What he was doing to Susannah proved it.
His father would simply have beaten a defiant woman. This sort of game was in Apollonia’s wheelhouse. Manipulation and treachery were her life’s blood.
How had he failed to see it?
“I hope you let her know that you know what she did,” Susannah said, frowning. “That she hasn’t gotten away with it. That there will be consequences, whether she likes it or not.”
But Leonidas was looking past her then. He looked out toward the rocks and the sea beyond. The wild Greek sea that stirred something deep in his bones. It always had. He liked the rawness of these islands, unmanicured and untamed. They spoke to something deep inside him, and he understood in a sudden flash that Susannah did the same.
She had warned him. He couldn’t pretend she hadn’t. He could keep her, but he would never have her. A cage was a cage was a cage.
And he recognized that now only because he’d broken out of his. At long last, he’d finally seen his mother for who she was. Not an amusing socialite, flitting here and there as the whim took her. But the woman who had ordered the murder of her own son. On a whim.
She hadn’t even denied it.
“You were being so tiresome about my allowance,” she’d told him when he’d called, her voice shifting over into that nasally whine she used when she thought she could plead her way out of a scrape. She didn’t seem to understand that this was no “scrape.” That Leonidas was done. “What did you expect me to do?”
Some part of him—most of him—might have preferred to stay imprisoned in the last gasp of the lie he’d built a long time ago to explain Apollonia’s behavior, because it was easier. It was what he knew.
But this was better. It had to be. There had to be a point to this sort of bleak freedom, he was sure of it, even if he couldn’t see it now.
“I have never loved anything in my life,” he told Susannah, out where the air was fresh and the sky was blue and none of the stink of his family could taint her. “I doubt I am capable, and now I know why.”
“You are not responsible for the things that woman did,” Susannah retorted, instantly drawing herself up as if she intended to go to war with Apollonia there and then. “Not a single thing.”
“I fear it is in my blood,” he confessed. “It’s not only the Betancurs. It’s every single part of me. Venal. Malicious. Scheming and vile. Those are my bones, Susannah. My flesh. My blood.”
“Leonidas,” she began.
But he couldn’t stop.
“I have been a god and I have been a king, of sorts. I have acted the lover, but I have never felt a thing. I can run a company and I can lead a cult, but I have no idea how to raise a child. How to be a father.” He shook his head, not sure if he was dazed or this was what it felt like to finally have perfect, devastating clarity. “I’m not entirely certain I know how to be a man.”
“Stop it.” Her voice was ragged. A scrape of sound, and then she was moving toward him again. He hadn’t realized he’d stepped away. “Just stop this.”
Susannah didn’t wait for him to argue as she must surely have known he would. She crossed the distance between them, dropping her shawl at her feet and not bothering to look back. She leaned in and wrapped her arms around him at his waist, then tilted her head back to scowl up at him.
“I want you to stop talking,” she told him.
And he heard it then. All the power and authority of the Widow Betancur herself. A woman who had every expectation of being obeyed.
But he had never been anybody’s underling. “And if I refuse?”
She studied him for a moment, then she stepped back again. Keeping her gaze fixed to his, she reached down to gather up the loose, flowing dress she wore. It was long and deceptively shapeless while managing to emphasize the sweetness of her figure, and she simply watched him with that challenging glint in her eyes while she pulled it up and off. And then she stood before him in nothing at all save a pair of panties.
She was already so ripe. Her breasts had grown heavier in these weeks, round and sweet. Her belly was beginning to curve outward, reminding him of the baby she carried even now. And the fact that she was his.
No matter who he was, no matter what he’d done, she was still his.
“You can refuse me if you like,” she said, all womanly challenge. “Or you can take me. I know what I would choose.”
And Leonidas might not be much of a man, but he still was one. And when it came to this woman he had no defenses left.
He hauled her to him, crashing his mouth to hers, and taking her with all the wild ferocity that stampeded through him.
Raw. Hot.
Perfect.
She was fire, she was need, and he was nothing but greedy where Susannah was concerned.
He couldn’t get close enough. He couldn’t taste her enough, touch her enough.
Leonidas took her down onto the lounger where she’d been sitting, and let himself go. It was a frenzy, it was a dance. It was madness and it was beautiful.
And she was his.
Right here, right now, she was his.
And as he thrust into her, for what he understood even then was the last time, he let himself pretend that he deserved her.
Just this once. Just for this moment. Just to see what that felt like.
He made her fall apart. He made her scream his name. He made her beg, and he knew he’d never hear anything so beautiful again as the sound of her voice when she pleaded with him for more. And then more still.
When he finally let himself go, Leonidas toppled over the side of the world, and he carried Susannah with him one final time.
And later that afternoon, while the bright Greek sun was still shining and the air was still cold, he put her on that helicopter and he sent her away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT WAS NOT a good week.
Leonidas spent most of it in his office, because he couldn’t bear to be in that damned penthouse, filled as it was with the ghost of the wife he’d sent away.
