A Baby To Bind His Bride

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.

As if this was their wedding night after all.

“This has been four years overdue,” he said, his voice a low growl against her neck, and she could feel him just as she could hear him. There was something in his tone she didn’t like—a certain skepticism, perhaps, that pricked at her—but it was swept away when his mouth fixed to hers again.

And Susannah did nothing to dig her feet into whatever ground she could find. She let Leonidas take her with a fervent joy that might have concerned her if she’d been able to think critically.

She didn’t think. She kissed him instead.

His hands dug into her hair, tugging slightly until he pulled it out of the knot she’d worn the heavy mass of it in. He muttered something she couldn’t quite hear, but she didn’t care because he was kissing her again and again.

When he moved his mouth from hers to trace a trail down the length of her neck, she moaned, and he laughed, just a little bit. When he tugged on her cashmere coat, she lifted herself up so he could pull it from her body. He did the same with her shift dress, tugging it up and over her head. She had the vague impression that he tossed both items aside, but she didn’t care where they landed.

Because she was lying beneath him with nothing on but a bra and panties and her knee-high boots, and the look in his dark eyes was...savage.

It made Susannah shake a little. It made her feel beautiful.

Raw. Aching and alive.

As if, after all this time, she really was more than the shroud she’d been wearing like armor for all these years. As if she wasn’t the little girl he’d married, but the woman she’d longed to be in her head.

“You are the perfect gift,” he said, as if he really couldn’t remember who she was. As if his amnesia game was real and he really believed himself some or other local god, tucked away here in the woods.

But Susannah couldn’t bring herself to worry about that. Because Leonidas was touching her.

He used his mouth and his hands. He found her breasts and cupped them with his palms, then bent his head to tease first one nipple, then the next. Through the soft fabric of her bra, his mouth was so hot, so shocking, that she arched off the bed. To get away from him—or get closer to him—she couldn’t quite tell.

He stripped the bra from her, then repeated himself, but this time there was no fabric between the suction of his mouth and her tender skin. Susannah had never felt anything like it in her life. She felt...open and exposed, and so bright red with too much sensation she might as well have been a beacon.

Her head thrashed against the mattress beneath her. She gripped him wherever she could touch him, grabbing fistfuls of the flowing white garments he wore at his sides, his hips, and not caring at all when her own gasps and moans filled her ears.

Then he moved lower. His tongue teased her navel, and then his big hands wrapped around her hips.

And he didn’t ask. He didn’t even move her panties out of his way. Leonidas merely bent his head and fastened his mouth to the place where she ached the most.

Susannah thought she exploded.

She was surprised to find, between one breath and the next, that she was still in one piece. That every bit of suction he applied between her legs made her feel like she was breaking and fusing back together again—over and over again.

She felt a tug at her hip, heard a faint tearing sound that she only dimly understood was him tearing her panties from her body, and when he bent his head to her once again, everything changed.

It had already been madness. And now it was magic.

Leonidas licked his way into her, teasing her and tasting her. It took her long moments to realize that he was humming, a low sound of intense male approval that she could feel like shock waves crashing through her body. It was like a separate thrill.

She felt his fingers tracing through her heat, and then they were inside her. Long and hard and decidedly male.

“My God...” she managed to say, her head tipped back and her eyes shut tight.

“That’s what they call me,” he agreed, laughter and need in his voice and his words like separate caresses against her soft heat.

He scraped the neediest part of her with his teeth, then sucked at her, hard—and that was it.

Susannah thought she died, but there was too much sensation. Too much. It broke her into pieces, but it didn’t stop. It didn’t ever stop. It went on and on and on, and she couldn’t breathe.

She didn’t want to breathe.

And she was still spinning around and around when he pulled away from her. She managed to open her eyes and fix them on him, watching in a dizzy haze as Leonidas stripped himself of that flowing white shirt at last.

Susannah couldn’t help the gasp she let out when she finally saw all of him.

His muscles were smooth and tight, packed hard everywhere in a manner that suggested hard labor instead of a gym. She might not have seen him naked four years ago, but she’d certainly spent time researching him online. She thought he was bigger now than he’d been when that plane went down. Tougher, somehow.

