She was doing this only because it was easier. He understood that. It was a way to hide in plain sight, right out there in the middle of the dance floor, looking for all the world like a fairy tale come to life. The Lazarus Betancur and his lovely bride, at last. It provided the damned optics she loved so much, and in as perfect a form as possible.
But when Leonidas pulled her into his arms, bent his head to meet and hold her gaze, and then began to move—none of that seemed to matter.
There was nothing but the music, then. The music and the woman in his arms, the whisper of her rich green gown and those blue eyes of hers like whole summers in the sort of simpler times he’d never known. There was nothing but Susannah and the way she gazed up at him, the same way she had that day in the compound when he’d been so deep inside her he hadn’t cared what his name was.
It was almost too much to bear.
He was used to waking up in the middle of the night with wildfire dreams of those delirious, delicious moments in the compound storming all over him like some kind of attack. She’d touched him a thousand times since then in those dreams, glutting herself on the hardest part of him, and even better, letting him take his time with her. Again and again, until she fell apart the way she had then.
And he woke every time to find himself alone.
He was used to handling his hunger as best he could, with his hand in the shower and the ferocity of his self-control throughout all the hours they spent together every day. But the scent of her skin was imprinted on him now. The sound her legs made when she slid one over the other to cross them. The sweetness of her breath against his neck when she leaned in to whisper something to him in a meeting.
This was something else. This was holding her against him, as if in an embrace, and for all that it was formal and right there in full view of so many, that was what it felt like.
The kind of embrace Leonidas didn’t want to end. Ever.
And even as alarms went off inside him at that, at a notion so foreign to him, Leonidas couldn’t bring himself to pull away as he knew he should have. He didn’t do what he knew he should. The truth was, he feared he’d lost his sanity a long time ago and the only person who had tried to save him—from the compound, from himself, from that wall between him and his memories—was Susannah.
Then she’d surrendered herself to him, and he couldn’t seem to get past that.
She’d given him a gift and yet somehow he felt as if she owned him. Stranger still, he didn’t mind the feeling when he knew—he knew—everything in him ought to have rebelled at the very notion.
He couldn’t find the words to tell her that. He wasn’t certain he would have said anything even if he could. Instead, he danced.
They danced and they danced. Leonidas swept her from one side of the ballroom to the other, then back again. Whether he could remember how to dance or not was immaterial, because his body certainly knew what to do while he held her. And then did it well.
And all the while he held her in his arms and against his chest as if she was precious. As if she was everything.
As if she was his.
“Susannah...” he said, his voice low and urgent.
But there was something else in her gaze then. Something more than blue heat and longing. She swallowed, hard, and he watched as emotion moved over her face, then made her generous mouth tremble.
She looked miserable.
And Leonidas was such a bastard it only made him hold her tighter.
“You promised,” she whispered, and he shouldn’t have found a kind of solace in the catch in her voice. “You promised me that this was only temporary.”
“Susannah,” he said again, and there was an intensity to his own voice that he didn’t want to recognize. “You must know—”
“I need this to end,” she told him, cutting him off.
Her voice was like a blow, and he didn’t know how she could have spoken so softly when it felt as if she’d hauled off and struck him. Hard.
He told himself he was grateful.
The things he saw in her eyes were not for him. He was a Betancur. The worst of them, according to Susannah. The high king of the vipers, and nothing would ever change that. Not his so-called death and resurrection.
Not her.
“Of course,” he said stiffly, all cut glass and stone. “You need only ask.”
“Leonidas,” she whispered then, her blue eyes filling with a different emotion he didn’t want to see. He could feel it in the way her fingers dug into his shoulder and her hand clenched in his. “Leonidas, you have to understand—”
“I don’t,” he told her, and he willed himself to stone. To granite. To something impenetrable, even to a woman like this, who still smelled like innocence and still gazed at him like he might really be a god after all. “I don’t have to understand anything. We had a deal. Even the worst of the Betancurs can keep his word, Susannah, I assure you.”
She flinched at that. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I think we both know you did. Every word.” He stopped moving, holding her against his chest as if he was turning the dance into something else, right there beneath the riot of chandeliers where everyone could see them. Her green dress pooled around his legs, and he had the fleeting thought that he was the one drowning. Steel, he ordered himself. Stone. “I am everything you think I am and worse, little one. I will eat you alive and enjoy every bite. Running away from me and this cesspool I call my business and family is the best thing you could possibly do.”
“Leonidas, please.”
“You were my widow for four years,” he said with a quiet ferocity that left marks inside him with every word. “All I need is a few more hours. Can you do that?”
She looked helpless and he knew who he was then. Not that he’d been in any doubt. Because he liked it.
“Of course. And this doesn’t have to end tonight. It just has to end.”
