A Baby to Bind His Bride
Page 7
“Leonidas—”
“You are married to me, not them.”
“That argument might have worked four years ago,” she said faintly, because the truth was, it was working now and that was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t understand herself. She’d worked tirelessly all these years to find him so she could escape and now she could do just that, her body was staging a rebellion. Her breasts hurt when she was with him. They ached so much it echoed low in her belly, and the fire of it made her feel entirely too hot. So hot she was afraid he could see it all over her. “I was a very malleable teenager, but that was then.”
“And this is now.” She didn’t think he moved or did anything in particular, and yet somehow, there was no more air in the room. As if he’d taken it all and was holding it ransom right there in front of her. “And my need of you is dire. Would you refuse me?”
“I would like to,” she told him, smiling to take the sting out of it. But the way he regarded her suggested she had succeeded.
“Tell me, Susannah, why did you track me down?” he asked after a moment. When the gold of the city outside had long since blended into the gold of his eyes and she worried she’d be eaten alive by the gleam. “Why did you come all the way to Idaho and climb up that mountain when it would have been so easy to stay right here? Everyone believed me dead. You could have left me there and no one would have been the wiser. Not even me.”
“I really, really want that divorce,” she told him as blithely as she could, but she could hear the catch in her voice. The breathlessness.
What she didn’t want was this conversation. She’d naively assumed that there wouldn’t be anything to discuss. Leonidas didn’t know her. He couldn’t possibly want any kind of relationship with her, and the truth was, he likely hadn’t wanted one back when. She doubted that he was even the same man who had left on that plane four years ago. And it wasn’t as if she would note the difference, because they’d been strangers thrown together in a marriage convenient to their families, and no matter that she’d had teenage fantasies to the contrary.
This was the perfect time to draw a line under their strange, doomed marriage, and go on with their lives. Separately.
Before she was forced to face the fact that after saving her virginity all this time—after turning away Leonidas’s cousins one after the next and after shutting down each and every delusional suitor who’d tried to convince her that they’d fallen in love with her smile, or heard her laughter across a room, or found her unrelenting use of black clothing seductive—she’d thrown herself at this man.
Leonidas hadn’t known who he was. But she’d known exactly who she was, and that was what she couldn’t forgive.
It had taken every bit of self-control she had to act as if the loss of her virginity didn’t affect her. But she was terribly afraid she’d used it all up back there in that compound she fervently hoped American law enforcement had since dismantled. Because the longer she was around this man, the less she thought she would be able to keep that control intact.
She wanted out before she broke. She wanted an escape at last from what she’d never wanted to accept would be the rest of her life, and she didn’t care if her parents were disappointed. She refused to be a pawn any longer. She wanted no part of Apollonia’s theatrics and schemes. She didn’t want to be a bargaining chip between the grasping Betancur cousins. She was tired of all this corrosive power and all the greed everyone around her had for more and more and more.
All this time, she’d believed she had a responsibility to the husband who had died so suddenly. Maybe because of all her girlish fantasies about what could have been. Whatever the cause, Susannah had taken that responsibility seriously, and one of the reasons she’d been so successful was because she’d felt nothing. She’d understood exactly who her parents were on her wedding night when they’d had the opportunity to try to comfort her and had instead made her feel small. Soon after, she’d come to understand the intricacies of the Betancur family and its businesses in repulsive detail. The plane crash and its wake had showed her everything she needed to know about her in-laws.
She’d filed it all away, felt nothing besides the loss of her dreams that she’d convinced herself weren’t real, and that had helped her become perhaps the most powerful widow in the world.
But then she’d walked into a cult leader’s compound after all these numb, safe years, and she’d felt entirely too much.
The entire plane ride back she’d tried to convince herself that it had been a geographic problem, that was all. That what had happened in that compound had been a thing that could happen only in the Rocky Mountains out there in the midst of that unnervingly huge continent. And still she woke every night to find herself barricaded in her room in the penthouse, swaddled in her bedclothes with her heart gone mad and a deep wildness between her legs, alive with too much yearning. With too much intense hunger.
It wasn’t going away. It wasn’t getting better.
And Susannah had realized that the only thing worse than spending the rest of her life as the Widow Betancur was this. Longing for a man who she knew, even if he didn’t—not yet, anyway—would grow out of his need for her. Fast. The way her mother had coldly told her men did, in her version of “the talk” the night before Susannah’s wedding.
“Leonidas Betancur is a man of tremendous wealth and taste,” Annemieke Forrester had told her only daughter that night, sitting on the edge of Susannah’s bed in the hotel suite where they’d all been staying in anticipation of the grand ceremony. “You would do well to assume his sexual tastes are equally well cultivated.” Susannah must have made some kind of noise to match her immediate reaction, a flush of confusion and something like shame, because Annemieke had laughed. “You are an untried, untouched teenager, child. You cannot hope to interest a man like Leonidas.”
