A Baby to Bind His Bride

by Caitlin Crews

  “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

  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 b
egin 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.