That Leonidas had survived the crash had not been known to anyone at first, they’d told the press. His funeral had been a sincere gesture of grief and mourning, not a cynical spectacle while they waited to find out if he’d live. And when his survival had become known to them, his condition had been so extreme that everyone involved had kept it quiet rather than throw the corporation into turmoil.
“Of course, I wanted nothing more than to race to his side,” Susannah had told a concerned American interviewer. “But my husband is a Betancur. I knew he would want me to take care of his company while the doctors took care of him.”
His assumed widow’s refusal to hand over the reins looked much less stubborn through this lens, of course, which had led to any number of think pieces celebrating Susannah’s “iron will” and “clear-eyed leadership” from publications that had addressed her in far less friendly terms a few months back.
But the ball was a different animal. It was overwhelming at the best of times, so filled was it with the members of the Betancur family and all their usual drama and intrigue. Susannah expected that the return from the dead of the Betancur heir himself would make it all...insane.
Surely the prospect would make anyone tired. At least this year she wouldn’t have to deal with marriage proposals over canapés and several attempts at a coup before dessert. Or so she hoped.
Leonidas sat beside her in the car’s comfortable backseat as the driver navigated the Paris traffic, talking into his mobile in dark, silky tones that didn’t require Susannah’s fluency in German to realize were menacing in the extreme. His tone did it for him. It was something about one of the resorts the corporation ran in the South Pacific, but she couldn’t quite summon up the energy to care about that the way she might have normally. She stared out the window as Paris gleamed in the wet dark and plucked a bit listlessly at the dress she wore. Not that it was the dress’s fault. It was a stunning creation in a deep, mesmerizing green that had been presented to her like a gift by Leonidas’s Milanese tailors when she knew very well it hadn’t been a gift at all. It had been a command.
Leonidas didn’t have to say that he didn’t want her to wear black any longer. That she was no longer the Widow Betancur, but his wife, and should allow her wardrobe to reflect that reality. She’d understood the message.
It was the first time she’d worn a bright color—or any color other than the darkest of navys and the deepest of charcoals—since her wedding, which seemed appropriate for their anticipated debut as an actual married couple, a whole four years later than planned.
No wonder her head felt so tender.
The city blurred into one long gleam of frenetic light outside the car windows, and Leonidas’s voice was that same low murmur, all power and command, that Susannah could feel as much inside her body as with her ears.
The trouble was, she was just so tired these days.
It wasn’t the dress. Or the rich shade of green that flattered her so well she’d been forced to consider the fact that Leonidas had selected it because he’d known it would, which made her...uncomfortable. Restless in her own skin. She’d have liked to blame something so relatively innocuous as her wardrobe, but she knew better.
Susannah told herself it was the charade itself that exhausted her. The difficulty of keeping one foot in the Betancur world when she planned to escape it as soon as possible. That would exhaust anyone, surely. The weeks since she and Leonidas had made their bargain had seemed to creep by, every day somehow harder than the last. After all those years of playing the Widow Betancur so well, it should have been easy enough for Susannah to continue along in the same role just a little while longer. But for some reason, this last month had been more difficult than any she could remember.
It’s because you know this is temporary, she told herself now, watching the city melt from shadow into dancing light and back again on the other side of the glass. When there was no escape, when you had no choice, it was easier to simply do what had to be done.
Her headaches had only gotten worse as time went on. It seemed all she wanted to do was lie down and sleep, except even when she forced herself into a long and uninterrupted night’s rest, she never woke refreshed. She felt thick all the way through. Underwater, somehow.
She’d been toying with the idea that she was allergic to Leonidas.
But the thing she felt when she was close to him, doing as he’d asked and helping him navigate the cutthroat world he occupied as if he’d never been away, was not an allergy. It had a great many similar symptoms. Breathlessness. A pervasive flush. A sort of restless, itchy feeling all over...
If it was an allergy, she could take decongestants and be done with him. With this. But there was no remedy for the intensity that Leonidas exuded the way other men wore cologne.
God help her, all she wanted was to be done with this.
She’d spent her entire life training to be married off to a man like Leonidas. Then the whole of her marriage training to be as ruthless and powerful as the husband she’d lost. Susannah had no idea what it was like to be on her own.
No one had ever asked her what it was she wanted. Which was probably a good thing, she thought wryly, because she had no idea.
“You seem drained yet again,” Leonidas said from beside her, as if in answer to the question in her head, but she knew better than to think he could read her. Or would want to read her, for that matter, as if they shared some kind of intimacy. The truth was, she might be married to him, but he wasn’t hers.
A man like Leonidas would never be any woman’s.
Susannah hadn’t realized he’d finished his call. She turned from the rain-lined windows and the gleaming lights of Paris just there on the other side, and tried to arrange her face into something pleasant. Or calm enough to be mistaken for pleasant, anyway.
