A Baby To Bind His Bride

“You are not the Count of anything. You are Leonidas Cristiano Betancur, and you are the heir to the Betancur Corporation. That means that you are so wealthy you could buy every mountain in this range, and then some, from your pocket change alone. It means that you are so powerful that someone—very likely a member of your own family—had to scheme up a plane crash to get around you.”

The pain in his temples was sharpening. The pressure at the base of his skull was intensifying.

“I am not who you think I am,” he managed to say.

“You are exactly who I think you are,” she retorted. “And Leonidas, it is far past time for you to come home.”

There was the pain and then a roaring, loud and rough, but he understood somehow it was inside him.

Maybe that was the demon that took him then. Maybe that was what made him haul her closer to him as if he was someone else and she was married to him the way she claimed.

Maybe that was why he crushed her mouth with his, tasting her at last. Tasting all her lies—

But that was the trouble.

One kiss, and he remembered.

He remembered everything.

Everything.

Who he was. How he’d come here. His last moments on that doomed flight and his lovely young bride, too, whom he’d left behind without a second thought because that was the man he’d been then, formidable and focused all the way through.

He was Leonidas Betancur, not a bloody count. And he had spent four years in a log cabin surrounded by acolytes obsessed with purity, which was very nearly hilarious, because there was not a damned thing about him that was or ever had been pure.

So he kissed little Susannah, who should have known better. Little Susannah who had been thrown to him like bait all those years ago, a power move by her loathsome parents and a boon to his own devious family, because he’d always avoided innocence. He’d lost his own so early.

His own, brutal father had seen to that.

He angled his head and he pulled her closer, tasting her and taking her, plundering her mouth like a man possessed.

She tasted sweet and lush, and she went straight to his head. He told himself it was only that it had been so long. The part of him that had honestly believed he was who these crazy people thought he was—the part that had developed the conscience Leonidas had never bothered with—thought he should stop.

But he didn’t.

He kissed her again and again. He kissed her until the rest of her was as soft and pliable as her mouth. He kissed her until she looped her arms around his neck and slid against him as if she couldn’t stand on her own feet. He kissed her until she was making tiny noises in the back of her throat.

He remembered her in a confection of a white dress and all the people their families had invited to the ceremony on the Betancur family estate in France. He remembered how wide her blue eyes had been and how young she’d seemed, the virgin sacrifice his brute of a father had bought for him before he’d died. A gift tied up in an alliance that benefited the family.

One more bit of evidence of the insupportable rot that was the Betancur blood—

But Leonidas didn’t care about that.

“Leonidas,” she whispered, tearing her mouth from his. “Leonidas, I—”

He didn’t want to talk. He wanted her mouth, so he took it.

Susannah had found him here. Susannah had brought him back his life.

So he swept her up into his arms, never moving his mouth from hers for an instant, and Leonidas carried her into the bedroom he couldn’t wait to leave at last.

But first, Susannah owed him that wedding night.

And four years later, Leonidas was ready to collect.

CHAPTER THREE (#u7f16f372-c946-544d-ba84-b431224dac0f)

LEONIDAS’S MOUTH WAS on hers, and she couldn’t seem to recover from the sweet shock of it. He kissed her again and again and again, and the only thing she could manage to do was surrender herself to the slick, epic feel of his mouth against hers.

As if she’d spent all these years stumbling around in the dark, and the taste of this man was the light at last.

She should stop him. Susannah knew that. She should step back and draw some boundaries. Make some rules. Demand that he stop pretending he didn’t remember her, for a start. She didn’t believe in amnesia. She didn’t believe that someone like Leonidas, so bold and relentless and bright, could ever disappear.

But then, he’d always been larger than life to her. She’d known who he was since she was a child and had been thrilled when her parents had informed her she was to marry him. He’d been like a starry sky as far as she’d been concerned on her wedding day, and some part of her had refused to believe that a man that powerful could be snuffed out so easily, so quickly.

And before she’d had a chance to touch him like this, the way she’d imagined so fervently before their wedding—

She needed to stop him. She needed to assert herself. She needed to let him know that the girl he’d married had died the day he had and she was far more sure and powerful now than she’d been then.

But she didn’t do any of the things she imagined she should.

When Leonidas kissed her, she kissed him back, inexpert and desperate. She didn’t pause to tell him how little she knew of men or their ways or the things that lips and teeth and that delirious angle of his hard jaw could do. She met his mouth as best she could. She tasted him in turn.

And she surrendered.

When he lifted her up in his arms, she thought that was an excellent opportunity to do...something. Anything. But his mouth was on hers as he moved, and Susannah realized that she’d been lying to herself for a very long time.

She could hardly remember the silly teenager she’d been on the day of her wedding after all that had happened since. She’d known she was sheltered back then, in the same way she’d known that her father was a very high-level banker and that her Dutch mother loathed living in England. But knowing she was sheltered and then dealing with the ramifications of her own naïveté were two very different things, it turned out. And Susannah had been dealing with the consequences of the way she’d been raised—not to mention her parents’ aspirations for their only child—for so long now, and in such a pressure cooker, that it was easy to forget the truth of things.

Such as the fact that when her parents had told her—a dreamy sixteen-year-old girl who’d spent most of her life in a very remote and strict Swiss boarding school with other heiresses to various kingdoms and fortunes—that she was destined to marry the scion of the Betancur family, Susannah hadn’t been upset. She hadn’t cried into her pillow every night the way her roommate did at the prospect of her own marriage, scared of the life spooling out in front of her without her permission or input.

On the contrary, she’d been delighted.

Leonidas was gorgeous, all her school friends had agreed. He was older than them, but much younger than some of her friends’ betrothed, and with all his hair and teeth as far as anyone could tell. And she’d met him, so she knew firsthand that he was merciless and forbidding in ways that had made her feel tingly all over. Moreover, every time they’d interacted—as few and far between as those times might have been over the years, because he was an important man and she was just a girl, as her mother chastised her—he’d always treated her with a great patience even she’d been able to see was at complete odds with the ferocity of his dark gaze.

She forgotten that. He’d disappointed her on her wedding night, then he’d died, and she’d forgotten. She’d lost herself in the scandal and intrigue of the Betancur Corporation and all its attendant family drama, and she’d completely failed to remember that when it came to Leonidas she had always been a very, very silly girl.

Back when she was one, and again now. Clearly.

Say something, she ordered herself.

But then he was laying her down on the bed in the next room, and following her down to the mattress, and Susannah didn’t have it in her to care if she was silly.

She’d been promised a wedding night. Four years ago, she’d expected to hand over her innocence to the man who’d become her husband and instead, she’d been left to years of widow’s weeds and seas of enemies—not all of whom had come at her as opponents.

Susannah couldn’t count the number of men who’d tried to seduce her over the years, many related to Leonidas, but she’d always held firm. She was the Widow Betancur and she mourned. She grieved. That little bit of fiction had protected her when nothing else could.

But Leonidas wasn’t dead. And more than that, as he sprawled out above her on that firm mattress and pressed her into it, all his lean, solid strength making her breathless with a dizzy sort of joy, it made her forget that he had ever disappeared in the first place.