A Baby to Bind His Bride

by Caitlin Crews

  Suddenly Susannah was afraid of the emotions she could feel slopping around inside her as if they might flood her, then carry her away, if she gave in to a single one of them.

  She needed to stop this. She needed to escape this gilded, vicious world while she still could.

  And she needed to leave soon, before she forgot the way out.

  Something in her whispered that the line was coming faster than she wanted to admit—and if she wasn’t careful, she’d cross it without realizing it.

  “Resurrection is a tricky business,” Leonidas was saying to her mother, merging their two conversations into one.

  “It could be that, I suppose,” Annemieke said with a sniff. “Though Susannah has never been a sickly thing, all fainting spells and fragility.”

  “This is where she calls me ‘sturdy,’ which is never a compliment,” Susannah murmured, not quite under her breath.

  Annemieke swept a look over her daughter, from her head all the way to her toes and then back again, in that pointedly judgmental way that always left Susannah feeling lacking. More than lacking.

  Susannah reminded herself that she didn’t send time with her parents for a reason. After tonight it would likely be months and months before she had to face them again and by then, who knew where she’d be? If she was divorced from Leonidas the way she planned, it was entirely likely that her parents would want nothing to do with her.

  If she kept that happy day in mind, tonight didn’t seem so bad. And there was no point indulging the part of her that went a bit too still at the notion of leaving Leonidas when she could feel all that warmth and strength from the hand he held at her back. No point at all.

  She made herself smile. “It’s only a little headache now and then,” she said. “I’m sure I just need to drink more water.”

  “I only suffered from headaches once and it was very unpleasant.” Her mother lifted a brow, and there was a gleam in the blue eyes she’d passed on to her daughter that Susannah did not like at all. “It was when I was pregnant.”

  And Susannah didn’t hear if there was any conversation after that point, because everything seemed to...stop. Leonidas went very, very still beside her. His hand didn’t move, and she suddenly felt it less as moral support and more like a threat. A terrible threat she should have heeded from the start.

  A dark foreboding she wanted to reject swept over her. But she couldn’t seem to speak, not even to deny what she knew—she knew—was completely false.

  Especially not when she could feel all that lethal power emanating from the man beside her. The husband who had agreed to let her leave—but he was a Betancur. There wasn’t a Betancur in six generations who’d been laissez faire about the family bloodline, and somehow she very much doubted that Leonidas would be the first.

  Not that she was pregnant, of course, because she couldn’t be.

  She couldn’t be.

  “I’m nothing like my mother,” she told him fiercely when he made their excuses in a gruff tone and led her away, his hand wrapped tight around her upper arm as if he expected her to bolt. “I never have been. I don’t even look like her. It’s ridiculous to assume that we would share anything.”

  He didn’t stop moving through the crowd, inexorable and swift, towing her toward the doors though the party was still in full swing.

  “Everyone gets headaches, Leonidas,” she gritted out at him from between her teeth. “There’s no need to jump to dramatic conclusions. It’s as likely to be a brain tumor as it is that I’m pregnant.”

  But Leonidas only threw her a dark, glittering sort of look that made everything in her pull tight and then shiver. He didn’t reply, he just slipped his phone from his pocket with his free hand, hit a button, then put it to his ear and kept walking.

  Sweeping her along with him whether she liked it or not.

  And everything after that seemed to happen much too fast, as if she was watching her own life catapult off the side of a cliff in front of her.

  Leonidas whisked her from the ballroom without seeming to care overmuch that they had been expected to stay for the whole of the gala. He didn’t even bother to make their excuses to his family. He had her in the back of his car and headed back to the soaring townhome he kept in Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement, steps from the Avenue des Champs-élysées, without another word to her on the drive back.

  And worse than that, when they arrived back in the glorious nineteenth-century dwelling in the sought-after Haussmann style, a doctor waited there in the foyer.

  “This is ridiculous,” Susannah all but sputtered, forgetting any pretense of calm, and who cared that the doctor was standing there as witness.

  “Then it costs you nothing to indulge me,” Leonidas replied, that same glittering thing in his gaze while he continued to hold the rest of his body so still.

  As if he is lying in wait, something in her whispered. She repressed a shudder.

  “I can’t possibly be pregnant,” she snapped at him.

  “If you are so certain, you have even less reason to refuse.”

  Susannah realized he’d turned to stone. That there was no give in him at all. This was the Leonidas of stark commands and absolute power, not the man who’d touched her back, held her hand and made her heartbeat slow. She didn’t understand how he could have both men inside him, but clearly he couldn’t be both at the same time.

  And she knew she’d surrendered to the inevitable—that it must have showed on her face—because the doctor smiled his apologies and led her from the room to take the test.

  More astonishingly, she followed him.

