e-56f7-94af-cb7a6c4f5a92)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#u7f16f372-c946-544d-ba84-b431224dac0f)
“THEY CALL HIM the Count,” the gruff man told her as he led her deeper and deeper into the wild, wearing more flannel and plaid than Susannah Betancur had ever seen on a single person. “Never a name, always the Count. But they treat him like a god.”
“An actual god or a pretend god?” Susannah asked, as if that would make any difference. If the Count was the man she sought, it certainly wouldn’t.
Her guide shot her a look. “Not sure it really matters this far up the side of a hill, ma’am.”
The hill they were trudging up was more properly a mountain, to Susannah’s way of thinking, but then, everything in the American Rockies appeared to be built on a grand scale. Her impression of the Wild, Wild West was that it was an endless sprawl of jaw-dropping mountains bedecked with evergreens and quaint place names, as if the towering splendor in every direction could be contained by calling the highest peak around something like Little Summit.
“How droll,” Susannah muttered beneath her breath as she dug in and tried her best not to topple down the way she’d come. Or give in to what she thought was the high elevation, making her feel a little bit light-headed.
That she was also breathless went without saying.
Her friend in flannel had driven as far as he could on what passed for a road out in the remote Idaho wilderness. It was more properly a rutted, muddy dirt track that had wound deeper and deeper into the thick woods even as the sharp incline clearly indicated that they were going higher and higher at the same time. Then he’d stopped, long after Susannah had resigned herself to that lurching and bouncing lasting forever, or at least until it jostled her into a thousand tiny little jet-lagged pieces. Her driver had then indicated they needed to walk the rest of the way to what he called the compound, and little as Susannah had wanted to do anything of the kind after flying all the way here from the far more settled and civilized hills of her home on the other side of the world in Rome, she’d followed along.
Because Susannah might not be a particularly avid hiker. But she was the Widow Betancur, whether she liked it or not. She had no choice but to see this through.
She concentrated on putting one booted foot in front of the other now, well aware that her clothes were not exactly suited to an adventure in the great outdoors. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d actually be in the wilderness instead of merely adjacent to it. Unlike every person she’d seen since the Betancur private jet had landed on an airfield in the middle of nowhere, Susannah wore head-to-toe black to announce her state of permanent mourning at a glance. It was her custom. Today it was a sleek cashmere coat over a winter dress in merino wool and deceptively sturdy knee-high boots, because she’d expected the cold, just not the forced march to go along with it.
“Are you sure you don’t want to change?” her guide had asked her. They’d stared each other down in his ramshackle little cabin standing at lopsided attention in an overgrown field strewn with various auto parts. It had made her security detail twitchy. It had been his office, presumably. “Something less...?”
“Less?” Susannah had echoed as if she failed to catch his meaning, lifting a brow in an approximation of the ruthless husband she’d lost.
“There’s no real road in,” her guide had replied, eyeing her as if he expected her to wilt before him at that news. As if a mountain man or even the Rocky Mountains themselves, however challenging, could compare to the intrigues of her own complicated life and the multinational Betancur Corporation that had been in her control, at least nominally, these last few years, because she’d refused to let the rest of them win—her family and her late husband’s family and the entire board that had been so sure they could steamroll right over her. “It’s off the grid in the sense it’s, you know. Rough. You might want to dress for the elements.”
Susannah had politely demurred. She wore only black in public and had done so ever since the funeral, because she held the dubious distinction of being the very young widow of one of the richest men in the world. She found that relentless black broadcast the right message about her intention to remain in mourning indefinitely, no matter what designs her conspiring parents and in-laws, or anyone else, had on her at any given time.
She intended to remain the Widow Betancur for a very long while. No new husbands to take the reins and take control, no matter how hard she was pushed from all sides to remarry.
If it was up to her she’d wear black forever, because her widowhood kept her free.
Unless, that was, Leonidas Cristiano Betancur hadn’t actually died four years ago in that plane crash, which was exactly what Susannah had hauled herself across the planet to find out.
Leonidas had been headed out to a remote ranch in this same wilderness for a meeting with some potential investors into one of his pet projects when his small plane had gone down in these acres and acres of near-impenetrable national forest. No bodies had ever been found, but the authorities had been convinced that the explosion had burned so hot that all evidence had been incinerated.
Susannah was less convinced. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she’d been increasingly more convinced over time that what had happened to her husband—on their wedding night, no less—had not been any accident.
That had led to years of deploying private investigators and poring over grainy photographs of dark, grim men who were never Leonidas. Years of playing Penelope games with her conniving parents and her equally scheming in-laws like she was something straight out of The Odyssey, pretending to be so distraught by Leonidas’s death that she couldn’t possibly bear so much as a conversation about whom she might marry next.
When the truth was she was not distraught. She’d hardly known the older son of old family friends whom her parents had groomed her to marry so young. She’d harbored girlish fantasies, as anyone would have at that age, but Leonidas had dashed all of those when he’d patted her on the head at their wedding like she was a puppy and had then disappeared in the middle of their reception because business called.
“Don’t be so self-indulgent, Susannah,” her mother had said coldly that night while Susannah stood there, abandoned in her big white dress, trying not to cry. “Fantasies of fairy tales are for little girls. You are now the wife of the heir to the Betancur fortune. I suggest you take the opportunity to decide what kind of wife you will be. A pampered princess locked away on one of the Betancur estates or a force to be reckoned with?”
Before morning, word had come that Leonidas was lost. And Susannah had chosen to be a force indeed these past four years, during which time she’d grown from a sheltered, naive nineteen-year-old into a woman who was many things, but was always—always—someone to be reckoned with. She’d decided she was more than just a trophy wife, and she’d proved it.
And it had led here, to the side of a mountain in an American state Susannah had heard of only in the vaguest terms, trekking up to some “off the grid” compound where a man meeting Leonidas’s description was rumored to be heading up a local cult.
“It’s not exactly a doomsday cult,” her investigator had told her in the grand penthouse in Rome, where Susannah lived because it was the closest of her husband’s properties to the Betancur Corporation’s European headquarters, where she liked to make her presence known. It kept things running more smoothly, she’d found.
“Do such distinctions matter?” she’d asked, trying so hard to sound distant and unaffected with those photographs in her hands. Shots of a man in flowing white, hair longer than Leonidas had ever worn it, and still, that same ruthlessness in his dark gaze. That same lean, athletic frame, rangy and dangerous, with new scars that would make sense on someone who’d been in a plane crash.
Leonidas Betancur in the flesh. She would have sworn on it.
