A Baby To Bind His Bride

Though he couldn’t have said what his standard was.

It had taken him almost eighteen months to feel something like normal.

And another eighteen months to realize that no matter what he pretended because it seemed to make his people so nervous when he did not, he didn’t really know what normal was.

Because he still couldn’t remember anything but this. Here. Now.

His people assured him it was preordained. They told him that it was all a part of the same glorious plan. They had gathered, they had prayed, and so to them a leader had appeared in this same forest where they lived. The end.

The Count had agreed because there was no reason not to agree.

He certainly felt like a leader. He had since the first moment he’d opened his eyes. When he issued an order and people leaped to fill it, it didn’t feel new. It felt deeply familiar. Right and good.

He rarely shared with anyone how much he liked the things that felt familiar. It seemed to shy too close to some kind of admission he didn’t want to make.

His every need was attended to here, of course. His people gathered to hear him speak. They fretted over his health. They fed him and they clothed him and they followed him. What more could a man want?

And yet there was a woman in the compound, claiming she was his wife, and the Count felt as if something in him he’d never known was there had cracked wide open.

“She’s quite insistent,” his closest adviser, Robert, said. Again—and this time with more obvious disapproval. “She says she’s been looking for you for some time.”

“And yet I do not have a wife,” the Count replied. “Have you not told me this from the start?”

Robert was the only follower with him then, watching the woman in question on the bank of monitors before them. The Count waited to feel some kind of familiarity or recognition. He waited to know her one way or another, but like everything in his life, there was no knowing. There was no memory.

Sometimes he told his people that he was grateful for this blank canvas.

But then there were other times, like this, when the things he didn’t feel, the things he didn’t know, seemed to batter at him like a winter storm.

“Of course you do not have a wife,” Robert was saying, sounding something like scandalized. “That is not your path. That is for lesser men.”

This was a place of purity. That was one of the few things that had always been clear to the Count, and it was handy that he’d never been tempted to stray from that path. The men and women here practiced a version of the same radical purity that he did—with a special dispensation for those who were married—or they left.

But in all this time, the Count had never gazed upon a female and felt something other than that same purity, drowning out anything else.

Until now.

It took him a moment to recognize what was happening to him, and he supposed that he should have been horrified. But he wasn’t. Lust rolled through him like an old friend, and he couldn’t have said why that failed to set off any alarms within him. He told himself temptation was good, as it would make him even more powerful to conquer it. He told himself that this was nothing more than a test.

The woman who filled his screens looked impatient. That was the first thing that separated her from the handful of women who lived here. More than that, she looked... Fragile. Not weathered and hardy the way his people were. Not prepared for any eventuality. She looked soft.

The Count had no idea why he wanted to touch her to see if she could possibly be as soft as she looked.

She was dressed in clothes that didn’t make any sense to him, here on top of the mountain. He could never remember being off the mountain, of course, but he knew that there was a whole world out there. He’d been told. And all that black, sleek and slick over her trim little figure, made him think of cities.

It had never occurred to him before, but he didn’t really think about cities. And now that he had, it was as if they all ran through his head like a travelogue. New York. London. Shanghai. New Delhi. Berlin. Cairo. Auckland.

As if he’d been to each and every one of them.

He shoved that oddity aside and studied the woman. They’d brought her inside the compound walls and placed her in a sealed-off room that no one ever called a cell. But that’s what it was. It was outfitted with nothing more than an old sofa, a toilet behind a screen in the corner and cameras in the walls.

If she was as uncomfortable as the last three law enforcement officials had been when they’d visited, she didn’t show it. She sat on the sofa as if she could do it forever. Her face was perfectly calm, her blue eyes clear. She looked almost serene, he might have said, which only drew attention to the fact that she was almost incomprehensibly pretty.

Not that he had many other women to compare her with. But somehow the Count knew that if he lined up every woman out there in the world he couldn’t remember, he would still find this one stunning.

Her legs were long and shapely, even in the boots she wore, and she crossed them neatly as if she hadn’t noticed they were splattered with mud. She wore only one rather large ring on her left hand that kept catching the light when she moved, and she crossed her fingers in her lap before her as if she knew it and was trying to divert attention away from all that excessive sparkle. Her mouth caught at him in ways he didn’t entirely understand, greed and hunger like a ball inside him, and the Count wasn’t sure he liked it. He concentrated on her remarkably glossy blond hair instead, swept back from her face into something complicated at her nape.

A chignon, he thought.

It was a word the Count didn’t know. But it was also the proper term to describe how she had styled her hair. He knew that in the way he knew all the things he shouldn’t have, so he shoved it aside and kept on.

“Bring her to me,” he said before he thought better of it.