Maybe she thought that because he was covered in scars. They wound all over his chest and dipped below his waistband.

“So many scars...” she whispered.

Leonidas froze. And Susannah couldn’t bear it.

She wasn’t sure she’d thought much at all since the moment she’d walked through the doors to this chamber and had seen Leonidas sitting there as if he belonged on this godforsaken mountaintop. As if he wasn’t a Betancur. Or her husband. Her mind had gone blank while her mouth had opened, and she saw no reason to reverse the not-thinking trend now.

Susannah reached up and traced the scars that she could touch. Over the flat plane of his chest. Across the ridged wonder of his abdomen. On the one hand, he was a perfect specimen of a male, lean and strong and enough to make her mouth water. On the other, he wore the evidence of the plane crash that everyone had said was too deadly for anyone to survive. It was as if two pictures tried to collide in her head, and neither one of them made sense. Not the Leonidas he’d been, who had left her so abruptly. Not the man who called himself the Count and hid away in this compound.

But her fingers didn’t need pictures. They didn’t care which version of him he was today. His skin was so hot and his body was so hard, and every time she found a new scar and ran her fingers over it as if she was trying to memorize it, he pulled in his breath with a sharp sound that she knew, somehow, had nothing to do with pain.

“Do they make me a monster?” he asked, his voice a quiet rumble.

Susannah opened her mouth to refute that—but then saw the way his dark eyes gleamed. And she remembered. This was a man who had considered himself something of a god even before he’d crash-landed in the middle of the Rocky Mountain wilderness and found some followers to agree with him.

He didn’t think he was a monster. She doubted Leonidas Betancourt ever thought ill of himself at all, no matter what he was calling himself today.

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Do you care if they do? Or do you fancy yourself as much a monster as a man?”

And he laughed. Leonidas threw back his head, and he laughed and laughed.

Something speared through her then, part fear, part recognition. And something else she couldn’t quite identify.

It was because he was so beautiful, she thought. There was no denying it. That thick, rich dark hair, shot through with a hint of gold and much longer than his austere cut back in the day. Those dark, tawny eyes that burned and melted in turn. His height and his whipcord strength, evident in everything he did, even sit on a makeshift throne in a white room in a guarded compound. All of that would have been enough to make him noticeable no matter what. To make him attractive no matter where he went.

He had turned her head when she’d been little more than a girl.

But he was so much more than that. It was something about the sheer, sensual perfection of his face. The way his features were sculpted so intensely and precisely, put together like an amalgam of everything that was beautiful in him. His Greek mother. His Spanish father. His Brazilian grandparents on one side, his French and Persian grandparents on the other.

He was glorious. There was no other word for it.

And when he laughed, Susannah was tempted to believe that he really was a god, after all.

“You are quite right,” Leonidas said after a long while. Long after she’d been captivated by the way his laughter transformed him, right there where he sat astride her. Long after she’d lost another part of herself she couldn’t quite name. “I don’t care at all. Monster, god, man. It is all the same to me.”

And this time when he came down over her, she was already shaking. A deep, internal trembling, as if a terrible joy was tearing her apart from inside out. Some part of Susannah wanted it no matter how she feared it, and because she couldn’t tell if it was suicide or something sweeter, she threw herself into his hands.

Leonidas shifted. He kicked off his trousers, and then settled himself between her legs. He pulled her thighs up on either side of his hips while Susannah tried to make her whirling head settled down enough to accommodate him.

Then it didn’t matter, because he kissed her. Again and again, he took her mouth until she felt branded. Possessed.

Taken. At last.

It made her wonder how she’d ever survived all this time without him. Without this.

In some distant part of her brain she knew she should tell him.

I’m a virgin, she could say. Word of warning, our wedding really was a white one. Maybe he would even laugh again, at the absurdity of a woman her age still so untouched. Whatever he did, whether he believed her or not, it would be said. He would know.

But Susannah couldn’t seem to force the words out.