“I’m not drained,” she said, because it was polite. But he was watching her, his dark eyes brooding and entirely too close, there in the backseat of the car, and she didn’t feel particularly polite after all. “I find I am less interested in this endless game of playacting with every day that passes, that’s all.”
His brows rose and she thought she saw something glitter there, deep in his dark gold gaze. But when he spoke his voice was even.
“I regret that my presence is such a burden upon you.”
It occurred to her that he was playing a role just as much as she was, and she couldn’t have said why that realization sent a bolt of something like shame spinning through her. But she didn’t let it keep her quiet.
“Yes, thank you. It always helps to be sardonic, I find. It makes everything so much better.”
“As does sarcasm.”
“You asked me to help you, and I agreed to do that,” Susannah reminded him tightly. “I could end that agreement at any time, and whether you recall the name of every assistant in the Malaysian office or not is no concern to me either way.”
Leonidas didn’t look chastened. But then again, he never did. He might not remember the many people who tried to speak to him over the course of a day, but he certainly seemed to remember that he was the one in charge. Of everything. It galled her that she’d allowed him to take charge of her as well, when surely she simply could have left.
Why hadn’t she left?
“Let me hasten to assure you that this extreme torture will end soon enough,” he told her, and there was a note in his voice she didn’t like. One that made it seem impossible that he was doing anything but indulging her, with no intention whatsoever of keeping his promises.
But there was no point debating possibilities. And her head hurt too much anyway. Susannah didn’t respond. She rubbed at her temples instead, listening to the music her bracelets made as they jangled on her wrist.
“If you continue to get these headaches, I think you should see the doctor,” Leonidas murmured after
a moment. In that way of his that would have made an apology sound like a command.
Not that Susannah could imagine this man apologizing for anything. Ever.
“I don’t need a doctor to tell me that I’m under stress,” Susannah said tautly. “Or that what I need to recover from such stress is a solitary retreat. Far, far away the intrigue and drama of the Betancur Corporation.”
For once, Leonidas did not respond in kind. Instead, he reached over and took her hand in his. And Susannah wanted to pull it back instantly, rip her hand from his so that she wouldn’t have to sit there and fight the surging sensation that rolled through her at even so small a touch.
As if they were naked again. As if he was braced above her and thrusting deep inside her—
That was what bothered her most about this extra and intense time with him.
She didn’t hate him. She wasn’t disgusted with him or even disinterested. On the contrary, she continued to find her husband entirely too fascinating by half. And every time he touched her, it set off the same chain reaction. Sometimes he took her elbow as they walked down a hall or through a press gauntlet. Sometimes he helped her in or out of the car, his hand so strong around hers she imagined he could use it to lift her straight off the ground if he chose. Sometimes he touched the small of her back as they entered the room, as if he was guiding her before him. It didn’t matter what he did, how utterly innocuous it was—gestures knit together by old-world manners and inbred politeness, meaningless in their way.
And yet every single time his body touched hers, Susannah...ignited.
She felt it at the point of contact first, like a burst of bright light. Then it rolled through her, making her breasts feel heavy and aflame at once. Making the blood in her veins feel sluggish. And then all of that heavy ache and thick sweetness spiraled around and around, sinking down through her until it pooled deep in her belly. Low and hot and maddening, there between her legs.
She comforted herself with the knowledge that no matter what, Leonidas had no idea what he did to her. He couldn’t. Of course he couldn’t, because she went to such lengths to hide it. And soon she would be far away from him and only she would ever know the true depths of her own weakness.
But as the brilliant lights of central Paris danced over his bent head from beyond the car windows, as he held her hand between his and she felt as bright as the ancient city shimmering in the rain all around her, there was a shuddering part of her that wondered if any of that was strictly the truth.
Maybe he did know. Maybe he knew exactly what he did to her, just as he’d known exactly how to touch her back in that compound...
Not that she cared, because he was pressing his big, clever fingers into her palm.
“What are you doing?” she managed to ask, and assured herself he’d think the catch in her voice was from her headache, not him.
“I was taught that massaging pressure points eases headaches,” Leonidas said with gruff certainty. More to her hand than her, she thought, dispassionate and distant, like a doctor. But then he glanced up to catch her gaze, a little smile flirting with his mesmerizingly hard mouth, and her heart slammed at her.
It took her a few moments to collect herself long enough to recognize that he was right. That the pain in her temples was receding.
“Your family obviously taught you more useful things than mine ever did,” she said without thinking. “My mother believes in suffering, as she’d be the first to tell you.”
“My father was a mean old bastard who relished the pain of others.” Leonidas’s voice was matter-of-fact. He exchanged one hand for the other, pressing down into her palm and alleviating the pain almost instantly when he did. “Particularly mine, as he told me every time he beat me bloody, which he did with great relish and regularity until I got too big at sixteen, at which point, he switched to psychological warfare. And you’ve met my mother. The only sort of pain Apollonia Betancur knows how to relieve comes back every morning-after when the night’s intoxicants wear off.”