Leonidas did nothing to contain himself then. The wildness in him. The darkness he feared might be lethal. The need and the hunger and all the things he wanted to do to her, all wrapped up in that howling thing that didn’t want to let her go. That wanted more.
That wanted.
He knew exactly what he wanted tonight.
“It will be tonight,” he growled at her, still holding her too close against him. “Or not at all. The choice is yours. But once you make it, Susannah, there’s no going back. I am not a forgiving man no matter what identity I wear. Do you understand me?”
He could see her nostrils widen and her pupils dilate. He saw her pulse go mad in her neck. There was a faint flush turning her skin hot and red at once, and she wasn’t doing a particularly good job of restraining her shudders.
But she didn’t speak. It was as if she knew better. As if she knew exactly what it would do to him—to them both—if she did.
Instead she nodded once. Jerkily. Her gaze fixed to his as if she didn’t dare look away.
And without another word, Leonidas turned and led her from the dance floor, like the gentleman he wasn’t, not anymore.
Before he threw her over his shoulder and carted her off to his lair, the way he wanted to do more than he wanted to draw his next breath.
And might do still, he told himself grimly.
The night was young.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SUSANNAH HAD FORGOTTEN about her parents.
The truth was, Leonidas had taken her into his arms and she’d forgotten everything. The charity ball all around them. The fact they were the furthest thing from alone. That there were smiling business rivals and leering paparazzi and everything in between, with his family’s treachery and the inevitable appearance of her own parents, just to make everything that much more fraught.
It had all disappeared.
There was nothing but Leonidas. The music soaring and dancing along with them. And all the sweet and terrible things that swelled between them, making it entirely too hard to breathe.
She’d felt this way only once before, and it had been far more muted in comparison. What kept racing through her like a different sort of heat was that she was positive Leonidas knew it.
She had been such a confused jumble of feelings on their wedding day. She’d still had such high, silly expectations, of course, no matter how many chilly lectures her parents had given her to prepare her—but he had taken the knees out of each and every one of them. She’d been trembling as she’d walked down the aisle, but the cool, assessing look he’d given her when he’d swept back her veil hadn’t assuaged her nerves any. And then when he’d pressed a kiss to her mouth at the front of the church, it had been little more than a stamp of acknowledgment. As if he was affixing a halfhearted seal to one of his lesser possessions. The things he said to her in the car, the way he’d called her a child, had rocked her. And his total disinterest in her at their own reception, too busy was he talking to his business associates, had hurt her feelings more than she’d wanted to admit even then.
A wise girl would have armored herself a little after all these clear indications that this man did not and would not care about her, and she’d tried. Susannah really had tried—but she’d been so young. So frothy and silly, looking back.
But then there had been that dance. That single dance. When Leonidas had held her in his arms and gazed down at her, something arrested and yet stern on his face that seemed to match the wildfire raging inside her. There had been nothing in all the world but the feel of his intensely strong arms around her and the easy way he’d moved her around the floor, as if he was giving her a preview of the way their life would go. Him, in complete control. Her, a little too captivated by the way he handled her and everything else.
And all of it distressingly breathless and dizzyingly smooth.
She shouldn’t remember it the way she did, in vivid and excruciating detail. And it certainly shouldn’t have played out in her head the way it had all these years, over and over. That dance had made her wonder about him, the man she’d lost so swiftly, more than she’d ever admitted to anyone. It had made her wonder what would have happened between them if they’d ever had a proper wedding night. If he hadn’t gotten on that plane.
Now she knew.
And this dance tonight had made her heart hurt all over again, if for different reasons. Because she knew too much now. She knew him and she knew herself and she knew that no matter how precarious it all felt when she was in his arms or how badly she wanted to stay there, she had to go.
Or she wouldn’t.
She was still sorting through the clamor inside her as Leonidas led her from the dance floor. His hand was still wrapped around hers, all that fire and strength making her feel entirely too hot and something achy besides. And Susannah knew she needed to jerk her hand away and step away from her husband.
Now.
Before she spent any more time noticing how perfectly her hand fit in his and how the enveloping heat of it seemed to wrap itself around her and hold tight—
But before she could do the right thing, they stepped into the throng and the first people she saw were her parents.
Her parents, who had not supported Susannah’s transformation from biddable pawn into powerful widow—because they couldn’t control her and oh, how they’d hated that. They’d urged her to remarry with all possible haste, preferably to a man of their choosing, and hadn’t liked it when she’d told them that one marriage of convenience was enough, thank you. They hadn’t much cared for it when she’d ignored their arguments in favor of various suitors anyway.
They’d liked it least of all when she’d stopped taking their calls.
