Because the possibility that it was joy, ferocious and encompassing, might be the end of her.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly, her voice sounding as rough as she felt. “I didn’t believe the plane could go down like that. I certainly didn’t believe it was an accident. And the more I looked into it, the less I believed you’d died.”
“But you don’t need me. You don’t want me.”
He wasn’t asking her a question. He was taunting her. Leonidas shifted then. He pushed away from the fireplace and he stalked toward her, making everything inside Susannah shake to hold her ground.
And then he kept right on coming, until he was standing over her and she was forced to tilt her head back to meet his gaze.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t want you. I want to be free.”
He took her face in his hands, holding her fast, and this close his eyes were a storm. Ink dark with gold like lightning, and she felt the buzz of it. Everywhere.
Inside and out.
As complicated as that mad thing that could not possibly be joy.
“This is as close as you’re going to get, little one,” he told her, the sound of that same madness in his gaze, his voice.
And then he claimed her mouth with his.
CHAPTER NINE
WHEN SHE KISSED him back, shifting her body so she could press closer against him and dig her hands into his chest, something deep inside Leonidas eased.
Even as something else burned anew, harder and wilder at once.
He kissed her again and again. He dug his fingers into the sweet, shining gold of her hair and he let it tumble down over her shoulders, and still he took her mouth, claiming her and possessing her and marking her the only way he could.
She was his. His.
And he was tired of keeping himself on a leash where his woman—his wife—was concerned.
She wasn’t going anywhere. Never, ever again.
He had never been much of a gentleman, and then he’d become a god. He was the one who’d been acting as if he was in a cage these last seven weeks, but that time was over now.
She was pregnant. His beautiful Susannah was ripe with his child even now. A child they’d made when she’d surrendered her innocence to him in that compound where he hadn’t known his own name until he’d tasted her. A child she’d already started building inside her when she’d walked with him through the gates and back into the world.
Leonidas had never felt anything like this in his life.
Triumph pounded through him, wild and ruthless in turn, and he wanted to shout out his savage joy from the rooftops of Paris until the whole world trembled before the child that he would bring into it.
And this woman whom he had no intention of letting out of his sight, ever, was a miracle. His miracle. She had not left him on that mountain. She hadn’t left him the moment she’d delivered him home. She hadn’t left when she’d wanted to do it a month ago, and despite what she’d said on the dance floor, she hadn’t left him tonight, either.
And now she’d missed her chance, because he would see to it that she never would.
She was his wife. She carried his child.
Nothing would ever be the same.
Leonidas devoured her mouth, and when her sweet little moans began to sound like accusations, greedy and hungry against his mouth, he lifted her against him and then bore her down onto the thick rug that stretched out before the fire on the floor of his salon. The flames crackled behind their grate, and he laid her out there before the fire like some kind of offering, determined that this time he would go slow.
This time, he would learn her. This woman who had consented to be his right hand all these weeks, when she so easily could have left him to fend for himself. This woman who was not only the wife who had waited for him and stayed dressed in black years after his death, but who was also the mother of his child.
The child who would not grow up the way he did, with a cruel father and a selfish mother, beaten into becoming the Betancur heir they’d wanted.
He would die before he let that happen and for good this time.
But first he intended to imprint himself on Susannah. He wanted her to taste him when she licked her own lips. He wanted her to feel him as if he was inside her, even when he wasn’t.
He wanted to wreck her and redeem her, over and over, until the very idea of leaving him was what made those tears spill from her eyes.
And then he wanted to keep doing it, again and again, until this edgy hunger for her was sated at last. If it could be.
He took his time, exulting in the fact there was no barbed wire here. No followers with an arsenal and no video cameras on the walls.
There was nothing but the two of them. At last.
Leonidas moved over her, touching and tasting and indulging himself, from her lush mouth all the way down to the delicate arch of her feet. Then back again. He stripped off the stunning ball gown he’d insisted she wear, in that bright green that was so unlike the Widow Bettencourt that he expected whole tabloids to speak of nothing else come morning.
But he couldn’t wait to take it off her.
He stripped her bare so that he could get to the glory beneath it, all those luscious curves he’d dreamed a thousand times since that day in Idaho. Did he imagine that they were richer than he recalled? He cupped her breasts in his palms, then tried them against his tongue. He worshipped that belly of hers that was still flat, though slightly thicker, perhaps, than it had been that last time.
He settled himself between her legs and bent to taste her fully. Sweet cream and that feminine kick, she went straight to his head. And he did absolutely nothing to stop the intoxication.
He brought her to a shuddering, rolling sort of shattering with his mouth, there where she was wet and needy. Then he did it again. And only when she called out his name, her voice cracking, did Leonidas finally crawl up the length of her and fit himself to her center.
At last.
Then he finally thrust himself into her, sinking to the hilt, and loved the hitch in the little sound she made as he possessed her completely.
