He wanted to taste her. He wanted to test the difference between how delicate she appeared to be and how fierce he suspected she truly was.
He couldn’t seem to get his need for her under control, but he told himself it was no more than a function of the time he’d spent away from the company of women. She’d reignited his thirst, that was all. It was nothing personal. It couldn’t be.
Leonidas wouldn’t let it be anything like personal.
He didn’t do personal. He suspected that had been the first casualty of his father’s style of parenting. Nothing was personal. Everything was the business.
He waited there as she made her way down the long hall, smiling and nodding to all she passed. Some in the hall itself, some through those walls of glass. Not quite friendly, he noticed. But cool. Direct and precise.
The Widow Betancur.
“I was barely more than a child when we married,” she had told him, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. She’d curled her feet beneath her on the leather sofa in the private jet’s living room area and managed to look nothing at all like small or vulnerable when she did it. The air steward had handed her a warm mug of something—and it ate at Leonidas that he didn’t know what she drank, that he didn’t know her preferences as well as the least of his employees—and she held it between her palms as she spoke in that smooth voice of hers, all those polished European vowels that could dance so nimbly from one romance language to the next. “For the first year after your disappearance, the only thing I had going for me was the depths of my grief.”
Leonidas had let out a hoarse sound. A laugh, he’d told himself. “What grief? To my recollection we barely knew each other.”
Her blue eyes had been frank. Assessing.
“But no one knew that,” she’d said quietly. “Or if they did, it was their word against mine. And I was your widow, with your fortune and your power at my fingertips. So it didn’t matter what people speculated. It mattered what I said. And I said my grief was too intense to even think about naming your successor.”
He tried to imagine the company—his family—after his death. His scheming cousins would have seen it as divine intervention and a chance at last to take what they’d long believed was theirs. His manipulative mother would have moved to consolidate her power, of course, but would also have grieved him, surely. If only in public, the better to attract the attention she always craved. And Apollonia Betancur’s public emotional performances tended to raze cities when she got going. Meanwhile, his greedy board of directors, each one of them so determined to squeeze every last euro out of any potential deal, would have formed alliances and tried to pulverize the competition in their race to take what had been Leonidas’s.
All of them were jaded sophisticates. All of them were deeply impressed with their ability to manipulate any and all situations to their benefit. They were among the most debauched and pampered of the wealthy elite in Europe, and they exulted in the things they owned and the lives they ruined along the way.
And it seemed they’d all been bested by a nineteen-year-old.
He’d smiled at that. “So you mourned my untimely passing. You grieved for much longer than anyone could have expected after a marriage that lasted less than a day. Judging by your somber attire, you continue to do so.”
“Grief squats on a person and stays until it is finished,” Susannah had said softly, as much to the mug between her hands as to him. Then she’d lifted her gleaming gold head and she’d smiled at him, her clever blue eyes gleaming. “And who among us can say how another person grieves? Or when that grief should be finished?”
It had been clear to Leonidas that she’d outsmarted them all.
An impression that his weeks back here in Rome had done nothing to dissipate.
As if she could feel his eyes on her then, all the way from his end of the long hallway, she looked up. Her stride didn’t change. Her expression didn’t alter. Still, Leonidas felt sure that something in her had...hitched.
She pushed through his door when she reached it, letting it fall shut behind her. And then they were enclosed in the hushed quiet of his soundproofed space. A big smile took over her face and Leonidas felt that strange hitch again, but in him this time.
It took him longer than it should have to remember that his wife was entirely about optics. She was only putting on a show, he told himself sternly. She was smiling for the benefit of the people in the office around them who could look in through the glass of his wall and watch them interacting. This was for everyone out there who gossiped and wondered and whispered among themselves about the kind of relationship a man who should have been dead had with the wife he’d left behind.
He knew better than to give them anything. But keeping his expression impassive was harder than it ought to have been.
“Your secretary said you wished to see me,” Susannah said. She didn’t wait for his answer. Instead, she walked over to the sitting area nearest the big window with the sweeping views of Rome and settled herself on one of the low couches.
“I did indeed.”
“I think it’s going well, don’t you?” She folded her hands in her lap, and Leonidas had the strangest flashback to the compound. To the way she’d sat there then, in that little cell with cameras trained on her, as calmly as she was sitting before him now. Exuding serenity from every pore. “I think your cousins found it a bit difficult to pretend they were excited by your resurrection, but everyone else is eating up the story like candy.”
“By everyone else, you mean the world. The tabloids.”
“Not just the tabloids. You are a major story on almost every news network in Europe. Returning from the dead, it turns out, is a feel-good crowd-pleaser for all.”
He knew she was right. But something in him balked at her cynicism—or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was the fact that when she was close to him, all he wanted to do was touch her the way he had when he’d been the Count and hadn’t known better.