“But...” Susannah had been so young. It hurt to remember how young. How sheltered. “He is to be my husband.”
“You will quickly learn that your power comes from the grace with which you ignore his dalliances,” her mother had told her matter-of-factly. “It will make him respect you.”
“Respect?” she’d echoed.
“Your job is to produce an heir,” her mother had continued. “Your virginity is your wedding gift. After that, you concentrate on getting pregnant and staying pretty. Think grace, Susannah. No one values a shrill, embittered woman en route to a nasty divorce. You will live a life filled with comfort and ease. I’d advise you to make the best of what you have.”
“I thought that marriage would be—”
“What?” her mother had interrupted scornfully. “A fairy tale? Leonidas will tire of you, girl, and quickly. Let him.” She’d waved her hand in the air impatiently. “It doesn’t matter where a man roams. What matters is the home he returns to. Over time, he will return to you more than he will leave you, and he will do this far more cheerfully if you have spared him the scenes and remonstrations.”
Susannah had tried to take that to heart when her brand-new husband had left her on their wedding night, apparently already tired of her, though she’d been crushed. She wasn’t as foolish these days as she’d been then. And the only reason he wanted her around now, she’d thought even before he’d told her that there were gaps in his memory, was because she was the one who had found him. The only one who knew where he’d been.
Leonidas Betancur was not a sentimental man. She knew that. Neither with his memory nor without it. The scars on his body hadn’t made him into someone new, they’d chiseled him into a harder sort of perfect marble, that was all. He was more beautiful, somehow, for being tested—and surviving—but he was still made of stone.
She knew. She’d felt him surge inside her and send her shattering into pieces.
And Susannah wasn’t a teenager anymore. She’d grown out of the fairy tales that had colored her you
th because she hadn’t known any better.
She knew better now. She wanted only to be free.
“You must know there can be no divorce,” Leonidas said now. Darkly, that gaze of his still fixed on her. “Not so soon after my return.” His hard mouth moved into something only an optimist would have called a smile. “Think of the optics.”
“I’m sensitive to optics, certainly.” She was proud of how even her voice sounded. How controlled. “But I also want my life back.”
“What life do you mean, exactly?” He tilted his head slightly to one side and she felt that sense of disconnection again. As if they were in two places at once, and one of them was the compound where he had ruled supreme. “If memory serves, and of course it may not, the life you led before marrying me was little better than a prison. A pretty one, I grant you. And that was the appeal, of course. Your promised naïveté. You were more sheltered than the average nun.”
She’d gone stiff and she didn’t even know why. “What you talking about?”
“It is amazing what things stay in the memory, even when the chief financial officer’s name has gone up in smoke.” Leonidas wandered across the office, and that should have taken a bit of that predatory focus off her. He wasn’t even looking at her, after all. But somehow, Susannah did not feel at all at her ease. “Your father promised you to me when you were very young, you must know this.”
“Of course I know it. I never forgot it in the first place.”
She regretted her petulance the instant she spoke, but if it bothered him, he ignored it. Which only made her regret it more.
“Your father is not a kind man, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Leonidas said in that same dark way. He poured himself a measure of something from his personal bar, dark and amber, but he didn’t drink it. He only swirled it in its tumbler and stared at it as if he was studying it. “Nor is he a good one. He sought to sweeten the pot, you see, when I was less interested in the match than he wished me to be.” His gaze rose from the crystal and met hers, and it took everything Susannah had not to flinch. “He wasn’t simply selling his daughter, you understand. He promised me you would be untouched. Completely and wholly unsullied. That was meant to sweeten the deal. A virgin sacrifice, all for me.”
There was no reason why Susannah’s mouth should have gone dry. Why her heart should have pounded too hard and her eyes feel too bright. It wasn’t as if any of this was a surprise, not really.
But on the other hand, he was talking about her life. And all those years she’d spent in her overly strict boarding school, forever fielding intrusive questions about her virtue. When there had been no moral reason for her to remain pure, the way her parents had pretended there was.
When there had never been anything to it but leverage.
“Whatever my father is or isn’t is immaterial.” She shrugged, and hoped she was managing to keep her expression clear, because there was no point mourning her parents when she already knew exactly who they were. “This is about me. This is not about what a teenage girl thinks she owes her parents. It’s about what I want.”
Again, he didn’t appear to move. And still Susannah found it difficult to pull in a breath.
“And what is it you want?”
“Freedom,” she replied at once. Perhaps a touch too intensely. “I want my freedom.”
“And what do you imagine freedom looks like for a woman who was the Widow Betancur?” he asked quietly. “Where do you think you can hide from the influence of my name?”
