A Baby to Bind His Bride
Page 5
He didn’t know who this we was. He hadn’t known who he was for four years, and he certainly didn’t know who Susannah was. His memories of her were so vague, after all, especially in comparison with the vibrant creature who stood before him in this room that had never held anything but his thoughts. He had a faint flash of their wedding, or the pageantry of it, and a flash of her blond hair above that theatrical dress she’d worn. He could hear the distant echo of the lectures he’d received from his mother on the topic of why it was necessary he marry a woman he had not chosen himself and what he owed the family as the acting head of it after his brutal, controlling father’s death. His mother, selfish and deceitful and lavish in turn, who’d never sacrificed a thing for any reason—who had given her violent husband the son he’d demanded and then done nothing to protect Leonidas from the old man’s rages. His mother, whom he’d loved despite all the evidence across the years that he shouldn’t, and whom he’d obeyed because he hadn’t had it in him to break her heart.
Or whatever passed for her heart, that was.
The actual woman he’d agreed to wed had been an afterthought. A placeholder. The truth was, he’d thought more about Susannah today than he ever had during the whole of their engagement or even the ceremony and reception where they’d united their two wealthy and self-satisfied families and thereby made everyone involved a great deal wealthier.
And he was thinking more about her right now than he should have been when there was a cult yet to escape and a whole life to resume. Almost as if he was the one who required cajoling and care, a notion that appalled him. So deeply it nearly made him shake.
Susannah twisted her hair back and secured it by simply knotting it there, and she frowned slightly at him when she was done. Her eyes moved from the towel knotted around his waist to the scars that tracked across his chest, and only after that did she meet his gaze.
“You’re not planning to stay here, are you?” she asked, and though Leonidas looked, he couldn’t see the note of doubt he heard in her voice on her face. “Not now that I’ve found you, surely.”
And Leonidas didn’t spare a glance for this room he’d spent entirely too much time in over the past few years. This room where he’d recovered from a plane crash and failed completely to recover his own mind. This room where winter after winter had howled at the walls and barricaded him inside. This room he’d once called a perfect place to clear his mind of everything but what mattered most. He’d thought he knew what that was, too. If he let it, the knowledge of how lost he’d been might bring him to his knees.
He didn’t let it.
“I think not,” he said.
He took his time dressing in what his followers—though it made Leonidas uneasy to call them that now that he remembered everything and found it all more than a little distasteful—would call his “out there” clothes. Meaning, something other than all that flowing white. Boots and jeans and a sweatshirt as if he was an interchangeable mountain person like the rest of them.
When he was Leonidas Betancur and always had been, no matter what the people here had told him about prophets falling from the sky.
But he remembered who he was now. And the fact that his wife—his wife, after all these years of chastity—stood opposite him in clothing far more suitable to their station than his...gnawed at him. The fact she’d put herself back together with such ruthless efficiency after what had happened between them, almost as if she was attempting to erase it, on the other hand, bit deep.
Leonidas didn’t want her in tears, necessarily. But the fact Susannah seemed utterly unaffected by handing over her virginity to him in a cult’s compound rankled. If he hadn’t been watching her closely he might have missed the faintest tremor in her fingers. The hint of vulnerability in that mouth of hers he already wanted to taste again.
But he couldn’t focus on that. He couldn’t focus on her the way he wanted to do. Not in a place like this, where she could never be safe.
They needed to walk out of this compound before anyone in it discovered that the Count had remembered his true identity. And Leonidas needed to keep himself from burning it down on the way out. Somehow.
“Follow me,” he told her when he was ready. “Do as you’re told and we might just make it out without incident.”
She looked startled. “Do you think there could be a problem?”
“Not if you do exactly what I tell you to do.”
Leonidas cast an eye around the room, but everything in it belonged to the Count, not him. He wanted nothing that had been here.
His long, agonizing recovery. His acceptance of his role in this place. His acquiescence to the followers here, allowing them to make him into the god of their choosing. His cooperation. He wanted none of those things.
Leonidas wanted to be himself again.
And once he left the bedchamber, everything went as seamlessly as he could have wished. The people here had no idea that everything had changed. That their Count had woken up from the spell he’d been laboring under at last.
Leonidas told his followers that Susannah was chastened and humiliated after making such absurd claims against him, something she made believable by walking several steps behind him, her head demurely lowered, as if she really was. So chastened and humiliated, in fact, that the Count was taking her down off his mountain himself in one of his rare excursions from his sanctuary.
“In the future,” he told Robert as the other man walked beside him, “we should not allow women making false claims behind our walls.”
“She seemed so certain,” the other man said, with that little gleam in his dark eyes. “And you seemed so intrigued, Count.”
Leonidas smiled at him the way he always did, but this time, he saw what the Count never had. That Robert thought he was the leader here, for all his noisy, public piety. That perhaps he was, as he was the one who had found Leonidas and doctored him back to health. That Robert needed a prophet—because a prophet could so easily become a martyr.