And her reaction to that swept over her from the inside, one earthquake after another, while she tried to smile blandly at her investigator.
“The distinction only matters in the sense that if you actually go there, signora, it is unlikely that you’ll be held or killed,” the man told her.
“Something to look forward to, then,” Susannah had replied, with another cool smile as punctuation.
While inside, everything had continued that low, shattering roll, because her husband was alive. Alive.
She couldn’t help thinking that if Leonidas really had repaired to the wilderness and assembled a following, he’d been trained for the vagaries of cult leadership in the best possible classroom: the shark-infested waters of the Betancur Corporation, the sprawling family business that had made him and all his relatives so filthy rich they thought they could do things like bring down the planes of disobedient, uncontrollable heirs when it suited them.
Susannah had learned a lot in her four years of treading that same water. Mainly, that when the assorted Betancurs wanted something—like, say, Leonidas out of the way of a deal that would make the company a lot of money but which Leonidas had thought was shady—they usually found a way to get it.
Being the Widow Betancur kept her free from all that conniving. Above it. But there was one thing better than being Leonidas Betancur’s widow, Susannah had thought, and it was bringing him back from the dead.
He could run his damned business himself. And Susannah could get back the life she hadn’t known she wanted when she was nineteen. She could be happily divorced, footloose and fancy free by her twenty-fourth birthday, free of all Betancurs and much better at standing up for herself against her own parents.
Free, full stop.
Flying across the planet and into the Idaho wilderness was a small price to pay for her own freedom.
“What kind of leader is the Count?” Susannah asked crisply now, focusing on the rough terrain as she followed her surprisingly hardy guide. “Benevolent? Or something more dire?”
“I can’t say as I know the difference,” her guide replied out of the side of his mouth. “One cult seems like another to me.”
As if they were a dime a dozen in these parts. Perhaps they were.
And then it didn’t matter anyway, because they’d reached the compound.
One moment there was nothing but forest and then the next, great gates reared up on the other side of a small clearing, swaddled in unfriendly barbed wire, festooned with gruff signs warning intruders to Keep Out while listing the grisly consequences of trespassing, and mounted with aggressively swiveling video cameras.
“This is as far as I go,” her guide said then, keeping to the last of the trees.
Susannah didn’t even know his name. And she wished he could come with her, since he’d gotten her this far already. But that wasn’t the deal. “I understand.”
“I’ll wait down by the truck until you need to go down the hill,” the man continued. “I’d take you inside...”
“I understand that you can’t,” Susannah said, because this had all been explained to her down in that ramshackle cabin. “I have to do the rest of this alone.”
That was the part that had given her security detail fits. But everyone had agreed. There was no way that Susannah could descend upon some faraway compound with an entire complement of Betancur security guards in tow when it was likely her husband was hiding from the world. She couldn’t turn up with her own small army, in other words. Even a few hardy locals would be too much, her guide had told her, because the sort of people who holed up in nearly inaccessible compounds in the Rocky Mountains were usually also the sort who didn’t much care for visitors. Particularly not if said visitors were armed.
But a young woman who called herself a widow and was dressed to look as out of place on this mountain as Susannah felt was something else entirely.
Something wholly nonthreatening, she hoped.
Susannah didn’t let herself think too much about what she was doing. She’d read too many thrillers while locked away in the Swiss boarding school where her parents had insisted she remain throughout her adolescence, and every last one of them was running through her head on a loop this afternoon.
Not helpful, she snapped at herself. She didn’t want to think about the risks. All she wanted—all she’d ever wanted—was to find out what had happened to Leonidas.
Because the sad truth was, she might be the only one who cared.
And she told herself that the only reason why she cared was because finding him would set her free.
Susannah strode toward the gates, her skin crawling with every step she took. She knew the video cameras were trained on her, but she was worried about something worse than surveillance. Like snipers. She rather doubted anyone built a great fortress in the woods like the one she saw before her, sprawling this way and that, if they didn’t intend to defend it.
“Stop right there!”
She couldn’t see where the voice came from, exactly. But Susannah stopped anyway. And raised her hands up, though not entirely over her head. There was no point coming over completely submissive.
“I’m here to see the Count,” she called into the silent, chilly forest all around her.
Nothing happened.
For a moment Susannah thought nothing would. But then, slowly, a door at the side of one of the great gates before her swung open.
She held her breath. Would this be Leonidas after all this time?
A man came out through the door, but it wasn’t Leonidas. This man was much shorter than the husband she’d lost, with an alarming semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder and a distinctly unfriendly expression on his round face.
“You need to get off our mountain,” he told her, waving the rifle as punctuation.
But he was frowning at her as he spoke. At her clothes, Susannah realized after a moment. Because she certainly wasn’t dressed for an assault on a compound. Or even a walk in the woods, for that matter.
“I have no particular desire to be on this mountain,” she replied crisply. “I only want to see the Count.”
“The Count sees who he wants to see, and never on demand.” The man’s voice throbbed with fervor. And more than that, fury. As if he couldn’t believe Susannah’s temerity in suggesting she should have access to a being of such greatness.
It was possible she was imagining that part. What did she know about cult members?
She inclined her head at the man. “He’ll want to see me.”
“The count is a busy man,” the man scoffed. “He doesn’t have time for strange women who appear out of nowhere like they’re begging to get shot.”
That would be a direct threat where she came from, Susannah reflected, while her heart beat out a desperate tattoo in her chest. She reminded herself that here, in the middle of this vast and dangerous wilderness, the people who held these places had a different relationship to their weapons. And to threats, for that matter.
The man before her was perhaps being nothing but matter-of-fact.
“I’m not looking to get shot,” she told him as calmly as possible. “But the Count will want to see me, I’m sure of it.” She wasn’t sure of any such thing. The fact that Leonidas had locked himself away in this place and started calling himself something so ridiculous suggested that he had no desire to be located. Ever. But she wasn’t going to get into that with one of his wild-eyed true believers. She aimed a cool smile the guard’s way instead. “Why don’t you take me to him and he can tell you so himself?”
“Lady, I’m not going to tell you again. You should turn around. You need to get off this hill and never come back here again.”
“I’m not going to do that,” Susannah said, with that iron matter-of-factness she’d developed over the past few years. As if she expected her orders to be obeyed simply because she’d issued them. As if she was Leonidas himself instead of the young widow everyone knew he’d never meant to leave in charge of anything, much less the whole of his fortune. But Susannah had done exactly what her mother had told her to do. She’d taken Leonidas’s name and gained his authority at the same time. She’d been confounding people in the corporate world he’d left behind with this exact same attitude for years now. “I have to see the Count. That’s nonnegotiable. Whatever needs to happen so that I can do that is up to you. I don’t care.”