She heard the trap around her. It was as if she could feel iron closing in on her from all sides, and the funny part was, though she knew she should get up and run while she could, she didn’t move. There was something about that sardonic lash in his voice. There was something about the way his dark gaze met hers, and held.
“I am no longer a widow,” she reminded him. “You are standing right in front of me.”
“And yet you are still dressed in dark clothes that might as well be fully black, as if you anticipate a second funeral at any moment.”
“Dark colors are very slimming.”
“The world is not prepared to let go of such an icon as their favorite widow, Susannah. Surely you must know this. Where will you go? Your past will follow you as surely as a shadow. It always does.”
“Says the man who took a four-year break from his.”
“I’m not going to argue with you.”
She recognized that voice. It brought her back to the conversation they’d had in the car that had delivered them from the church to their reception four years ago. To the pitiless way her new husband—a perfect stranger with a cruel mouth she’d found fascinating despite herself—had gazed at her from his seat.
It was not unlike the way the Count had gazed at her from his white seat in his bright white throne room.
“There will be no honeymoon,” he had told her four years ago. “I cannot take that kind of time away from my business.” And when she had reacted to that, when she had allowed some or other emotion to color her face, he had only grown colder. “I understand that you are young, but in time you will thank me for giving no quarter to your childishness. We all must grow up sometime, Susannah. Even spoiled little girls must turn into women.”
She hadn’t thought about that conversation in years.
And he was still talking now.
“You obviously hold a bargaining chip,” he was saying, but in that merciless way as if no matter what she held, he was the one in total control. “I do not wish anyone to know that I lost my memory in the first place, much less that I have not yet gotten parts of it back. For all the reasons we discussed in Idaho that make what happened there so precarious. Optics, my cousins. All of the above.”
“I sympathize, but that doesn’t make any difference—”
“I’m not finished.”
And there was no reason Susannah should feel duly chastised, but she did. And worse for her self-esteem and the strides she’d been so sure she’d made in his absence, she fell quiet.
On command, like a dog.
“If you wish to divorce me, Susannah, I have no objection to that.”
His voice was so cool, so even and without inflection, that she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly for one jarring beat of her heart. Then another. But then his words sank in.
And she had no idea why there was some perverse thing in her that very nearly wanted to...argue, perhaps? Or make him take it back. Almost as if...
But she didn’t let herself think that through. She should never let him touch her, that was all. That was the beginning and the end of it, and that was what she kept returning to while she sat here, her fingers laced together lest they take it upon themselves to touch him again.
“Oh. I mean, good. We agree.”
“I will give you a divorce,” Leonidas told her. “But not now.”
As if it was entirely up to him. Again, as if he was the god of everything.
“You can’t bargain me into staying,” she said, with entirely too much intensity once more.
It was a mistake. She knew it when something flared in that gaze of his, and the way he stood there, all that arrogance in a bespoke suit, seemed to blur a bit. Less a pointed weapon, somehow.
Leonidas only shrugged, but the tenor of everything had changed and seemed...almost lazy.
“You want to be free. I want your help and am willing to free you after you give it.”
“Why does my freedom come with a price tag?” she demanded, because she couldn’t seem to help herself.
“Because that is the world we live in, little one.” He didn’t shrug again, but the look in his dark eyes seemed to suggest it, all the same. “I don’t see why we can’t help each other. But if that is not possible, I will have no choice but to use what leverage I have.”
“This is a good thing,” she told him after a moment, when she was absolutely certain that she would sound and look nothing but in complete control. As if she was made of the same stone he was. “I was tempted to forget, you see. I was tempted to think that you were a victim. I almost felt sorry for you, but this clears it up, thank goodness. It reminds me who you are.”
“Your beloved husband?” he asked sardonically. “The one you have grieved with such dedication all these many years?”
“Not just a Betancur,” she said, as if it was an epithet. It was. “But the worst of them by far.”
Leonidas looked more than merely predatory, then. Something in his starkly beautiful face edged toward cruel, but it wasn’t intimidating. Or it was—of course it was, because this was a man who couldn’t help but intimidate as surely as he breathed—but Susannah was more focused on the melting sensation that swept over her, then settled low in her belly like a greedy pulse.
And the fact that she was almost 100 percent positive that he knew it.
“It sounds as if we have a deal,” he said.
And then Leonidas smiled.
CHAPTER SIX
A LONG AND exhausting month later, Susannah sat in the back of a car careening through the wet streets of Paris, wishing her head would stop feeling as if it might split into pieces at any moment.
She wasn’t particularly optimistic. A long evening loomed ahead of her, and she would have given anything to leap out of the car, race through the rain and the crowds of fashionable Parisians to tuck herself up in her bed and hide beneath the covers—but she knew that wasn’t possible. Tonight was the Betancur Foundation’s annual charity ball that this year would serve as Leonidas’s formal reintroduction to society after all his time away.