Then he thought better of it and still said nothing to contradict himself.

“She’s not your wife,” Robert said, scowling. “You have no wife. You are the Count, the leader of the glorious path, and the answer to every question of the faithful!”

“Yes, yes,” the Count said with a wave of his hand. What he thought was that Robert didn’t actually know if this woman was his wife. Neither did he. Because he couldn’t simply have appeared from nowhere in a shower of flame, the way everyone claimed. He’d understood that from the start. At the very least, he’d thought, if he’d simply appeared one day in a burst of glory, he wouldn’t have needed all that time to recover, would he?

But these mysteries of faith, he’d learned, were not something he could explore in public.

What he knew was that if he’d come from somewhere else, that meant he’d had a life there. Wherever it was. And if this woman thought she knew him, it was possible she could prove to be a font of information.

The Count wanted information more than anything.

He didn’t wait to see if Robert would obey him. He knew the other man would, because everyone did. The Count left the surveillance room behind and walked back through his compound. He knew it so well, every room and every wall built of logs. The fireplaces of stone and the thick rugs on the common floors. He had never thought beyond this place. Because everything he wanted and needed was right here. The mountain gave and the followers received, that was the way.

Sydney. Saint Petersburg. Vancouver. Reykjavik. Oslo. Rome.

What did it mean that he could suddenly see so many more places? Places not hewn from wood and tucked away in these mountains, with nothing to see in all directions but trees and weather? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

The Count made his way to his own private rooms, set apart from the dormitories where the rest of his people slept. He kept his expression blank as he moved, as if he was communing with the Spirit the way he was supposed to do, the better to discourage anyone from approaching him.

The good news was that no one would dare. They watched him as he walked and the more attention-seeking among them pitched their prayers even louder, but no one tried to catch his eye.

When he got to his rooms, he waited in the outer chamber. When he’d first started to come into awareness, to become himself, he’d recoiled from the starkness of these rooms. It had felt like a prison, though he knew, somehow, he’d never been in one. But now he’d come to prefer it to the relatively cozier rooms on the other side of his doors. Stark-white walls. Minimal furnishings. Nothing to distract a man from his purpose.

It was between him and his conscience that he’d never quite managed to feel that purpose the way everyone assumed he did.

He didn’t have to wait long for them to bring her in. And when they did, the starkness of the walls seemed to make the shock of her black clothes that much bolder in comparison. Everything was white. The clothes he wore, loose and flowing. His walls, the hardwood floor, even the chair he sat in, like an ivory throne.

And then this woman in the middle of it all, black clothes, blue eyes and unbent knees. This woman who stared at him, her lips slightly parted and a sheen in her eyes he couldn’t quite read.

This woman who called herself his wife.

“I do not have a wife,” he told her when his followers had left them alone at last. He told himself there was no reason his anticipation should make him so...restless. “The leader has no wife. His path is pure.”

He stayed where he was, sitting on the only chair in the room. But if standing there before him like one of his supplicants bothered her—though, of course, his followers would all be prostrate before his magnificence rather than stand and risk his displeasure—she didn’t let it show.

In fact, the look on her face was something that edged more toward astonishment. With an undertone he was fairly sure was temper—not that he’d seen such a thing with his own eyes. Not directed at him.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

That was all she said. It was a harsh little whisper, nothing more.

And the Count found himself fascinated by her eyes. They were so tremendously blue it made him think of the breathless summers here, and they were filled with a brilliant, diamond-cut emotion he couldn’t begin to understand.

“I do not kid,” he said. Or he didn’t think he did. He was certain he never had, anyway. Not here.

The woman before him blew out a breath as if something was hard. As if she was performing some kind of physical labor.

“How long do you intend to hide out here?” She threw the words at him in a tight sort of voice that suggested she was upset.

The Count could not think of any reason at all that she should be.

“Where else would I be?” He tilted his head slightly to one side as he regarded her, trying to make sense of all the emotion he could see swirling around her, written into every line of her black-clad body. Trying to puzzle out its cause. “And I’m not hiding. This is my home.”

She let out a sharp little laugh, but not as if she thought anything was funny. The Count found himself frowning, which never happened.

“You have many homes,” she said in a voice that sounded almost...gritty. “I enjoy the penthouse in Rome, certainly, but there’s something to be said for the New Zealand vineyard. The island in the South Pacific. The town house in London or the Greek villa. Or all those acres of land your family owns in Brazil. You have multiple homes on every possible continent, is my point, and not one of them is a sanitarium in a mountain tree house in Idaho.”

“A sanitarium?” he echoed. It was another word he didn’t know—and yet did, as soon as she said it.