“Listen, lady—”
“Or you can shoot me,” Susannah suggested coolly. “But those are the only two possible outcomes here.”
The man blinked at her as if he didn’t know what to do. Susannah didn’t entirely blame him. She didn’t cower. She didn’t shift her weight from side to side or give any indication that she was anything but perfectly calm. She simply stood there as if it was completely natural that she should be thousands of feet high on the side of a mountain in the Idaho wilderness. She gazed back at the strange man before her as if she marched up to the doors of cults and demanded entry every day of the week.
She stared at him until it became clear that he was the one who was ill at ease, not her.
“Who the hell are you?” he finally demanded.
“I’m so glad you asked,” Susannah said then, and this time, her smile was something less than cool. Something more like a weapon and she’d had four years to learn how to shoot it. “I’m the Count’s wife.”
CHAPTER TWO (#u7f16f372-c946-544d-ba84-b431224dac0f)
THE COUNT DIDN’T have a wife.
Or he hadn’t had one in as long as he could remember—but that was the trouble with everything, wasn’t it? It was eating at him more and more these days that there were so many things he couldn’t remember.
There were more things he couldn’t remember than things he could. And all of them had happened in the last four years.
His followers told the stories of how they’d found this place. How they’d come here, each finding his or her own way up the mountain and proving themselves worthy of entry. They spoke of what they’d left behind. The people, the places. The things. The dreams and expectations.
But the Count knew only the compound.
His first memory was of waking up in the expansive set of rooms he still occupied. He been battered, broken. It had taken him a long time to return to anything approaching health. To sit, then stand. Then slowly, painfully, walk. And even when he’d been walking around of his own volition at last, he hadn’t felt that his body was back to his standard.
Though he couldn’t have said what his standard was.
It had taken him almost eighteen months to feel something like normal.
And another eighteen months to realize that no matter what he pretended because it seemed to make his people so nervous when he did not, he didn’t really know what normal was.
Because he still couldn’t remember anything but this. Here. Now.
His people assured him it was preordained. They told him that it was all a part of the same glorious plan. They had gathered, they had prayed, and so to them a leader had appeared in this same forest where they lived. The end.
The Count had agreed because there was no reason not to agree.
He certainly felt like a leader. He had since the first moment he’d opened his eyes. When he issued an order and people leaped to fill it, it didn’t feel new. It felt deeply familiar. Right and good.
He rarely shared with anyone how much he liked the things that felt familiar. It seemed to shy too close to some kind of admission he didn’t want to make.
His every need was attended to here, of course. His people gathered to hear him speak. They fretted over his health. They fed him and they clothed him and they followed him. What more could a man want?
And yet there was a woman in the compound, claiming she was his wife, and the Count felt as if something in him he’d never known was there had cracked wide open.
“She’s quite insistent,” his closest adviser, Robert, said. Again—and this time with more obvious disapproval. “She says she’s been looking for you for some time.”
“And yet I do not have a wife,” the Count replied. “Have you not told me this from the start?”
Robert was the only follower with him then, watching the woman in question on the bank of monitors before them. The Count waited to feel some kind of familiarity or recognition. He waited to know her one way or another, but like everything in his life, there was no knowing. There was no memory.
Sometimes he told his people that he was grateful for this blank canvas.
But then there were other times, like this, when the things he didn’t feel, the things he didn’t know, seemed to batter at him like a winter storm.
“Of course you do not have a wife,” Robert was saying, sounding something like scandalized. “That is not your path. That is for lesser men.”
This was a place of purity. That was one of the few things that had always been clear to the Count, and it was handy that he’d never been tempted to stray from that path. The men and women here practiced a version of the same radical purity that he did—with a special dispensation for those who were married—or they left.
But in all this time, the Count had never gazed upon a female and felt something other than that same purity, drowning out anything else.
Until now.
It took him a moment to recognize what was happening to him, and he supposed that he should have been horrified. But he wasn’t. Lust rolled through him like an old friend, and he couldn’t have said why that failed to set off any alarms within him. He told himself temptation was good, as it would make him even more powerful to conquer it. He told himself that this was nothing more than a test.
The woman who filled his screens looked impatient. That was the first thing that separated her from the handful of women who lived here. More than that, she looked... Fragile. Not weathered and hardy the way his people were. Not prepared for any eventuality. She looked soft.
The Count had no idea why he wanted to touch her to see if she could possibly be as soft as she looked.
She was dressed in clothes that didn’t make any sense to him, here on top of the mountain. He could never remember being off the mountain, of course, but he knew that there was a whole world out there. He’d been told. And all that black, sleek and slick over her trim little figure, made him think of cities.
It had never occurred to him before, but he didn’t really think about cities. And now that he had, it was as if they all ran through his head like a travelogue. New York. London. Shanghai. New Delhi. Berlin. Cairo. Auckland.
As if he’d been to each and every one of them.
He shoved that oddity aside and studied the woman. They’d brought her inside the compound walls and placed her in a sealed-off room that no one ever called a cell. But that’s what it was. It was outfitted with nothing more than an old sofa, a toilet behind a screen in the corner and cameras in the walls.
If she was as uncomfortable as the last three law enforcement officials had been when they’d visited, she didn’t show it. She sat on the sofa as if she could do it forever. Her face was perfectly calm, her blue eyes clear. She looked almost serene, he might have said, which only drew attention to the fact that she was almost incomprehensibly pretty.
Not that he had many other women to compare her with. But somehow the Count knew that if he lined up every woman out there in the world he couldn’t remember, he would still find this one stunning.
Her legs were long and shapely, even in the boots she wore, and she crossed them neatly as if she hadn’t noticed they were splattered with mud. She wore only one rather large ring on her left hand that kept catching the light when she moved, and she crossed her fingers in her lap before her as if she knew it and was trying to divert attention away from all that excessive sparkle. Her mouth caught at him in ways he didn’t entirely understand, greed and hunger like a ball inside him, and the Count wasn’t sure he liked it. He concentrated on her remarkably glossy blond hair instead, swept back from her face into something complicated at her nape.
A chignon, he thought.
It was a word the Count didn’t know. But it was also the proper term to describe how she had styled her hair. He knew that in the way he knew all the things he shouldn’t have, so he shoved it aside and kept on.
“Bring her to me,” he said before he thought better of it.