He waited as she accommodated him, wriggling her hips and flushed bright everywhere, more beautiful beneath him than any woman had a right to be.
And when he moved, it was with the knowledge that she had given him the one thing he hadn’t known he wanted more than anything else in this world. Again.
His blood was all around him. His cousins, his mother, more Betancurs than anyone could possibly want. They were shoved down his throat whether he liked it or not. They schemed and plotted. They lived sparkling lives his hard work provided them and they still would have been the first to snap at him if they could. They were the part of his life he wished could have stayed forgotten, but it wasn’t as if he could escape them. They were everywhere.
It had been that way all his life. His mother the worst of them, demanding and deceitful and never, ever any kind of parent in any real sense. He’d stopped expecting any better of her and he’d stopped wondering why he always felt empty inside when others clearly did not.
He knew why. This was how they’d made him. This was who his family wanted him to be, this harsh creature who felt nothing.
But Susannah hated them all as much as he did. She wanted nothing to do with his blood or what proximity to the Betancurs could do for her. If she saw the emptiness in him, she didn’t shy away from it. On the contrary, she was the only person he’d ever met who treated him as if he was no better or different from anyone else.
And she had given him a family.
A family.
Leonidas would do everything in his power to make sure that he never lost what was his. Not to his own memory, and certainly not to those vultures who banked on the fact they shared his blood, assuming t
hat would keep them safe.
He made himself a vow, there on the floor in his Paris townhome, on the night of the Betancur Ball where once again, Susannah had given him the world.
He would do no less for her—whether she liked it or not.
And then he lost himself in her, making her cry out again and again, until he finally lost his patience. He gathered her to him, then reached down between them to help her fly apart one last time.
And he followed, calling out her name as he fell.
Later, she stirred against him and he lifted her up, carrying her through the house to the room he had no intention of letting her stay in on her own the way she’d planned to do when they’d arrived. But there was no point arguing it now. He found a loose long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of lounging pajama bottoms, and dressed her quickly. She made a face at him while he did it, but then curled herself into a ball on the bed in the last guest suite she would occupy.
And when she fell asleep, she fell hard.
With any luck, she’d stay that way until they made it to the island. Where he had every intention of keeping her until she couldn’t imagine any possible scenario that involved leaving him, because that was unacceptable.
She was his.
Leonidas had led a cult for years. Whether he’d been a figurehead or not, he knew exactly how to keep one woman where he wanted her, and he had no qualms about using each and every one of the dirty little tricks he knew to make her think it was the best idea anyone had ever had.
He stood there and watched her sleep for a moment, aware that his heart was pounding at him and that he should probably be concerned that it was so easy for him to slip back into the sort of headspace the Count had always occupied. But he wasn’t. The truth was that the Leonidas Betancur who had got on that plane and the man who had been dragged from its ashes weren’t so different. Neither one of them had believed in much besides themselves. The Count had possessed a version of morality, but it had all been arranged around the fact he’d believed he was at the center of everything.
Susannah had changed that, as well. She’d knitted him together and made him care about her, too. It should have outraged him. Maybe on some level it did. But more than that was the deep, abiding notion that she belonged with him and anything else was intolerable.
Especially now that she was carrying his child.
It was the beginning and the end of everything, and he’d be happy to fight with her about it on his favorite private island, where she could scream into the impervious ocean if she liked and it wouldn’t do a single thing to save her. If he was honest, he was almost looking forward to watching what she’d do when she realized she really was stuck there. With him.
Leonidas smiled, then tucked a strand of her golden hair behind her ear. He had to order himself not to bend closer and put his lips to her sweetly flushed cheek, because he knew he wouldn’t stop if he did.
But he forced himself away from her, out into the hall.
Then he called for his staff and his plane, and methodically set about kidnapping his wife.
* * *
Susannah jolted awake when the plane touched down and she had no idea where she was.
She knew she was on one of the Betancur jets, though it took her a moment to recognize the stateroom she was in. She clung to the side of the bed as the plane taxied in, frowning as she tried to make sense of the fact that she’d apparently slept through an entire flight to somewhere unknown.
Paris gleamed in her memory. And the doctor’s visit. Her pregnancy, confirmed.
And what had happened after that announcement, there before the fire.
But everything else following it was a blur. She had the vague recollection of a car moving through the city in the dark, her head pillowed on Leonidas’s shoulder. Then the spinning sensation of being lifted into his arms.
She might have thought she’d been drugged but she’d felt this way before, and more than once these last weeks. This powerfully exhausted. The good news was that she knew it was the pregnancy now, not something that required a hospital stay, or that allergy she’d been half-convinced she had to Leonidas.
When the plane came to a full stop she stayed where she was for a while, then rolled out of the bed, surprised that no attendant—or confusing, breathtaking husband—had come looking for her.