And all she wanted to do was talk about narratives. Optics. Campaigns and complicated plots to secure his place here again.
She had been the virgin. But Leonidas was the one who couldn’t seem to let go.
In all the time since they’d been back in Rome, she’d stayed out of his way. Available should he require her assistance, but back in the penthouse—where she had been sleeping in one of the guest rooms the whole time he’d been away, apparently—they hardly interacted at all. When he’d asked one night why she appeared to be avoiding him in the home they shared, she’d only smiled sweetly and told him that she was very cognizant of the fact that he needed to find his own way back into his life. That she didn’t want to intrude.
The entire situation set his teeth on edge. And Leonidas didn’t particularly care to investigate why that was.
“I’m glad you called me in,” Susannah was saying. “Because I’ve wanted to speak to you, too. I didn’t want to rush into this until you’d been home long enough to really feel as if you’d got your feet beneath you, but I also don’t think there’s any point in dragging things out unnecessarily.”
Leonidas knew he needed to say what he’d wanted to say, or he wouldn’t. Because he hadn’t believed it was happening at first. He assumed it was stress, or that perhaps he was overwhelmed—though he couldn’t recall ever being overwhelmed before in his life. Then again, his life had never included a lost four years and a cult before now.
Then this morning he’d sat in a meeting, listening to the discussion all around him and well aware that the people speaking were among those he ought to have recognized. He’d recognized the names on the memo that his secretary had handed him, but he hadn’t been able to match names to faces.
“There are holes in my memory,” he told her now, before he thought better of it. He stayed where he was. Tall and straight and with all that glass and Rome behin
d him, as if that would make a difference. As if that would make him whole.
Susannah blinked, and he thought she froze. “Holes?”
“I know who I am. I know you. I certainly knew my mother when she finally deigned to appear the other night, in all her state.”
“Apollonia is not easily forgotten. Though one might have occasion to wish otherwise.”
“But there is so much I can’t remember. Too much.”
There. He’d said it. He waited for it to hit him—for the fact that he’d admitted to such weakness to take his knees out from under him where he stood. The way his father would have taken his knees out for him, were he still alive.
But it didn’t happen.
And it was because of her, Leonidas knew it. She was why he hadn’t keeled over in the telling of this most disastrous of truths. She only gazed at him as if she was perfectly happy to wait as long as it took for him to tell her the rest of it.
“Faces. Names. Business decisions I clearly made years ago.” He shrugged. “I don’t have access to any of it.”
She considered, her hands seeming to tighten in her lap. “Is this all the time?”
“No. But it’s enough. I was in a meeting of vice presidents this morning and I didn’t know a single person in the room. And not all of them were hired in the past four years.”
“No, they weren’t.” She was frowning then, that gaze of hers fixed on his, and there was no reason Leonidas should have felt something like relief. That someone other than him knew. That it wasn’t only his weight to carry. “Do they know you can’t remember them?”
He let out a harsh sound without meaning to do it. “That would be bad optics, I realize,” he said, perhaps more sternly than necessary. “I would hate to dilute the message.”
Susannah didn’t appear to move, and yet Leonidas was certain her back was straighter than it had been before.
“I was less concerned with the optics, or any message you might have sent, and more concerned with you.” Her lips pressed together in a firm line, and Leonidas couldn’t possibly have said why he felt chastened. “I expect you managed to cover it so no one could tell you didn’t remember them.”
“I did.” He inclined his head. “But I worry it is only a matter of time before I find myself in a situation where covering it is not possible.”
She appeared to mull that over. “What did the doctor say about any lingering memory loss? Did the subject arise?”
Leonidas had not been at all interested in seeing a doctor when he’d finally made it home, as it had seemed like yet another admission of weakness to him. But he had eventually succumbed to the family doctors who had tended to the Betancur family for years, because in the end, how could he not? Whether it was a weakness or not, there was no one more concerned with the four years he’d lost than him. He was the one who would had lived through them, convinced that he was someone else entirely.
There had been no small part of him that had worried he was damaged forever by that damned Count.
He blew out a breath now, and kept his gaze on Susannah. “It’s possible I’ll never recall the actual plane crash, but I imagine that is something of a blessing. The doctor was confident that more and more memories will come back with time, until there is very little, if anything, missing. But I don’t have time.”
A faint line appeared between her brows. “You have all the time you need, surely.”
“Only as long as no one suspects the truth.” He eyed her. “You are the only one who knows, Susannah. You and one doctor who I very much doubt would dare to disobey my order of silence. Not when his livelihood depends on me.”