For her own good, he snarled at himself every time he thought about it—but he never seemed to ease his own agitation. He was beginning to imagine it couldn’t be done.
It had amazed him at first that a space he’d lived in with her for only seven short weeks should feel haunted by her, particularly when she’d gone to such lengths to avoid him. But Susannah was everywhere, filling up the soaring levels of the penthouse as if she was some kind of aria he couldn’t bring himself to shut off or even turn down. He didn’t understand how she could manage to inhabit a place when she wasn’t even in it, especially when he hadn’t spent the kind of time with her in the penthouse as he had on the island.
They had never shared his bed in Rome. He’d never touched her the way he wanted to here.
And still he lay awake as if, were he only to concentrate enough, he might catch her scent on pillows she’d never touched.
He’d spent his first night back from the island in the penthouse, restless and sleepless, and he’d avoided it ever since. It was easy enough to spend twenty-four hours a day in the office, because there was always a Betancur property somewhere in the world that required attention. Leonidas had poured himself into his work the way he’d done so single-mindedly before his wedding. And he had his staff pack up all the things Susannah had left in the guest room she’d stayed in while she was his widow, and he’d forwarded them on to her new home across the world from him.
Just as he’d wanted, he reminded himself daily.
He had not asked his staff in the Betancur Corporation’s Sydney office to report in on how she was settling into life in Australia. She wasn’t to be tailed and watched, or have any security above and beyond what was necessary for a woman in her position. He had vowed to himself that this would be a clean brea
k.
“You wondered why you couldn’t have me,” she’d said back on the island when he’d informed her that they needed to separate. That this was over, this thing between them. That their marriage worked, clearly, only when they were apart. Her voice had been thick with emotions he didn’t want to recognize or even acknowledge, and she’d swayed slightly as she stood, as if he’d dealt her a body blow. “This is why. There was never any question that you would leave. It was only a question of how and when.” Her gaze had nearly unmanned him. “I expected tawdry affairs I’d be forced to read about in the papers, if I’m honest. That’s usually how the people we know send these messages, isn’t it?”
He’d wanted to answer her in a way she could not possibly mistake for the usual vicious games of the kinds of people who glittered in Europe’s most prestigious ballrooms and viewed the tabloids as their own version of social media. But he’d kept himself under control. Barely.
“It is a big world,” he’d said coldly. Hoping he could turn them both to ice so neither one of them could feel a thing. “All I ask is that you choose a place to live that is within reach of one of the Betancur Corporation offices.”
“So you can monitor my every move, I presume?”
“So that if the child or you are ever in need, help can arrive swiftly,” he’d replied. Through his teeth. “I am trying very hard not to be the monster here, Susannah.”
But he’d felt like one. His scars had felt like convictions, pressed into his flesh for all the world to see.
“I want to live in Sydney,” she’d told him, her voice a rough sort of whisper. “I not only wish to be on a different continent from you, but across the international dateline whenever possible. So we won’t even have a day in common.”
He hadn’t responded to that the way he’d have liked to, either. Instead, he’d sent her on her way and had a plane meet her in Athens for the flight to Sydney. She’d been as far out of his life as it was possible for her to get without him retreating back to the compound in Idaho.
And now he had exactly what he’d wanted.
Leonidas reminded himself of that as he stood at the window in his immaculately furnished, quietly intimidating office, where he could look out over Rome and feel like a king instead of a monstrous wild man who’d thrived in the wilderness for years. Centuries of rich, powerful men had stood in positions much like this one, looking out at the same view. Rome had been breeding emperors since the dawn of time, and what was he but one more?
An empty king on an empty throne, he thought with more than a little bitterness today. But that was what he’d asked for.
He hadn’t been lying when he’d told her that he always, always got what he wanted. It was only that it had never really occurred to him what a pyrrhic victory that could be, and the truth was, the world without her felt entirely too much like bitter ash.
It will fade in time, he told himself now. Everything does.
Leonidas realized he wasn’t paying attention to the conference call he was meant to be on, the way he hadn’t been paying attention to much these last days. His memory was as good as it was going to get, he’d decided. Too good, since all it seemed to want to do was play out every moment of every interaction he’d had with Susannah since she’d found him in the compound. On an endless, vivid loop.
“I want this settled,” he interjected into the heated conversation between several vice presidents scattered around the world, because he had no patience left. Not when he had to spend his every waking moment not flying to Sydney. The call went quiet. “Quickly.”
Someone cleared his throat. He heard the shuffle of papers, echoing down the line, and what sounded like traffic noise in some or other distant city.
“Of course,” the Philippines vice president began carefully. “But it will take a little more time to really—”
“I want the matter dealt with,” Leonidas said again, more brusquely this time. “I don’t want any more discussion. If you cannot do it, I will find someone who can.”
He ended the call with perhaps a bit more force than necessary, and when he turned around to look out through the glass at the rest of the executive floor, he froze.
