A Baby to Bind His Bride

by Caitlin Crews

  Until now, something in her whispered.

  He knew exactly what that was like.

  But she reminded herself harshly that there was no now. There was no them. Leonidas wasn’t simply a Betancur, he was the worst of them. He was what happened when greed and ambition was chiseled over generations into aristocratic blood and entirely too much power. If inconceivably wealthy families could create an avatar, Leonidas was the perfect choice to represent his. Hard and dark and utterly lethal.

  And now risen from the dead, as if he needed to add to his mystique.

  She told herself these things over and over, until it was like cold water in her face.

  But it didn’t change the way he’d touched her. Or the fact that somehow, the worst of the Betancurs—her husband—had managed to comfort her when no one else could. Or ever had.

  Or had bothered to try.

  Somehow he’d managed to soothe her on the night of the annual gala, when Susannah was used to facing nothing but fanged smiles and knives to the back all around. She would have said it was impossible.

  “Ready, then?” he asked, in that low voice that did upsetting things to her pulse. And that look in his eyes was worse. It made something deep inside her melt.

  “Ready,” she said, as briskly as she could, but it didn’t stop the melting.

  Susannah was beginning to think nothing could. That she’d been doomed since the moment she’d walked up that mountain in farthest Idaho and had demanded to see the man they called the Count.

  That the Count had been easier, because he’d simply kissed her. Taken her. Done as he wished. Which had allowed her to pretend that under other circumstances, she’d have resisted him.

  When what these weeks had taught her was that she didn’t want to resist this man, no matter what he called himself.

  Leonidas inclined his head and offered her his arm, and Susannah took it. And for the first time since they’d entered their wedding reception four years ago, she entered a glittering, gleaming ballroom packed to the chandeliers above with the toast of Europe not as the rigidly composed, much-hated, always solitary Widow Betancur.

  This time, she was no more and no less than Leonidas’s wife.

  And he was right there with her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THAT SUSANNAH WAS used to the endless pageant and conspiratorial drama of the Betancur clan was immediately obvious to Leonidas—and likely to the whole of the gala, he thought as he stood near the high table some time later, because she remained so composed in the face of their antics.

  He was the one having some trouble adjusting to life back in the fold.

  Only a scant handful of his relatives actually stirred themselves to do anything resembling work, of course, so he hadn’t seen much of them since his return as he’d been focused on the company and getting up to speed on everything he’d missed. But this was a widely publicized, celebrity-studded charity ball where they could all do what they liked best: lounge about in pretty clothes, exchange vicious gossip, and carry on theatrical affairs with whoever struck their fancies—from lowly valets to exalted kings as it suited them. Usually in full view of their spouses and the press.

  Leonidas was used to the offhanded debauchery his cousins practiced with such delight. He remembered it all in excruciating detail when really, his cousins’ behavior was something he’d happily have forgotten.

  The Betancurs gathered the way they always did at functions like this one, sulky and imperious in turn, making Leonidas wish he could rule here as he’d done in the compound. His cousins usually did as he asked because it was bad for their bank accounts to get on his bad side, but only after great productions of pointless defiance. Meanwhile, Apollonia held court the way she liked to do, carrying on about her only child’s return from death when it suited her, and then ignoring him entirely when it amused her to harangue the guests instead, likely in search of her next lover.

  That his mother valued only the fact that she’d borne him because of the access that granted her to the Betancur fortune and consequence should no longer have had the power to hurt him. He’d gotten over that when he was still a boy, he would have said. But it rubbed at him tonight even so.

  “It would not kill her to at least put on a decent show of maternal devotion, surely,” he said in an undertone to Susannah at one point.

  And then asked himself what the hell he was doing. The woman wasn’t his friend. She wasn’t even his date. She was the wife he’d never wanted who, it turned out, didn’t want him, either. Whatever else she was—including the only woman he could recall being so obsessed with it was becoming an issue he feared his own hand wouldn’t cure—she was certainly no confidante.

  “This is no show, it’s what Apollonia’s maternal devotion looks like,” Susannah replied in that cool way of hers that he found he liked entirely too much, all smooth vowels and that little kick of archness besides. She stood beside him as they watched his mother berate a minor duchess, and Leonidas tried to channel a measure of her untroubled amusement. “It is only that she is devoted to herself, not you.”

  And that was the trouble, Leonidas knew. He’d been on that mountain too long, perhaps. But he hadn’t expected to like the sweet little virgin his mother had insisted he marry to best honor his late father’s wishes that the stodgy Martin Forrester be recognized for his hard work in turning at least three small Betancur fortunes into remarkably large ones, and then adding to them every year. Even from beyond the grave, his father’s orders carried the weight of his fists.

  But it had not occurred to Leonidas to revolt. Not then.

  “Besides,” Apollonia had said while sunning herself on one of the family yachts as the Côte d’Azur gleamed in the distance, some years before his wedding, “it will make you look more relatable.”

  “I hope not.” Leonidas had been reading complicated work emails on his mobile instead of waiting attendance on his mother, but that was when he’d still shown up when she’d called—when he’d still felt some measure of obligation. “Why would I wish to relate to anyone?”