And she forgot about it anyway as his hands gripped her hips again, and he shifted her body beneath his in an even more pointed manner, as if he intended to take charge of this and do it his way.

Maybe that would be enough.

It would have to be enough, because she could feel him then. Huge and hard, flush there against the part of her that no other person had ever touched.

A different sort of shiver ran over her then. Foreboding, perhaps. Or a wild need she’d never encountered before, drawing tight all around her as if she was caught in a great fist. Again she opened her mouth to say the thing she didn’t want to say, just to make sure he didn’t—

But he thrust into her then, deep and sure.

Susannah couldn’t control her response. She couldn’t pretend. It was a deep ache, a burning kind of tear, and her body took over and bucked up against him as if her hips were trying to throw him off of their own volition. She couldn’t control the little yelp that she let out, filled with the pain and shock she couldn’t hide.

Though the instant it escaped her, she wished she’d bitten it back.

Above her, Leonidas went still. Forbidding.

His eyes were like flint.

And still, she could feel him there, deep inside her, stretching her and filling her, making her feel things in places she’d never realized were part of her own body. The fact she couldn’t seem to catch her breath didn’t help.

“It has been a while, I grant you,” Leonidas said and he sounded almost...strained. Tight and something like furious at once. “But it’s not supposed to hurt.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Susannah lied.

He studied her for a long moment. Then, not changing the intensity of his gaze at all, he lifted a hand and wiped away a bit of moisture she hadn’t realized had escaped from her eye and pooled beneath it.

Leonidas repeated it on her other eye, still watching her intently.

“Try that again.”

“Really.” Susannah didn’t want to move, possibly ever again, but there was something working in her she didn’t understand. Something spurring her on, pulsing out from the ache between her legs that she knew was him, fusing with that breathlessness she couldn’t control. A kind of dangerous restlessness, reckless and needy. She tested her hips against his, biting down on her lower lip as she rocked yourself against him. “It feels fantastic.”

“I can see that. The tears alone suggest it, of course. And the fact that you’re frowning at me proves it beyond a doubt.”

Susannah was indeed frowning at him, she realized then, though she hadn’t known it. She knew it now, and she let it deepen.

“Here’s a newsflash,” she managed to say. “Just because people worship the ground you walk on—literally—doesn’t mean you can read minds. Particularly not mine.”

“Tell yourself anything you need to, little one,” he murmured, and that should have enraged her. But it didn’t. If anything, it made her feel...warm. Too warm. Leonidas ran his hands down her sides. Once, then again. He brushed her hair back from her face. She could still feel him inside her, so big and so hard, and yet all he did was smooth those caresses all over her. “I don’t have to read your mind. Your body tells me everything I need to know. What I don’t understand is how you’ve managed to remain innocent all this time.”

She opened her mouth to answer him, but she was distracted by the way he touched her. Those big hands of his moved all over her, spreading heat and sensation everywhere he touched. He didn’t move inside her. He didn’t slam himself into her or any of the other things she half expected him to do. He only touched her. Caressed her. Settled there above her as if he could wait forever.

It made a little knot deep in her belly pull tight. Then glow as it began to swell into something far bigger and more unwieldy.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Susannah said at last, blinking more unwelcome heat from her eyes. “I am your widow. Of course I’m innocent. You died before you could change that.”

If she had any doubt that he was pretending not to remember her before, it disappeared. Because the look he turned on her then was 100 percent Leonidas Betancur. The hard, ruthless man she remembered vividly, all ruthless power sharply contained.

The one who hadn’t been in evidence when she’d walked into this place.

Had he truly forgotten who he was?

And if he had—when had he remembered?

“I find that hard to believe, knowing my cousins,” he was saying, offering more proof. He tilted his head to one side, and his dark eyes glittered. “I would have thought they’d be on my widow like carrion crows.”

“They were, of course.”

“But it was your depth of feeling for me that prevented you from taking a better offer when it was presented to you?” Leonidas’s voice was sardonic. The expression in his tawny dark eyes was cynical.

And that knotted thing inside her seemed harder. Edgier.