  Susannah had worked herself into a state by the time she found Leonidas again, waiting for her in his private salon filled with priceless antiques and bristling with evidence of the Bettencourt wealth at every turn. But she could hardly pay attention to that sort of thing when her life was slipping out of her grasp right there in front of her. He stood at the fireplace, one arm propped up on the mantel as he frowned at the flames, and he didn’t turn to look at her when she came in.

  “You are going to feel very silly,” she told him. Through her teeth. And opted not to notice how absurdly attractive he looked without his coat and tie, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck so his scars showed. Or the way she melted inside at the sight of him, until she could feel that dangerous pulse between her legs. “This is embarrassing. That doctor will sell the story to every tabloid in Europe.”

  “I am not the least embarrassed,” Leonidas replied, still not looking at her. “And if the good doctor dares, I will destroy him.”

  She felt dizzy at the mild tone he used, or perhaps it was the unmistakable ferocity beneath it. Either way, she took a few more steps into the salon and gripped the back of the nearest settee. She told herself it wasn’t to keep her balance, because nothing was happening that should so unsettle her that she’d lose her footing. Because she wasn’t pregnant. Her mother was waspish because she enjoyed it, but Susannah had long ago stopped listening to her when she was being provoking.

  Leonidas would learn to do the same, she told herself piously.

  Or not, a voice inside her remarked. As you are so intent on leaving him.

  “I’m not pregnant, Leonidas,” she said for the hundredth time, as if she could finally make it so if she said it fiercely enough. As if she might finally light upon the right tone that would make him listen.

  Leonidas stood then. He turned from the mantel and regarded her for a moment in a manner that made every part of her shiver. And keep right on shivering.

  “You are so certain, little one,” he said after a moment. “But I can count.”

  Susannah flushed at that, as if he really had slapped her this time. She felt feverish, hot and then cold, and she gripped the high back of the settee so hard she could see her knuckles whiten in protest. She wanted
to tear that damned Betancur sapphire off her finger and hurl it at him. She wanted to run down the grand staircase and out into the Paris streets, and keep on running until her legs gave out.

  And while he stared at her, his gaze too dark and much too certain, she counted. The way she’d absolutely not done on the way here because it was impossible and she refused. But she did it now.

  Seven weeks since that night in the compound and she hadn’t bled in all that time. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had. It certainly hadn’t been in the ten days before she’d left for Idaho to find him, because she would have remembered having to deal with that while pretending to everyone she knew that she was going anywhere but where she was really heading.

  “I assumed this couldn’t possibly be an issue,” she said after a moment, aware she sounded more like her mother than herself. Harsh and accusing, and that was just to start. She couldn’t imagine the expression on her face and wondered if she was more like her mother than she’d ever believed possible. “And I’m sure it won’t be. But why didn’t you make sure that something like this could never be in question?”

  “Did you see a condom in that compound, Susannah? Because I did not. Perhaps I assumed you would be on birth control yourself.”

  “I find that hard to believe. I was the virgin in the scenario, not you.”

  “And I was a holy man who’d been on the top of a mountain for four years. How did I know how you’d spent your time out there in all that sin?”

  “You’re one to talk. My understanding is that the entire point of becoming a cult leader is to avail yourself of the buffet of attractive followers.”

  Leonidas smiled, and under the circumstances Susannah thought that scared her most of all.

  “Did I not mention that I was entirely chaste that entire time?” His smile deepened, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “Untouched and uninterested for four years. I have been entirely faithful to you throughout our marriage, Susannah. As you have been to me. Surely this is something to celebrate.”

  But she was sure that she could hear a steel door slamming shut as he said it.

  “It was an accident,” she said, but her voice was barely a whisper. “It didn’t mean anything. It was only an accident.”

  And if he planned to answer beyond that enigmatic expression on his face, she would never know. Because that was when there was a discreet knock on the paneled door and the doctor stepped back into the room.

  “Congratulations, madame, monsieur,” the doctor said, nodding at each of them in turn while Susannah’s breath caught in her throat. “The test is positive. You are indeed pregnant, as you suspected.”

  And this time, it was Susannah who turned to stone.

  There was no other word to describe it. One moment she was standing there, furious and affronted and so very certain that this was all a mistake, and then the next she found herself a hard thing all the way through, as every part of her rejected the notion outright. Physically.

  Because she couldn’t possibly be pregnant.

  But one hand crept around to slide over her belly and hold it, just in case.

  She barely noticed when Leonidas escorted the doctor from the room. He could have been gone for hours. When he returned he shut the door behind him, enclosing them in the salon that had seemed spacious before, and that was when Susannah walked stiffly around the settee to sit on it.

  Because she thought it was that or grow roots down into the black herringbone floor.

  He crossed back to the fireplace and stood there again, watching her, while the silence grew fangs between them.

  His dark, tawny gaze had changed, she noticed. It had gone molten. He still held himself still, though she could tell the difference in that, too. It was as if an electrical current ran through him now, charging the air all around him even while his mouth remained in an unsmiling line.