She stepped out into the corridor, blinking in the light that poured in from the plane’s windows in the common areas. It told her two things—that the shades had been pulled in her stateroom and that wherever they were, it was morning.
And when she looked out the windows, she could see the sea.
She made her way to the front of the plane and stepped out onto the landing at the top of the jet’s fold-up steps. She blinked as she took in the soft light, then looked around, realizing after a beat or two that she was on a small landing strip on a rocky island. She saw silvery olive trees in all directions, solid hills covered in green, and the sea hovering in the distance on all sides, blue and gray in turn.
And Leonidas waited at the foot of the stairs, leaning against the side of a sleek, deep green Range Rover.
It was only then that she became aware of what she was wearing. The long-sleeve shirt she slept in and a pair of very loose yoga pants. And there was only one way that she could have come to be wearing such things, she thought, when she had no recollection of putting them on. When the last thing she knew she’d been wearing was that green dress at the ball.
Although she hadn’t been wearing much of anything in front of the fire.
And maybe that was what shivered through her then. The sheer intimacy of the fact he’d dressed her. She imagined him tugging clothes into place over her bare skin, then pulling her hair out of the way...
It wasn’t heat that moved through her then, though she thought it was related in its way. It was something far more dangerous. She tried to swallow it down, but her feet were moving without her permission, carrying her down the metal stairs whether she wanted to go or not.
And she could feel Leonidas’s dark gaze on her all the way.
She made it to the bottom of the steps, then crossed over to stand in front of him, and the silence was what got to her first. She was so used to Rome. Paris. Great cities filled with as many people as cars. Foot traffic and horns, sirens and music. But there was nothing like that here. There was a crisp, fresh breeze that smelled of salt. No voices. No sounds of traffic in the distance. It was as if they were the only two people left on the earth.
“Where are we?” she asked, and was not surprised to hear how hushed she sounded, as if the island demanded it.
“Greece,” Leonidas replied. Perhaps too readily. “More or less.”
“What are we doing in Greece?” What she meant was, Why are we so clearly not in Athens near the Betancur offices if we’re in Greece? But she didn’t say that part out loud. It was as if some part of her thought the island spoke for itself.
Leonidas’s hard mouth kicked up a little bit in one corner, but something about that smile of his didn’t exactly make her feel easy. He did not cross his arms, or straighten from where he continued to lounge against the side of his vehicle. And something a little too much like foreboding moved through her then.
“In one sense, we are in Greece because I am Greek,” he said, and his conversational tone only made the foreboding worse. Susannah felt the itch of it down the length of her spine. “My mother is Greek, anyway. This island has been in her family for many generations. There are very few staff, and all of them are some relation to me.” That curve in the corner of his mouth deepened. “I mention this because you are very enterprising, I think, and you do not wish to frustrate yourself unnecessarily with fruitless escape attempts.”
She blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“I will not insult you by giving you a
list of rules, Susannah. That is the beauty of an island such as this. There is no way off. No ferries land here. The plane will leave tonight and you will not be on it, and there is a helicopter that flies only at my command. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I assume I’m still asleep,” she said tightly. “And this is a terrible nightmare.”
“Alas, you are wide awake.”
“Then I do not understand,” she managed to say, though she was very much afraid that she did. “It sounds as if you’ve just imprisoned me.”
“I prefer to think of it as an opportunity for you to embrace the realities of your life.” Leonidas inclined his head. “An opportunity to spend some time accepting what is and let go of what cannot be.”
“That sounds suspiciously like cult talk.”
“If that is what you wish to call it, I cannot argue.” One arrogant shoulder rose, then fell. “I would encourage you to recall that I was not a follower of any cult. I was the leader.” He smiled at her. “I can be very persuasive.”
“You need to take me back to civilization,” she snapped at him, because that smile lit her up inside and she didn’t know which one of them she hated more for it. “Immediately.”
Leonidas shook his head, almost as if he pitied her. “I’m afraid I’m not going to do that.”
And it was as if everything that had happened and everything she’d seen since she’d stepped off that plane into the wilds of Idaho slammed into her then. The compound itself, after that steep climb. The barbed wire, the cameras, the ugly weapon pointed at her with a few threats besides. Not to mention what had happened inside with her long-lost husband.
There’d been the press storm when they’d left, when Leonidas had been returned to the world that had thought him dead. And these weeks of close proximity, always so scrupulously polite and careful not to touch too much, as if she wasn’t spending entirely too much time with the man she meant to leave. The Betancur Ball. His cousins and his mother and then worse, her parents.
And that dance in the middle of all the rest of it, like some bittersweet nod to a life she’d only ever dreamed about but had never seen. It had never existed and it never would, and the fact that she discovered she was pregnant and then fell all over him like some kind of wild animal didn’t change that.
A Baby to Bind His Bride Page 12