Information he imagined American law enforcement might find useful when he got out of here.
“You should be more certain,” he told Robert, enjoying the way the man’s gaze turned defiant, though he kept his mouth shut tight in the presence of the Count. “Or perhaps you do not belong here.”
And then Leonidas walked right out of this life he’d never chosen and didn’t want, back out into the world he’d never meant to leave.
“The moment the press discovers you’re alive, I expect they’ll descend on us like locusts,” Susannah said in that cool way of hers that made him wonder exactly what had changed her from the sweet little princess he recalled into this quiet powerhouse who walked beside him, out of the compound and down the mountain to where a local waited in a four-wheeled truck covered in mud. “If they discover you’ve been held here, that will be bad enough. But that you lost your memory? Forgot who you are and thought you were a—”
“Do not say ‘god,’” he warned her in an undertone as they approached the waiting vehicle, because she wasn’t the only one who worried about optics. And the press. And the consequences of these lost years, now that he could remember what he’d lost. “Not when there is the slightest possibility that someone else might hear you.”
“We can’t let anyone paint you as weak,” she told him, with only a nod at the man waiting for them. Her blue gaze met Leonidas’s and held. “That would have entirely too many repercussions.”
She sounded like a perfect little bloodthirsty Betancur, not the hesitant schoolgirl he remembered. It reminded him that while he’d been stuck in amber for years, she hadn’t been. She’d been thrust into the middle of his family and all its tiresome intrigue and squabbling.
And Leonidas couldn’t tell if that chafed at him—or if he liked that she was no longer so fragile. So frothy and breakable, all big white dress and wide eyes.
>
All he knew was that he wanted more. He wanted everything he’d missed. More of Susannah. More time with her, to probe that fascinating head of hers and take a whole lot more time exploring that perfectly lush little body. Just more.
He wanted back the four years he’d lost. He wanted to clear away all the shadows in his head, once and for all. He wanted to feel even an ounce as invulnerable as he had before that plane had gone down, or as he had as the Count—a man who knew his exact place in the world.
He wanted to be certain, and he could start with his wife, he thought. Because she was a sure thing. She was already married to him. She’d come and found him.
But first he had to play Lazarus and rise from the dead.
* * *
Just over three weeks later, Leonidas stood in Rome.
Where he belonged.
The Betancur Corporation offices were chrome and steel packed into a historic building in the bustling heart of the ancient city. He could glimpse his reflection in the glass of the great windows that rose before him, making one entire wall of his vast office a view of Rome spread out at his feet. He remembered this view just as he remembered the company and all the years he’d spent here, bolstering the family fortune and living up to his name.
But what he couldn’t quite remember was the man who’d stood here four years ago, seeing what he saw.
He knew who he was now. He remembered the before, the after. His childhood, one vicious beating after the next as his father “prepared” him for life as the Betancur heir. His mother’s carelessness and total lack of interest in protecting her child from these rampages, as none of it concerned her directly, she’d told him once.
“Your father is your problem,” she’d said.
He was that all right. And more. Whether Leonidas had wanted everything that came with his position as the Betancur heir or not hadn’t signified. No one had ever asked him what he wanted. His mother had abandoned him to his father’s tender mercies, and Leonidas hadn’t had any choice but to become the man his father wanted him to become.
He could remember everything now. The child who’d stopped crying out, hoping someone might save him, because no one ever had. The adolescent who had never bothered to step outside the lines drawn for him because the consequences couldn’t possibly be worth surviving just to engage in a little pointless defiance. He’d grown into the life he’d lived according to his father’s every harsh dictate until the old man had died—possibly after poisoning himself with his own evil, Leonidas had always thought, despite the medical authorities who’d deemed it an aneurysm.
He remembered it all.
Leonidas knew that if he turned around and sought out a mirror, he would finally look like himself again, despite the scars that told the story of that terrifying plane crash. His bespoke suits were flown in from Milan and tailored to his specifications in the privacy of his own home. He wore leather shoes crafted by hand for him by local artisans who thanked him for the honor. His hair was once more cut the way he’d always preferred it, short and neat and with the vaguest hint of the military, as if he was always on the verge of going to war.
He’d learned to sleep again in his own bed, a king-size monstrosity that sprawled across the better part of his penthouse and had been designed to work as well for intense play as sleep. Far better than the sturdy, efficient mattress in the compound.
He indulged in rich foods again instead of the bland rations of the compound. He rediscovered his family’s wine labels and his own vast collection. He reintroduced himself to strong coffee and even stronger spirits.
It wasn’t simply that he didn’t belong in the cult—that he’d never belonged on that mountaintop—it was that the place where he did belong was almost unimaginably luxurious, and he could see that now in a way he’d never done before. He knew exactly how marvelous every bit of his life was, because he’d lost it for four years.