Then he thought better of it and still said nothing to contradict himself.
“She’s not your wife,” Robert said, scowling. “You have no wife. You are the Count, the leader of the glorious path, and the answer to every question of the faithful!”
“Yes, yes,” the Count said with a wave of his hand. What he thought was that Robert didn’t actually know if this woman was his wife. Neither did he. Because he couldn’t simply have appeared from nowhere in a shower of flame, the way everyone claimed. He’d understood that from the start. At the very least, he’d thought, if he’d simply appeared one day in a burst of glory, he wouldn’t have needed all that time to recover, would he?
But these mysteries of faith, he’d learned, were not something he could explore in public.
What he knew was that if he’d come from somewhere else, that meant he’d had a life there. Wherever it was. And if this woman thought she knew him, it was possible she could prove to be a font of information.
The Count wanted information more than anything.
He didn’t wait to see if Robert would obey him. He knew the other man would, because everyone did. The Count left the surveillance room behind and walked back through his compound. He knew it so well, every room and every wall built of logs. The fireplaces of stone and the thick rugs on the common floors. He had never thought beyond this place. Because everything he wanted and needed was right here. The mountain gave and the followers received, that was the way.
Sydney. Saint Petersburg. Vancouver. Reykjavik. Oslo. Rome.
What did it mean that he could suddenly see so many more places? Places not hewn from wood and tucked away in these mountains, with nothing to see in all directions but trees and weather? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
The Count made his way to his own private rooms, set apart from the dormitories where the rest of his people slept. He kept his expression blank as he moved, as if he was communing with the Spirit the way he was supposed to do, the better to discourage anyone from approaching him.
The good news was that no one would dare. They watched him as he walked and the more attention-seeking among them pitched their prayers even louder, but no one tried to catch his eye.
When he got to his rooms, he waited in the outer chamber. When he’d first started to come into awareness, to become himself, he’d recoiled from the starkness of these rooms. It had felt like a prison, though he knew, somehow, he’d never been in one. But now he’d come to prefer it to the relatively cozier rooms on the other side of his doors. Stark-white walls. Minimal furnishings. Nothing to distract a man from his purpose.
It was between him and his conscience that he’d never quite managed to feel that purpose the way everyone assumed he did.
He didn’t have to wait long for them to bring her in. And when they did, the starkness of the walls seemed to make the shock of her black clothes that much bolder in comparison. Everything was white. The clothes he wore, loose and flowing. His walls, the hardwood floor, even the chair he sat in, like an ivory throne.
And then this woman in the middle of it all, black clothes, blue eyes and unbent knees. This woman who stared at him, her lips slightly parted and a sheen in her eyes he couldn’t quite read.
This woman who called herself his wife.
“I do not have a wife,” he told her when his followers had left them alone at last. He told himself there was no reason his anticipation should make him so...restless. “The leader has no wife. His path is pure.”
He stayed where he was, sitting on the only chair in the room. But if standing there before him like one of his supplicants bothered her—though, of course, his followers would all be prostrate before his magnificence rather than stand and risk his displeasure—she didn’t let it show.
In fact, the look on her face was something that edged more toward astonishment. With an undertone he was fairly sure was temper—not that he’d seen such a thing with his own eyes. Not directed at him.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
That was all she said. It was a harsh little whisper, nothing more.
And the Count found himself fascinated by her eyes. They were so tremendously blue it made him think of the breathless summers here, and they were filled with a brilliant, diamond-cut emotion he couldn’t begin to understand.
“I do not kid,” he said. Or he didn’t think he did. He was certain he never had, anyway. Not here.
The woman before him blew out a breath as if something was hard. As if she was performing some kind of physical labor.
“How long do you intend to hide out here?” She threw the words at him in a tight sort of voice that suggested she was upset.
The Count could not think of any reason at all that she should be.
“Where else would I be?” He tilted his head slightly to one side as he regarded her, trying to make sense of all the emotion he could see swirling around her, written into every line of her black-clad body. Trying to puzzle out its cause. “And I’m not hiding. This is my home.”
She let out a sharp little laugh, but not as if she thought anything was funny. The Count found himself frowning, which never happened.
“You have many homes,” she said in a voice that sounded almost...gritty. “I enjoy the penthouse in Rome, certainly, but there’s something to be said for the New Zealand vineyard. The island in the South Pacific. The town house in London or the Greek villa. Or all those acres of land your family owns in Brazil. You have multiple homes on every possible continent, is my point, and not one of them is a sanitarium in a mountain tree house in Idaho.”
“A sanitarium?” he echoed. It was another word he didn’t know—and yet did, as soon as she said it.
But she wasn’t paying attention to what he did or didn’t comprehend. She was pivoting to take in the stark-white chamber, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Is this supposed to be some kind of hospital room?” she demanded. “Has this been a four-year mental health retreat from all your responsibilities?” Her blue gaze was even sharper when it landed on him again. “If you knew you were going to run away like this, why bother marrying me? Why not pull your disappearing act before the wedding? You must know exactly what I’ve had to deal with all this time. What did I ever do to you to deserve being left in the middle of that mess?”
“You’re speaking to me as if you know me,” the Count said in a low, dangerous voice that she did not seem to heed.
“I don’t know you at all. That’s what makes this so vicious. If you wanted to punish someone with the company and your horrible family, why choose me? I was nineteen. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that they tried to eat me alive.”
There was something sharp inside him, like broken glass, and it was shredding him with every word she spoke. He found himself standing when he hadn’t meant to move.
“I did not choose you. I did not marry you. I have no idea who you are, but I am the Count.”
His hand had ended up over his chest and he dropped it, ill at ease with his own fervency.
“You are not a count,” snapped the woman he was realizing, too late, was far more dangerous to him than he’d imagined anyone could be. And he couldn’t tell if that was a kind of apprehension that worked in him then or, worse, something far closer to exhilaration. And she clearly wasn’t finished. “Your family has certainly flirted with this or that aristocracy over the years, but you are not titled. Your mother likes to claim that she is a direct descendent of the Medicis, but I’m not sure anyone takes that seriously no matter how many times she threatens to commit a murder over a meal.”
The Count’s head was reeling. There was a faint, dull pain at his temples and at the base of his skull, and he knew it was her fault. He should have had her removed. Tossed back in that cell, or dropkicked down the side of his mountain.
There was no reason he should cross the room, his bare feet slapping against the bare floor, to tower there above her.
There was no reason—but she should have been concerned. If she’d been one of his followers she would have thrown up her hands in surrender and then tossed herself at his feet. She would have sobbed and begged for his forgiveness.