  And he looked at her as if she was naked. Stripped. Flesh and bone with nothing left to hide.

  “Is it so bad, then?” he asked in a mild sort of tone she didn’t believe at all.

  Susannah’s chest was so heavy, and she couldn’t tell if it was the crushing weight of misery or something far more dangerous. She held her belly with one hand as if it was already sticking out. As if the baby might start kicking at any second.

  “The Betancur family is a cage,” she told him, or the parquet floor beneath the area rug that stretched out in front of the fireplace, and it cost her to speak so precisely. So matter-of-factly. “I don’t want to live in a cage. There must be options.”

  He seemed to grow darker as she watched, which she knew was impossible. It was a trick of the light, or the force of her reaction. He couldn’t summon his own storm.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked, and this time there was something in his low, fierce voice that made her break out in goose bumps.

  Everywhere.

  “I have no idea,” she said, sounding broken to her own ears.

  Panic was so thick inside her that she was surprised she could breathe, much less speak, and scenarios drifted through her head, one more outlandish than the next. She could live abroad, in a country far from here, just her and the baby. So long as no one knew who they were or how to find them, they could live anywhere. She could raise a child in some protected mountain valley somewhere and learn how to farm—perhaps in Idaho, for a little symmetry, where it was apparently perfectly easy to disappear into the woods for years at a time. She could relocate to any number of distant, unfashionable cities she’d never seen and work in an anonymous office somewhere, raising her child as a single mother no different from all the rest.

  “None?” The way Leonidas studied her did not make her goose bumps subside. She rubbed at her arms and wished she could stop that shivering thing down deep inside her. “No ideas at all?”

  “Anything but this,” she threw at him. “That’s my idea.”

  “Define ‘this,’ please.”

  “This, damn you.” She shook her head, only dimly aware that moisture leaked from her eyes as she did. “I’ve been a pawn in Betancur games for four years, and it’s too long. I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life. I certainly don’t want to raise a child the way I was raised. Or worse, the way you were. This is a prison and if I don’t want to live in it, I’m certain my child deserves better, too.”

  And she watched him change again, softening somehow without seeming to move. She didn’t understand it. It wasn’t as if it made him any less... Leonidas. But it was as if something in him loosened.

  It occurred to her as she watched his subtle transformation that he might not have known what she’d meant by options.

  Just as it occurred to her that it had never crossed her mind that she wouldn’t keep her baby. She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, but the doctor had told her she was and all she’d thought about was escaping the Betancurs with her child.

  She supposed that answered a question she hadn’t known she had inside her. That she was already a better mother than her own, who had spent a memorable Christmas one year regaling Susannah with tales of how close she’d come to ending her pregnancy, so little had she wanted a child. Susannah had been twelve.

  “You must know that I never wanted to let you go in the first place,” Leonidas said now, drawing her attention back to him and that hooded, lethal way he was watching her from his place by the fire. And she should have been appalled by that. She should have railed against the idea. But instead there was something small and bright inside her, and it glowed. “I entertained the possibility because I owed you. You came to that mountain and you restored me to myself. I told myself the least I could do was grant you a wish. But you should know, Susannah, that there is no such possibility now.”

  He almost sounded sorrowful, but she knew better. She could see the glittering thing in his gaze,
dark and possessive and very, very male.

  “You might as well slam the cage door shut and throw away the key,” she managed to get out past the constriction in her throat.

  “I am not a cage,” Leonidas said with quiet certainty. “The Betancur name has drawbacks, it is true, and most of them were at that gala tonight. But it is also not a cage. On the contrary. I own enough of the world that it is for all intents and purposes yours now. Literally.”

  “I don’t want the world.” She didn’t realize she’d shot to her feet until she was taking a step toward him, very much as if she thought she might take a swing at him next. As if she’d dare. “And I understand that you’re used to ruling everything you see, but I took care of your company and your family and this whole great mess just fine when you were gone. I don’t need you. I don’t want you.”

  “Then why did you go to such trouble to find me?” he demanded, and the force of it rocked her back on her heels. “No one else was looking for me. No one else considered for even one second that I might be anything but dead. Only you. Why?”

  And Susannah hardly knew what she felt as she stared at him, her chest heaving as if she’d been running and her hands in fists at her sides. There were too many things inside her then. There was the fact that she was trapped, in this marriage and in his family and in this life she’d wanted to escape the whole time she’d been stuck in it. More than that, there was the astounding reality of the situation—that there was life inside her. That she’d found her husband on a mountaintop when everyone had accepted that he was gone, and she’d done more than save him. They’d made a life.

  She thought it was grief that swept over her then. Grief for the girl she’d been and grief for the woman she’d been forced to become. Grief for the years she’d lost, and grief for the years he’d had taken from him.

  Susannah told herself it had to be grief, this wild and unwieldy thing that ravaged her, turning her inside out whether she wanted it or not. She told herself it could only be grief.