But she wasn’t paying attention to what he did or didn’t comprehend. She was pivoting to take in the stark-white chamber, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Is this supposed to be some kind of hospital room?” she demanded. “Has this been a four-year mental health retreat from all your responsibilities?” Her blue gaze was even sharper when it landed on him again. “If you knew you were going to run away like this, why bother marrying me? Why not pull your disappearing act before the wedding? You must know exactly what I’ve had to deal with all this time. What did I ever do to you to deserve being left in the middle of that mess?”

“You’re speaking to me as if you know me,” the Count said in a low, dangerous voice that she did not seem to heed.

“I don’t know you at all. That’s what makes this so vicious. If you wanted to punish someone with the company and your horrible family, why choose me? I was nineteen. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that they tried to eat me alive.”

There was something sharp inside him, like broken glass, and it was shredding him with every word she spoke. He found himself standing when he hadn’t meant to move.

“I did not choose you. I did not marry you. I have no idea who you are, but I am the Count.”

His hand had ended up over his chest and he dropped it, ill at ease with his own fervency.

“You are not a count,” snapped the woman he was realizing, too late, was far more dangerous to him than he’d imagined anyone could be. And he couldn’t tell if that was a kind of apprehension that worked in him then or, worse, something far closer to exhilaration. And she clearly wasn’t finished. “Your family has certainly flirted with this or that aristocracy over the years, but you are not titled. Your mother likes to claim that she is a direct descendent of the Medicis, but I’m not sure anyone takes that seriously no matter how many times she threatens to commit a murder over a meal.”

The Count’s head was reeling. There was a faint, dull pain at his temples and at the base of his skull, and he knew it was her fault. He should have had her removed. Tossed back in that cell, or dropkicked down the side of his mountain.

There was no reason he should cross the room, his bare feet slapping against the bare floor, to tower there above her.

There was no reason—but she should have been concerned. If she’d been one of his followers she would have thrown up her hands in surrender and then tossed herself at his feet. She would have sobbed and begged for his forgiveness.

This woman did none of those things.

She tipped her chin up and met his gaze as if she didn’t notice that he was significantly taller than she was. More, as if she didn’t care.

“I would be very careful how you speak to me,” he told her, managing to get the words out through the seething thing that had its claws in him and that broken glass inside.

“What is the purpose of this charade?” she demanded. “You know I’m not going to be fooled by it. You know I know exactly who you are. No threat is going to change that.”

“That was not a threat. It was a warning.” He realized he wanted to reach over and put his hands on her, and that threw him. But not enough to back away. Not enough to put a safe distance between them the way he should have. “There’s a certain disrespect that I confess, I find almost refreshing, since it is so rare. And suicidal. But you should know my people will not accept it.”

“Your people?” She shook her head as if he wasn’t making sense. Worse, as if he was hurting her, somehow. “If you mean the cult on the other side of these doors, you can’t really think they’re anything but accessories to a crime.”

“I’ve committed no crimes.”

But he threw that out as if he was defending himself, and the Count had no idea why he would do such a thing. Nothing in his memory had prepared him for this. People did not argue with him. They did not stand before him and hurl accusations at him.

Everyone in this compound adored him. The Count had never been in the presence of someone who didn’t worship him before. He found it...energizing, in a strange way. He recognized lust, but the form it took surprised him. He wanted to drag his hands through her neat, careful hair. He wanted to taste the mouth that dared say such things to him.

He wanted to drag out the broken glass inside him and let her handle it, since he might not know how or why she was doing it, but he knew it was her fault.

“You swanned away from the scene of an accident, apparently,” she was saying, with the same fearlessness he couldn’t quite believe, even as it was happening. And she was carrying on as if he was about as intimidating as a tiny, fragile female should have been. “Your entire family thinks you’re dead. I thought you were dead. And yet here you are. Hale and healthy and draped in bridal white. And hidden away on the top of the mountain, while the mess you left behind gets more and more complicated by the day.”

The Count laughed at her. “Who is it that you imagine I am?”

“I am not imagining anything,” the woman said, and she seemed to bristle as she said it. Maybe that was why the Count found his hands on her upper arms, holding her there before him. Then dragging her closer. “I knew it was you when I saw the pictures. I don’t understand how you’ve managed to hide it for so long. You’re one of the most recognizable men alive.”

“I am the Count,” he repeated, but even he could taste the faintly metallic tang of what he was very much afraid was desperation. “The path—”

“I am Susannah Forrester Betancur,” she interrupted him. Far from pulling away from his grip, she angled herself toward him, surging up on her toes to put her face that much closer to his. “Your wife. You married me four years ago and left me on our wedding night, charmer that you are.”

“Impossible. The Count has no wife. That would make him less than pure.”

She let out a scoffing sound, and her blue eyes burned.

“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

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.