This woman did none of those things.
She tipped her chin up and met his gaze as if she didn’t notice that he was significantly taller than she was. More, as if she didn’t care.
“I would be very careful how you speak to me,” he told her, managing to get the words out through the seething thing that had its claws in him and that broken glass inside.
“What is the purpose of this charade?” she demanded. “You know I’m not going to be fooled by it. You know I know exactly who you are. No threat is going to change that.”
“That was not a threat. It was a warning.” He realized he wanted to reach over and put his hands on her, and that threw him. But not enough to back away. Not enough to put a safe distance between them the way he should have. “There’s a certain disrespect that I confess, I find almost refreshing, since it is so rare. And suicidal. But you should know my people will not accept it.”
“Your people?” She shook her head as if he wasn’t making sense. Worse, as if he was hurting her, somehow. “If you mean the cult on the other side of these doors, you can’t really think they’re anything but accessories to a crime.”
“I’ve committed no crimes.”
But he threw that out as if he was defending himself, and the Count had no idea why he would do such a thing. Nothing in his memory had prepared him for this. People did not argue with him. They did not stand before him and hurl accusations at him.
Everyone in this compound adored him. The Count had never been in the presence of someone who didn’t worship him before. He found it...energizing, in a strange way. He recognized lust, but the form it took surprised him. He wanted to drag his hands through her neat, careful hair. He wanted to taste the mouth that dared say such things to him.
He wanted to drag out the broken glass inside him and let her handle it, since he might not know how or why she was doing it, but he knew it was her fault.
“You swanned away from the scene of an accident, apparently,” she was saying, with the same fearlessness he couldn’t quite believe, even as it was happening. And she was carrying on as if he was about as intimidating as a tiny, fragile female should have been. “Your entire family thinks you’re dead. I thought you were dead. And yet here you are. Hale and healthy and draped in bridal white. And hidden away on the top of the mountain, while the mess you left behind gets more and more complicated by the day.”
The Count laughed at her. “Who is it that you imagine I am?”
“I am not imagining anything,” the woman said, and she seemed to bristle as she said it. Maybe that was why the Count found his hands on her upper arms, holding her there before him. Then dragging her closer. “I knew it was you when I saw the pictures. I don’t understand how you’ve managed to hide it for so long. You’re one of the most recognizable men alive.”
“I am the Count,” he repeated, but even he could taste the faintly metallic tang of what he was very much afraid was desperation. “The path—”
“I am Susannah Forrester Betancur,” she interrupted him. Far from pulling away from his grip, she angled herself toward him, surging up on her toes to put her face that much closer to his. “Your wife. You married me four years ago and left me on our wedding night, charmer that you are.”
“Impossible. The Count has no wife. That would make him less than pure.”
She let out a scoffing sound, and her blue eyes burned.
“You are not the Count of anything. You are Leonidas Cristiano Betancur, and you are the heir to the Betancur Corporation. That means that you are so wealthy you could buy every mountain in this range, and then some, from your pocket change alone. It means that you are so powerful that someone—very likely a member of your own family—had to scheme up a plane crash to get around you.”
The pain in his temples was sharpening. The pressure at the base of his skull was intensifying.
“I am not who you think I am,” he managed to say.
“You are exactly who I think you are,” she retorted. “And Leonidas, it is far past time for you to come home.”
There was the pain and then a roaring, loud and rough, but he understood somehow it was inside him.
Maybe that was the demon that took him then. Maybe that was what made him haul her closer to him as if he was someone else and she was married to him the way she claimed.
Maybe that was why he crushed her mouth with his, tasting her at last. Tasting all her lies—
But that was the trouble.
One kiss, and he remembered.
He remembered everything.
Everything.
Who he was. How he’d come here. His last moments on that doomed flight and his lovely young bride, too, whom he’d left behind without a second thought because that was the man he’d been then, formidable and focused all the way through.
He was Leonidas Betancur, not a bloody count. And he had spent four years in a log cabin surrounded by acolytes obsessed with purity, which was very nearly hilarious, because there was not a damned thing about him that was or ever had been pure.
So he kissed little Susannah, who should have known better. Little Susannah who had been thrown to him like bait all those years ago, a power move by her loathsome parents and a boon to his own devious family, because he’d always avoided innocence. He’d lost his own so early.
His own, brutal father had seen to that.
He angled his head and he pulled her closer, tasting her and taking her, plundering her mouth like a man possessed.
She tasted sweet and lush, and she went straight to his head. He told himself it was only that it had been so long. The part of him that had honestly believed he was who these crazy people thought he was—the part that had developed the conscience Leonidas had never bothered with—thought he should stop.
But he didn’t.
He kissed her again and again. He kissed her until the rest of her was as soft and pliable as her mouth. He kissed her until she looped her arms around his neck and slid against him as if she couldn’t stand on her own feet. He kissed her until she was making tiny noises in the back of her throat.
He remembered her in a confection of a white dress and all the people their families had invited to the ceremony on the Betancur family estate in France. He remembered how wide her blue eyes had been and how young she’d seemed, the virgin sacrifice his brute of a father had bought for him before he’d died. A gift tied up in an alliance that benefited the family.
One more bit of evidence of the insupportable rot that was the Betancur blood—
But Leonidas didn’t care about that.
“Leonidas,” she whispered, tearing her mouth from his. “Leonidas, I—”
He didn’t want to talk. He wanted her mouth, so he took it.
Susannah had found him here. Susannah had brought him back his life.
So he swept her up into his arms, never moving his mouth from hers for an instant, and Leonidas carried her into the bedroom he couldn’t wait to leave at last.
But first, Susannah owed him that wedding night.
And four years later, Leonidas was ready to collect.
CHAPTER THREE (#u7f16f372-c946-544d-ba84-b431224dac0f)
LEONIDAS’S MOUTH WAS on hers, and she couldn’t seem to recover from the sweet shock of it. He kissed her again and again and again, and the only thing she could manage to do was surrender herself to the slick, epic feel of his mouth against hers.
As if she’d spent all these years stumbling around in the dark, and the taste of this man was the light at last.
She should stop him. Susannah knew that. She should step back and draw some boundaries. Make some rules. Demand that he stop pretending he didn’t remember her, for a start. She didn’t believe in amnesia. She didn’t believe that someone like Leonidas, so bold and relentless and bright, could ever disappear.
But then, he’d always been larger than life to her. She’d known who he was since she was a child and had been thrilled when her parents had informed her she was to marry him. He’d been like a starry sky as far as she’d been concerned on her wedding day, and some part of her had refused to believe that a man that powerful could be snuffed out so easily, so quickly.