Susannah was very still, and not only because he was still holding her hand with his. But because of that searing, dark undercurrent in his voice that told her exactly what it must have been like to be born a Betancur. And not just any Betancur, ushered into a life of privilege from the first breath, but the heir to the whole of the Betancur kingdom whether he liked it or not.
Of course they’d beaten it into him. How else would these people do anything? She already knew they were monsters.
But she also knew her husband well enough by now to know that he would hate it if she expressed anything like sympathy for the childhood he’d survived, somehow.
“I was glad they sent me away to that school when I was small,” Susannah said softly. So softly he could ignore it if he wanted and better yet, she could pretend she wasn’t saying it out loud at all. “For all that it was lonely, I think it was better than having to live with them.”
But he didn’t ignore her. “I wish they’d sent me away more than they did, but you see, there were a great many expectations of the next Betancur and none of them could be beaten into me while I was elsewhere.”
Leonidas was no longer smiling when he let go of her hand and Susannah knew better, somehow, than to reach back over and touch him again the way everything in her wanted to do—and not with a meaningless little gesture. He looked carved from rock, as impossible as a distant mountain, and she wanted to...comfort him, somehow. Care for him. Do something to dispel the dark grip that seemed to squeeze tight around the both of them.
But she didn’t dare put a finger on this man.
She kept her hands from curling into impotent fists by flattening them on her own lap.
“My headache is gone,” she told him. “Thank you. You are a miracle worker, no matter where you learned it.”
“The benefits of living off the grid, far away in the woods and high up on a mountaintop,” he told her after a moment, when she’d thought he might not speak at all. “No one can run out to the nearest pharmacy to fetch some tablets every time someone feels a bit of pain. We learned other methods.”
“I’m stunned,” she managed to say. And she was aware as she spoke that she didn’t sound nearly as calm as she should have. “I would have thought it would cause a full-scale revolt if you’d healed someone with anything other than the force of your holiness.”
Leonidas let out only a small laugh, but to Susannah it sounded like nothing less than a victory parade.
“It’s possible I was a terrible disappointment as a resident god,” he said, his voice rich with something it took her entirely too long to realize was humor. At his own expense, no less. And she felt that like a new, different sort of touch. “But in the habit of most gods, I will choose not to inquire.”
And it was lucky Susannah didn’t have to summon up a response, she thought as the car pulled up to the entrance of the desperately chic Betancur Hotel. They had to get out of the car and acknowledge the waiting paparazzi. She had to steel herself against Leonidas’s hand at her back when she’d barely survived the car ride over. And still, she could only count her good fortune that she was able to stand and walk at all—because the sound of real laughter in her husband’s dark voice was enough to make her knees feel weak.
She was very much afraid of the things she might have said—or worse, done—if that car ride had lasted another moment.
And none of that could happen, because she wasn’t staying. Not only wasn’t she staying, she needed to hurry up her departure, she told herself as they walked into the hotel in a flurry of flashbulbs and the typical shouting of their names. The lobby was a riot of color, golds and marbles and sultry onyxes, but all Susannah could see with any clarity was Leonidas as he led her to the grand ballroom.
She needed to hurry up and leave before she couldn’t. She needed to go before she found herself addict
ed to these small moments with him and stayed. Like an addict forever chasing that dragon and never, ever finding it.
“You look appropriately somber at the prospect of a long night with my family and all their works,” Leonidas said as they made their way toward the gala, smiling and nodding at Europe’s elite as they passed in the gilded hallways.
Susannah let out a small laugh. “I can handle your family. It’s mine that makes me anxious.”
“I don’t remember much about our wedding,” he said then, angling a look down at her as they reached the doors of the ballroom. She thought she could see too much in his gaze, that was the trouble. She thought there was more in all that dark gold than there was or ever could be.
And Susannah didn’t understand where the forced calm she’d wielded like a sword these last years had gone. She only knew it had deserted her completely tonight.
“I don’t think that’s the memory loss acting up again,” she said quietly, but not at all as calmly as she’d have liked. “I think it’s that you didn’t much care.”
“I didn’t care at all,” Leonidas agreed, and whatever had afflicted her, she thought it was gnawing at him, too. And there was no reason that should bring her any sort of comfort. What did it matter what happened between them? This was temporary. This had to be temporary. “But I remember you. And your mother.”
“Mother prides herself on being memorable, but only for the correct reasons. Namely that she is Europe’s foremost gorgon.”
She’d meant that to be funny. But her words hung there between them, and even Susannah could tell that they were something else entirely.
The hand at her back smoothed down an inch or two, then rose again. And all the while, Leonidas’s gaze was fixed to hers as if he could see every last part of her. Because of course, he knew what it had been like to come of age in that chilly, remote boarding school, aware at all times that her only use to her parents was as a pawn to further their ambitions. To have no sense of family the way others did. To be so utterly and terribly alone, always.
A Baby to Bind His Bride Page 8