  “Most men in your position marry cadaverous actresses or shriveled little heiresses, all of whom are notable chiefly for the breadth of their promiscuity,” Apollonia had told him, glaring at him over the top of her oversize sunglasses. If the fact that she had been a Greek heiress with something of a reputation when his father had met her years ago struck her as at all ironic, she didn’t show it. “This one is a merchant’s daughter, which makes you look benevolent and down-to-earth for choosing her, and better yet, she’s a guaranteed vestal virgin. People will admire you for your keen character judgment in choosing someone so spotless, and better yet, you won’t be forced to make desultory chitchat with every man who’s been beneath her skirts.”

  In truth, Leonidas hadn’t expected to spend much time with her at all. What access he had to the offhanded memories of the man he’d been back then assured him that he’d envisioned a comfortably Continental sort of arrangement with his new wife. He’d assumed they’d handle the matter of his heirs as quickly and painlessly as possible, appear at an agreed-upon number of social events together each season, and otherwise retreat to whichever Betancur properties they preferred to live out their lives as they saw fit, with as many lovers as they could handle as long as they were reasonably discreet about it.

  This was the world they’d both grown up in. People organized their lives around money, not emotion.

  But Leonidas found that as he watched his spotless wife navigate the toothsome sharks masquerading as the crème de la crème of Europe—to say nothing of the far more unpredictable members of his own family—he hated it. All of it.

  The notion that they were destined to end up like all these people here tonight, full of Botox and emptiness. The idea that she was one of them, this forthright creature with the cool smile and the far
away eyes. Even the faintest possibility that the woman who’d gazed at him as if he’d cured her outside these very doors tonight could ever become a master manipulator like his own mother.

  He hated this.

  He was nothing like these parasites any longer. That was the trouble. The compound had changed him whether he liked to believe that or not. The Count had believed in something—and no matter if it was crazy, Leonidas couldn’t seem to get past the fact that he didn’t.

  He’d done what was expected of him. But did he know what he wanted?

  Susannah wasn’t like the vultures in this hard, brittle world either, he reminded himself fiercely. She’d told him who he was and given him the one thing he’d never had in his whole life of excess. Her innocence. As a gift, not a bargaining chip.

  In fact, unlike every other person he’d ever known, in this life or the one he’d thought was his for four years across the planet, she hadn’t bartered with it. She hadn’t even mentioned it, before or since. If he didn’t know better—if he couldn’t see her reaction every time his hand brushed hers—he might have thought he’d imagined the whole thing.

  Most people he met used whatever they had as leverage to make him do something for them. Give them power, money, prestige, whatever. In the compound, access to the Count had been doled out like currency. It was no different in the Betancur Corporation. There was literally nothing people wouldn’t do to get a piece of him.

  Susannah was the only person he’d ever met who didn’t appear to want anything from him.

  And he found he could think of very little else but keeping her, whether she wanted to stay or not.

  “What a glorious resurrection,” his cousin Silvio interjected then, smiling to cover the sharpness in his voice and failing miserably as he came to stand beside Leonidas. Yet his gaze rested on Susannah. “You must be so happy to have your beloved husband back, Susannah. After you mourned him so fiercely and for so long.”

  Leonidas understood from his cousin’s tone, and Susannah’s deliberately cool response, that Silvio had been one of the cousins desperate to marry her himself. To take control of the Betancur Corporation, of course—but it was more than that. Leonidas could see it all over Silvio. It was Susannah herself. She got under a man’s skin.

  But the only man who had touched her—or ever will, something dark in him growled—was him.

  You agreed to let her go, he reminded himself. Who does or doesn’t touch her has nothing to do with you.

  He jerked his attention away from Silvio and looked around at the rest of his assembled family instead. His few remaining aunts were clutching wineglasses like life vests and muttering to each other beneath pasted-on smiles. His single living uncle stood with a cluster of Italian celebrities, yet looked as dour as ever.

  The rest of the cousins were up to their usual tricks. Gilded swans with murder in their eyes, they all smiled to Leonidas’s face, exclaimed over Susannah when they could get her attention, and hardly bothered to do him the courtesy of hiding their plotting behind a polite hand.

  And Silvio wasn’t the only one who’d sniffed around Susannah, right in front of Leonidas. He might have thought it was nothing more than a test to see exactly what sort of marriage he and Susannah had—but he saw the way they looked at her. He knew that every last one of them would die to get his hands on her if they could.

  The frostier she was, the more they wanted her.

  The trouble was, so did he.

  His entire family would be ridiculous if they weren’t so dangerous at times, Leonidas thought as the night wore on. Some more than others, lest he forget that at least one of the sleek relatives smiling his way tonight was more than just teeth. One of them had arranged for that plane to go down.

  He’d seen the reports that had led Susannah to his compound. He knew as much as she did—that the plane had been tampered with. He didn’t have to cast around for a reason when he was the head of the family, the CEO and president of the company, and he was related to all these jealous snakes. He was sure it had made perfect sense to one of the jackals he called cousin to get rid of him before he could have his own children and complicate matters—and their own fortunes—even further.