He kept telling himself he was lucky. That many people never got the opportunity to see life from more than one side, or if they did, it was usually a downward spiral with no possibility of return.
That notion had buoyed him for the better part of his reentry into the world. The long plane flight back, filled with phone calls to the Betancur legal teams across the planet, as well as the authorities back in Idaho about Robert’s plans and goals. And then to his mother, who had performed her usual Maria Callas–like operatics at the sound of his voice but, of course, hadn’t stirred herself to rush to his side from her current holiday in the South Pacific.
All excellent distractions from the fact that the last time he’d been on a private plane, it had exploded and very nearly killed him.
He’d reminded himself of his luck over and over again during the press junket when he landed. During the speeches he gave in all the subsequent interviews, or the little myths he told anyone who asked about his time away. Every time he smiled and shaped those optics that Susannah was so concerned with—and that his board of directors had agreed were of paramount importance.
And then it had been time to go back to work, and that was where Leonidas had discovered that his memory was not all that it should have been.
He refused to admit it at first because he didn’t want to believe it was possible, but it seemed as if he hadn’t quite remembered everything when he’d regained his memory. Not everything.
He turned then, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his three-piece suit, keeping his face impassive as he looked out the glass on the other side of his office. This was the internal wall, and through it he could see the whole of the serenely lavish executive floor the Betancur Corporation offices.
More to the point, he could see Susannah.
He didn’t know what he’d thought she did, back there in the States when she’d appeared at the compound. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to consider it while he was so busy regaining his own identity. His own past, for good or ill. He’d first had an inkling on the flight back to Europe when she’d managed all the calls he’d had to make and had cut in when necessary with a quiet word that had always—always—stopped everyone else talking. Instantly. And he’d noticed it even more during that first press conference when they’d pulled up outside his building and she’d handled his reintroduction to life with such seeming ease. She used that smile of hers, cool and calm. She’d exuded that particular slickness, impressive and unmistakable, that seemed to define her these days—because she hadn’t dropped it when they’d finally made it past the throng of reporters and into the private elevator that whisked them from the street to the lobby of his penthouse.
Their penthouse, he’d had to remind himself. Because she lived here, too—and had, she’d informed him, ever since the wedding he’d forgotten for all this time.
“Have you taken over my position in the company, as well?” he’d asked when they’d stood in a silence he didn’t want to consider awkward, not quite, in the great open room that soared up three stories and had been his pride and joy, before. His architects had made his vision real when he’d bought the building, making the top three floors of one of Rome’s many ancient edifices so modern and airy within while still including elements of the historical details.
But that day, all he’d been able to focus on was Susannah. His throat had been dry from the press conference. He’d felt outside himself, as if he was recovering all over again from the accident that had struck him down in the first place. When what he really was doing was standing in the middle of what should have felt like home.
Then again, maybe nothing was going to feel like home anymore, he’d told himself. Maybe that was the trouble. There was not one single part of him that wanted to return to those Idaho mountains. But he didn’t quite know how to be in Rome where he belonged, either.
In the fact that the wife he barely knew was more comfortable in his home than he was... Troubled him.
“No one has replaced you,” Susannah had replied in those first moments in the penthouse. She’d been standing there in another one of her sleek black ensembles. She seemed to have nothing but. The only color on her was the gold of her hair and the bright blue of her eyes. It made her something more than pretty. Striking.
He had the distinct impression that no one underestimated her twice.
“Do not attempt to placate me, please.”
She’d raised one eyebrow, and he, in turn, had hated that he didn’t know her well enough to read that expression on her face.
“You died before you could alter your will to reflect the changes everyone assured me had been agreed to before our wedding, Leonidas, which meant everything defaulted to me. And I saw no particular reason to appoint a new president or CEO, just to fill the position. There have been many candidates over the years, as you might imagine. But none have been you.”
“It’s been four years. That’s an eternity.”
She’d smiled coolly. “We’ve only actively been looking for replacement for...oh...the last eighteen months or so.”
Leonidas had imagined he could feel the rusted gears of his mind start to grind together. “That makes no sense. Surely one of my cousins—”
“Your cousins have a great many ideas, and an even greater sense of entitlement, but what they do not have are the skill sets to back those up.” She’d raised one delicately shaped shoulder, then dropped it. “And unfortunately for them, while they may be of the Betancur blood, I’ve been the one with the deciding vote.”
No, Leonidas thought now as he had then, it would not be wise to underestimate his ever-surprising wife.
She was in the office, making her way down the center aisle of the executive floor with all its deliberate windows to let light pour into the company’s highest offices. This afternoon she wore yet another dark wardrobe concoction, black boots and a dark dress he knew was an inky navy blue only because the color was slightly different from the boots. Today’s boots boasted impressively high heels, but she seemed to walk in them just the same as she had when she’d been hiking up and down mountains. The dress had tiny sleeves that curved over her shoulders, somehow calling more attention to her feminine, elegant figure without actually showing too much of it.