She no longer clasped her hands together in front of her like a latter-day nun. One had risen to her collarbone and she pressed against it, as if she was trying to leave her fingerprints against her own skin. There was no particular reason Leonidas should find that so maddeningly sexy. So alluring. It was as if he was helpless against the need to taste her. Just one more time. That’s what he told himself, night and day when this craving hit him: one more time.
But not now.
“I need you,” he said baldly. Starkly.
Leonidas didn’t think he imagined the faint jerk of her body then. She flinched, then obviously worked to repress it.
“It’s clear to me that you spent the past four years learning everything there is to know about this company,” he said, as much to cover his own admission as anything else.
“I had no choice.” Her blue gaze had gone stormy. “It was that or be swallowed whole.”
“Then you will guide me,” he told her, and he wasn’t sure he was entirely concealing his relief. “You will cover for things I cannot remember.”
The strangest expression flitted across her face. “Will I?”
He moved toward the sofa then, as if admitting what he needed had loosened his feet. “Under normal circumstances it would be strange to bring my wife wherever I went, but you have already served as a quasi-CEO. No one will think anything of it.”
“And how will this work? Will we develop a system of touch? Will we rely on sign language? Or, I know, I will alert you to things you should know in Morse code. Using my eyelashes.”
Her hands were back in her lap. It occurred to him that she did that when she was anything but serene. When she only wished to appear calm.
That shouldn’t have felt like an electrical current inside him, but it did.
“Or you could simply greet the person in front of you, using the correct name, and I will follow suit.” She didn’t say anything. And yet somehow he had the distinct impression that that expression he couldn’t quite read on her face was mutinous. “Will this be a problem for you?”
“It would be helpful if you knew the time frame for your memory to return.”
“I’m told the human mind does what it will,” he said coolly. Through his teeth. “I assure you, however inconvenient my memory loss is for you, I feel it more keenly.” She nodded with that, and then swallowed, visibly. And something like foreboding wound its way through him. “What was it you wished to speak to me about?”
“Well,” Susannah said quietly, her face calm. Serene. And yet Leonidas didn’t believe it this time. “This feels awkward. But I want a divorce.”
CHAPTER FIVE
SUSANNAH WAS CERTAIN that Leonidas could see how she shook where she sat, as his usual arrogant, haughty expression shifted to something far more lethal and dark.
He stood there, more beautiful than any man should have been, a dark and bold thrust of impossible masculinity in the middle of this glass office with the mellow gold of Rome behind him. She’d be lying if she said he didn’t affect her. If she didn’t shiver every time she was near him as if she was still that overwhelmed teenage bride from four years ago.
And it had been bad enough on that mountain. She’d been beating herself up for the way she’d succumbed to him ever since it happened. What had she been thinking? How had she toppled so quickly to a man she hardly knew? She’d called it her wedding night, but it hadn’t been. The Leonidas she’d found in that compound, leading that cult, was more of a stranger than the convenient husband she’d barely known years before.
She had no excuse for her behavior. She knew that. Just as she knew that she could never let him know about the dreams that woke her with their potency, night after night, until she’d had to lock herself in her own bedroom in the penthouse they shared to make sure she stayed away from him in those dark, dangerous hours when she woke up alone and so very hungry.
For him.
Leonidas’s return had changed everything, just as she’d imagined it would.
The world had gone mad when the fact he’d been found alive had hit the wires. Reporters and law enforcement and his board of directors had been in fits all around him, his family had
hardly known how to process it and had acted out as they always did, but beneath all of that, the truth was that this homecoming was Leonidas’s. Not hers. This had nothing to do with her.
Susannah had been a widow for all of her marriage. And she’d deliberately maintained that position these past four years because it was that or succumb to a far worse situation.
But with Leonidas home, she was free.
No matter that he was looking at her now with an expression she could only describe as predatory.
“I appear to have misheard you.” His voice was nothing but cold warning, but she made herself meet his gaze as if she couldn’t hear it. “Would you repeat that?”
“I think you heard me perfectly well,” she said, as if that trembling thing wasn’t taking her over. As if she didn’t feel there was a very good chance it might sweep her away. But she told herself he couldn’t possibly see that, because no one ever saw her. They saw what they wanted to see, nothing more. “I want a divorce. As soon as possible.”
“We’ve barely been married for any time at all.”
“Perhaps it feels that way to you because you can’t remember it. But I can.” She forced a smile and kept it cool. “Four years is actually a very long time to be a Betancur.”
“That sounds as if you do not wish to be part of my family, Susannah.” He inclined his head in that way of his that reminded her that there were people out there in the world who considered him a god. And it wasn’t a metaphor. “No one can blame you in this, of course. They are an unpleasant, scavenging, manipulative lot, and that is on a good day. But they are not me.”
A Baby to Bind His Bride Page 6