And before she’d had a chance to touch him like this, the way she’d imagined so fervently before their wedding—
She needed to stop him. She needed to assert herself. She needed to let him know that the girl he’d married had died the day he had and she was far more sure and powerful now than she’d been then.
But she didn’t do any of the things she imagined she should.
When Leonidas kissed her, she kissed him back, inexpert and desperate. She didn’t pause to tell him how little she knew of men or their ways or the things that lips and teeth and that delirious angle of his hard jaw could do. She met his mouth as best she could. She tasted him in turn.
And she surrendered.
When he lifted her up in his arms, she thought that was an excellent opportunity to do...something. Anything. But his mouth was on hers as he moved, and Susannah realized that she’d been lying to herself for a very long time.
She could hardly remember the silly teenager she’d been on the day of her wedding after all that had happened since. She’d known she was sheltered back then, in the same way she’d known that her father was a very high-level banker and that her Dutch mother loathed living in England. But knowing she was sheltered and then dealing with the ramifications of her own naïveté were two very different things, it turned out. And Susannah had been dealing with the consequences of the way she’d been raised—not to mention her parents’ aspirations for their only child—for so long now, and in such a pressure cooker, that it was easy to forget the truth of things.
Such as the fact that when her parents had told her—a dreamy sixteen-year-old girl who’d spent most of her life in a very remote and strict Swiss boarding school with other heiresses to various kingdoms and fortunes—that she was destined to marry the scion of the Betancur family, Susannah hadn’t been upset. She hadn’t cried into her pillow every night the way her roommate did at the prospect of her own marriage, scared of the life spooling out in front of her without her permission or input.
On the contrary, she’d been delighted.
Leonidas was gorgeous, all her school friends had agreed. He was older than them, but much younger than some of her friends’ betrothed, and with all his hair and teeth as far as anyone could tell. And she’d met him, so she knew firsthand that he was merciless and forbidding in ways that had made her feel tingly all over. Moreover, every time they’d interacted—as few and far between as those times might have been over the years, because he was an important man and she was just a girl, as her mother chastised her—he’d always treated her with a great patience even she’d been able to see was at complete odds with the ferocity of his dark gaze.
She forgotten that. He’d disappointed her on her wedding night, then he’d died, and she’d forgotten. She’d lost herself in the scandal and intrigue of the Betancur Corporation and all its attendant family drama, and she’d completely failed to remember that when it came to Leonidas she had always been a very, very silly girl.
Back when she was one, and again now. Clearly.
Say something, she ordered herself.
But then he was laying her down on the bed in the next room, and following her down to the mattress, and Susannah didn’t have it in her to care if she was silly.
She’d been promised a wedding night. Four years ago, she’d expected to hand over her innocence to the man who’d become her husband and instead, she’d been left to years of widow’s weeds and seas of enemies—not all of whom had come at her as opponents.
Susannah couldn’t count the number of men who’d tried to seduce her over the years, many related to Leonidas, but she’d always held firm. She was the Widow Betancur and she mourned. She grieved. That little bit of fiction had protected her when nothing else could.
But Leonidas wasn’t dead. And more than that, as he sprawled out above her on that firm mattress and pressed her into it, all his lean, solid strength making her breathless with a dizzy sort of joy, it made her forget that he had ever disappeared in the first place.
As if this was their wedding night after all.
“This has been four years overdue,” he said, his voice a low growl against her neck, and she could feel him just as she could hear him. There was something in his tone she didn’t like—a certain skepticism, perhaps, that pricked at her—but it was swept away when his mouth fixed to hers again.
And Susannah did nothing to dig her feet into whatever ground she could find. She let Leonidas take her with a fervent joy that might have concerned her if she’d been able to think critically.
She didn’t think. She kissed him instead.
His hands dug into her hair, tugging slightly until he pulled it out of the knot she’d worn the heavy mass of it in. He muttered something she couldn’t quite hear, but she didn’t care because he was kissing her again and again.
When he moved his mouth from hers to trace a trail down the length of her neck, she moaned, and he laughed, just a little bit. When he tugged on her cashmere coat, she lifted herself up so he could pull it from her body. He did the same with her shift dress, tugging it up and over her head. She had the vague impression that he tossed both items aside, but she didn’t care where they landed.
Because she was lying beneath him with nothing on but a bra and panties and her knee-high boots, and the look in his dark eyes was...savage.
It made Susannah shake a little. It made her feel beautiful.
Raw. Aching and alive.
As if, after all this time, she really was more than the shroud she’d been wearing like armor for all these years. As if she wasn’t the little girl he’d married, but the woman she’d longed to be in her head.
“You are the perfect gift,” he said, as if he really couldn’t remember who she was. As if his amnesia game was real and he really believed himself some or other local god, tucked away here in the woods.
But Susannah couldn’t bring herself to worry about that. Because Leonidas was touching her.
He used his mouth and his hands. He found her breasts and cupped them with his palms, then bent his head to tease first one nipple, then the next. Through the soft fabric of her bra, his mouth was so hot, so shocking, that she arched off the bed. To get away from him—or get closer to him—she couldn’t quite tell.
He stripped the bra from her, then repeated himself, but this time there was no fabric between the suction of his mouth and her tender skin. Susannah had never felt anything like it in her life. She felt...open and exposed, and so bright red with too much sensation she might as well have been a beacon.
Her head thrashed against the mattress beneath her. She gripped him wherever she could touch him, grabbing fistfuls of the flowing white garments he wore at his sides, his hips, and not caring at all when her own gasps and moans filled her ears.
Then he moved lower. His tongue teased her navel, and then his big hands wrapped around her hips.
And he didn’t ask. He didn’t even move her panties out of his way. Leonidas merely bent his head and fastened his mouth to the place where she ached the most.
Susannah thought she exploded.
She was surprised to find, between one breath and the next, that she was still in one piece. That every bit of suction he applied between her legs made her feel like she was breaking and fusing back together again—over and over again.
She felt a tug at her hip, heard a faint tearing sound that she only dimly understood was him tearing her panties from her body, and when he bent his head to her once again, everything changed.
It had already been madness. And now it was magic.
Leonidas licked his way into her, teasing her and tasting her. It took her long moments to realize that he was humming, a low sound of intense male approval that she could feel like shock waves crashing through her body. It was like a separate thrill.
She felt his fingers tracing through her heat, and then they were inside her. Long and hard and decidedly male.