He thought he was hallucinating.
On some level, he welcomed it.
Leonidas was already starting to think of his time in Idaho as an extended hallucination. It already seemed more like a dream than a reality he’d known for four years—the only reality he’d known at all while he was in it. He’d decided that perhaps he needed to simply accept that he was the sort of person for whom reality was malleable. So it made perfect sense that he should see Susannah marching down the central corridor of the executive floor of the Betancourt Corporation dressed in her trademark inky black.
His widow had been resurrected. And was headed straight for him.
And Leonidas told himself that what he felt as he watched her stride toward him in impossible shoes with an unreadable expression on her lovely face was fury.
The way his pulse rocketed. The way his heart kicked at his ribs. That pounding thing in his head, his gut, his sex.
Fury. He told himself it had to be fury that she had dared contradict his wishes and show up here.
Because he wouldn’t let it be anything else.
Susannah nodded imperiously at his secretary, but didn’t slow. She swept past the outer desk, then pushed her way into his office as if he’d issued her an engraved invitation to do just that.
And then she was here. Right here. And it had been only a week since he’d last seen her on that island. A week since he’d said the words he knew would hurt her, and so they had. A week since she’d stood before him, her mouth moving in a way that told him she was working her hardest to keep her tears inside. She hadn’t let one fall. Not a single one.
He’d felt that like a loss, too.
But today he told himself that his response to her was fury, because it should have been. He didn’t move as she kept coming, bearing down upon him where he stood as if she was considering toppling him straight backward, through the window and down to the streets of Rome far below.
A part of him thought he might let her try.
Before she made it all the way to the window, she veered to the left and to his desk. Her blue eyes met his and he felt himself tense, because the look that she was giving him was not exactly friendly. She held his gaze and stabbed her finger on the button that made the glass in all his windows that faced the office go smoky. Giving them exactly the sort of privacy he didn’t want.
“You are supposed to be in Sydney.” His voice sounded like steel. Harsh and very nearly rude. “Sydney, Australia, to be precise, which is a good, long way from here. A good, long, deliberate way from here.”
“As you can see, I am not in Sydney.”
This woman made him...thirsty. His eyes drank her in and he wanted to follow his gaze with his hands. The deep black dress she wore fit her beautifully, and called attention to that tiniest of swells at her belly. So tiny that he very much doubted anyone but him would know what it signified.
But he knew. Oh, did he know.
And this time, when a new wave of fury broke over him, he knew it wasn’t masking anything. He knew it was real.
“Do you think I sent you away for my health?” he demanded.
She let out a noise. “I don’t care why you sent me away, Leonidas.”
And he had never heard that tone from her before. Not at all cool. Not remotely serene. Not calm in any way whatsoever. It was so surprising—so very unlike the Susannah he knew—that it almost knocked him back a step.
He frowned at her, and realized abruptly that while she looked as sleek and controlled as she usually did, it was only the surface. The effortless chignon to tame her blond hair, the stunning dress that called attention to its asymmetrical hem and its dark co
lor, and the sort of shoes that most women couldn’t stand in upright, much less use to stride across office buildings. All of that was typical Susannah.
But her blue eyes were a storm.
And this close to her, hidden away behind smoky glass in his office, he could see that she was trembling besides.
“Susannah—”
“I don’t care,” she said again, more sharply this time. She took a step toward him, then stopped as if she wasn’t sure she could control herself. “For once, I just don’t care about you or your health or your feelings or anything else. My God, Leonidas, do you realize that my entire life has been about you?”
“Hardly.” Leonidas scoffed at her. At that notion. At the heavy thing that moved in him, entirely too much like shame. “I doubt you could have picked me out of a lineup before our marriage.”
And the laugh she let out then was hollow. Not much like laughter at all. It set his teeth on edge.
“You’re thinking of yourself, not me,” she retorted. “A rather common occurrence, I think.” When he only blinked at her, astonished, she pushed on. “I was a teenager. My parents told me that I was promised to you long before we got married, and believe me, I knew exactly who I was saving myself for. You were Leonidas Betancur. I could have found you blindfolded and in the dark.”
He told himself there was no reason that, too, should settle on him like an indictment.
“I am not responsible for the fantasy life of a schoolgirl,” he gritted out at her.
Susannah nodded, as if he’d confirmed her expectations. Low ones, at that. “On our wedding day, you took great pains to tell me how little the things that mattered to me matter to you. Like my schoolgirl fantasies that you might treat me the way any man treats his bride. And I accepted that, because my mother told me it was my place to do so.”
Leonidas couldn’t tell if he was affronted or abashed by that. He didn’t much care for either. He decided he preferred affront, and stood taller.
“You were nineteen years old and I was an extremely busy—”
“But then you died,” she continued, and there was a shaking in her voice, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the least. She advanced another step. “Has it ever crossed your mind how much easier it would have been for me to marry someone else after that?”
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