“It might surprise you to learn that I don’t like your cousins very much,” she told him, bracing her hands on his shoulders as if she’d half a mind to push him off her. But she didn’t. Her fingers curled into him of their own accord. “I asked them to respect my mourning process. Repeatedly.”

This time, when Leonidas laughed, it wasn’t anything like sunshine. But Susannah still felt it deep inside her, where they were connected, and then everywhere else in a rolling wave of sensation.

“What exactly have you been mourning, little one?” he asked, that sardonic cast to his beautiful face. “Me? You hardly know me. Let me be the first to assure you I’m no better than my cousins.”

“Maybe you are and maybe you’re not,” she retorted. “But I’m married to you, not them.”

And something changed in him then, she could feel it. A deep kind of earthquake, shaking through him and then all over her.

But as if he didn’t want her to notice, as if he wanted to pretend instead that it hadn’t happened, that was when he chose to move.

Everything changed all over again. Because she was so slick and he was so hard, so deep. And Susannah had never felt anything like it. The thrust, the drag. The pressure, the heat. The pure, wild delight that seemed to pound through her veins, turning to a bright, hot liquid everywhere it went.

Tentatively, with growing confidence, she learned to match his slow, steady rhythm. He was being something like careful she would have said with all her total lack of experience, but there was something in the slowness that tore her wide open with every intense stroke.

She felt it building in her all over again, that impossible fire she’d never felt before today, and she could tell from the deepening intensity on his face above her that he knew it. That he was doing this. Deliberately.

That this had been the point all along.

And something about that set her free. She didn’t fight it. She didn’t try to keep her body’s wild responses in check. Maybe she would regret her abandon later, but here, now, it felt natural. Right. Necessary.

She simply hung on to him and let him take her wherever he wanted them to go.

This was her husband, back from the dead. This was overdue.

This was the very thing she’d wanted more than anything else in all the world, that she’d missed all these years, and Susannah hadn’t known it until now. Until Leonidas had touched her and changed everything.

Until they were so deeply connected that she doubted she would ever be the same again.

He reached between them and found her center with his deliciously hard fingers, and then he made everything worse.

Better.

“Now,” he ordered her, every inch of him in control of this. Of her.

And she obeyed.

Susannah shattered. She shattered and she flew, like a sweeping, sparkling thing, pouring up and out and over the side of the world.

And she thought she heard him call out her name as he followed.

CHAPTER FOUR

ALL THE CULTS Leonidas had ever heard of in his former life discouraged the departure of their members under any circumstances—sometimes rather violently.

But he had every intention of walking out of his.

He rolled out of the bed, leaving her there in this chamber of his that had somehow become most of his world, despite how tempted he was to taste her all over again. All her flushed and sweet flesh, his for the taking, as she’d curled up there and breathed unevenly into his pillows.

God, how he wanted more.

But he’d remembered who he was. And that meant he couldn’t stay in these mountains—much less in this prison of a compound—another day.

He braced himself against the sink in his bathroom and didn’t allow himself to gaze in the mirror that hung there above it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see what he’d become, now that he knew the difference. Now that he could remember what he had been like unscarred, unscathed.

When he’d been a different sort of god altogether.

He took a quick shower, trying to reconcile the different strands of memory—before and after the accident. Leonidas Betancur and the Count. But what he kept dwelling on instead was Susannah, spread out there in his bed with her blond hair like a bright pop against the cheerless browns and grays he’d never noticed were so grim before. She’d looked delicate lying there, the way he remembered her from their wedding, but his body knew the truth. He could still feel the way she’d gripped him, her thighs tight around him and the sweet, hot clutch of her innocence almost too perfect to bear.

Leonidas shook it off. He toweled dry, expecting he’d have to cajole her out of his bed. Or dry her tears. Or offer some other form of comfort for which he was entirely unprepared and constitutionally ill-suited. Leonidas had no experience with virgins, but conventional wisdom suggested they required more care. More...softness. That wasn’t something he was familiar with, no matter who he thought he was, but he assumed he could muster up a little compassion for the young, sweet wife who had tracked him down out here in the middle of nowhere and returned him to himself. Or he could try, anyway.

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