“My God...” she managed to say, her head tipped back and her eyes shut tight.
“That’s what they call me,” he agreed, laughter and need in his voice and his words like separate caresses against her soft heat.
He scraped the neediest part of her with his teeth, then sucked at her, hard—and that was it.
Susannah thought she died, but there was too much sensation. Too much. It broke her into pieces, but it didn’t stop. It didn’t ever stop. It went on and on and on, and she couldn’t breathe.
She didn’t want to breathe.
And she was still spinning around and around when he pulled away from her. She managed to open her eyes and fix them on him, watching in a dizzy haze as Leonidas stripped himself of that flowing white shirt at last.
Susannah couldn’t help the gasp she let out when she finally saw all of him.
His muscles were smooth and tight, packed hard everywhere in a manner that suggested hard labor instead of a gym. She might not have seen him naked four years ago, but she’d certainly spent time researching him online. She thought he was bigger now than he’d been when that plane went down. Tougher, somehow.
Maybe she thought that because he was covered in scars. They wound all over his chest and dipped below his waistband.
“So many scars...” she whispered.
Leonidas froze. And Susannah couldn’t bear it.
She wasn’t sure she’d thought much at all since the moment she’d walked through the doors to this chamber and had seen Leonidas sitting there as if he belonged on this godforsaken mountaintop. As if he wasn’t a Betancur. Or her husband. Her mind had gone blank while her mouth had opened, and she saw no reason to reverse the not-thinking trend now.
Susannah reached up and traced the scars that she could touch. Over the flat plane of his chest. Across the ridged wonder of his abdomen. On the one hand, he was a perfect specimen of a male, lean and strong and enough to make her mouth water. On the other, he wore the evidence of the plane crash that everyone had said was too deadly for anyone to survive. It was as if two pictures tried to collide in her head, and neither one of them made sense. Not the Leonidas he’d been, who had left her so abruptly. Not the man who called himself the Count and hid away in this compound.
But her fingers didn’t need pictures. They didn’t care which version of him he was today. His skin was so hot and his body was so hard, and every time she found a new scar and ran her fingers over it as if she was trying to memorize it, he pulled in his breath with a sharp sound that she knew, somehow, had nothing to do with pain.
“Do they make me a monster?” he asked, his voice a quiet rumble.
Susannah opened her mouth to refute that—but then saw the way his dark eyes gleamed. And she remembered. This was a man who had considered himself something of a god even before he’d crash-landed in the middle of the Rocky Mountain wilderness and found some followers to agree with him.
He didn’t think he was a monster. She doubted Leonidas Betancourt ever thought ill of himself at all, no matter what he was calling himself today.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Do you care if they do? Or do you fancy yourself as much a monster as a man?”
And he laughed. Leonidas threw back his head, and he laughed and laughed.
Something speared through her then, part fear, part recognition. And something else she couldn’t quite identify.
It was because he was so beautiful, she thought. There was no denying it. That thick, rich dark hair, shot through with a hint of gold and much longer than his austere cut back in the day. Those dark, tawny eyes that burned and melted in turn. His height and his whipcord strength, evident in everything he did, even sit on a makeshift throne in a white room in a guarded compound. All of that would have been enough to make him noticeable no matter what. To make him attractive no matter where he went.
He had turned her head when she’d been little more than a girl.
But he was so much more than that. It was something about the sheer, sensual perfection of his face. The way his features were sculpted so intensely and precisely, put together like an amalgam of everything that was beautiful in him. His Greek mother. His Spanish father. His Brazilian grandparents on one side, his French and Persian grandparents on the other.
He was glorious. There was no other word for it.
And when he laughed, Susannah was tempted to believe that he really was a god, after all.
“You are quite right,” Leonidas said after a long while. Long after she’d been captivated by the way his laughter transformed him, right there where he sat astride her. Long after she’d lost another part of herself she couldn’t quite name. “I don’t care at all. Monster, god, man. It is all the same to me.”
And this time when he came down over her, she was already shaking. A deep, internal trembling, as if a terrible joy was tearing her apart from inside out. Some part of Susannah wanted it no matter how she feared it, and because she couldn’t tell if it was suicide or something sweeter, she threw herself into his hands.
Leonidas shifted. He kicked off his trousers, and then settled himself between her legs. He pulled her thighs up on either side of his hips while Susannah tried to make her whirling head settled down enough to accommodate him.
Then it didn’t matter, because he kissed her. Again and again, he took her mouth until she felt branded. Possessed.
Taken. At last.
It made her wonder how she’d ever survived all this time without him. Without this.
In some distant part of her brain she knew she should tell him.
I’m a virgin, she could say. Word of warning, our wedding really was a white one. Maybe he would even laugh again, at the absurdity of a woman her age still so untouched. Whatever he did, whether he believed her or not, it would be said. He would know.
But Susannah couldn’t seem to force the words out.
And she forgot about it anyway as his hands gripped her hips again, and he shifted her body beneath his in an even more pointed manner, as if he intended to take charge of this and do it his way.
Maybe that would be enough.
It would have to be enough, because she could feel him then. Huge and hard, flush there against the part of her that no other person had ever touched.
A different sort of shiver ran over her then. Foreboding, perhaps. Or a wild need she’d never encountered before, drawing tight all around her as if she was caught in a great fist. Again she opened her mouth to say the thing she didn’t want to say, just to make sure he didn’t—
But he thrust into her then, deep and sure.
Susannah couldn’t control her response. She couldn’t pretend. It was a deep ache, a burning kind of tear, and her body took over and bucked up against him as if her hips were trying to throw him off of their own volition. She couldn’t control the little yelp that she let out, filled with the pain and shock she couldn’t hide.
Though the instant it escaped her, she wished she’d bitten it back.
Above her, Leonidas went still. Forbidding.
His eyes were like flint.
And still, she could feel him there, deep inside her, stretching her and filling her, making her feel things in places she’d never realized were part of her own body. The fact she couldn’t seem to catch her breath didn’t help.
“It has been a while, I grant you,” Leonidas said and he sounded almost...strained. Tight and something like furious at once. “But it’s not supposed to hurt.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Susannah lied.
He studied her for a long moment. Then, not changing the intensity of his gaze at all, he lifted a hand and wiped away a bit of moisture she hadn’t realized had escaped from her eye and pooled beneath it.
Leonidas repeated it on her other eye, still watching her intently.
“Try that again.”
