She wanted her baby. She didn’t want the Betancur baby and the circus that went along with that. She didn’t want Leonidas.
Because she couldn’t have him, not the way she wanted him, and all of this was just delaying the inevitable. Why couldn’t he see that?
“I told you that I didn’t want to live in a prison,” she said when she was sure that she could speak again, and she didn’t care if she sounded distinctly unlike her usual serene self. She didn’t care if he saw her fall apart right there in front of him. “I told you that our marriage already felt like a cage. Your name is the key in the lock. I told you. And your response to that was to pack as I was sleeping and strand me on some island?”
Leonidas finally stood. He straightened from the side of the Range Rover, unfolding to his full height, and then loomed there above her. His arms dropped to his sides and his face took on that granite, lethal expression that she somehow kept forgetting was the truth of him. She’d seen it when he was the Count. And she’d seen it last night in Paris. And there been glimpses here and there, across these past seven weeks, of a different side to the man—but she understood now that they were flashes, nothing more.
This was the truth of Leonidas Betancur. Susannah had absolutely no doubt. Ruthless, bordering on grim, seeming practically to burn with all that power he carried around so effortlessly inside him.
This was the man she’d married. This was the man she’d given her innocence to, then made a baby with.
And she had no one to blame but herself, because he’d never hidden any of it. He was a Betancur. This was who he was and always had been.
“I am your cage,” he told her, in the kind of voice it didn’t surprise her at all had led men to abandon their lives and follow him up the side of a mountain “The marriage, the Betancur name, all of that is noise. The only prison you need worry about is me, Susannah. And I will hold you forever.”
She wanted to shake. She wanted to cry—put her head down and sob until her heart felt like hers again. She wanted to scream at him, beat at him with her fists, perhaps. Pound on him until something made sense again, but she didn’t do it. That same impossible grief—because it couldn’t be joy, not here, not now—rocked through her again.
She sucked in a breath and tried to straighten her shoulders. “If that was meant to make me feel better, it failed.”
“You are carrying my child,” he blazed at her, and it took everything she had not to jump. “I don’t know what kind of man you think I am, but I don’t give away what’s mine, Susannah.”
It was possible the top of her head exploded. She surged forward, recklessly taking her finger and poking him in the chest with it. “I am not yours.”
Leonidas wrapped his hand around hers, but he didn’t pull her finger away from him. He kept her hand trapped against his chest.
“I will not debate you on that, my little virgin. But it doesn’t change the fact that only I have ever had you.”
“I was the widow of one of the most famous men in the world.” She tugged at her hand, but he didn’t release it. “I couldn’t exactly pop into a club and pick someone up to have sex with, could I?”
“But you would have, you think. Had you been a less identifiable widow.”
She frowned at his sardonic tone. “I would have divested myself of my virginity before the end of your funeral if I could have. Happily.”
She threw that at him, but he only laughed, and she hated him for it. Or she hated herself for feeling so unsteady at the sound.
“I don’t believe you,” he told her. “You pride yourself on your control, little one. It’s obvious in everything you do. The only place you cede it is when you are beneath me.”
She shook at that, and she knew he saw it. Worse, he could likely feel it in the hand he still held against the steel wall of his chest.
“I’m an excellent actress. Ask anyone in your company. Or your family.”
“Deny it if you wish, it makes no difference to me.” This time when she tugged on her hand, Leonidas let her go. And it didn’t make anything better. He regarded her with that dark stare of his that she was sure could see all the things she wanted to hide. All those feelings she didn’t want to name. “But do not imagine for even one second that I will let you wander off with my child. Do not fool yourself into some fantasy where that could ever happen, prison or no prison. It won’t.”
“You can’t keep me here.” Her voice didn’t even sound like hers. Susannah supposed she sounded the way she felt—frozen straight through.
Or at least that’s what she thought she felt. The longer she spent around this man, the less she seemed to know. Because there was a perverse part of her that almost liked the fact that he wasn’t letting her swan off, out of his life. The way everyone else in her life had if she’d proved less useful than they’d imagined she’d be.
“I can,” he said quietly.
“You’ll have to spend your every waking hour trying to keep me locked up if you want me to stay here,” she warned him. “Is that really what you want?”
“I think you’ll find that I won’t need to expend any energy at all,” Leonidas told her. Almost happily, Susannah thought, which she knew damned her even before he went on. “The geography takes care of that. It is an island, after all, in an unforgiving sea.” He shrugged, clearly amusing himself. “All I have to do is wait.”
CHAPTER TEN
SUSANNAH DIDN’T SPEAK to him for a week.
In that time, she explored every inch of the island. She had access to one of the vehicles parked in the garage if she wanted, but it wasn’t as if there was anything to do but drive back and forth along the same dirt road that led from one end of the island to the other, about a fifteen-mile round-trip. There was a dock or two, but they were clearly for swimmers when the weather was fine. No boats were moored at them, or even pulled up on the beaches.
