A Baby to Bind His Bride

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.