“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
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 h
imself 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.
A Baby to Bind His Bride Page 3