Nothing that could make it across the brooding Ionian Sea, anyway, even if Susannah had been a sailor.
There were olive trees everywhere, growing too wild to be considered a grove. There were beaches, more rock than sand. It was a sturdy island, with no village to speak of and only a few homes clustered together around one of the coves. What few people lived on the island worked in the big house that sprawled over the top of the highest point of the island. It rambled this way and that, a jumble of open atriums and windows that let the sea in and then flirted with the nearest cliff.
She might have loved it, wild and raw something far more intense than the usual whitewashed Greek scenes that cluttered up the postcards, if she hadn’t wanted to escape so badly.
“You cannot keep this up forever,” Leonidas said a week into her prison sentence.
She’d wandered into the villa’s surprisingly well-stocked library without realizing he was within. He usually worked in the office that was tucked away on the far side of the house, which meant she’d gotten used to avoiding him easily when she was inside.
Susannah spent her days driving aimlessly around the island as if she expected a magical bridge to the mainland to appear at any moment. She sunned herself on the rocks if the weather was fine, though it was always too chilly for swimming. Or she took quiet walks among the olive trees, trying to keep her head clear. When she felt sufficiently walked out, she usually moved inside and rummaged around the books that were packed onto the library’s shelves, smelling faintly of age and water.
If she hadn’t been trapped here, this might have been the most relaxing holiday she’d ever had.
Today she’d gone straight for the huge stack of German novels that had caught her eye yesterday. And she cursed herself for not looking around before she’d wandered into his vicinity.
Leonidas was sprawled back in one of the deep, comfortable chairs, his feet propped up on the table before him and a cup of coffee at hi
s elbow. He had a laptop open on the wide arm of the chair, but he wasn’t looking at the screen. He was studying Susannah instead, with an amused, indulgent look in his eyes that drove her mad.
“Why would I speak to you?” she asked, making no particular attempt to keep the challenge from her voice. Or the dislike. “What can you imagine I could possibly have to say to the prison warden?”
Leonidas shrugged. “I told you before that you can be as stubborn as you like, Susannah. It will make no difference.”
“I know you think you can wait me out,” she seethed at him. “But you have no idea who you’re dealing with. You never actually met the Widow Betancur.”
He laughed at that, raking a hand through his dark hair and reminding her, against her will, how much she’d liked sifting her fingers through it herself.
“I’m not afraid of my own widow, little one.”
And she didn’t know why the way he said that, his gaze trained on her though he didn’t rise from that chair, should have echoed in her like a promise.
“You should be,” she told him coldly, snatching up her book and heading for the door again—and faster than she’d come in. “You will be.”
But the truth was, she thought that evening as she readied herself for another one of the long, dangerous nights she tried so hard not to think about during the day, she was very much afraid that he could indeed wait her out. That he was already halfway there.
Because Leonidas was relentless.
He didn’t argue with her. If he saw her throughout the day, he rarely said anything. Maddeningly, he would most often offer her a slight smile, nothing more, and leave her to it while he carried on running the Betancur Corporation remotely. The staff served food in the villa only at specific times, so there was no avoiding him when she wanted to eat, but if she didn’t speak to him he did nothing about it. He only smiled and ate, as if he enjoyed his own company immensely.
More, as if he already knew how this would end.
Every night, Susannah readied herself for bed and resolutely climbed into the four-poster in the guest suite she’d tried to claim as her own. And every night she would fight to stay awake, but she never managed it. She fell asleep, and sometimes dreamed of being lifted into a pair of strong arms. Or being carried through the villa with only the moon peeking down into the open atriums to light the way. But the dreams were never enough to wake her.
And every morning she woke up in Leonidas’s bed, because they weren’t dreams at all.
Not just in the same bed, another massive king bed like the one she’d never slept in back in Rome, but curled around him as if she couldn’t get enough of him. As if she wanted to be a part of him.
It didn’t matter what she told herself the night before. It didn’t matter what promises she made. Every morning it was the same. She woke up feeling rested, warm and safe, and only gradually became aware that she was sprawled over him. Or curled on her side, with him wound tight around her, holding her to him with one heavy arm.
And every morning she fled as soon as she woke. And he let her go, his arrogant laughter following her as she went.
It was an insidious kind of warfare, and he was far too good at it.
Tonight, Susannah sat on the edge of the bed in her room she kept trying to sleep in, but she was running out of steam. More to the point, she was growing tired of her own defiance.
It did nothing to Leonidas if she ignored him, or tried. He didn’t care if she stormed off or if she snapped at him. He was like a mountain, unyielding and impassable, and she’d been battering herself against him for much too long now.
Meanwhile, all he did was smile and go about his business, and he got what he wanted anyway. What was the point?