“Really.” Susannah didn’t want to move, possibly ever again, but there was something working in her she didn’t understand. Something spurring her on, pulsing out from the ache between her legs that she knew was him, fusing with that breathlessness she couldn’t control. A kind of dangerous restlessness, reckless and needy. She tested her hips against his, biting down on her lower lip as she rocked yourself against him. “It feels fantastic.”
“I can see that. The tears alone suggest it, of course. And the fact that you’re frowning at me proves it beyond a doubt.”
Susannah was indeed frowning at him, she realized then, though she hadn’t known it. She knew it now, and she let it deepen.
“Here’s a newsflash,” she managed to say. “Just because people worship the ground you walk on—literally—doesn’t mean you can read minds. Particularly not mine.”
“Tell yourself anything you need to, little one,” he murmured, and that should have enraged her. But it didn’t. If anything, it made her feel...warm. Too warm. Leonidas ran his hands down her sides. Once, then again. He brushed her hair back from her face. She could still feel him inside her, so big and so hard, and yet all he did was smooth those caresses all over her. “I don’t have to read your mind. Your body tells me everything I need to know. What I don’t understand is how you’ve managed to remain innocent all this time.”
She opened her mouth to answer him, but she was distracted by the way he touched her. Those big hands of his moved all over her, spreading heat and sensation everywhere he touched. He didn’t move inside her. He didn’t slam himself into her or any of the other things she half expected him to do. He only touched her. Caressed her. Settled there above her as if he could wait forever.
It made a little knot deep in her belly pull tight. Then glow as it began to swell into something far bigger and more unwieldy.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Susannah said at last, blinking more unwelcome heat from her eyes. “I am your widow. Of course I’m innocent. You died before you could change that.”
If she had any doubt that he was pretending not to remember her before, it disappeared. Because the look he turned on her then was 100 percent Leonidas Betancur. The hard, ruthless man she remembered vividly, all ruthless power sharply contained.
The one who hadn’t been in evidence when she’d walked into this place.
Had he truly forgotten who he was?
And if he had—when had he remembered?
“I find that hard to believe, knowing my cousins,” he was saying, offering more proof. He tilted his head to one side, and his dark eyes glittered. “I would have thought they’d be on my widow like carrion crows.”
“They were, of course.”
“But it was your depth of feeling for me that prevented you from taking a better offer when it was presented to you?” Leonidas’s voice was sardonic. The expression in his tawny dark eyes was cynical.
And that knotted thing inside her seemed harder. Edgier.
“It might surprise you to learn that I don’t like your cousins very much,” she told him, bracing her hands on his shoulders as if she’d half a mind to push him off her. But she didn’t. Her fingers curled into him of their own accord. “I asked them to respect my mourning process. Repeatedly.”
This time, when Leonidas laughed, it wasn’t anything like sunshine. But Susannah still felt it deep inside her, where they were connected, and then everywhere else in a rolling wave of sensation.
“What exactly have you been mourning, little one?” he asked, that sardonic cast to his beautiful face. “Me? You hardly know me. Let me be the first to assure you I’m no better than my cousins.”
“Maybe you are and maybe you’re not,” she retorted. “But I’m married to you, not them.”
And something changed in him then, she could feel it. A deep kind of earthquake, shaking through him and then all over her.
But as if he didn’t want her to notice, as if he wanted to pretend instead that it hadn’t happened, that was when he chose to move.
Everything changed all over again. Because she was so slick and he was so hard, so deep. And Susannah had never felt anything like it. The thrust, the drag. The pressure, the heat. The pure, wild delight that seemed to pound through her veins, turning to a bright, hot liquid everywhere it went.
Tentatively, with growing confidence, she learned to match his slow, steady rhythm. He was being something like careful she would have said with all her total lack of experience, but there was something in the slowness that tore her wide open with every intense stroke.
She felt it building in her all over again, that impossible fire she’d never felt before today, and she could tell from the deepening intensity on his face above her that he knew it. That he was doing this. Deliberately.
That this had been the point all along.
And something about that set her free. She didn’t fight it. She didn’t try to keep her body’s wild responses in check. Maybe she would regret her abandon later, but here, now, it felt natural. Right. Necessary.
She simply hung on to him and let him take her wherever he wanted them to go.
This was her husband, back from the dead. This was overdue.
This was the very thing she’d wanted more than anything else in all the world, that she’d missed all these years, and Susannah hadn’t known it until now. Until Leonidas had touched her and changed everything.
Until they were so deeply connected that she doubted she would ever be the same again.
He reached between them and found her center with his deliciously hard fingers, and then he made everything worse.
Better.
“Now,” he ordered her, every inch of him in control of this. Of her.
And she obeyed.
Susannah shattered. She shattered and she flew, like a sweeping, sparkling thing, pouring up and out and over the side of the world.
And she thought she heard him call out her name as he followed.
CHAPTER FOUR (#u7f16f372-c946-544d-ba84-b431224dac0f)
ALL THE CULTS Leonidas had ever heard of in his former life discouraged the departure of their members under any circumstances—sometimes rather violently.
But he had every intention of walking out of his.
He rolled out of the bed, leaving her there in this chamber of his that had somehow become most of his world, despite how tempted he was to taste her all over again. All her flushed and sweet flesh, his for the taking, as she’d curled up there and breathed unevenly into his pillows.
God, how he wanted more.
But he’d remembered who he was. And that meant he couldn’t stay in these mountains—much less in this prison of a compound—another day.
He braced himself against the sink in his bathroom and didn’t allow himself to gaze in the mirror that hung there above it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see what he’d become, now that he knew the difference. Now that he could remember what he had been like unscarred, unscathed.
When he’d been a different sort of god altogether.
He took a quick shower, trying to reconcile the different strands of memory—before and after the accident. Leonidas Betancur and the Count. But what he kept dwelling on instead was Susannah, spread out there in his bed with her blond hair like a bright pop against the cheerless browns and grays he’d never noticed were so grim before. She’d looked delicate lying there, the way he remembered her from their wedding, but his body knew the truth. He could still feel the way she’d gripped him, her thighs tight around him and the sweet, hot clutch of her innocence almost too perfect to bear.
Leonidas shook it off. He toweled dry, expecting he’d have to cajole her out of his bed. Or dry her tears. Or offer some other form of comfort for which he was entirely unprepared and constitutionally ill-suited. Leonidas had no experience with virgins, but conventional wisdom suggested they required more care. More...softness. That wasn’t something he was familiar with, no matter who he thought he was, but he assumed he could muster up a little compassion for the young, sweet wife who had tracked him down out here in the middle of nowhere and returned him to himself. Or he could try, anyway.
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