“You ungrateful child!” her father had boomed at her only a few months back when she’d refused to attend a dinner party he was throwing, where he’d wanted to use her presence to impress some of his associates as all things Betancur did, and Susannah had foolishly allowed her assistant to connect his call. “You wouldn’t be where you are if not for me!”
“If I’d listened to you I would have married Leonidas’s dour old uncle when he demanded it three years ago,” she’d replied, happy all of Europe sat between her and her parents’ home outside London. “Somehow, I can live with the consequences of the choice I made.”
The conversation had disintegrated from there.
But invitations to the Betancur Ball were highly prized and fought over across the world, and there was no keeping her own parents off the list. What Susannah couldn’t believe was that somehow she’d forgotten they’d be coming tonight.
You’ve been so consumed with Leonidas you hardly know your own name, she accused herself. And she knew it was true.
It was one more reason she had to put distance between them. Because she knew all too well that the day was fast approaching when she wouldn’t want to do anything of the kind, and then she might as well lock herself away in a tower somewhere before he grew bored of her and did it himself.
Leonidas came to a stop before her parents, and Susannah didn’t know if it was because he recognized them or simply because they dared to block his path.
“You remember my parents, of course,” Susannah said for his benefit. She thought perhaps Leonidas was lucky to forget so many things. She’d like to forget her parents herself. Particularly on a night like tonight when she knew that they’d come with every intention of cutting her down to size. Right here in public where she was unlikely to make a scene or even respond too harshly.
Leonidas inclined his head, but said nothing when Susannah slipped her arm through his. She felt the dark gaze he slid her way, but he still said nothing, so she moved closer to him as if she intended to use him as a human shield.
Perhaps she did.
“Your husband has been resurrected from the dead,” her mother said coolly instead of condescending to offer a conventional greeting to either her daughter or the man whose funeral she’d attended. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have expected a call, Susannah. Or was it your intention that your only flesh and blood should learn of this miracle in the press like everyone else?”
“What my mother means to say, Leonidas,” Susannah said in mild reproof, her gaze on her mother, “is ‘welcome home.’”
Leonidas gave her another swift, dark look she thought was a little too much like a glare, but he didn’t say anything. He certainly didn’t indicate that their relationship had effectively ended just moments before on the dance floor.
Instead, he smiled in that way he did sometimes, that made it seem as if he was bestowing a great gift upon the receiver, and then he shook her father’s hand. The two men started one of those endlessly tedious masculine conversations that purported to be about business and was in fact a clever little game of one-upmanship, which left Susannah to her mother’s manicured talons.
But she still held tight to Leonidas’s arm.
“Imagine my surprise to discover that the tabloids knew more about my daughter’s life than I did,” Annemieke continued, and Susannah doubted anyone would be fooled by the little trill of laughter her mother let out as punctuation.
“Given that you and Father were exhorting me to remarry only a few months ago, I didn’t think you would be the best person to take into my confidence on this matter.”
Annemieke sniffed. “You knew he was alive all this time and yet you played your deceitful games. With everyone. You are a sneaky creature, aren’t you?”
She raised her voice when she said it, because, of course, it was for Leonidas’s benefit. And something swept over Susannah, hot and prickly. Because her mother didn’t know that she was planning to leave this man who had only just returned to her. Her mother didn’t have the slightest idea wha
t their relationship was like. Even if she believed that Susannah had spent years knowing that Leonidas was alive and pretending otherwise, it was obvious they hadn’t spent any time together. How could they have when the world thought he was dead and Susannah had been busy acting as the face of the Betancur Corporation?
Which meant her mother was deliberately trying to undermine Susannah in front of Leonidas. She wanted to malign Susannah in his eyes.
Of course she does, a voice deep inside Susannah said briskly, before that sad, silly part of her that always hoped her parents might act like parents despite years of never doing anything of the kind showed itself. This is about power. Everything to all of these people is always, always about power.
She’d had four years of it, and she was sick of it. More than sick of it. She could feel her aversion to the games these people played like a weight beneath her breastbone, doing its best to claw its way out.
But she refused to give her mother the satisfaction of seeing that she’d landed a blow.
“I haven’t been feeling well,” Susannah said as evenly as possible, before her mother could start in again with some new insult. “I keep getting terrible headaches. I suppose it’s possible that the emotion of Leonidas’s return has got to me more than I might have thought.”
Leonidas moved beside her, letting her know that he was paying attention to her conversation as well as his own. She instantly regretted using the word emotion where he could hear it. And she hated that she was holding on to him in the first place. She’d been handling far more intense scenes than this all by herself for years. He didn’t need to do anything to support her.
But before she could put the distance between them she should have, he shifted where he stood and then slid his hand to the small of her back as if they weren’t strangers who happened to be married to each other, but a unit.
A Baby to Bind His Bride Page 10