She moved over to the French doors that led out to her terrace, and threw them open. It was too dark tonight to see the sea, but she could hear it, crashing against the rocky shore down below. She’d always loved the waves. She’d always admired the inexorable push of the sea, over and over, tide after tide. But tonight she found that she felt significantly more sympathetic to the shoreline. Battered over and over by a ruthless, unyielding force, whether it wanted it or not.
She let the night air slap at her, chilling her from the stones beneath her bare feet all the way up to where her hair moved against her shoulders. She hugged her arms around her middle, noticing with a touch of awe and wonder the changes that were happening to her every day. She was a little thicker. A little bit different all over despite her best efforts to pretend none of this was happening.
As if her body had picked sides a long time ago.
She turned back toward the bedroom and stopped, the buttery light from within gripping her. She could see the rest of the villa, built to look almost haphazard as it claimed the top of the cliff with bright windows glowing against the dark night, too cloudy for stars. But she didn’t need light to see the island any longer.
It was one more thing that was becoming a part of her no matter how little she wanted it. She remembered when that had happened four years ago. The first day she’d walked into the Betancur Corporation offices had been intense. Awful, even. She’d been a nineteen-year-old with nothing going for her but her ability to hold the gazes of angry men and smile politely until they finished ranting. But every day she’d gone back had been easier. Or she’d gotten used to it.
And one day she’d found herself sitting in the office she’d claimed, going through some files, and it had struck her that it was all...normal. She’d made the impossible normal.
Leonidas was right, she realized then, pulling in a breath of the cold night air. He was going to win. Because she could apparently adapt to anything, and would without thinking about it.
That night she fell asleep almost before her head hit the pillow the way she always did. But when she felt his strong arms around her, lifting her up and carrying her through the dark halls, she forced herself to wake up. To become more alert with every step. And when he laid her down in his wide bed, she waited for him to sprawl out beside her, and then she propped herself up on one hand and gazed at him.
“Sleeping Beauty is awake at last,” Leonidas said in a low voice. “That’s when the trouble starts, I’m told. Historically.”
There were no lights on in his bedroom, only the last of his fire glowing in the grate. Susannah was grateful for the reprieve. In the almost total dark, there was no need to worry about what expression she might have been wearing. There was no need to hide if he couldn’t really see her. So she forgot about her own masks for a moment, and let herself marvel at the lack of his.
In the dark, he seemed approachable. Not soft—he could never be soft—but all those bold lines and harsh edges seemed muted, somehow. And though she knew his scars were there, stamped into his rangy body, she couldn’t see them either.
It was as if the shadows made them both new.
“If you didn’t want trouble,” she whispered, “you should have let me go.”
“At some point, Susannah, you will have to face the fact you didn’t really want to leave,” Leonidas said, his voice barely more than a thread in the dark. “Or why go to such lengths to find me at all?”
“I thought it was what you would have wanted,” she said before she thought better of it.
But she knew the truth then. When her words were lying there between them, so obvious once spoken. It was what she would have wanted if her plane had gone down. She would have wanted someone to find out what had happened, and when the answers didn’t make sense, to dig deeper. She would have wanted someone to send investigators. She would have wanted someone who refused to give up until the truth came out.
She would have wanted someone to care. Just once.
“I always get what I want,” Leonidas said, his voice as dark as the room around them. “Sooner or later.”
And Susa
nnah had spent entirely too much time working this through in her head. On all those drives, walks through the olive trees, and afternoons on the rocks with a wool sweater wrapped tight around her to ward off the cold while the sea spray made her face damp. Or when she’d sat out by the heated pool near the house and had pretended the sun might warm her more than it did, there where she could smell flowers and dirt and the salted crispness of the bright Greek air. She’d been so furious, and she hadn’t wanted to see what was on the other side of it, because fury felt like a destination all on its own.
The island slowed her down. It made her think even when she didn’t want that. It had defeated her even if he couldn’t.
But it had also given her a new resolve.
“Always?” She reached across the wedge of space between them and traced that hard, unsmiling mouth of his with her fingers. “I know that’s what you tell yourself. But I think we both know you don’t always get what you want. I saw the compound, remember. I know how you lived there. And how quick you were to leave a place they worshipped you outright.”
“Eventually,” Leonidas said, but there was an edge to his voice then. He stilled her hand, drawing it away from his mouth. And he didn’t let go. “I always get what I want, eventually.”
And this was what had happened to her four years ago. First the shock, and a kind of grief that the life she’d been training for all those years was no more. She’d let it take her down. But then she got up again, and when she did she’d taken action.
It was what Susannah always did.
So she would do it here, too. And if there was a part of her that mourned the man who’d held her in his arms while they’d danced at that gala, well. That had only been a fantasy, after all. A fairy tale. This was gritty. This was a baby she hadn’t planned for and a complicated life with a husband whose name she knew better than she knew him.
A Baby to Bind His Bride Page 13