  It almost didn’t matter which one it had been.

  “Are you enjoying all this family time?” he asked Susannah during a lull in the forced family interactions.

  “Are they a family, then?” she asked, but there was a smile in her blue eyes and that eased the weight in his chest he’d hardly noticed was there. “I rather thought I was being feasted upon by a pool of piranhas.”

  “Never fear,” Leonidas said darkly. “I haven’t forgotten that one of them wished me dead. Or I should amend that. I assume they all wish me dead. But I also assume that only one of them acted on that wish.”

  She tipped her head to one side, still smiling. “Can you really make such an assumption? They do seem to like gathering in groups.”

  “Indeed they do.” Leonidas inclined his head toward his aunts, who had gone from conspiratorial whispers to gritted teeth and eye daggers, visible from halfway across the ballroom. “But teamwork is not exactly a Betancur family strength.”

  Susannah laughed, which Leonidas enjoyed entirely too much, but then stopped abruptly. As if it had been snuffed out of her. He followed her gaze across the room and found an older couple entering the room. The woman was tall and thin, with a haughtily sour look on her face, as if she’d smelled something foul—and continued to smell it as she swept in. The man was much rounder and wreathed in as many mustaches as chins, looking so much like a staid, plush banker that Leonidas would have guessed that finance was the man’s trade even if he hadn’t recognized the pair of them on sight.

  Susannah’s parents. His in-laws.

  And his wife looked about as happy to see them as he was.

  The older couple picked Susannah out of the crowd and started toward her as the band began to play again after a short interval. And to Leonidas’s surprise, Susannah grabbed his arm.

  “We must dance, of course,” she said, sounding almost offhand when he could see that frantic gleam in her gaze.

  “Can I dance?” he asked mildly, looking down at her. And the way she was still watching her parents approach as if she expected them to strike her down where she stood. “Or is it only that I do not wish to?”

  That penetrated. She blinked, then frowned at him.

  “Of course you can dance,” she told him, with only a hint of frost. He admired her restraint. “You were taught as a boy, like every other member of your social class. And mine.”

  “I can’t remember one way or the other, but I feel certain I detest dancing.”

  “Luckily for you, I can remember that you love it.” She smiled at him, and no matter that it was a touch overlarge. “Adore it, in fact.”

  Leonidas did not adore dancing by any stretch of the imagination. But he’d walked into that one, he was aware.

  “You cannot possibly wish to dance with me in front of so many people,” he said as if they had all the time in the world to have this conversation. As if her parents weren’t bearing down on them even now. And what was the matter with him that he vastly preferred her family troubles to his own? “How will you possibly extricate yourself from this marriage when there will be so many witnesses to our romantic waltz on this, our first night in society since my return?”

  “That is a sacrifice I’m willing to make,” she replied sweetly. “Because you love dancing so much, and of course I want to help you return to the life you were denied all this time.”

  Leonidas eyed her, and tried to keep his lips from twitching. “You are too good to me. Especially when you have so little experience with formal dancing. To think, you could make a fool of yourself so easily.”

  Her sweet smile took on an edge. “I know how to dance,
thank you.”

  “You can’t possibly have practiced since you were in school. What if you’ve forgotten all you learned?”

  “I don’t know why you imagine yourself an expert on my dancing prowess,” Susannah said loftily, “but for all you know I danced all night and day while you were gone.”

  “While draped in black shrouds to honor my memory? I doubt it.” He smiled at her then, a bit lazily, and was astonished to realize that he was enjoying himself for the first time since he’d entered this ballroom and started wading through too many vipers to count. “As far as I can tell, that means the only real dance partner you have ever had is me. At our wedding.”

  He didn’t know why he said it that way—as if he was staking a claim on her where they stood. Or why she took his simple statement of fact so seriously, her blue eyes turning solemn as she regarded him. That odd electricity that had nearly been his undoing in the car earlier, then again at the ballroom doors, coursed through him again then. Making him think that if he didn’t touch her right now he might char himself from the inside out.

  But he managed to keep his hands to himself.

  “I said you love to dance,” she said after a moment, and the smile she aimed at him then wasn’t a fake one, all polite savagery. It was real. Wry and teasing and real. And all theirs, here in a ballroom that might as well have been a goldfish bowl. “I didn’t say I enjoyed it, only that I could. You know how it is. A single bad experience can ruin the whole thing and then you’re left with a lifetime aversion.”

  “I’ll assume we’re still talking about dancing,” Leonidas said mildly.

  She laughed then, and Leonidas couldn’t help himself. He told himself he was indulging her, but he had the sinking suspicion that really, he was indulging himself.

  He took her hand in his and he led her out into the middle of the crowded dance floor, ignoring the couples who parted to let them through—as much to gawk at them as to show them any consideration, he knew. He didn’t care. Just as he didn’t care that she was melting into him and holding on to him not because she was as wild with need as he was—or not only because of that—but because she wanted to avoid unpleasant conversations with her own parents.